Google launches the final beta of Android 11

With the launch of Android 11 getting closer, Google today launched the third and final beta of its mobile operating system ahead of its general availability. Google had previously delayed the beta program by about a month because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Image Credits: Google

Since Android 11 had already reached platform stability with Beta 2, most of the changes here are fixes and optimizations. As a Google spokesperson noted, “this beta is focused on helping developers put the finishing touches on their apps as they prepare for Android 11, including the official API 30 SDK and build tools for Android Studio.”

The one exception is some updates to the Exposure Notification System contact tracing API, which users can now use without turning on device location settings. Exposure Notification is an exception here, as all other Android apps need to have location settings on (and user permission to access it) to perform the kind of Bluetooth scanning Google is using for this API.

Otherwise, though, there are no surprises here, given that this has already been a pretty lengthy preview cycle. Mostly, Google really wants developers to make sure their apps are ready for the new version, which includes quite a few changes.

If you are brave enough, you can get the latest beta over the air as part of the Android Beta program. It’s available for Pixel 2, 3, 3a, 4 and (soon) 4a users.

Google’s budget Pixel 4a addresses its premium predecessor’s biggest problem

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Twitter adds labels for government officials and state-controlled media

Twitter is introducing new labels for accounts and tweets tied to government officials and “state-affiliated media.”

“Twitter provides an unmatched way to connect with, and directly speak to public officials and representatives,” the company wrote in the blog post announcing these changes. “This direct line of communication with leaders and officials has helped to democratize political discourse and increase transparency and accountability.”

However, Twitter suggested that these labels are part of a larger effort “to protect that discourse because we believe political reach should be earned not bought.”

When it comes to labeling government officials, the company said it’s focusing on those who represent “the official voice of the state abroad,” including “foreign ministers, institutional entities, ambassadors, official spokespeople, and key diplomatic leaders.” It’s starting with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, with plans to add other countries in the future.

Twitter said these labels will not apply to “the personal accounts of heads of state,” because “these accounts enjoy widespread name recognition, media attention, and public awareness.” For example: President Donald Trump’s Twitter account has not been labeled, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s account has.

Image Credits: Twitter

As for state-affiliated media, Twitter said that media organizations that maintain editorial independence despite government financing, such as the BBC and NPR, will not labeled.

Instead, the label will be reserved for “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution” — for example, Russia-backed RT. To identify these outlets, the company says it’s consulting outside experts, including members of its Digital and Human Rights Advisory group (part of Twitter’s Trust & Safety Council).

Facebook introduced a similar label in June.

Twitter also said state-affiliated media will no longer receive promotion via the service’s home timeline, notifications and search. (This limitation does not apply to government officials.) The service had already blocked these groups from purchasing advertising after an incident last year in which China’s state news agency bought promoted tweets to portray pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong as violent.

Twitter adds a warning label fact-checking Trump’s false voting claims

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Attorneys general from twenty states call on Facebook to do more to fight discrimination, disinformation and harassment

In an open letter to Facebook’s leadership posted earlier today, the attorneys general from 20 states called on the company to do more to fight intimidation, discrimination, disinformation, harassment and hate speech on the platform.

“Although Facebook has made some progress in counteracting the use of its platform to dehumanize and demean, that is just the beginning of what is necessary,” the attorneys general wrote. “Private parties, organized groups, and public officials continue to use Facebook to spread misinformation and project messages of hate against different groups of Americans. In many cases, these messages lead to intimidation and harassment of particular individuals online.”

Roughly 40% of Americans have experienced online harassment, according to a study by the Anti-Defamation League, and around 70% of those reporting harassment said it came on Facebook or its associated platforms, according to the report.

So the attorneys general asked Facebook to take more steps to protect users and provide redress for those platform participants who are victims of intimidation and harassment.

Their letter joins a chorus of consternation that has arisen to chastise the platform and its chief executive for doing too little, too late to stem the hate speech and misinformation that has come to define the platform’s experience for many users.

Over the summer, some of the biggest brands in the U.S. pulled advertising from social media platforms in response to a campaign from civil rights organizations.

That boycott includes huge mainstream brands, including Coca-Cola, Best Buy, Ford and Verizon. Other brands on board include Adidas, Ben & Jerry’s, Reebok, REI, Patagonia and Vans.

While some of the companies may have ulterior motives for pulling advertising, pressure has been growing on the company to take more action against the provocateurs on its platform.

In the face of all this criticism, Zuckerberg has been steadfast in his refusal to budge (even as his logic becomes increasingly tortured).

Watch Sacha Baron Cohen skewer Zuckerberg’s ‘twisted logic’ on hate speech and fakes

The attorneys general agree with these other assessments. “[The] steps you have taken thus far have fallen short,” the attorneys wrote. “With the vast resources at your disposal, we believe there is much more that you can do to prevent the use of Facebook as a vehicle for misinformation and discrimination, and to prevent your users from being victimized by harassment and intimidation on your platforms.”

The leaders of the legal arms of state governments from California to the District of Columbia took the company to task and called on its leadership to follow the steps highlighted in its Civil Rights Audit to strengthen its commitment to civil rights and fighting disinformation.

Facebook also may be beginning to listen to its critics. Earlier this evening the company took down a post from President Donald Trump that included misinformation about the COVID-19 epidemic.

Facebook just took down a Trump post that claimed kids are immune to COVID-19

It’s a decision that could signal a new direction for Facebook, which has taken incremental steps to distance itself from the perception that the company deliberately turns a blind eye to the president’s potentially harmful behavior.

“This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation,” Facebook’s Liz Bourgeois said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Facebook also had a response for the attorneys general. In a statement issued to NBC News, Facebook spokesperson Daniel Roberts said that Facebook was working to ensure people feel safe on the internet.

“Hate speech is an issue across the internet and we are working to make Facebook as safe as possible by investing billions to keep hate off our platform and fight misinformation,” Roberts told the network in a statement.

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UK reported to be ditching coronavirus contacts tracing in favor of ‘risk rating’ app

What’s going on with the UK’s coronavirus contacts tracing app? Reports in the national press today suggest a launch of the much delayed software will happen this month but also that the app will no longer be able to automatically carry out contacts tracing.

The Times reports that a repackaged version of the app will only provide users with information about infection levels in their local area. The newspaper also suggests the app will let users provide personal data in order to calculate a personal risk score.

The Mail also reports that the scaled back software will not be able to carry out automated contacts tracing.

We’ve reached out to the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) with questions and will update this report with any response. DHSC is the government department leading development of the software, after the NHS’s digital division handed the app off.

As the coronavirus pandemic spread around the world this year, digital contacts tracing has been looked to as a modern tool to COVID-19 by leveraging the near ubiquity of smartphones to try to understand individual infection risk based on device proximity.

In the UK, an earlier attempt to launch an NHS COVID-19 app to support efforts to contain the virus by automating exposure notifications using Bluetooth signals faltered after the government opted for a model that centralized exposure data. This triggered privacy concerns and meant it could not plug into an API offered by Apple and Google — whose tech supports decentralized coronavirus contacts tracing apps.

At the same time, multiple countries and regions in Europe have launched decentralized contacts tracing apps this year. These apps use Bluetooth signals as a proxy for calculating exposure risk — crunching data on device for privacy reasons — including, most recently, Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.

However in the UK’s case, after initially heavily publicizing the forthcoming app — and urging the public to download it in its daily coronavirus briefings (despite the app not being available nationwide) —  the government appears to have stepped almost entirely away from digital contacts tracing, claiming the Apple-Google API does not provide enough data to accurately calculate exposure risk via Bluetooth.

Decentralized Bluetooth coronavirus contacts tracing apps that are up and running elsewhere Europe have reported total downloads and sometimes other bits of data. But there’s been no comprehensive assessment of how well they’re functioning as a COVID-fighting tool.

There have been some reports of bugs impacting operation in some cases, too. So it’s tricky to measure efficacy. Although the bald fact remains that having an app means there’s at least a chance it could identify contacts otherwise unknown to users, vs having no app and so no chance of that.

The Republic of Ireland is one of the European countries with a decentralized coronavirus contacts tracing app (which means it can interoperate with Northern Ireland’s app) — and it has defended how well the software is functioning, telling the BBC last month that 91 people had received a “close contact exposure alert” since launch. Although it’s not clear how many of them wouldn’t have been picked up via manual contacts tracing methods.

A government policy paper published at the end of last month which discussed the forthcoming DHSC app said it would allow citizens to: identify symptoms; order a test; and “feel supported” if they needed to self isolate. It would also let people scan a QR codes at venues they’ve visited “to aid contact tracing and help understand the spread of the virus”.

The government paper also claimed the app would let users “quickly identify when they have been exposed to people who have COVID-19 or locations that may have been the source of multiple infections” — but without providing details of how that would be achieved.

“Any services that require more information from a citizen will be provided only on the basis of explicit consent,” it added.

Ahead of the launch of this repackaged app it’s notable that DHSC disbanded an ethics committee which had been put in place to advise the NHS on the app. Once development was handed over to the government, the committee was thanked for its time and sent on its way.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s World at One program today, professor Lilian Edwards — who was a member of the ethics committee — expressed concern at the reports of the government’s latest plans for the app.

“Although the data collection is being presented as voluntary it’s completely non-privacy preserving,” she told the program, discussing The Times’ report which suggests users will be nudged to provide personal data with the carrot of a ‘personal risk score’. “It’s going to involve the collection of a lot of personal, sensitive data — perhaps your health status, your retirement status, your occupation etc.

“This seems, again, an odd approach given that we know one of the reasons why the previous app didn’t really take off was because there was rather a loss of public trust and confidence in it, because of the worries partly about privacy and about data collection — it not being this privacy-preserving decentralized approach.”

“To mix the two up seems a strange way to go forward to me in terms of restoring and embedding that trust and confidence that your data won’t be shared with people you don’t want it to be,” Edwards added. “Like maybe insurers. Or repurposed in ways that you don’t know about. So it seems rather contrary to the mission of restoring trust and confidence in the whole test and trace endeavour.”

Concerns have also been raised about another element of the government’s digital response to the coronavirus — after it rushed to ink contracts with a number of tech giants, including Palantir and Google, granting them access to NHS data.

It was far less keen to publish details of these contracts — requiring a legal challenge by Open Democracy, which is warning over the impact of “Silicon Valley thinking” applied to public health services.

In another concerning development, privacy experts warned recently that the UK’s test and trace program as a whole breaches national data protection laws, after it emerged last month that the government failed to carry out a legally required privacy impact assessment ahead of launch.

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Google discontinues the Pixel 4, nine months after release

Days after announcing the Pixel 4a, Google has quietly discontinued sales of the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. The move, noted early by the Verge, represents an extremely truncated lifecycle for a Google flagship — around half of the 18 months the company continued to sell its two predecessors.

Google already announced the imminent arrival of the Pixel 5, when it noted the forthcoming handset would be one of two Pixels devices to sport 5G, along with the Pixel 4a 5G.

The company confirmed the move in a statement, noting, “Google Store has sold through its inventory and completed sales of Pixel 4 [and] 4 XL. For people who are still interested in buying Pixel 4 [and] 4 XL, the product is available from some partners while supplies last. Just like all Pixel devices, Pixel 4 will continue to get software and security updates for at least three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US.”

The Pixel 4 was a largely well-received device, owing mostly to impressive camera work. But the handset was hampered by bad battery life — something Google has since addressed in the 4a. The new budget handset also sports an excellent camera for its price point, making the Pixel 4’s  existence somewhat redundant. Though the end of the Pixel 4 XL does leave Google with a larger option.

The company has clearly been dealing with a kind of identity crisis with its smartphones. A recent management shakeup appears to point to a desire for a new direction for the line, which has long suffered from uneven sales. Among other things, Google entered an already saturated market and has had some trouble distinguishing its offerings from other Android handsets.

It remains to be seen whether the Pixel 5 will be the first device to benefit from the division’s new direction.

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Google discontinues the Pixel 4, nine months after release

Days after announcing the Pixel 4a, Google has quietly discontinued sales of the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. The move, noted early by the Verge, represents an extremely truncated lifecycle for a Google flagship — around half of the 18 months the company continued to sell its two predecessors.

Google already announced the imminent arrival of the Pixel 5, when it noted the forthcoming handset would be one of two Pixels devices to sport 5G, along with the Pixel 4a 5G.

The company confirmed the move in a statement, noting, “Google Store has sold through its inventory and completed sales of Pixel 4 [and] 4 XL. For people who are still interested in buying Pixel 4 [and] 4 XL, the product is available from some partners while supplies last. Just like all Pixel devices, Pixel 4 will continue to get software and security updates for at least three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US.”

The Pixel 4 was a largely well-received device, owing mostly to impressive camera work. But the handset was hampered by bad battery life — something Google has since addressed in the 4a. The new budget handset also sports an excellent camera for its price point, making the Pixel 4’s  existence somewhat redundant. Though the end of the Pixel 4 XL does leave Google with a larger option.

The company has clearly been dealing with a kind of identity crisis with its smartphones. A recent management shakeup appears to point to a desire for a new direction for the line, which has long suffered from uneven sales. Among other things, Google entered an already saturated market and has had some trouble distinguishing its offerings from other Android handsets.

It remains to be seen whether the Pixel 5 will be the first device to benefit from the division’s new direction.

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What Is the Mr. Krabs Meme? 6 Examples

Who lives in a pineapple and spawns many memes? SpongeBob SquarePants! While the yellow sponge himself is the focus of many memes, the character Mr. Krabs also has lots of memes of his own.

You can spot the Mr. Krabs money meme, the “are you feeling it now, Mr. Krabs?” meme, or the confused Mr. Krabs meme plastered all over the internet.

We’re going to explore the most popular Mr. Krabs memes and explain how they came into existence.

Who is Mr. Krabs?

Mr. Krabs (or to give him his full name, Eugene H. Krabs) is a character in the popular animated television show SpongeBob SquarePants.

He is one of the main characters in the show. He has also appeared in it since the very first episode in 1999 and is voiced by Clancy Brown.

Mr. Krabs owns Krusty Krab, a fast food joint in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom, where the titular SpongeBob is a cook. The restaurant is known for its delightful Krabby Patty burger.

Mr. Krabs is obsessed with money. If there’s a way that Mr. Krabs can make more money then he’ll take it, even if it’s to the disadvantage of everyone else.

The SpongeBob SquarePants show is known for being silly and off-the-wall, which makes it rife for memes. Mr. Krabs is the star of some of these memes. Some of them focus on his love for money, others just capture him in a funny pose. Let’s explore all the best Mr. Krabs memes.

What is the Confused/Shook Mr. Krabs Meme?

When you just wake up from a nap and your parents already yelling at you pic.twitter.com/ksf0Sbop8P

— ahmed (@hijabihunty) February 1, 2016

Perhaps the most famous meme featuring the crabby entrepreneur is the Confused Mr. Krab meme. It seems to have originated from @hijabihunty on Twitter.

The basis of the meme is an image of Mr. Krab surrounded by lots of angry people (well, fish). The captions usually feature a joke about the poster being confused, confronted, or disorientated by a situation.

The still comes from an episode called “Patty Hype”, where SpongeBob sells colorful designer burgers called Pretty Patties. Mr. Krabs tricks SpongeBob into selling the rights for Pretty Patties. However, once eaten, it turns out the burger changes the color of your tongue. The image shows the moment when Mr. Krabs is confronted by these customers.

If you like this meme, you should check out our round-up of other funny confused memes.

What is the Mr. Krabs “I Like Money” Meme?

As we know, Mr. Krabs loves money. He makes that abundantly clear in this exchange from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, where he’s celebrating the opening of another Krusty Krab:

Perch Perkins: First of all, congratulations Mr. Krabs.

Mr. Krabs: Hello, I like money.

Perch Perkins: What inspired you to build the a second Krusty Krab right next to the original?

Mr. Krabs: Money!

Meme fans have turned this into an image meme to poke fun at businesses making decisions motivated only by profit. Sometimes, Mr. Krab’s face sports a company’s logo.

One example is the caption asking “Disney, what inspired you to make Frozen 2?”, with the image showing Mr. Krabs leaning into the microphone to say “money”.

What is the Mr. Krabs Wack/Glasses Meme?

This meme is inspired by another meme—a memeception, if you will. Hannibal Buress is a comedian who featured on The Eric Andre Show. A reaction image of him captioned with “wack” is used as a response to undesirable situations.

The Mr. Krabs version seems to have originated from Tumblr. Someone edited a picture of Mr. Krabs, to which another person responded asking if it was Hannibal Buress.

The internet ran with this, taking the picture of Mr. Krabs and overlaying the “wack” caption. The context of the meme is the same as the original but is automatically better since it’s Mr. Krabs (albeit in a weirdly modified form).

What is the “Are You Feeling It Now, Mr. Krabs?” Meme?

“Are you feeling it now, Mr. Krabs?” is a meme that was born from the “Mid-Life Crustacean” episode of the show. In it, Mr. Krabs has a mid-life crisis and SpongeBob tries to help him find the joy in life once more.

Each time they try another activity, like chilling in a paddling pool, SpongeBob asks Mr. Krabs if he’s “feeling it now”. And so, a meme was created!

For this meme, the makers have mixed audio and/or video of the scene with other clips. Sometimes it’s used for sexual connotations, other times for more humorous purposes—like transitioning the clip into “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins or “Promiscuous” by Nelly Furtado.

What is the “Oh Yeah, Mr. Krabs” Meme?

Warning: The audio in the video above is very loud. You should turn down your volume before playing.

Just when you thought memes couldn’t get weirder, along comes the “Oh yeah, Mr. Krabs” meme. This quote originated from a 2007 YouTube video, where a boy is playing with some SpongeBob toys, says the line, and then screams incoherently.

The original video didn’t get much traction, Though, a reupload another channel in 2009 has amassed over nine million views.

There’s not much logic to this meme. People simply take the audio from the video and mix it into other things, like other memes of Mr. Krab or just something random.

What is the “Could You Play That Song Again” Meme?

In the episode “Krab Borg”, Mr. Krabs calls a radio station to request a song. He sings the tune, but the DJ corrects him. The episode revolves around SpongeBob thinking Mr. Krabs is a robot, but that’s irrelevant to the meme.

People have taken this clip and edited it so that Mr. Krabs is singing other songs (well-known or invented) or simply making weird noises. Above is a compilation video with some remixes.

The Best Memes Ever

As long as SpongeBob SquarePants exists, there will be memes of it. Who knows what the future holds for the fruitful industry of Mr. Krabs memes?

If you’re a big meme fan, check out our guide to the best memes ever.

Read the full article: What Is the Mr. Krabs Meme? 6 Examples

Special raises $2.26M to build a subscription platform for online creators

Special is a new startup offering online video creators a way to move beyond advertising for their income.

The service was created by the team behind tech consulting and development firm Triple Tree Software. Special’s co-founder and CEO Sam Lucas told me that the team had already “scrapped our way from nothing to a seven-figure annual revenue,” but when the founders met with Next Frontier Capital (Next Frontier, like Special, is based in Bozeman, Montana) they pitched a bigger idea — an app where creators charge a subscription fee for access to premium content.

While Triple Tree started in the service business, Lucas explained that the goal was always to create “a product company that we could sell for $100 million.” Now Special is announcing that it has raised $2.26 million in seed funding from Next Frontier and other investors.

It’s also built an initial version of the product that’s being tested by friends, family and a handful of creators, with plans for a broader beta release in October.

With online advertising slowing dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, YouTube recently highlighted the fact that 80,000 of its channels are earning money from non-ad sources, and that the number of creators who receive the majority of their income from those sources grew 40% between January and May.

One of the main ways that creators can ask their viewers for money is through Patreon. Lucas acknowledged Patreon as a “very big inspiration” for Special, but he said that conversations with creators pointed to a few key ways that the service falls short.

Image Credits: Special

For one thing, he argued while contributions on Patreon are framed as “donations” or “support,” Special allows creators to emphasize the value of their premium content by putting it behind a subscription paywall. patreon supports paywalls as well, but that leads to Lucas’ next point — it was built built for creators of all kinds, while Special is focused specifically on video, and it’s built a high-quality video player into the experience.

In fact, Lucas described Special’s spin on the idea of a white labeled product as “silver label.” The goal is to create “the perfect balance between a platform and a custom app” — creators get their own customizable channels that emphasize their brand identity (rather than Special’s), while still getting the distribution and exposure benefits of being part of a larger platform, with their content searchable and viewable on web, mobile and smart TVs.

Creators also retain ownership of their content, and they get to decide how much they want to charge subscribers — Lucas said it can be anywhere between “$1 or $999” per month, with Special taking a 10% fee. He added that the team has plans to build a bundling option that would allow creators to team up and offer a joint subscription.

Lucas’ pitch reminded me of startups like Vessel (acquired and shut down by TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon in 2016), which previously hoped to bring online creators together for a subscription offering. In Lucas’ view, Vessel was similar to newer apps like Quibi, in that they directly funded creators to produce exclusive content.

“It’s a billion-dollar arms race, with what used to be a technology play but is now a production studio play,” he said. Special doesn’t have the funding to compete at that level, but Lucas suggested that a studio model also provides the wrong incentives to creators, who say “Hell yeah, keep those checks coming in,” but disappear “the moment the checks stop.”

“I almost think it’s an egotistical play,” Lucas added. “The company thinks they know best what a creator should produce for an audience that doesn’t exist yet. We say: Let them do it on Special. Do whatever you want, as long as you follow our terms of service, and own your creative vision.”

It might also seem like a big challenge to recruit creators while based in Montana, but Lucas replied that Special has more access than you might think, especially since the town has become “such a hotspot for extremely wealthy people to buy their third home.”

More broadly, he suggested that the distance from Hollywood and Silicon Valley “allows us to not follow the trends of every new streaming platform and [instead] truly find those independent creators underneath the woodworks.”

What went wrong with Quibi?

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Microsoft Abandons Project xCloud Game Streaming on iOS

Microsoft’s upcoming game streaming service, Project xCloud, will allow you to play games in the cloud no matter where you are. However, for some unknown reason, Microsoft has abandoned testing xCloud on iOS. And the company is instead focusing on an Android-only release.

What Happened With Project xCloud on iOS?

Microsoft opened its doors for iOS testers back in early 2020. Microsoft had previously told users that testing would continue until September 11, 2020; however, the company has since announced that iOS testing will end on August 5. The planned Android test dates did not change; neither did its release date of September 15, 2020.

In a statement to The Verge, A Microsoft representative said:

“Our Project xCloud preview TestFlight period has ended on iOS and we are focused on delivering cloud gaming as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to Android customers beginning September 15. It’s our ambition to scale cloud gaming through Xbox Game Pass available on all devices.”

Why Has Microsoft Killed Project xCloud on iOS?

Microsoft has not make an official statement explaining why it has abandoned iOS in favor of Android. However, there are a few reasons which hint as to how Microsoft arrived at this decision.

First, testing Project xCloud on iOS did not go smoothly. Due to the iOS App Store policy, Microsoft could only allow 10,000 users to test the service. Not only that, but this small pool of testers could only test the game, Halo: The Master Chief Edition. As a result, Microsoft probably could not test the iOS app to a satisfactory level, thus prompting the company to drop support for it.

If this theory is correct, Microsoft is not the first company to suffer issues launching on iOS. Google’s game streaming service, Stadia, has still not launched on iOS devices. The Steam Link app took a year to release after Valve fought to meet Apple’s high standards. As such, this may be another story of a games company struggling to launch on the iOS App Store.

However, Microsoft made an appearance at the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2020 event. During the event, Samsung mentioned how close the company has worked with Microsoft to bring Project xCloud to Galaxy phones. While the Project xCloud presentation did not show any Samsung-exclusive features, the partnership may have forced Microsoft to stop its iOS support to favor Android instead. But that is pure speculation.

Preparing for the Launch of Project xCloud

With the launch of Project xCloud rapidly approaching, Microsoft has stopped testing on iOS to focus on an Android-only release. Whether this is because Microsoft encountered issues with Apple’s App Store policies, or because its Samsung partnership has muddied the waters, is as-yet unknown.

If you’re unsure about how gaming in the cloud works, be sure to read our explainer detailing how cloud gaming works.

Read the full article: Microsoft Abandons Project xCloud Game Streaming on iOS

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What Is the Mr. Krabs Meme? 6 Examples

Who lives in a pineapple and spawns many memes? SpongeBob SquarePants! While the yellow sponge himself is the focus of many memes, the character Mr. Krabs also has lots of memes of his own.

You can spot the Mr. Krabs money meme, the “are you feeling it now, Mr. Krabs?” meme, or the confused Mr. Krabs meme plastered all over the internet.

We’re going to explore the most popular Mr. Krabs memes and explain how they came into existence.

Who is Mr. Krabs?

Mr. Krabs (or to give him his full name, Eugene H. Krabs) is a character in the popular animated television show SpongeBob SquarePants.

He is one of the main characters in the show. He has also appeared in it since the very first episode in 1999 and is voiced by Clancy Brown.

Mr. Krabs owns Krusty Krab, a fast food joint in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom, where the titular SpongeBob is a cook. The restaurant is known for its delightful Krabby Patty burger.

Mr. Krabs is obsessed with money. If there’s a way that Mr. Krabs can make more money then he’ll take it, even if it’s to the disadvantage of everyone else.

The SpongeBob SquarePants show is known for being silly and off-the-wall, which makes it rife for memes. Mr. Krabs is the star of some of these memes. Some of them focus on his love for money, others just capture him in a funny pose. Let’s explore all the best Mr. Krabs memes.

What is the Confused/Shook Mr. Krabs Meme?

When you just wake up from a nap and your parents already yelling at you pic.twitter.com/ksf0Sbop8P

— ahmed (@hijabihunty) February 1, 2016

Perhaps the most famous meme featuring the crabby entrepreneur is the Confused Mr. Krab meme. It seems to have originated from @hijabihunty on Twitter.

The basis of the meme is an image of Mr. Krab surrounded by lots of angry people (well, fish). The captions usually feature a joke about the poster being confused, confronted, or disorientated by a situation.

The still comes from an episode called “Patty Hype”, where SpongeBob sells colorful designer burgers called Pretty Patties. Mr. Krabs tricks SpongeBob into selling the rights for Pretty Patties. However, once eaten, it turns out the burger changes the color of your tongue. The image shows the moment when Mr. Krabs is confronted by these customers.

If you like this meme, you should check out our round-up of other funny confused memes.

What is the Mr. Krabs “I Like Money” Meme?

As we know, Mr. Krabs loves money. He makes that abundantly clear in this exchange from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, where he’s celebrating the opening of another Krusty Krab:

Perch Perkins: First of all, congratulations Mr. Krabs.

Mr. Krabs: Hello, I like money.

Perch Perkins: What inspired you to build the a second Krusty Krab right next to the original?

Mr. Krabs: Money!

Meme fans have turned this into an image meme to poke fun at businesses making decisions motivated only by profit. Sometimes, Mr. Krab’s face sports a company’s logo.

One example is the caption asking “Disney, what inspired you to make Frozen 2?”, with the image showing Mr. Krabs leaning into the microphone to say “money”.

What is the Mr. Krabs Wack/Glasses Meme?

This meme is inspired by another meme—a memeception, if you will. Hannibal Buress is a comedian who featured on The Eric Andre Show. A reaction image of him captioned with “wack” is used as a response to undesirable situations.

The Mr. Krabs version seems to have originated from Tumblr. Someone edited a picture of Mr. Krabs, to which another person responded asking if it was Hannibal Buress.

The internet ran with this, taking the picture of Mr. Krabs and overlaying the “wack” caption. The context of the meme is the same as the original but is automatically better since it’s Mr. Krabs (albeit in a weirdly modified form).

What is the “Are You Feeling It Now, Mr. Krabs?” Meme?

“Are you feeling it now, Mr. Krabs?” is a meme that was born from the “Mid-Life Crustacean” episode of the show. In it, Mr. Krabs has a mid-life crisis and SpongeBob tries to help him find the joy in life once more.

Each time they try another activity, like chilling in a paddling pool, SpongeBob asks Mr. Krabs if he’s “feeling it now”. And so, a meme was created!

For this meme, the makers have mixed audio and/or video of the scene with other clips. Sometimes it’s used for sexual connotations, other times for more humorous purposes—like transitioning the clip into “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins or “Promiscuous” by Nelly Furtado.

What is the “Oh Yeah, Mr. Krabs” Meme?

Warning: The audio in the video above is very loud. You should turn down your volume before playing.

Just when you thought memes couldn’t get weirder, along comes the “Oh yeah, Mr. Krabs” meme. This quote originated from a 2007 YouTube video, where a boy is playing with some SpongeBob toys, says the line, and then screams incoherently.

The original video didn’t get much traction, Though, a reupload another channel in 2009 has amassed over nine million views.

There’s not much logic to this meme. People simply take the audio from the video and mix it into other things, like other memes of Mr. Krab or just something random.

What is the “Could You Play That Song Again” Meme?

In the episode “Krab Borg”, Mr. Krabs calls a radio station to request a song. He sings the tune, but the DJ corrects him. The episode revolves around SpongeBob thinking Mr. Krabs is a robot, but that’s irrelevant to the meme.

People have taken this clip and edited it so that Mr. Krabs is singing other songs (well-known or invented) or simply making weird noises. Above is a compilation video with some remixes.

The Best Memes Ever

As long as SpongeBob SquarePants exists, there will be memes of it. Who knows what the future holds for the fruitful industry of Mr. Krabs memes?

If you’re a big meme fan, check out our guide to the best memes ever.

Read the full article: What Is the Mr. Krabs Meme? 6 Examples

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5 Great Siri Shortcuts to Improve Your Health and Well-Being

The Siri Shortcuts app makes it possible to create your own mini-apps by stringing together a list of commands. You can use these shortcuts to perform all kinds of tasks on your iPhone or iPad, including using them to improve your health and well-being.

Although there’s no shortage of fitness-related apps on the App Store, many of them feel bloated with ads, paywalls, and excessive features. Sometimes it’s better to simplify matters and take your health back into your own hands.

You can do that with each of the well-being Siri Shortcuts below.

How to Use Siri Shortcuts

Take a look at our guide to Siri Shortcuts if you’ve never used this app before. We’ve explained all you need to know about getting started with Siri Shortcuts, including how to create your own shortcuts.

That said, you don’t need to create anything yourself to take advantage of the well-being shortcuts below. Since the app lets you install third-party shortcuts, all you need to do is tap the link at the bottom of each section to download and install that shortcut on your device.

Some of these shortcuts come directly from Apple, some of them we created ourselves, and some are from other Siri Shortcuts users. They should all be safe to use. But you can make sure you’re comfortable with a script by checking the actions inside a shortcut before you use it.

1. Meditate

Meditation has steadily grown in popularity as more people recognize the potential benefits of this practice. Simply sitting still and focusing on your breathing can lower your heart rate, reduce stress, and boost your happiness.

There are already plenty of great meditation apps available. But if you want a simpler alternative that you have complete control over, you should use the Siri Shortcut below.

After activating the Meditate shortcut, choose how long you want to meditate for and start relaxing.

This shortcut temporarily enables Do Not Disturb mode and starts a timer for the set duration. It also adds the appropriate number of mindfulness minutes to the Health app, making it easy to keep track of your meditation practice.

Download: Meditate

2. Nap

Sleep researchers recommend you get between seven and nine hours of sleep each night. But if that isn’t possible, you can make up for a shortfall with a good nap instead.

Napping isn’t for everyone; some people feel worse afterward than they did before. But it’s still the best way to rejuvenate yourself in the middle of the day. And you can help avoid grogginess by choosing the right time and duration to nap.

It’s best to nap between 1pm and 3pm, which is when we naturally start to slump after eating lunch. And you’re better off napping for either 30 minutes or 90 minutes to avoid waking up in the middle of deep sleep.

The Nap shortcut below can help improve your well-being by suggesting a good nap duration. The shortcut then enables Do Not Disturb, starts a timer, and adds that sleep time to the Health app.

Download: Nap

3. Log Water

It’s important to keep hydrated throughout the day. Your water intake can affect your blood pressure, hunger, and energy levels. If you care about your health and well-being, you should use the Log Water shortcut to build a water-drinking habit.

This simple shortcut asks how many ounces of water you drank, then adds that to the Health app. You can check the Health app at any time to track your total water intake and make sure you’re drinking enough.

A small glass of water is typically around eight ounces. And while there are no hard-and-fast rules, general guidance suggests you need at least 64 ounces of water per day.

Open the Log Water shortcut every time you finish a glass to keep track of what you’re drinking.

Download: Log Water

4. Pill Reminder

When you’re seriously unwell, you might have a stack of pills that you must remember to take at different times during the day. It’s difficult to remember what pills you took and when, which is why the Pill Reminder shortcut can be a literal lifesaver.

After activating this well-being shortcut, select the pill you just took to create a reminder for the next time you need to take it. That could be six hours from now, four hours from now, or at the same time tomorrow.

You need to edit the shortcut settings slightly to match your particular prescription, but this is easy to do. After installing the shortcut, open the Shortcuts app and tap the More (…) button for the Pill Reminder shortcut.

Now edit the pill names and time periods to match your medication. You can also repeat the same series of actions to add more pill options to the shortcut.

Download: Pill Reminder

5. Activity Report

You don’t need an Apple Watch to keep track of your activity. The Health app on your iPhone already tracks the steps you take each day, and you can use Apple’s Activity Report shortcut to find out if you’re walking more or less this week than last week.

Of course, there is no shortage of free fitness apps on the iPhone. But this well-being shortcut is lightweight, easy to use, and fully customizable.

When you activate the Activity Report shortcut, your iPhone displays your average steps from last week and compares it to your steps so far today. If you’re above average, good for you. When you’re below average, you might want to consider walking around the block before crashing on the sofa.

Try to check the Activity Report throughout your day to find out if you’re on target or not.

You could even use the Automation function in Siri Shortcuts to set the Activity Report to go off at the same time each day. However, to do this, you need to recreate the shortcut yourself from the Automation tab.

Download: Activity Report

Take Care of Your Well-Being With These Apps

Looking after your physical and mental health is important to live a long and happy life. Although your iPhone might seem like a hindrance to this goal at times, with these well-being shortcuts, it’s really one of the best tools at your disposal.

Siri Shortcuts lets you create and edit as many shortcuts as you like, designing them to perfectly meet your specific needs. But tweaking all those shortcut actions can take a lot of effort to get right. Sometimes the easiest route is to find a third-party app instead.

If you can’t get your head around Siri Shortcuts, but still want to improve your health and well-being, check out the best mental health apps on iPhone instead.

Read the full article: 5 Great Siri Shortcuts to Improve Your Health and Well-Being

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Time to Uninstall: TikTok Is a Huge Privacy Risk

TikTok is quickly becoming one of the largest social networks. It has over 800 million users worldwide, and roughly half of its users are between 16 and 24.

There have been privacy concerns about TikTok for some time. Recent information paints a very ugly picture of how TikTok operates to destroy your privacy.

Today we’ll take a detailed look at how TikTok compromises your smart devices, and what you can do about it.

Snooping on Your Clipboard

Okay so TikTok is grabbing the contents of my clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes. iOS 14 is snitching on it with the new paste notification pic.twitter.com/OSXP43t5SZ

— Jeremy Burge (@jeremyburge) June 24, 2020

While it is a fairly well-known fact that most apps collect user data for advertising and telemetry reasons, TikTok seems to be taking it to an extreme. As Twitter user Jeremy Burge demonstrates, his clipboard contents are being copied into TikTok every few seconds even when he is not using the app.

Copying from the user clipboard isn’t something unique to TikTok. Other apps do this to offer greater functionality to the user and don’t use it as a data collection technique. There is no way to tell which apps are checking your clipboard as part of their functionality, and which are simply mining your data.

It Gets Worse

Copying data from your clipboard so frequently may seem odd, but not inherently dangerous. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that, as Forbes writer Zak Doffman explains:

“The most acute issue with this vulnerability is Apple’s universal clipboard functionality, which means that anything I copy on my Mac or iPad can be read by my iPhone, and vice versa. So, if TikTok is active on your phone while you work, the app can basically read anything and everything you copy on another device: Passwords, work documents, sensitive emails, financial information. Anything.”

This behavior, whether on purpose or as a result of poor code, it pretty worrying. It’s fair to say that exploiting this vulnerability may not have been the original intention of the TikTok development team.

However, later in the same Forbes article TikTok seem to be unable to say whether clipboard snooping is an “anti-spam feature” or an error in the Google Ads software development kit (SDK).

TikTok: Unwrapped

One of the reasons we now know so much more about how TikTok operates is down to the work of a Reddit user named bangorlol. In a comment on a now-deleted post criticizing TikTok they describe how they reverse-engineered the app, and what they found.

This thread, along with some other citizen investigative journalism, show TikTok to be either morally corrupt or incompetent developers. Neither bode well for your security. The main ways TikTok collect and manipulate your data were listed by u/bangorlol:

• “Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
• Other apps you have installed (I’ve even seen some I’ve deleted show up in their analytics payload—maybe using as cached value?)
• Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
• Whether or not you’re rooted/jailbroken
• Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds—this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
• They set up a local proxy server on your device for “transcoding media”, but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication”

Add to this the fact that TikTok contains code that allows the downloading of a remote zip file, before extracting and running its contents, and things start to look very scary indeed.

Time to Uninstall TikTok?

With so many security breaches, surely there is no good reason to keep using TikTok? Some developers disagree. While TikTok is taking it to an extreme, almost every app you use will be collecting your data.

One aspect of the TikTok controversy appears to have been neglected. Both Google and Apple have standards that all companies must adhere to in order to have their app listed on the Play and App stores. While this doesn’t protect you entirely, it seems unlikely that a single app would be acting in a way that was different from others on the same platforms.

Whether you see this as a good thing or further evidence that smartphone security is in a terrible place is up to you.

It’s Not Just TikTok

The recent flow of TikTok related news makes it easy to forget that they are far from the only company who’ve been criticized for shady data usage. Facebook have repeatedly proved themselves to be a privacy nightmare. They routinely track users in ways that go far beyond any of the TikTok accusations. Very few users ended up leaving Facebook due to these allegations, and TikTok might be the same.

Another popular viewpoint on the TikTok controversy is that while the security issues are grave, they are under greater scrutiny due to political tension. India has already banned many Chinese apps, including TikTok, and the US is considering a similar ban. It’s telling that these two countries both have fraught relationships with China.

What’s Next for TikTok Security?

The original post by bangorlol on Reddit, along with posts by Twitter users, caused a stir. There is now real momentum around the TikTok privacy issue, and a small community has grown around uncovering what TikTok might be up to.

One hub for this work is the TikTok reversing subreddit started by bangorlol. It now has over 1000 members crowdsourcing further revelations about the app.

Several security groups have published papers on TikTok including Penetrum and Zimperium.

Social Media Erodes Your Security

TikTok’s security concerns are nothing new, and while it is worrying, there are ways you can make your account more secure.

However, one thing is certain: TikTok, and most other social media apps, continue to erode your security daily. Getting off TikTok might be a good start, but the only way to be sure is to get off social media entirely!

Read the full article: Time to Uninstall: TikTok Is a Huge Privacy Risk

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Love Reading But No Free Time? You Need 12min Micro Book Library

Have you ever made plans to read more often, perhaps at the turn of a new year, but found the idea too difficult to stick to? Even with the convenience of digital books on our phones and ereaders, it’s often difficult to invest enough time into reading to get through full books.

If this sounds like you, 12min can help. Let’s take a look at this neat service, what it offers, and how you can start using it for a great price.

What Is 12min?

12min is best described as a “micro-book service”. The app’s mission is to take nonfiction books and distill them down into their most important concepts. Its team reads through best-selling books, noting key ideas, then works together to create a slimmed-down version that contains all the essentials.

Using the service, these micro-books let you interact with many works in a fraction of the time. This is where the name comes from: each book in 12min only takes about 12 minutes of your time to get through.

Even better, 12min offers both audio and text versions of books. That means that you can get through a book whether you’re in an area where you can’t make noise (like the bus) or want to listen to the audio while doing something different (like cooking dinner).

What Books Are on 12min?

Of course, no service like this is worthwhile without books that you want to read. Thankfully, 12min is full of hundreds of non-fiction titles, and adds new books every week.

Some of them include:

• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
• 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

This is just a sampling of what’s available. And if there’s a book you’d like to see the 12min treatment for that isn’t on the service yet, you can request it.

A New Era of Learning at a Discount

When you’re reading through entire books, reading one per week is a suitable goal for serious readers. But if you don’t have time for that, how many books per year do you read—maybe 12 or 24?

With 12min, you’ll be able to process more books than ever before. If you can find 12 free minutes every day, you’ll have processed 365 books by the end of the year!

While 12min has a free plan that lets you access one micro-book per day, the 12min Premium subscription adds much more value. In addition to allowing you to access the full library, you can download the micro-books offline on your device to read anywhere.

This normally costs $69.30 for a 12-month subscription, but you can get a lifetime subscription to 12min at MakeUseOf Deals for just $39. Since this usually costs $346, you save a huge 88 percent. Having a subscription means you’ll be all set to read whatever books 12min adds to its collection in the future.

Give 12min a try now and start reading more books than you ever thought possible.

Read the full article: Love Reading But No Free Time? You Need 12min Micro Book Library

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TikTok announces first data center in Europe

TikTok, the Chinese video sharing app that’s found itself at the center of a geopolitical power struggle which threatens to put hard limits on its global growth this year, said today it will build its first data center in Europe.

The announcement of a TikTok data center in the EU also follows a landmark ruling by Europe’s top court last month that put international data transfers in the spotlight, dialling up the legal risk around processing data outside the bloc.

TikTok said the forthcoming data center, which will be located in Ireland, will store the data of its European users once it’s up and running (which is expected by early 2022) — with a slated investment into the country of around €420M (~$497M), according to a blog post penned by global CISO, Roland Cloutier.

“This investment in Ireland… will create hundreds of new jobs and play a key role in further strengthening the safeguarding and protection of TikTok user data, with a state of the art physical and network security defense system planned around this new operation,” Cloutier wrote, adding that the regional data centre will have the added boon for European users of faster load times, improving the overall experience of using the app.

The social media app does not break out regional users — but a leaked ad deck suggested it had 17M+ MAUs in Europe at the start of last year.

The flipside of TikTok’s rise to hot social media app beloved of teens everywhere has been earning itself the ire of US president Trump — who earlier this month threatened to use executive powers to ban TikTok in the US unless it sells its US business to an American company. (Microsoft is in the frame as a buyer.)

Whether Trump has the power to block TikTok’s app is debatable. Tech savvy teenagers will surely deploy all their smarts to get around any geoblocks. But operational disruption looks inevitable — and that has been forcing TikTok to make a series of strategic tweaks in a bid to limit damage and/or avoid the very worst outcomes.

Since taking office the US president has shown himself willing to make international business extremely difficult for Chinese tech firms. In the case of mobile device and network kit maker, Huawei, Trump has limited domestic use of its tech and leant on allies to lock it out of their 5G networks (with some success) — citing national security concerns from links to the Chinese Communist Party.

His beef with TikTok is the same stated national security concerns, centered on its access to user data. (Though Trump may have his own personal reasons to dislike the app.)

TikTok, like every major social media app, gathers huge amounts of user data — which its privacy policy specifies it may share user data with third parties, including to fulfil “government inquiries”. So while its appetite for personal data looks much the same as US social media giants (like Facebook) its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, is subject to China’s Internet Security Law — which since 2017 has given the Chinese Chinese Communist Party sweeping powers to obtain data from digital companies. And while the US has its own intrusive digital surveillance laws, the existence of a Chinese mirror of the US state-linked data industrial complex has put tech firms right at the heart of geopolitics.

TikTok has been taking steps to try to insulate its international business from US-fuelled security concerns — and also provide some incentives to Trump for not quashing it — hiring Disney executive Kevin Mayer on as CEO of TikTok and COO of ByteDance in May, and promising to create 10,000 jobs in the U.S., as well as claiming US user data is stored in the US.

In parallel it’s been reconfiguring how it operates in Europe, setting up an EMEA Trust and Safety Hub in Dublin, Ireland at the start of this year and building out its team on the ground. In June it also updated its regional terms of service — naming its Irish subsidiary as the local data controller alongside its UK entity, meaning European users’ data no longer falls under its US entity, TikTok Inc.

This reflects distinct rules around personal data which apply across the European Union and European Economic Area. So while European political leaders have not been actively attacking TikTok in the same way as Trump, the company still faces increased legal risk in the region.

Last month CJEU judges made it clear that data transfers to third countries can only be legal if EU users’ data is not being put at risk by problematic surveillance laws and practices. The CJEU ruling (aka ‘Schrems II’) means data processing in countries such as China and India — and, indeed, the US — are now firmly in the risk frame where EU data protection law is concerned.

One way of avoiding this risk is to process European users’ data locally. So TikTok opening a data center in Ireland may also be a response to Schrems II — in that it will offer a way for it to ensure it can comply with requirements flowing from the ruling.

Privacy commentators have suggested the CJEU decision may accelerate data localization efforts — a trend that’s also being seen in countries such as China and Russia (and, under Trump, the US too it seems).

EU data watchdogs have also warned there will be no grace period following the CJEU invalidating the US-EU Privacy Shield data transfer mechanism. While those using other still valid tools for international transfers are bound to carry out an assessment — and either suspend data flows if they identify risks or inform a supervisor that the data is still flowing (which could in turn trigger an investigation).

The EU’s data protection framework, GDPR, bakes in stiff penalties for violations — with fines that can hit 4% of a company’s global annual turnover. So the business risk around EU data protection is no longer small, even as wider geopolitical risks are upping the uncertainty for global Internet players.

“Protecting our community’s privacy and data is and will continue to be our priority,” TikTok’s CISO writes, adding: “Today’s announcement is just the latest part of our ongoing work to enhance our global capability and efforts to protect our users and the TikTok community.”

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The FBI Warns Windows 7 Users to Secure Their PCs

On January 14, 2020, Windows 7 came to the end of its support life; however, that didn’t stop users and businesses from continuing to use it. Because of this, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has published a Private Industry Notification (PIN) telling all Windows 7 users to secure their computers.

What Did the FBI Say?

In the FBI’s Windows 7 PIN, the bureau explains why security is important for an older PC.

The FBI points out that, in May 2017, 71 percent of healthcare organizations used operating systems that became unsupported in January 2020. If those organizations didn’t upgrade before January, it creates an opportunity for hackers to cause damage to improperly-secured systems.

The FBI also mentions how Microsoft patched a critical exploit in Windows 7 back in March 2017. Despite this, the same exploit was used in the infamous WannaCry attacks in May of that year.

A massive 98 percent of WannaCry (one of the most famous computer viruses) victims used Windows 7, which proved that users were not properly securing their systems. This counts double now that the operating system has no access to patches any more.

The FBI finishes the PIN by discussing how to secure an old computer:

• Upgrading operating systems to the latest supported version.
• Ensuring anti-virus, spam filters, and firewalls are up to date, properly configured, and secure.
• Auditing network configurations and isolate computer systems that cannot be updated.
• Auditing your network for systems using RDP, closing unused RDP ports, applying two-factor authentication wherever possible, and logging RDP login attempts.

How Windows 7 Persisted Into the Modern Day

Windows 7 has been a constant thorn in Microsoft’s side. After the company failed to impress customers and businesses with Windows 8, users opted to dig in further with Windows 7. Once Windows 10 was released, companies had important systems entrenched within old versions of Windows, complete with software made specifically for that version.

As such, transitioning all essential programs and software to a Windows 10 environment is a daunting task. Which is why some companies opted to stick with what they had to prevent bugs cropping up during an upgrade.

Now that the end-of-life date has passed for Windows 7, those systems require proper protection. For some businesses, they have the means to hire technicians to properly secure their older computers. For those who can’t, it leaves the door open for hackers to steal and destroy data.

Holding on to Windows 7

Despite showing its age, users and businesses alike have stood beside the loveable Windows 7. As a result, the FBI has warned everyone still using the operating system to upgrade to the latest version and install antivirus programs to protect their PCs. And Windows 7 users would do well to take notice.

If you still love your older computers, why not grab one of the best free antivirus software solutions to protect it from threats? After all, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Image Credit: Tony Webster/Flickr

Read the full article: The FBI Warns Windows 7 Users to Secure Their PCs

The FBI Warns Windows 7 Users to Secure Their PCs

On January 14, 2020, Windows 7 came to the end of its support life; however, that didn’t stop users and businesses from continuing to use it. Because of this, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has published a Private Industry Notification (PIN) telling all Windows 7 users to secure their computers.

What Did the FBI Say?

In the FBI’s Windows 7 PIN, the bureau explains why security is important for an older PC.

The FBI points out that, in May 2017, 71 percent of healthcare organizations used operating systems that became unsupported in January 2020. If those organizations didn’t upgrade before January, it creates an opportunity for hackers to cause damage to improperly-secured systems.

The FBI also mentions how Microsoft patched a critical exploit in Windows 7 back in March 2017. Despite this, the same exploit was used in the infamous WannaCry attacks in May of that year.

A massive 98 percent of WannaCry (one of the most famous computer viruses) victims used Windows 7, which proved that users were not properly securing their systems. This counts double now that the operating system has no access to patches any more.

The FBI finishes the PIN by discussing how to secure an old computer:

• Upgrading operating systems to the latest supported version.
• Ensuring anti-virus, spam filters, and firewalls are up to date, properly configured, and secure.
• Auditing network configurations and isolate computer systems that cannot be updated.
• Auditing your network for systems using RDP, closing unused RDP ports, applying two-factor authentication wherever possible, and logging RDP login attempts.

How Windows 7 Persisted Into the Modern Day

Windows 7 has been a constant thorn in Microsoft’s side. After the company failed to impress customers and businesses with Windows 8, users opted to dig in further with Windows 7. Once Windows 10 was released, companies had important systems entrenched within old versions of Windows, complete with software made specifically for that version.

As such, transitioning all essential programs and software to a Windows 10 environment is a daunting task. Which is why some companies opted to stick with what they had to prevent bugs cropping up during an upgrade.

Now that the end-of-life date has passed for Windows 7, those systems require proper protection. For some businesses, they have the means to hire technicians to properly secure their older computers. For those who can’t, it leaves the door open for hackers to steal and destroy data.

Holding on to Windows 7

Despite showing its age, users and businesses alike have stood beside the loveable Windows 7. As a result, the FBI has warned everyone still using the operating system to upgrade to the latest version and install antivirus programs to protect their PCs. And Windows 7 users would do well to take notice.

If you still love your older computers, why not grab one of the best free antivirus software solutions to protect it from threats? After all, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Image Credit: Tony Webster/Flickr

Read the full article: The FBI Warns Windows 7 Users to Secure Their PCs

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