Month: October 2021

Daily Deals (10-06-2021)

Adorama is selling Apple’s brand new iPad mini for $25 off. Amazon is offering up to $50 off the starting price for its Fire tablets. And Lenovo is taking $120 off the price of its 11 inch Lenovo Tab P11 Plus Android tablet. Here are some of the day’s best deals. Tablets Amazon Fire HD […]

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Adorama is selling Apple’s brand new iPad mini for $25 off. Amazon is offering up to $50 off the starting price for its Fire tablets. And Lenovo is taking $120 off the price of its 11 inch Lenovo Tab P11 Plus Android tablet.

Here are some of the day’s best deals.

Tablets

Wireless audio

Other

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Twitch hack reveals unannounced Amazon “Vapour” game store (and much, much more)

Twitch has suffered a major data breach, with hackers releasing more than 125 gigabytes of data from the Amazon-owned platform used by millions to live stream video game sessions and other activities. The data includes source code for the Twitch website as well as for Twitch desktop, mobile and console clients. Also found in the […]

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Twitch has suffered a major data breach, with hackers releasing more than 125 gigabytes of data from the Amazon-owned platform used by millions to live stream video game sessions and other activities.

The data includes source code for the Twitch website as well as for Twitch desktop, mobile and console clients. Also found in the data? Code for an unannounced, unreleased game store called Vapour that appears to be Amazon’s answer to Steam or the Epic Games Store.

Twitch.tv

According to folks who have pored over the leaked data, Vapor seems to have many of the features you’d expect from a modern game store as well as Twitch-specific features like Emotes (the platforms’ name for a type of emoticon).

It’s unclear for now whether Vapour is a work-in-progress that Amazon and Twitch plan to release one day, a project the company is exploring, or something that’s been canceled. But it does raise interesting questions about just how far Amazon wants to travel down the path of copying Valve’s Steam platform – maybe we’ll see a Steam Deck-like Twitch Deck handheld game console with Vapour integration one day? Stranger things have happened.

That said, while it’s interesting to see a hint of possible things to come in the Twitch data breach, if you have a Twitch account, now might be a good time to change your password, even though no password data appears to have been leaked (yet).

You might want to change it again in the future though. Twitch says it’s investigating the data breach and will provide updates “as soon as additional information is available“, but at this point it’s unclear if the vulnerability that allowed hackers to obtain this massive trove of data has been patched yet.

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Nokia T20 is a $250, 10.4-inch Android tablet with a big battery

Android’s tablet resurgence continues with HMD’s Nokia brand jumping into the fray.

  • The Nokia T20. [credit: HMD ]

We're in the middle of an Android tablet resurgence—no, seriously—and following recent devices from Samsung, Walmart, Xiaomi, and Lenovo, HMD is up next with its first-ever tablet, the Nokia T20. Nokia is tackling the lower end of the market by releasing a $249.99 tablet with a 10.4-inch display.

Let's talk about the specs. The SoC is a Unisoc Tiger T610 (a Unisoc SoC is a rare component); it's a 12 nm chip with two A75 cores at 1.8 GHz and six A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. The main A75 cores are pretty old and were last seen in major flagships with the Snapdragon 845 in 2017, so this is an entry-level chip. There are 4GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a pretty big 8200 mAh battery. The display is a 10.4-inch LCD with a 2000×1200 resolution and a "toughened glass" (read: not the usual Gorilla Glass) cover. The back is aluminum, and there's a microSD slot, stereo speakers, a front and back camera, a USB-C port with 15 W charging, and a headphone jack. There's no fingerprint sensor.

$249.99 gets you the Wi-Fi-only model, but an unpriced LTE version is also listed on the spec page. Nokia is selling a kickstand folio case for an unknown amount. The device ships with Android 11 and comes with two years of major OS updates and three years of security updates.

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Algorithms shouldn’t be protected by Section 230, Facebook whistleblower tells Senate

Section 230 reform is just a start, Frances Haugen says in Senate testimony.

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on October 5, 2021. Haugen left Facebook in May and provided internal company documents about Facebook to journalists and others, alleging that Facebook consistently chooses profit over safety.

Enlarge / Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on October 5, 2021. Haugen left Facebook in May and provided internal company documents about Facebook to journalists and others, alleging that Facebook consistently chooses profit over safety. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before a Senate panel yesterday, recommending a slate of changes to rein in the company, including a Section 230 overhaul that would hold the social media giant responsible for its algorithms that promote content based on the engagement it receives in users' news feeds.

“If we had appropriate oversight, or if we reformed [Section] 230 to make Facebook responsible for the consequences of their intentional ranking decisions, I think they would get rid of engagement-based ranking,” Haugen said. “Because it is causing teenagers to be exposed to more anorexia content, it is pulling families apart, and in places like Ethiopia, it’s literally fanning ethnic violence.”

Haugen made sure to distinguish between user-generated content and Facebook’s algorithms, which prioritize the content in news feeds and drive engagement. She suggested that Facebook should not be responsible for content that users post on its platforms but that it should be held liable once its algorithms begin making decisions about which content people see.

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Android 12 custom ROMs are here

Google released the source code for Android 12 this week, but the company doesn’t plan to begin rolling it out for its own Pixel phones for at least a few more weeks, which means that if you want to run Android 12 on Pixel or third-party devices right now you have two choices: use an […]

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Google released the source code for Android 12 this week, but the company doesn’t plan to begin rolling it out for its own Pixel phones for at least a few more weeks, which means that if you want to run Android 12 on Pixel or third-party devices right now you have two choices: use an Android 12 Beta, or install a custom ROM.

That second option is a new one, made possible by this week’s source code drop.

The folks at xda-developers report that there’s already an Android 12-based custom ROM available for the Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro and Redmi K20 Pro smartphones. Based on Android Open Source Project code, the software functions as a replacement for the operating system Xiaomi ships on those phones.

It’s likely that this will just be the first of many Android 12 custom ROMs. At this rate, I suspect you’ll be able to install a third-party port of Android 12 on Pixel phones before Google’s official update rolls out.

If you are trying developer abhishek987’s custom ROM for the Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro though, there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that SELinux is set to “permissive,” by default, which could pose security risks. And second, since Google hasn’t yet open sourced the Android 12 theming system that will allow the color scheme to change based on your wallpaper, developer abhishek987’s custom firmware uses a third-party, open source solution to achieve similar results.

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Nokia T20 is a $250 Android tablet with a 10.4 inch display and 3 years of security updates

HMD has been releasing a series of Nokia-branded smartphones for the past few years, and now the company has unveiled the first Nokia-branded tablet since 2014. The Nokia T20 is a 10.4 inch tablet that will ship with Android 11, but which will receive major Android updates for at least two years, and security updates […]

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HMD has been releasing a series of Nokia-branded smartphones for the past few years, and now the company has unveiled the first Nokia-branded tablet since 2014.

The Nokia T20 is a 10.4 inch tablet that will ship with Android 11, but which will receive major Android updates for at least two years, and security updates for three. While that’s not as good as the update plan for some of the company’s phones, it’s not bad by modern standards for a tablet with a $250 starting price.

First announced October 6th, the Nokia T20 is now available for purchase in the US and UK for $250 and £180, respectively.

The tablet features solid mid-range specs including a 2000 x 1200 pixel display (with a 5:3 aspect ratio) and support for up to 400 nits of brightness, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and support for microSD cards up to 512GB.

HMD’s first tablet is powered by a Unisoc T610 processor, which is an octa-core chip featuring:

  • 2 x ARM Cortex-A75 CPU cores @ 1.8 GHz
  • 6 x ARM Cortex-A55 CPU cores @ 1.8 GHz
  • ARM Mali-G52 MP2 graphics

The tablet has an 8,200 mAh battery and comes with a 10 watt charger, but supports up to 15 watt fast charging if you use a third-party adapter.

Other features include a  USB 2.0 Type-C port, 3.5mm headphone jack, stereo speakers, dual microphones, support for WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 and optional support for 4G LTE and GPS.

The Nokia T20 has an aluminum body, a “toughened glass” screen, and the tablet is IP52 rated for dust and water resistance, which means it’s “protected from limited dust ingress” and from “water spray less than 15 degrees from vertical.”

The tablet measures 247.6 x 157.5 x 7.8mm (9.7″ x 6.2″ ” 0.3″) and weighs 465 grams (about 1 pound).

HMD is selling a WiFi-only model in the US, while customers in the UK have the option of paying £20 extra for a WiF + 4G model.

via @NokiaMobile

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