Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 94

When it comes to gaming, there aren't nearly as many options out there for Mac users as there are for Windows users. One of the bright spots for Mac gaming has been Steam, with some of the games offered there supporting Mac operating systems. Mac users who want to enjoy VR games had SteamVR to take advantage of, but that is changing.

Valve recently posted a very terse announcement on the Steam Community forums that SteamVR has ended macOS support. The announcement says that support has ended for Mac computers to allow the team to focus on Windows and Linux development. SteamVR is recommending that macOS users continue to opt into the SteamVR macOS branches for access to legacy builds.

Users can opt into a branch by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam and selecting properties, Betas. This means that Mac users will continue to be able to use VR, but no new features will be coming. The change also means the potential for future security or compatibility issues to surface.

There are many online chat and video chat services that are being used increasingly during the coronavirus pandemic around the world. One of those is Microsoft Teams, and with the significantly increased use of Teams also comes cybercriminals looking to take advantage of those using the service. A security research firm called Abnormal Security has announced that cybercriminals are using new phishing campaigns targeted at Teams users that are attempting to steal Microsoft account credentials.

Abnormal Security says that it has discovered a series of convincing emails that are designed to spoof notification messages from Microsoft Teams. One of the campaigns the security researchers talk about is a phishing email that includes a link to a document on a domain used by a legitimate email marketing company for hosting content for marketing campaigns. The document that is linked to is an image that prompts users to sign into their Microsoft Teams account.

Anyone clicking on the image is taken to is a malicious page impersonating the Microsoft Office logon page with the intent of capturing the user credentials. Another campaign the security researchers found redirects the user to a page hosted on YouTube. That page is redirected two more times until reaching a fake Microsoft page that is attempting to steal login credentials.

Many people who use Facebook have a huge number of pictures that have been uploaded to the site over many years of using the social network. Some of those users may want to back up their photos to the popular Google Photos service for sharing on other platforms or just keeping their pictures and video safe in the event something happens to their Facebook account. Facebook knows people want to keep their memories safe, and last year it launched a transfer tool for Google Photos in Ireland.

That Google Photos transfer tool is now live in the United States. The tool is found within the "Your Facebook Information" section of the settings on the user's Facebook account. Reports indicate that Facebook plans to expand the tool to work with other photo services in the future, but for now, it only works with Google Photos.

Facebook has said that the tool encrypts all data transferred between it and Google Photos and requires the user to enter their password before the transfer starts. The tool was previously available in Africa, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Facebook plans to enable additional countries to use the tool in the coming months.

The use of video conferencing and chat apps is booming around the world as people are forced to work and learn from home. Some of the software seeing massive increases in user numbers are Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, and Zoom. Zoom has been under fire during its rapid growth in part because of security issues. Zoom is now under fire again for offering up numbers that were misleading when it came to users.

Microsoft's chief marketing officer Chris Capossela was among the first to call zoom's numbers into question. He stated in a tweet that he believed Zoom's 300 million figure was not daily active users or monthly active users, but a number representing meeting participants. Capossela noted in the tweet that Microsoft Teams had seen more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month that generated over 4.1 billion meeting minutes.

Rather than admit someone had quoted an incorrect number, Zoom simply, and quietly, updated the blog post that bragged about the 300 million user figure. The blog post was edited to read that Zoom has over "300 million daily Zoom meeting participants." The difference between "users" and "participants" is massive and can't be understated. Anyone looking at the figures that Microsoft is quoting can see the significant difference between those two numbers with Microsoft seeing over 200 million meeting participants in a single day while boasting 75 million daily active users.

Coronavirus has put a real beating on just about every industry from automotive manufacturers to smartphone makers and everything in between. Research from IDC looking at the global smartphone market was published recently and shows that the smartphone market around the world suffered the worst annual decline ever in Q1 2020. IDC shows smartphone makers shipped 275.8 million devices during Q1, which was an 11.7% decline from the same quarter of 2019.

That decline marks the most significant annual decline ever, according to the research firm. The reason for the decline has to do with the uncertainty facing many consumers with work and with discretionary income. Many consumers are holding onto their devices and avoiding any discretionary purchases. Analysts say that replacement cycles are likely to become longer in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic.

Data from China offered by research firm Canalys shows that shipments in China, which is one of the biggest smartphone markets in the world, declined by 18 % year-over-year. IDC shows an even sharper decline for China, with its numbers showing a 20.3% year-over-year decline. IDC says that significant decline had an impact on the overall market because China accounts for nearly 25% of the global smartphone market.

TikTok has proven very popular with people during Q1 2020 as millions are stuck at home around the world due to the coronavirus pandemic. The latest data from Sensor Tower shows that the TikTok app has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally via the Apple App Store and Google Play. The 2 billion download milestone comes only five months after the app hit the 1.5 billion download mark.

Sensor Tower shows that the app had the most downloads for any app in history in a single quarter racking up more than 315 million downloads between Apple and Android users during Q1 2020. The app was popular and was being pushed hard by the developers before the coronavirus pandemic around the world. However, people stuck at home looking for ways to connect with others and to pass the time certainly helped downloads across the App Store and Google Play.

Prior to Q1 2020, the biggest month of downloads for TikTok, according to Sensor Tower, was Q4 2018, when the app had 205.7 million downloads for the quarter. The country where TikTok is the most popular is India, with that country generating 611 million lifetime downloads so far, totaling 30.3% of the overall downloads. The second most popular country for the app is China, with 196.6 million downloads so far, accounting for 9.7% of all downloads.

Anchor is a platform designed to allow users to create, distribute, and make money from podcasts on any device at no cost. It's a popular service, and Anchor has now announced a new tool that will automatically convert video to audio. The video-to-audio conversion allows users to turn video files into podcasts that are ready for audio distribution platforms.

Anchor says that the next time users have a conversation on Zoom, Google Meet, Instagram Live, or other video chat tools, those can be shared as a podcast for everyone to listen to. The anchor tool launched this week and makes it possible for users to convert video files into editable audio that can be shared and heard by anyone in the form of a podcast. The tool can be used to make it easy to turn interviews conducted via videoconferencing solutions into podcasts.

The tool could also help podcast cohosts who can't be in the same location due to the coronavirus pandemic maintain a natural workflow by hosting together via videoconferencing. Anchor says that transforming video chats in the podcasts requires only a few clicks when using your favorite video chat or streaming tool. Users upload the video file to Anchor on the web, and it's automatically converted to audio.

Any platform where people can share news or their personal beliefs tends to have a problem with viral messages that may or may not be true. Facebook-owned WhatsApp certainly has a problem with viral forwarded messages being sent, and it's currently bragging about a 70% drop in the number of viral forwarded messages. The significant decline in forwarded messages comes three weeks after WhatsApp imposed a limit on shared messages to stop the spread of coronavirus misinformation.

WhatsApp imposed a Highly Forwarded Message Limit on April 7 as a response to what it calls a "significant increase" in the number of forwarded messages since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. With the limit imposed, people are only allowed to forward viral messages to one chat instead of five as previously allowed.

WhatsApp issued a statement that said, "Since putting into place this new limit, globally, there has been a 70% reduction in the number of highly forwarded messages sent on WhatsApp. This change is helping keep WhatsApp a place for personal and private conversations." Like many other social networking, videoconferencing, and chat apps, WhatsApp has partnered with governments, the World Health Organization, and other organizations to create trustworthy information sources for users.

YouTube has published an official blog post that talks about its expanded fact checks for YouTube in the United States. The video service says that over the last two years, more and more people have begun coming to YouTube for news and information. That information runs the gamut from election coverage to perspectives on different topics and information about breaking news events.

One of the events that have brought more people to YouTube in recent months is the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. YouTube says that it's continuing to improve the news experience on the service, including raising authoritative sources of information across the site. YouTube is now expanding its fact check information panels that were launched in Brazil and India last year to the United States.

The fact check feature will expand on other ways that YouTube is using to connect people with authoritative sources. YouTube says that it started introducing information panels in 2018 with a wide range of contextual information from links to sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia for topics that were prone to misinformation. More recently, that has been expanded to cover coronavirus and includes links to the WHO, CDC, or local health authorities.

A new malicious campaign on the Google Play Store targeting Android devices dubbed PhantomLance has been discovered. According to the security researchers, the campaign has been active since at least 2015 and is ongoing. The campaign features multiple versions of sophisticated spyware that was created to gather the data of victims and targeted devices.

Another hallmark of the campaign is that it used smart distribution tactics such as distribution via dozens of applications on the Google Play store, according to researchers at Kaspersky. The spyware campaign also used alternative Android app stores for distribution such as APKpure and APKCombo. Kaspersky researchers say that the PhantomLance spyware overlapped with other attacks that targeted Windows and MacOS that were attributed toa hacker group known as OceanLotus believed to be based in Vietnam that was also tracked as APT32.

Researchers say that the malware used in this particular campaign is a lot more complicated than the typical malware used by cybercriminals to steal financial information and credentials from Southeast Asian Android users. The majority of users impacted by this campaign are located in Vietnam, with a small number located in China. Information that the malware campaigns are targeting included information about geolocation, call logs, contacts, text messages, lists of installed apps, and device information.