The European Union has announced a new funding package of 42.5 million euros (nearly $53m) to help the Palestinians build their new state. 

The announcement on Wednesday came as Brussels urged the US to not go it alone in any effort to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The EU  warned that doing so would end in failure.

“Any framework for negotiations must be multilateral and must involve all players – all partners – that are essential to this process. A process without one or the other would simply not work, would simply not be realistic,” EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said.

“Nothing without the United States, nothing with the United States alone,” Mogherini told reporters in Brussels.

Her comments came at an emergency meeting of an international committee coordinating Palestinian development aid. Government ministers from Israel and Egypt, as well as the Palestinian prime minister and a US senior official attended the talks.

The meeting was the first of its kind since US President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, breaking with an international consensus that the holy city’s status should be resolved in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Mogherini said “this is a difficult moment” for the region. She said that Wednesday’s meeting would focus on ways to promote a two-state solution to the conflict and expressed hope that it “could be an element of facilitation for restoring some trust and a level of confidence.”

As the talks began, the EU announced the funding package, including substantial support in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians hope to make their future capital.

The meeting was also set to look at ways to support the UN agency working with Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

The US has been the largest donor, giving one-third of the total budget. But the Trump administration withheld half of the first installment of payments this year, demanding reforms as a condition for future aid.

UNRWA says the move has sparked its biggest ever financial crisis. It’s called on donors to speed up their funding, and Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Kuwait, the Netherlands and Ireland have taken steps to do so.

UNRWA said it is seeking $800m for emergency operations in Syria, the West Bank and Gaza Strip this year.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Japan is one the largest cryptocurrency markets, and it still has a huge user base even when you don’t include its other products. Its existing payment service has about 40 million users, and this would be a logical extension. New financial services could give Line a healthy source of revenue and lock people in, whether they want to insure their apartment or buy a new car.

As it stands, Line isn’t betting solely on finance. It just struck a deal that gives wireless giant SoftBank a controlling 51 percent stake of its Line Mobile cellular service. It’s far from giant with a value of about $15 million, but this gives Line a boost while letting SoftBank wrap its fingers around yet another cell network. Don’t be surprised if Line Mobile grows beyond its fledgling roots, even if it’s unlikely to have a global presence.

Following the release of iOS 11.2.5 on January 23, Apple stopped signing older versions of iOS 11, including iOS 11.2, iOS 11.2.1, and iOS 11.2.2.

iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch owners who have upgraded to iOS 11.2.5 will no longer be able to downgrade to earlier versions of iOS.

Apple routinely stops signing older versions of software updates after new releases come out in order to encourage customers to keep their operating systems up to date.

iOS 11.2.5 is now the only version of iOS 11 that can be installed on iOS devices by the general public, but developers and public beta testers can download iOS 11.3, an update that is being beta tested ahead of a spring release.

While at CES I try to avoid getting bogged down by dozens of random gadgets, and this time I mostly succeeded — but the mouse reviewer in me was intrigued by Lexip’s new gaming mouse that’s also a sort of floating joystick. It’s a strange but cool idea, and although the learning curve is high, I can see some hardcore gamers and productivity fiends getting a lot of use out of it.

Lexip is running a Kickstarter right now to fund the mouse, and has already tripled its modest goal, but the company was kind enough to send a pre-production version of the device to me for an early look.

The basic idea is very simple: What if you took a perfectly good gaming mouse and sort of mounted it on top of a very flat joystick? Theoretically, you would get the best of both worlds: the absolute x-y movement of the mouse, plus the relative, analog movement of a joystick.

And that’s more or less what the Lexip does. But as you might expect, it takes a bit of getting used to.

The mouse portion is quite good; I’m very picky when it comes to mouse shapes (I use a Logitech G500s… since you asked) and found the Lexip perfectly comfortable, if slightly small. There’s an analog stick on the side, a nice touch for space sims, and three configurable buttons in addition to the usual left, right and scroll button. The sensor seemed solid; no jitters or problems with my mousing surface.

There’s no thumb shelf, and I would have preferred the button paddles reached farther toward the front of the mouse, but neither is really possible because of the joystick portion of things.

To that end, the whole top of the mouse is essentially a giant analog stick; you can tilt it in any direction and it acts just like a second analog input. So in a flight sim or space game you could be looking around the cockpit or directing the guns with the mouse itself, yawing and rolling with the full-mouse joystick and controlling thrust and strafing with the little joystick. Pretty cool, right?

That kind of control also could be useful to artists, 3D and otherwise. Working in 3D means a lot of rotating on various axes, zooming in and out and so on. Having two analog sticks on the mouse itself might allow an artist to replace a handful of commonly used keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures.

Speaking of which, the analog movements can be mapped like mouse buttons; I set up mine to have the tilts mean forward and back in a browser, plus scrolling up and down. It didn’t take long for these movements to become pretty natural, though I should say I also triggered them accidentally a bunch of times. (You can disable gestures for any application, but I was too lazy.)

The configuration tool could use a lot of work, though. Razer and Logitech have been honing their tools for years, allowing complex macros and interesting integrations. Lexip’s is workmanlike, lacking options pro gamers and power users might want. That’s relatively easy to fix with updates, of course, but the DPI selection method and inability to create a “double-click” button made it hard to keep the Lexip as a daily driver.

It also required something of a lighter touch than I’m used to; I tend to rest most of the weight of my hand on my mouse, apparently favoring the left side, since the Lexip tended to activate the “left” gesture now and then (certainly my fault and not a bug, just saying). It also seemed to me that the left side was easier to depress, but that may just be how I perceive it. (Speaking of left sides, a left-handed version is forthcoming.)

And you’ll need to pay close attention to your grip, because of course if you tilt forward by pressing down with your index and middle fingers, you’ll click while you tilt and cause all kinds of chaos. The extra non-button space on the front is meant to alleviate that, and it does, but I had to shift the position of my fingers to get a solid surface on which to push down. Not a deal breaker, just something you’d have to get used to.

I asked if the version I have will differ in any way from the version backers will receive, and was told only minor aesthetic changes will be made.

Overall I think this is a fun, smart device and one that many people might find useful. Of course, with even early-bird prices starting above $100, it isn’t cheap. But you probably already know if this is something you’re willing to give a shot. It’s a cool idea and it works, with some small caveats, so order with confidence.

Blockchaiiiiinnnnn! You can now buy and sell Bitcoin instantly with the Cash App!

Still unsure what Bitcoin is? https://t.co/5fH7YEolnN 👀 pic.twitter.com/XvYknaEzBl

— Cash App (@CashApp) January 31, 2018

The feature is available to most everyone who uses Cash App, unless they’re in New York, Georgia, Hawaii or Wyoming. The company promises that it’s working on it. This does seem to be a pretty simple way to get into owning Bitcoin, though Square warns that the cryptocurrency’s price is “volatile and unpredictable.” While the company won’t add additional fees when you purchase Bitcoin through its app, it calculates the price when buying based on a quoted mid-market price and margin, which could be different when selling. You’ll also be limited to up to $10,000 worth of Bitcoin per week, so be sure to plan accordingly.

We aren’t yet rolled out in New York, Georgia, Hawaii, or Wyoming – but we’re working on it! Stay tuned.

— Cash App (@CashApp) January 31, 2018

The iOS 11.3 update, seeded to developers and public beta testers last week, introduces ARKit 1.5, an upgraded version of the set of tools developers can use to create augmented reality apps for the iPhone and the iPad.

As it turns out, ARKit 1.5 can do a lot of neat things. It can map irregularly shaped surfaces for better detection of your surroundings, and it can also recognize and map vertical surfaces like walls and doors, so you can use AR to place and detect items on walls.

Over the course of the last week, developers have been testing out ARKit 1.5 and sharing short demo videos on Twitter, providing a look at just what will be possible with augmented reality apps when iOS 11.3 is available.

Vertical surface detection, for example, is shown off in the video below. A realistic-looking tunnel is projected on a wall, and while this doesn’t have any immediate usage implications, it’s a useful demo of how ARKit sees walls in iOS 11.3.

So I’ve been playing with the new ARKit wall detection today…what do you think?#arkit #madewitharkit #augmentedreality #iOS113 #arkit15 #ar #AugmentedReality pic.twitter.com/J9tj6sJf9S

— Ubicolor™ (@ubicolorapps) January 25, 2018

An example of how vertical plane detection can be used in augmented reality games is demonstrated in the video below, where creatures projected into open space take advantage of the area around them.

Made a weird #GGJ18 game Creature-z this weekend with @tristan_damron, @marknerys and @ericklind using #ARkit verticalPlane detection. Big up to @PIGSquad for hosting pic.twitter.com/BKRdhVKHvq

— lauri (＾ｰ^)ノ (@lingoded) January 29, 2018

Another demo adds virtual artwork to a blank wall, a concept that could potentially be used in an art gallery or museum where art is invisible without a smartphone.

Vertical plane detection is used in the video below to show a realistic-looking virtual cockatoo coming through a window and landing on a windowsill.

Look what flew in through my window today… #ARKit pic.twitter.com/MFYYQlBjP4

— Abhishek Singh (@shekitup) January 31, 2018

In addition to mapping oddly shaped spaces and recognizing vertical surfaces, ARKit 1.5 also includes image detection features that work on everything from movie posters to barcodes, as demoed below. In the future, you might be able to scan a barcode with ARKit to get a virtual popup of nutritional information, calories, and more.

In ARKit 1.5 reference images can be any image. Including barcodes!!!! #ARKit #AugmentedReality pic.twitter.com/8fwJTcSoRo

— azamsharp (@azamsharp) January 31, 2018

Image detection could be useful in settings like art galleries and museums, where visitors could use it to scan paintings and exhibits to receive more information, as shown off in the video below.

#arkit image detection 1st try: success! As @Apple said, great feature for museums. Now I need content for 2300 paintings @NationalGallery pic.twitter.com/1m3LZVVCfJ

— Romain Derrien (@LondonRom) January 28, 2018

Though not visible in the demo videos shared by developers, ARKit 1.5 also introduces a higher camera resolution, so passthrough video is 1080p rather than 720p, and there’s also support for autofocus capabilities, another feature that will improve the augmented reality experience on iOS devices.

Recent data has suggested that the ARKit framework has seen only modest adoption from developers and stagnating growth since its debut in iOS 11, but improvements like ARKit 1.5 may change that in the future. Augmented reality on iOS devices is still in its infancy and it will take time for developers and users to discover the best real-world use cases for the technology.

Apps using ARKit 1.5 will be available starting this spring when iOS 11.3 is released to the public.

If you’re more of a Gmail power user (or even semi-power user) and other email services geared toward work, you’ve probably installed plenty of plugins like Rapportive to make your job a little bit easier.

And while it’s all fine to try to pull together a suite of plugins to make that a little bit easier, a startup called Polymail is hoping to rope that all into a single hub that will suit the needs of marketers and other businesses without having to piece together all of the bits from external tools. Polymail, which was previously a Mac app, said it’s launching a web version today as it looks to enter some kind of parity with those services and move beyond just a niche application that might have some use cases.

“The first iteration was as an email client, which we knew had to be a native desktop experience,” co-founder Brandon Foo said. “Our long-term vision for Polymail has always been to extend the inbox into a business and team communication platform, and so to achieve that we had become cross-platform for both Windows and Mac users. By far the biggest driver was the demand we’ve seen from Windows and PC users since we launched Polymail for Mac. There was also the need for users to access Polymail from any device without having to install a desktop app.”

Polymail started off as a Mac app, but by expanding to being a web app, it sets it up for a wider audience accustomed to typical email services like GMail and other email marketing tools. The service brings together the kinds of products you have come to expect as a marketer or salesperson at a company, like tracking engagement with email and calendar functions. While born as a native app, most email users — whether that’s for typical email use cases or actual marketing tools — are probably used to working through a web interface so they can flip between platforms whenever they need, which seemed like it would initially hamper Polymail’s potential growth.

“We’ve seen quite a few email-related tools over the past few years, but we believe the market is still highly fragmented,” Foo said. “Businesses still have to rely on multiple point solutions from several different vendors to solve the problem they need, and in many cases, they don’t integrate well and end up costing a lot. With Polymail, companies can unify their entire email and sales communication workflow with one platform.”

There’s still something to be said about focusing on simplicity, which has led to the success of plenty of Silicon Valley darlings like Slack. Instead of putting together a patchwork service loaded up with multiple tools, some businesses may find it easier to just go to a single service that picks all the best and most useful ones and bundles them into a clean interface. That’s kind of the promise of Slack — which adds new features in a drip-drip-drip way as it at times hesitates to try to move away from the core simple experience.

But at the same time, there is definitely a graveyard of startups that have tried to re-invent the experience of email. While you’ve probably heard more about them on the consumer side, like Sparrow or Mailbox, the point is that it’s hard to rip users away from an experience they are very familiar with. That’s obviously a big challenge for Foo and Polymail, but the startup has focused on a business-first model from day one and that’s what will help it potentially survive that early hump of getting users.

“All of the email apps that were acquired and shut down were consumer-focused and never developed a strong business model,” he said. “Polymail is a software-as-a-service company first — our vision is to make Polymail the platform for external business communication, just as how Slack has become the platform for internal business communication. Email is the most relevant form of external business communication today, so that’s the starting point for us, but our platform will continue to expand to serve the needs of our customers.”

Polymail came out of Y Combinator’s summer 2016 batch. The company says it has 2,800 customers since launching in December 2016, including professionals and teams at Uber.

Featured Image: focusphotoart

Apple is working hard on the next major versions of its operating systems — macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS. While iOS is the big elephant in the room, the most intriguing new feature could be for macOS. According to reports from Bloomberg and Axios, Apple will let you run iPad apps.

Yesterday, Axios first reported that Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi announced a revised plan for iOS 12. Apple usually unveils the new version of iOS at its WWDC developer conference in June. It then goes through a few months of beta testing and gets released in September.

And this time, Axios has heard that Apple is delaying some features to work on quality issues. Many customers have been complaining about bugs in iOS 11, such as weird autocorrect bugs, messages arriving out of order, the Calculator app not calculating properly and more.

That’s why some rumored features have been pushed back to iOS 13 in 2019. Those features include a home screen redesign, CarPlay improvements, Mail and Photos updates.

Instead, you can expect a rock-solid iOS 12. There will still be new features, but not as many as expected. iOS 12 could feature better parental controls, a FaceTime update. There could be more augmented reality features too.

Some of those delays will also affect the next macOS update, such as the update to the Photos app for instance. But Bloomberg first reported that Apple is still on track to let you use iOS apps on your Mac. Axios confirmed those plans, saying that iPad apps in particular should run on macOS.

This could represent a huge change for the Mac platform with a big number of new apps hitting the Mac App Store. It’s still unclear whether Apple will optimize the user interface of those apps on the Mac. Using a touch screen is very different from using a mouse. But iPad app developers can expect to reach a lot more users.

Apple today began shipping the 18-core iMac Pro to customers in the United States, just over six weeks after it began accepting orders. The first orders are estimated for delivery starting Tuesday, February 6.

MacRumors readers Anthony Berenato and Steve McKinnon both alerted us of the shipped status of their orders, while a few other Apple customers have echoed the same in the iMac Pro order topic in our discussion forums.

18-core iMac Pro configurations start at $7,399 in the United States, and with fully maxed out tech specs, the powerful workstation costs up to $13,199.

Apple quoted a shipping estimate of 6-8 weeks for the 18-core iMac Pro, pushing most deliveries into early February, so it is ever so slightly ahead of its schedule. We haven’t confirmed if 14-core models have shipped yet.

iMac Pro is also available in 8-core and 10-core configurations, priced from $4,999, and those models began shipping in late December. Micro Center is offering an impressive $1,000 off the base model while supplies last.

Last month, some customers were quoted an updated delivery timeframe of early January for 18-core iMac Pro orders, but in a follow-up email, Apple said this was an error. This time, the first orders have actually shipped out.

iMac Pro is a powerful, top-of-the-line workstation designed for professional users with demanding workflows, such as advanced video and graphics editing, virtual reality content creation, and real-time 3D rendering.

The machine can be configured with up to an 18-core Intel Xeon processor, up to 4TB of SSD storage, up to 128GB of ECC RAM, and an AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64 graphics processor with 16GB of HBM2 memory.

The company is also improving the quality of results by displaying more than one snippet. After all, sometimes there isn’t one correct answer to a question. “There are often legitimate diverse perspectives offered by publishers, and we want to provide users visibility and access into those perspectives from multiple sources,” said Matthew Gray, the lead of the snippets team.

Google is also making it easier to provide feedback about snippets. This way, users can raise concerns about questionable snippets they see. A link at the bottom of the snippet box makes that quick and easy to do.

It’s good to see that Google is taking action on this troubling front. The additional features it’s putting into place (especially the rankings algorithm) will help prevent people from gaming the system in order to ensure that fake news is the first source that Google searchers see.

Oracle has released a security patch update to address a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability that affects its MICROS point-of-sale (POS) business solutions for the hospitality industry.

The fix has been released as part of Oracle’s January 2018 update that patches a total of 238 security vulnerabilities in its various products.

According to public disclosure by ERPScan, the security firm which discovered and reported this issue to the company, Oracle’s MICROS EGateway Application Service, deployed by over 300,000 small retailers and business worldwide, is vulnerable to directory traversal attack.

If exploited, the vulnerability (CVE-2018-2636) could allow attackers to read sensitive data and receive information about various services from vulnerable MICROS workstations without any authentication.

Using directory traversal flaw, an unauthorized insider with access to the vulnerable application could read sensitive files from the MICROS workstation, including service logs and configuration files.

As explained by the researchers, two such sensitive files stored within the application storage—SimphonyInstall.xml or Dbconfix.xml—contain usernames and encrypted passwords for connecting to the database.

“So, the attacker can snatch DB usernames and password hashes, brute them and gain full access to the DB with all business data. There are several ways of its exploitation, leading to the whole MICROS system compromise,” the researchers warned. 

“If you believe that gaining access to POS URL is a snap, bear in mind that hackers can find digital scales or other devices that use RJ45, connect it to Raspberry PI, and scan the internal network. That is where they easily discover a POS system. Remember this fact when you pop into a store.”

ERPScan has also released a proof-of-concept Python-based exploit, which, if executed on a vulnerable MICROS server, would send a malicious request to get the content of sensitive files in response.

Besides this, Oracle’s January 2018 patch update also provides fixes for Spectre and Meltdown Intel processor vulnerabilities affecting certain Oracle products.

A fortnight ago, the crew of the Dutch NGO boat Sea Watch 3 saved 165 people onboard a rubber vessel north of Libya.

The refugees, who had fled Libya and were trying to reach European shores, included eight children and 28 women, three of whom were pregnant.

Libya’s coast is a staging post for tens of thousands of people from Africa and the Middle East trying to make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

By the end of its mission, Sea Watch 3 had saved more than 400 people from possible death by drowning or cold. 

Sea Watch arrived at the Port of Messina in Italy after several days at sea, where the Italian authorities took charge of the refugees and migrants. 

The day after the Sea Watch 3 rescue on January 17, a Spanish rescue boat saved 265 people, also in the Mediterranean.

A total of 2,583 migrants and refugees have reached Europe by sea so far in 2018, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

It said 199 people died attempting to cross the Mediterranean between January 1 and January 17.

Less than half the arrivals, or 1,093 people, were registered in Italy, 847 in Greece and 653 in Spain.

South Korea’s finance minister Kim Dong-yeon said, “Customs service has been closely looking at illegal foreign exchange trading using cryptocurrency as part of the government’s task force,” and noted that it has detected around 637.5 billion won ($596.02 million) worth of foreign exchange crimes, with cryptocurrency forming the bulk of that figure. In one instance, an illegal exchange agency took 1.7 billion won ($1.59 million) from residents in the form of “electric wallet” coins and transferred them to a partner agent abroad. The agent then cashed them out and distributed the balance among clients in that country.

Only licensed banks and brokers may offer foreign exchange services in South Korea, with companies and residents moving more than $3,000 out of the country needing to submit documents to authorities explaining the transfer. It’s not yet clear exactly how the government plans to tighten regulation, although it has now imposed new rules that stipulate only real-name bank accounts can be used for trading, which it hopes will help tackle money laundering and other crimes.

Heightened scrutiny around cryptocurrency regulation has seen values dive this month. Bitcoin has dropped 27.1 percent in January alone, putting it on track for its largest monthly decline since January 2015. The market was further shaken last week after hackers stole more than $500 million from Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck.

Apple’s main iPhone manufacturer in India is closing in on a land deal in the tech hub of Bengaluru that will see the firm invest around $157 million to assemble iPhone SE and potentially iPhone 6s models on the site, according to Reuters.

Unnamed Indian government officials on Wednesday reportedly confirmed the Taiwanese contractor’s intentions, which could result in its iPhone SE assembly unit taking over about 100 acres in and around the capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka.

Wistron executives reportedly toured the area in November and met with the industries minister of Karnataka earlier this month, and a deal on the land lease could be struck in a few weeks, according to one of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to publicly comment on the plans.

Another source who spoke to Reuters said Apple will likely begin assembling iPhone 6s models in India soon, using Wistron’s expanding manufacturing capacity in the country, as it looks to cut costs and diversify its production base beyond greater China. Launched over two years ago, the iPhone 6s is still popular in emerging markets because of its affordability relative to Apple’s iPhone 7, iPhone 8, and iPhone X.

Apple sees opportunities to save on import taxes, price phones cheaper and potentially widen its customer base in India if it assembles phones locally. However last month India raised import taxes on electronic goods, which caused Apple to raise the price of most iPhone models there except for iPhone SE.

Apple has sought tax breaks and incentives from the Indian government for months as it looks to expand operations in the country, but despite some positive comments from state officials, no exceptions have yet been made for Apple.

Fresh from toppling Intel as the planet’s biggest seller of chipsets, Samsung has confirmed that it has begun manufacturing ASIC chips which are used to mine bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies.

“Samsung’s foundry business is currently engaged in the manufacturing of cryptocurrency mining chips. However we are unable to disclose further details regarding our customers,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Samsung declined to provide more details when we asked.

The statement follows reports in Korea media which claimed that the tech giant had made the move in collaboration with an unnamed Chinese distribution partner. Samsung already produces high-capacity memory chips for GPUs, which are conventionally used to handle graphics on computers but are also deployed for mining purposes.

The news brings big-name competition to the ASIC space, which is dominated by China’s Bitmain and Canaan Creative, both of which work with Taiwanese giant TSMC. Indeed, the crypto explosion is said to have added $350-$400 million to TSMC’s (already impressive) quarterly revenues.

How Samsung fits into this equation isn’t clear right now. At a base level, it will rival TSMC — which it knows well from competing in other industry segments — for the attention of companies that build and sell finished mining products in the market. But, if Samsung’s move brings on new partners or if it makes hardware itself, then it could enable competitors to Bitmain and co.

All the same, it’ll take some major business for crypto have a noticeable impact on Samsung’s bottom line. The Korean firm booked an incredible $69 billion in chip sales in 2017 thanks mainly to the smartphone industry.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Featured Image: Getty Images

SoftBank is partnering up with messaging app Line to help develop its Line Mobile telecom service.

Line announced that it has agreed to allow SoftBank to take a 51 percent in the business via an issuance of new shares. The deal is expected to close by March.

From the documents, its mobile business is valued at around $15 million (1.7 billion JPY) but a company spokesperson told TechCrunch that discussions remain ongoing around the valuation for SoftBank’s investment — in other words: it could be higher. The firm will, however, take a 51 percent stake, the spokesperson confirmed.

It’s certainly an odd relationship given that SoftBank is first and foremost a telecom company itself. This alliance may be a case of the company hedging its bets with a younger, more trendy brand. The market for MVNOs has boomed in Japan after the government relaxed regulations around handsets in early 2017. Rakuten’s MVNO claims to be Japan’s top MVNO with 1.4 million customers. Line does not reveal figures for its service.

Line Mobile’s premise in Japan is simplicity. The service claims to be easy to use, and it allows unlimited data for Line services and prominent social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Line also launched a mobile service in Thailand, one of its major markets, through a partnership with Telenor’s DTAC operator unit.

It’s been a busy day for Line. In addition to its latest earnings report, the company announced plans to add crypto trading and loans/insurance services to its chat app.

The company, which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and on the New York Stock Exchange, said it made a profit of 8.078 billion JPY (approximately $75 million) on total revenue of 167.147 billion JPY, $1.5 billion, in 2017. Those figures are up 19.4 percent and 18.8 percent, respectively.

Line said the number of monthly active users in Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand — its four largest markets — stands at 167.5 million combined. That’s up just one million year-on-year and down slightly on 168 million in the quarter previous. The company doesn’t provide a figure for all users worldwide.

Featured Image: Lee Jin-man/AP

Nintendo’s latest earnings, which cover the nine months leading up to December 31st, 2017, reveal some software triumphs too. The award-winning Super Mario Odyssey has reached 9.07 million sales, while Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — a re-release of the Wii U version with a reworked battle mode – has sold 7.33 million units to date. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sits at 6.7 million sales, while Splatoon 2, Nintendo’s colorful and competitive paint-based shooter, has shifted 4.91 million copies. According to Nintendo, that makes eight million-or-more selling Switch games.

The 3DS’ momentum, unsurprisingly, is starting to fade. Hardware sales grew in the US over the holiday season but it wasn’t enough to stop a global 9 percent year-over-year decline. Still, 5.86 million sales isn’t bad for a system that came out in 2011. Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon, unsurprisingly, were the software highlights with 7.17 million sales between them. They weren’t enough, however, to stop 3DS software falling to 31.25 million sales — a 33 percent decrease year-over-year. Nintendo is staying tight-lipped about the notoriously difficult to purchase Super NES Classic Edition, merely calling it “a hit” since its launch in September.

For the nine months ending on December 31st, Nintendo made 156.46 billion yen ($1.44 billion) in operating profit from 857 billion yen ($7.88 billion) in net sales. In light of these results, Nintendo has revised its forecast for the financial year ending on March 31st. The company now expects to make 160 billion yen ($1.47 billion) from 1.02 trillion yen in net sales. That’s a 33.3 percent increase from its previous prediction of 120 billion yen ($1.1 billion). In short, Nintendo is on a roll right now and the good times are set to continue provided it can keep its game pipeline moving.

Samsung has ended Intel’s 25-year run as the world’s biggest seller of chipsets after it posted its 2017 end of year financials.

The Korean tech giant’s chipset division — which has long been its biggest hitter — grossed total revenue of $69 billion in 2017, eclipsing the $62.8 billion Intel reported for last year. That was a record year for Intel — and an annual increase of six percent — but it wasn’t enough to stop Samsung from knocking it from the top spot, which Bloomberg reports it had occupied since 1992.

The writing was on the wall last year when Samsung beat Intel on a quarterly basis, but now it has held out for an annual win.

The change of position highlights Samsung’s focus on mobile, and in particular memory chips which are an essential part of smartphones. Intel’s chips may be in 90 percent of the world’s computers, but it missed the mobile boom and is playing catch-up.

Overall, Samsung’s entire business reported full-year profit of KRW 53.65 trillion ($50.7 billion) on revenue of KRW 239.58 trillion, $225 billion. For the final quarter of 2017, revenue was KRW 65.98 trillion ($62 billion) with KRW 15.15 trillion ($14 billion) in operating profit.

That’s a higher profit but slightly lower revenue than the previous quarter. The company’s mobile business actually saw its take-home drop by 3.2 percent year-on-year during Q4.

Looking ahead to 2018, Samsung said it intends to increase its chipset focus on cloud services, AI and automotive. On the smartphone front, where its name is best known among consumers, the company said it plans to adopt “cutting-edge technologies” like foldable displays. Samsung said also that it would continue to develop its smart services with a focus on its Bixby assistant and upcoming 5G technologies.

Featured Image: Bloomberg/Contributor/Getty Images

It’s been a while since we’ve seen the company’s mobile division become its top earner, and that definitely didn’t happen in the fourth quarter. Samsung’s mobile biz earnings were affected by the hike in marketing costs over the holidays, and the division’s operating profit was down YOY from $2.3 billion in Q4 2016 to around $2.25 billion in Q4 2017. While Samsung saw a decrease in shipments for its low-end phones, its Galaxy Note 8 shipments were up from the previous quarter.

The chaebol, expecting a “growing replacement demand for premium smartphones,” believes its mobile division will bounce back once it starts selling the Galaxy S9. It’s scheduled to unveil the upcoming flagship on February 25th and will make it available for purchase soon after. Of course, Samsung also has big plans for its top-earning components business: it will expand its NAND production this year to be able to meet the growing demand for chips. In addition, it’s putting a spotlight on OLEDs, which it believes will become a “mainstream panel in the smartphone industry.”

More figures from Samsung’s Q4 2017 earnings report:

• $61.5 billion in consolidated revenue overall for the quarter, $223 billion for the year
• memory chip business posted a $10 billion operating profit for the quarter
• display division posted a $1.3 billion operating profit

A California appeals court has sided with Allan Candelore, a man suing Tinder over the pricing for its premium service, Tinder Plus.

Specifically, Candelore and his lawyers argued that by charging $9.99 per month if a user is under 30, versus $19.99 per month if you’re 30 or older, Tinder is discriminating based on age, in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the Unfair Competition Law (those are both California laws).

Tinder co-founder Sean Rad defended the pricing at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference back in 2015 by saying, “Our intent is to provide a discount for our younger users.” Apparently a lower court agreed with Tinder’s reasoning, particularly the argument that younger users have less money to spend.

However, the appeals court came to a different conclusion:

(Yes, that’s a real quote from the ruling.)

We’ve reached out to Tinder for comment and will update if we hear back.

The government of British Columbia has proposed new regulations restricting the transportation of oil through the Western Canadian province in what is expected to be a major setback for a planned pipeline expansion project.

The province announced on Tuesday it would seek the public’s feedback on the newly proposed regulations, which include “restrictions on the increase of diluted bitumen transportation” through BC.

The restrictions would be in place “until the behaviour of spilled bitumen can be better understood and there is certainty regarding the ability to adequately mitigate spills”, the provincial government said in a statement.

The province aims “to improve preparedness, response and recovery from potential spills”, the statement added. 

George Heyman, BC’s minister of enviornment and climate change strategy, said that “the people of BC need to know that there is effective spill management across the province and, in particular, for our most environmentally sensitive areas, including coastlines.” 

The move is widely believed to target Kinder Morgan’s $5bn Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, which would transport 890,000 barrels of oil per day from the Alberta tar sands to the BC coast for shipment to Asia and other markets.

Al Jazeera could not immediately reach Kinder Morgan for comment.

“Kinder Morgan is aware of the Government’s announcement today and will actively participate in their engagement and feedback process,” Trans Mountain spokesperson Ali Hounsell told The Financial Post in an email.

‘Good news for the climate’

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, approved the expansion project in 2016 amid opposition from environmental and Indigenous groups across the country.

Environmental activist Cameron Fenton, a Canadian campaigner with the group 350.org, welcomed BC’s decision on Tuesday.

“When it comes to fossil fuel expansion, especially massive tar sands projects like Kinder Morgan, the rule of ‘when you’re in a hole, stop digging’ is a good place to start. This announcement from the government of BC does just that,” Fenton said in a statement.

“As of today, there’s a moratorium on new tar sands shipments to the West Coast, and that’s good news for the climate and communities.”

The BC government, a coalition between the left-leaning New Democrats and the Green Party, had previously vowed to block pipeline expansion through the province.

Kinder Morgan says the pipeline expansion project will create short- and long-term jobs, increase tax revenues at the provincial and federal levels, and “increase the value of Canadian oil”.

But protesters have rallied in cities across Canada against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project for several years.

They say an oil spill would endanger drinking water and harm fish and other species off the coast of BC and worsen Canada’s environmental footprint.

Indigenous communities along the pipeline route previously vowed to block the project from being completed.

The Treaty Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 Indigenous tribes across North America, said in 2016 that the project would not “see the light of day”.

“The world might not be able to immediately stop using oil tomorrow, but the last thing it needs is more oil, and especially not more of the dirtiest oil on the planet,” the group says on its website.

Earlier this afternoon, a bug with the Apple News app caused notifications for a single CNN news story to be sent out to iPhone and iPad users over and over again.

The issue, which lasted for approximately 15 minutes, appears to have impacted all Apple News subscribers who had alerts turned on for CNN based on a slew of complaints that popped up on reddit, Twitter, and the MacRumors forums.

It wasn’t clear if the problem was with CNN or the Apple News app, but on Twitter, CNN claims it was the latter. According to the news organization, CNN only sent a single notification, and the company is working with Apple to identify the problem.

We are aware that some Apple News users recently received multiples of the same alert. Our server log shows CNN sent only one. We are working with Apple to identify their issue, as users on CNN-owned platforms did not experience a problem. Apologies to those who did.

— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) January 30, 2018

Customers who were affected by the repeated notifications received somewhere around a hundred notifications, and the notifications in question were interrupting normal device operation. It appears that the issue centered around a single CNN news story, but we’ve also seen reports that some notifications from Fox News also repeated.

@MacRumors is anyone getting nonstop @CNN alerts about the Hawaii false alert? I have the alert turned off and still getting them. pic.twitter.com/zKLeDMhng7

— Tom Cheung (@tommyknockrs) January 30, 2018

The only fix for the issue at the time was to turn off Apple News notifications, but the problem was resolved by Apple quickly and customers who did turn off their notifications due to the CNN alert bug can now safely re-enable them.

The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package, with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt.

Over the last few years, the Australian company DroneShield has been showing off its DroneGun, essentially a high-powered antenna that blasts drones’ own antennas with a signal powerful enough that it drowns out the controller’s instructions. Many drones in such a situation treat this like a loss of signal, and attempt to make a safe landing or, if GPS isn’t also scrambled, return to a known location.

The problem with the DroneGun is that it’s really big, requiring a backpack with the batteries and other components in addition to the rifle-like gun itself.

The DroneGun Tactical, on the other hand, is merely large. It’s 56 inches long, 18 inches tall and 8 inches wide, weighing more than 30 pounds. But no pack!

I’m aware the pictures shown here are renders, but upon asking I was assured the device is in production. They already made the original, so I don’t doubt it.

DroneShield claims that the Tactical will drop drones more than a kilometer away (about half the distance of the original), though you’ll need to maintain line of sight; if the drone reestablishes signal with its controller, it might just take off again. You should get an hour or two of straight jamming, more than enough to take down a dozen UAVs. A GPS blocker add-on is also available, which makes it all the more sure that the rogue craft will simply descend instead of flying home.

I can certainly think of a few recent situations where I would have liked to bring an irresponsibly piloted drone down safely to give it a good stomp. But unfortunately ordinary folks like myself are strictly prohibited from getting their hands on one of these things.

The FCC hasn’t approved the device for use in the U.S., meaning it’s illegal to operate one unless you’re an authorized agent of the government; for example, someone testing it for the military. (The Tactical, in fact, was developed “following comprehensive international military end-user trials.”)

When I asked DroneShield’s CEO if these devices were likely to ever get FCC approval, he simply responded “no.” Well, at least he’s honest. You can learn more over at the company’s site.

Featured Image: DroneShield

This kind of state-run network is completely antithetical to the administration’s public stance on deregulation and privatization. It even prompted FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to come down strongly in opposition. It turns out, however, that the document was outdated, and the Trump administration strongly denies it ever seriously considered such a proposal.

Which is great news for fans of deregulation of course, but there was no reason for them to worry in the first place: Because it never could have happened anyway. In fact, there are countless reasons why a government-run 5G network would never fly in the US, especially under the current administration.

For one thing, most millimeter wave bands that were approved under the recently published 5G spec have already been licensed out. The 28, 38 and 60 GHz bands are largely split between the big four carriers — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — and a few smaller outfits. With the sale of FiberTower to AT&T and Straight Path to Verizon, the two biggest carriers will eventually own the majority of the country’s licensed millimeter-wave spectrum, which is a valuable 5G resource. And Verizon already owns enough 5G spectrum to cover the entire country.

What’s more, these carriers have already been busy laying the groundwork necessary to build out their 5G networks. AT&T hopes to launch spec-based mobile 5G to 12 cities in late 2018, Verizon has already been testing home-based 5G ahead of a 2018 launch, Sprint has committed to a 5G network in 2019, while T-Mobile will finally catch up in 2020.

While the carriers already have the hardware foundation to make their 5G dreams happen, the government would have to build everything from scratch. According to the document that was leaked to Axios, the National Security Council staff member did consider an alternative plan whereby wireless providers would compete to build the centralized nationwide network. But ultimately, it leaned toward a government-run and paid-for operation where it would pay for and build its own infrastructure. Needless to say, this would be an enormous undertaking that would take a great deal of money and time. The memo suggested that the government could do this in three years, which is highly unrealistic.

Plus, the companies have already spent a lot of time and money planning their 5G rollout, and it’s unlikely the government will be able to simply revoke band access without a fight. Plus, under the current law, the FCC isn’t authorized to go about revoking licenses without due cause, and not just in the arena of 5G spectrum. When president Trump threatened to revoke TV networks of their broadcast license, Pai said, “Under the law, the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.” Further, the Supreme Court has in the past banned the FCC from revoking broadband licenses, even in the case of bankruptcy.

On top of that, if the FCC were to go ahead and attempt to claw back spectrum, the carriers would probably sue the government, thus stalling the entire project in tedious court proceedings. By the time the lawsuits would be resolved, it’s highly likely that the carriers would have already deployed their 5G networks. It’s possible that the government could try to free up airwaves in a different part of the spectrum to use itself, but again, that would take considerable time and effort. Even if the government comes up with a plan that’s more realistic, it’s unclear if Congress would support it.

The FCC under the chairmanship of Pai has shown no interest in exerting any kind of power over the telecom industry. As the decision to repeal net neutrality rules shows, the FCC is actually trying to shed regulatory power and weaken its authority. If the government were to take on the role of a state-run wireless network of any kind, a strong FCC would be necessary. And a strong FCC this is not.

As Pinterest increasingly tries to sell itself as a startup specialized in computer vision that it plugs into visual discovery, it’s continuing to pick up additional pieces to help continue to build that out.

Today, the company said it is hiring former Google computer vision research lead Chuck Rosenberg, who was at Google for 14 years. Pinterest sees more than 300 million visual searches every month, which is up 70 percent year-over-year, and in order to keep that growth and engagement, it has to continue to parse an increasingly large base of content and deliver the right results to its users. Bringing in people with experience with those tools — especially in other parts of the market — can help broaden a startup’s view of the problem and think about new ways to attack it (in addition to recruiting, as, of course, new hires beget new hires).

Google, too, parses insane numbers of photos as part of its tools for visual recognition, trying to pick up the little pieces of information based on visual cues with increasingly sophisticated algorithms and training. Pinterest probably doesn’t have access to the scale of users and their search behaviors, but the company is known for bringing in content centered around products and brands and a sticky behavior around that kind of content — which could aid it in training its tools, if in a different way from Google.

Pinterest seems to increasingly be priming itself to demonstrate itself as a fleshed out company that’s graduated beyond just a small advertising play among brands (which, at nearly a decade old, can’t be called a startup at this point). It has the semi-daunting task of pulling advertising budgets away from Facebook and Google and growing beyond just an experiment with brands, and it’s made quite a few hires and pushes in that direction. In December, the company hired former Facebooker Gary Johnson as head of corporate development. At the end of the year, the company also said it added former CBS and PepsiCo exec Fred Reynolds to its board of directors.

As Pinterest continues to try to close that gap between finding content on Pinterest with reality through products like new QR codes or its camera search product Lens, it has to continuously tune (or even rethink) its approach to image recognition. That goes beyond just the actual search on the phone when you take a photo, but also training those algorithms in the background with massive sets of data like user behavior or the photos themselves. With more than 200 million users, the company has to justify a $12.3 billion valuation as it continues to look to build a true, robust advertising product that’s go-to for marketers and brands.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are jointly investigating Apple’s communications about the software update that slowed down older models of the iPhone, Bloomberg is reporting.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the government has reportedly requested details on the company’s communications about the software update.

The Bloomberg report indicates the two agencies are in very early stages of their investigation.

We’ve reached out to Apple, the SEC and the DOJ for comment and will update when we hear back.

For background, Apple got into a lot of trouble with customers who noticed that the performance of their older model phones was degrading over time. Apple was pushed to disclose that it had issued a software update that privileged power management over performance in older devices that had degraded batteries.

There was, unsurprisingly, some pushback, and Apple was forced to apologize for the way it handled the update.

The U.S. isn’t the only country where people are pressing Apple for more information. Consumer advocacy groups around the world — from Europe to Asia — are pressing for an investigation into the slowdown.

The relatively open nature of Android has made it a target for malware authors and other bad actors of all stripes who often try to get their wares onto your phone through both the official Google Play Store, third-party app stores and any other way they can think of. For most users, though, the main Android app store is Google’s own Play Store and as the company announced today, the company removed 700,000 potentially harmful or deceiving apps from its store last year. That’s up 70 percent from 2016.

This means your chance of installing a malicious app — be that one that tries to damage your phone or steal your information, or an app that is simply trying to deceive you into thinking it’s Spotify when it’s just a bad copycat — from the official Play Store is getting smaller by the day. Indeed, as Google VP and Head of Security for Google Play Dave Kleidermacher tells me, the chance of installing a malicious app is now 0.00006 percent (and Google sees about 8 billion installs per month across the world). The vast majority of these malicious apps (99 percent), never made it into the store and was outright rejected by Google’s algorithms and security teams.

Kleidermacher also notes that you are 10x more likely to install a harmful app from a non-Play source than Google’s official store.

With Google Play Protect now running on over 2 billion devices, it’s probably the most widely used malware scanner in the world.

The number of removed apps speaks to the increasing number of attempts by developers to sneak harmful app onto your phone, but also to Google’s efforts in using machine learning and other techniques to find these apps before they ever appear in the store. Google long used static analysis techniques to find potentially malicious code in new apps, but with the addition of machine learning in the last few years, the company is now able to find a far wider range of apps. Kleidermacher described the addition of these machine learning techniques as a “breakthrough in our ability to detect badness.”

As Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn also told me, there are some clear patterns in how malicious and deceiving developers try to sneak their apps into the store. They often try to make their apps look like existing popular apps, for example, to trick users into installing them. Google took down more than 250,000 of these apps in the last year.

As for other trends, Kleidermacher noted that Google is seeing more apps that try to run cryptominers on phones, but for the most part, these trends come and go. A few years ago, apps were trying to trick you into installing other apps, for example, while that isn’t really an issue anymore today. As Google finds and shuts down one category, though, another pops up sooner or later.

Google is quite aware that it can’t detect every single malicious app before it hits the store, though. “We have this fantastic technology and it work 99.99994 percent of the time,” he said. “But it’s never perfect.” Some forms of abuse are almost impossible for Google to detect, after all, especially now that a lot of the code for apps runs on backend systems that Google has no control over. If an app asks you to sign up but then sells your credentials on the black market, there was nothing on the phone that could’ve prevented that. To combat this, Google wants to teach users how to make better security decisions, though it’s also using Google’s Safe Browsing tools to detect if an app connects to a known bad site.

In the end, though, there’ll always be some apps that slips through the net. The good thing is that, for the most part, these apps don’t typically find a lot of users.

The Boring Company is getting decently well-capitalized on the back of sales of its flamethrower (yes, flamethrower). The no-doubt overpriced piece of knack, which can be make yourself at home using likely around $30 in parts, is selling for $500 and has already netted Elon Musk’s digging venture $7.5 million.

That’s after just over a day of being on sale, and not counting the revenue from fire extinguisher sales (those sell for just $30, which is itself also overpriced). All told, Musk says he’s sold 15,000 of the flamethrowers thus far, with only a total of 20,000 available in total during the sale.

Chances are, we’re very near the total sell-out of the stock, so if you really want to own this potential piece of transportation history, you’d better act fast. Or you could continue living your life, and ignore this particular circus show in favor of paying attention to what will hopefully be the main act: Actually building a network of interconnected underground hyperloops.

Apple is continuing to face scrutiny over the power management features it introduced in older iPhones last year, with the U.S Department of Justice and the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission launching an investigation into the company, reports Bloomberg.

The DoJ and the SEC are aiming to determine whether Apple violated security laws “concerning its disclosures” when it launched an iOS 10.2.1 update that throttled some older iPhones with degraded batteries in order to prevent unexpected device shutdowns.

According to Bloomberg‘s sources, the government recently requested information from Apple and the investigation is in the early stages.

Apple in iOS 10.2.1 introduced a new power management feature to address complaints of unexpected shutdowns in iPhone 6 and 6s iPhones. The shutdowns were caused by batteries below optimal health drawing too much power.

At the time, Apple did not make it clear that to solve the issue, it was throttling the iPhone’s processor at times of peak usage to limit power draw, and that lack of information has led to the company’s current predicament.

The full details behind the power management feature implemented in iOS 10.2.1 were not explained until benchmark testing revealed older iPhones with degraded batteries were being deliberately slowed down, and without an adequate explanation from Apple, customers were outraged and dozens of lawsuits were filed.

Apple has since apologized and made reparations in the form of a new no-questions-asked discounted battery replacement program available to customers who have an iPhone 6 and newer, and the company is planning to introduce much more detailed battery information in an upcoming iOS 11.3 update. iOS 11.3 will let customers know when their iPhones are being throttled due to battery degradation, and it will also allow them to opt out of the power management features.

Despite these efforts, Apple is still facing the aforementioned lawsuits and in addition to the U.S. investigation, the company will need to deal with inquiries in other countries including China, Italy, South Korea, France, Brazil, and more.

Mammoth Media has raised a $13 million Series A funding to create what it calls “entertainment experiences for the mobile-first generation.”

Mammoth is not the first startup to pitch itself as reinventing entertainment for smartphones, but for the most part, that message has come from gaming companies. Co-founder and CEO Benoit Vatere said he wanted to take the mobile-centric approach beyond gaming and social media.

Rather than “mixing social and media,” Vatere said the focus at Mammoth is “content and content alone.” That doesn’t mean excluding social entirely. For example, Mammoth made the Wishbone app, where users can vote on things “Who’s cuter?”, but Vatere said Wishbone is more like America’s Funniest Home Videos than it is a social networking app — the focus is on creating shareable content, not on talking to your friends.

Mammoth also created Yarn, one of the apps delivering fiction in a text message format. The company says that the average Yarn subscriber (pricing starts at $2.99 per week) spends 50 minutes reading in the first week. According to App Annie, Yarn been the number one books app in a number of countries, including the United States.

The app recently launched Hack’d, a horror series featuring Musical.ly star Kristen Hancher. Vatere said we can expect to see more series starring social media influencers — after seeing reaction videos to Yarn content, his team thought, “Why not, instead of having them react to the story, have them in the story itself?”

Besides subscriptions, Yarn also makes money from sponsorships — it’s a partnership with Skype, resulting in three stories that “highlight Skype’s communication features.”

And Vatere plans to launch new apps. The idea is to continue experimenting with new formats, which means some of the apps probably won’t take off, but he’s hoping to launch “one very successful experience” each year. This also requires a sustainable and repeatable model for building audiences.

“Virality is key to helping growth, but virality cannot sustain a business,” Vatere said. “You have to be able to do user acquisition properly … You need to understand how much you can afford per user.
We have the engine that tells us that.”

The funding was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Science Inc., the venture studio where Mammoth was incubated. Greylock’s Josh Elman wrote that he’ll be joining the Mammoth board, and he noted that this is his first investment in Los Angeles.

“I’m #longLA and I believe there will be many more great companies that bridge technology and entertainment and LA will be a great place for those companies to grow and prosper,” Elman said.