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(credit: Dsimic)

Google has—for years—kept secret the amount of money it has made from its Android operating system. But the cat is now out of the bag.

An Oracle lawyer has told a US court that the search and ad giant had generated £22 billion ($31 billion) in revenue, and £15 billion ($22 billion) in profit since the OS first launched in 2008, according to Bloomberg.

It was also disclosed that Google paid Apple £700 million ($1 billion) in 2014 to be the default search engine on the iPhone.

(credit: Steve Rhodes)

While nearly all of the big tech companies have some sort of plan in place to deal with the upcoming onslaught of virtual reality and augmented reality technology, there's been one rather large holdout: Apple. According to a report from the Financial Times, however, Apple now has its own VR/AR expert. Doug Bowman is joining Apple following a sabbatical from his position as a professor of computer science and the director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech.

Bowman, who was the lead author of 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice, has an impressive background in virtual reality tech, with research focused on "three-dimensional user interface design and the benefits of immersion in virtual environments," according to his academic profile. He also collaborated on numerous articles, including Virtual Reality: How Much Immersion Is Enough? (PDF), 3D User Interfaces: New Directions and Perspectives (PDF), and The Effects of Visual Realism on Search Tasks in Mixed Reality Simulation (PDF).

Notably, last year Bowman was the recipient of a $100,000 (£70,000) research grant from Microsoft for using its HoloLens headset for a study on "collaborative analysis of large-scale mixed reality data."

Netflix, right on schedule, has started blocking some subscribers who are using VPNs.

Last week, on January 14, Netflix said that it would begin cracking down on customers who use VPNs, proxies, or other "unblocking" services to view content that shouldn't be available in their country. The move is almost certainly to appease copyright holders and broadcasters. Way back in 2014, Sony Pictures accused Netflix of "semi-sanctioning" piracy by allowing "illegal subscribers" to view geoblocked content.

The first report of Netflix blocking a VPN comes from uFlix, an Australian VPN service that charges AUD$2 (£1) per month for the ability to view Netflix content from around the globe:

Independence sits atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

HOUSTON—It was the bitterest of pills for Houston, the home of human spaceflight. This is the city Neil Armstrong hailed, by name, after the lunar module reached the surface of the Moon. And more than that, however, thousands of technicians, engineers, and flight directors had managed the space shuttle program from Houston for three decades. They designed the shuttle, tested it, and operated it. They loved those vehicles and mourned when 14 neighbors lost their lives during two accidents.

And then, in April 2011, the city of astronauts learned the bitter truth. The retiring space shuttles would go to museums in Washington, DC, New York, and Los Angeles plus a visitor’s center at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Houston’s prize? A pair of flown space shuttle seats.

For the city and more specifically Space Center Houston, the official visitor’s center for Johnson Space Center that had made a bid for a shuttle, it was a humbling moment. “We are really disheartened,” the visitor center’s president, Richard Allen, said at the time.

Banish your car's stock infotainment system to the background with CarPlay. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

If you buy a car today, it will probably come with some kind of touchscreen computer onboard. These are basically embedded tablet computers that run some kind of operating system, but rather than coming from Apple, Google, or Microsoft, the software comes from car manufacturers and their suppliers. Car companies don't have a ton of experience when it comes to software, so the integrated computers generally aren't designed very well. They also never have the app ecosystem we've come to expect from smartphones and tablets, so it's no surprise that many people still prefer using their smartphones over the in-car option.

Traditional software companies are getting a foothold in cars, though. We already reviewed Android Auto, and recently we got to spend some time with Apple's CarPlay. CarPlay seeks to combine the benefits of the in-car system—namely the big, bright touchscreen—with the design, apps, and functionality of iOS. Plug an iPhone into a supported vehicle and the stock infotainment system will go away while the iPhone beams an iOS-style interface to the car screen. From our time with CarPlay, this system appears built from the ground up for computing on the go, with an easy-to-use, safety-focused UI, a heavy emphasis on voice commands, and a sliver of the huge iOS app ecosystem.

To run CarPlay in your vehicle, you'll need a compatible car (Apple has a list here) or an aftermarket radio. Phone-wise, you'll need an iPhone 5/5c or newer. CarPlay updates come up fairly frequently, but this is CarPlay as it exists in iOS 9.2.