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iOS 16 Battery Percentage, Google vs Apple on RCS, and VESA Studio Display on the AppleInsider Podcast

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Apple brings battery percentage back to the status bar in iOS 16 beta 5, Google puts Apple on blast over RCS adoption, we review the VESA mount Studio Display, and more on the AppleInsider podcast.

We discuss how the new battery percentage indicator may be Apple’s most disruptive feature of iOS 16. Many Apple fans are excited by the new feature, though neither of your hosts Wesley and Stephen will be turning it on.

Next, Google’s latest campaign for Apple to adopt RCS continues to push a narrative that’s missing a lot of details. The hosts dive into what’s wrong with RCS today and what it would take for Apple to consider the new messaging platform.

Meanwhile, Stephen’s Studio Display has arrived and he shares some controversial opinions about its speakers and webcam — they’re fine. Also, your hosts consider what it would take for them to upgrade from the existing Studio Display and whether Apple would introduce such a product anytime soon.

The latest product rumors point to new HomePods arriving sometime soon, and the new entry model iPad may see big changes in 2022. There’s also a quick discussion of Apple TV+ and the new animated film “Luck.”

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Telegram CEO claims Apple is delaying update that will ‘revolutionize’ messaging

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Telegram CEO Pavel Durov claims that Apple has been delaying an App Store update to the app that will “revolutionize how people express themselves in messaging.”

In a Telegram message on Thursday, Durov says that the upcoming update has been stuck in Apple’s review process for two weeks with no explanation from the iPhone maker about the holdup.

“If Telegram, one of the top 10 most popular apps globally, is receiving this treatment, one can only imagine the difficulties experienced by smaller app developers,” Durov wrote.

The Telegram chief executive also hit Apple and Google for charging a 30% commission on app and in-app purchases. Durov says the app review delay is just another harm on the commission, which he likes to a “tax.”

“The regulators in the EU and elsewhere are slowly starting to look into these abusive practices,” he said. “But the economic damage that has already been inflicted by Apple on the tech industry won’t be undone.”

This isn’t the first time that a Telegram update has been stuck in Apple’s app review process. Back in 2018, Apple delayed global updates after Russian authorities demanded the Cupertino tech giant remove the secure messaging app from the App Store.

Other app developers and executives have complained about Apple’s App Review process in the past. In 2021, Hopscotch CEO Samantha John called Apple’s review process “Kafkaesque.”

Apple has made moves to amend its App Store policies in recent years, including updated App Review processes and rules and the introduction of a lower 15% commission for apps making less than $1 million.

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Technology

Microsoft urges Windows users to run patch for DogWalk zero-day exploit

Microsoft urges Windows users to run patch for DogWalk zero-day exploit

Credit: Dreamtime

Microsoft has confirmed that a high-severity, zero-day security vulnerability is actively being exploited by threat actors and is advising all Windows and Windows Server users to apply its latest monthly Patch Tuesday update as soon as possible.

The vulnerability, known as CVE-2022-34713 or DogWalk, allows attackers to exploit a weakness in the Windows Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). By using social engineering or phishing, attackers can trick users into visiting a fake website or opening a malicious document or file and ultimately gain remote code execution on compromised systems.

DogWalk affects all Windows versions under support, including the latest client and server releases, Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022.

The vulnerability was first reported in January 2020 but at the time, Microsoft said it didn’t consider the exploit to be a security issue.

This is the second time in recent months that Microsoft has been forced to change its position on a known exploit, having initially rejected reports that another Windows MSDT zero-day, known as Follina, posed a security threat. A patch for that exploit was released in June’s Patch Tuesday update.

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Technology

Visual Studio Code 1.70 eases title bar customization

Visual Studio Code 1.70 eases title bar customization

Credit: Dreamtime

Visual Studio Code 1.70, the latest release of Microsoft’s popular code editor, promises easier title bar customization and Git merge conflict resolution, among a host of other improvements.

Introduced August 4, VS Code 1.70 can be accessed from visualstudio.com for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Also known as the July 2022 update, VS Code 1.70 brings easier title bar customization, with developers now able to right-click to the title bar to open a context menu that toggles the menu bar. For Windows users expecting the system context menu, the menu still can be triggered by right-clicking the VS Code icon in the top left corner of the window, or by pressing. Alt+Space.

Also in VS Code 1.70, the three-way merge editor, for quickly resolving Git merge conflicts, is enabled by default. The merge editor features improved context menus, new commands to accept all changes from one side, enhanced diff colors, and a greater emphasis on conflicting versus non-conflicting changes.

Microsoft also introduced command line options to bring up the merge editor in VS Code. The company said it is beginning to explore alternative diffing algorithms to improve the precision of merge conflicts.

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Technology

Spectralink DECT devices now integrated with Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway

Spectralink DECT devices now integrated with Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway

Spectralink DECT devices are now integrated with Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway to help create better results for business-critical frontline workers.

The DECT devices integration with Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway is now available in Australia and New Zealand through local distributor Wavelink.

The integration comes at a time when sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and logistics, are relying more heavily on business-critical deskless workers (workers who have to go to a business location to carry out their roles).

It is clear that enterprise businesses globally have also embraced the significant business benefits of cloud-based collaboration tools, leading to more demand for better technology.

In today’s climate, deskless workers must be able to communicate and collaborate easily with their colleagues who work across locations, shifts, and time zones from anywhere. This is often enabled by cloud-based communication and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams.

The new integration will further enable enterprise customers to migrate to Microsoft Teams while keeping those business-critical deskless workers connected through and after the process.

“Open integration is part of Spectralink’s DNA and this latest integration proves our commitment to the objective of providing customers with choice over their preferred systems,” says Spectralink Corporation managing director EMEA Julien Bertheuil.

“As more and more businesses were coming to us asking for support migrating to the cloud to improve worker collaboration and safety, our experience in enterprise-grade DECT, combined with our knowledge of the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market, meant we We were ideally placed to develop this much-needed integration with Microsoft Teams. We hope more and more businesses will now be able to complete their digital transformation journey seamlessly.”

Microsoft vice president teams engineering Mahendra Sekaran says the new integration will help many frontline workers with communication on the job, helping them better serve their communities.

“Spectralink DECT integration with Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway enables Teams users to use their DECT devices as another Teams endpoint, while getting access to all of Teams collaboration capabilities. Frontline workers rely on these devices to get their work done, and this new integration allows them to stay connected with their colleagues while on the go.”

Spectralink says it has been developing solutions ranging from on-premises digital private branch exchanges (PBXs) to private and public cloud-delivered collaboration tools for 30 years. They say that this integration, as with the company’s other implementations, helps to bridge the gap between enterprise communications platforms and infrastructure of all sizes.

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Technology

Microsoft launches .NET Community Toolkit

Microsoft launches .NET Community Toolkit

Credit: Dreamtime

Microsoft has officially launched the .NET Community Toolkit, providing developers with a collection of helpers and APIs for .NET developers, agnostic of any UI platform.

Redmond said an updated release of the MVVM (model-view-model) Toolkit is the biggest new feature in the toolkit.

A spin-off of the Windows Community Toolkit, .NET Community Toolkit 8.0.0 was announced August 4, following a preview phase that began in January.

Included with the MVVM Toolkit are new source generators intended to greatly reduce boilerplate code for setting up an application leveraging MVVM. These generators have been rewritten to run faster than before. Writing observable properties has been simplified, C# development enhanced, and messenger APIs have been improved for MVVM applications as well.

The .NET Community Toolkit 8.0.0 also brings improvements to the diagnostics package. The toolkit can be accessed from GitHub.

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Technology

DuckDuckGo to block Microsoft trackers amid backlash

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San Francisco: Following the May disclosure that the privacy-focused online browser DuckDuckGo permits Microsoft to track scripts on external sites, the platform now claims to begin banning those as well.

The platform said it was announcing more privacy and transparency around DuckDuckGo’s web tracking protections after community backlash.

“Over the next week, we will expand the third-party tracking scripts we block from loading on websites to include scripts from Microsoft in our browsing apps (iOS and Android) and our browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera) , with beta apps to follow in the coming month,” the platform said in a blogpost.

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DuckDuckGo said this expands its 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection, which blocks identified tracking scripts from Facebook, Google, and other companies from loading on third-party websites, to now include third-party Microsoft tracking scripts.

This web tracking protection is not offered by most other popular browsers by default and sits on top of many other DuckDuckGo protections.

To further deliver on its commitment to transparency, the privacy-focused online browser said it has posted a new help page that offers a comprehensive explanation of all the web tracking protections we provide across platforms.

“Users now have one place to look if they want to understand the different kinds of web privacy protections we offer on the platforms they use,” the platform said.

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Activision Making More Off Phone Games Than Console And PC

Activision Making More Off Phone Games Than Console And PC

A solider with a rifle stands near a large, brown orc and both are in front of a screenshot of Candy Crush.

picture: Activision / Blizzard / King / Kotaku

Here’s a sign of the times: Activision has confirmed via newly released financial documents that it made more money on its phone games last quarter than it did on all of its console and PC games combined.

As spotted by tweaktown, Activision’s quarterly report was published last week and sheds some light on how its biggest games across PC, console, and mobile are doing financially. And because of games like Devil Immortal, Call of Duty Mobileand Candy Crush Sagathe beleaguered Call of Duty publisher’s making a lot of cash off phone games. In fact, more than half of its total earnings for the second quarter of 2022 came from mobile titles and not console or PC games.

According to the report, about 51 percent of Activision’s total earnings from the Q2 2022 period came from mobile games. That adds up to a total of $831 million in mobile game earnings. Meanwhile, its console games earned around $376 million and PC games brought in a bit less, $332 million. Finally, it made $105 million from events and esports.

What you might not expect, especially if you don’t realize how massive mobile gaming has become over the last decade, is that of the $831 million made off phone games, most of it came from King’s titles and not stuff like Call of Duty Mobile. In the report, Activision says that King titles like candy crush and FarmHeroes brought in over $680 million.

ReadMore: Lawyer To Pay Activision For Not Playing Call Of Duty

What these numbers reveal is that for big publishers like Activision, the future is likely one where it invests even more resources and money into mobile games and focuses less and less on console games. In an era where AAA games are more expensive to make than ever, take years to createand often flop, mobile games have become a lifeline for large game companies looking to keep their heads above water.

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Logitech G502 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming Mouse

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Logitech G502 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming Mouse

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Uses exclusive ultra-fast wireless tech to make sure your mouse is faster than you are, can be sued alongside special software for highly-customizable performance, and has 11 buttons to mess around with, a hyper-fast scroll wheel, and RGB lighting too .

For Activision it’s especially important as Call of Duty continues to lose millions of players and underperform. Seeing as the company has spent years focusing much of its energy on Call of Duty—at one point even having every studio it owned working on the franchise in some capacity—it’s likely it will seek to diversify into mobile more, not less, moving forward.

It should also be noted that Activision’s hugely successful mobile games are one of the main reasons Microsoft began the process of buying the company earlier this year following a huge, public fallout after the company was sued over years of sexual harassment and discrimination.

in some way, Call of Duty and warcraft are more like bonuses that Xbox gets top of King and his money-printing games.

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Technology

Xbox Series S Receiving Performance Boost

Xbox Series S Receiving Performance Boost

A white Xbox Series S stands in front of a green background.

picture: Xbox/Kotaku

While it’s not the most powerful console out there, the smaller and more affordable Xbox Series S has been a big hit for Xbox. But reportedly, some devs have felt the strain of getting bigger, more advanced games to work on the console and in response, Microsoft is freeing up some memory to help improve the tiny console’s performance.

As spotted by TheVergeMicrosoft is hoping to make the Xbox Series S a bit more powerful by freeing up some memory and letting developers access that extra memory if needed. In a video explaining this new developer-focused update, Microsoft says that it is unlocking “hundreds of additional megabytes of memory” and that this will, in theory, give studies more control over how to use the console’s limited memory. Microsoft says this “can improve graphics performance in memory-constrained conditions.”

The June Game Development Kit (GDK) is Available Now

To be clear, this isn’t like Microsoft quadrupling the power of the Series S. Nor is this Microsoft flipping some secret switch to let the console start running games at 8K and 240hz or anything wild like that. Instead, the amount of memory dedicated to non-gaming functions in the $300 Series S is being tweaked.

While the more powerful xbox series x console has 16GB of RAM the cheaper Xbox Series S has only 10GB. But before this update, devs only had access to 8GB of that memory as Microsoft reserved around 2GB for the console’s OS. Now devs will have a few hundred extra megabytes of memory, which could help some games run a bit better moving forward.

The Xbox Series S has always been positioned by Microsoft as a cheaper, less-powerful, but still capable next-gen console option. and it’s proven to be a very popular piece of hardware since releasing alongside the beefier Xbox Series X in 2020. Hell, I already had an xbox series x and I ended up buying one. It’s become the main way we play games in our living room, perfect for Fall Guys and Fortnite. But for more intense games it can struggle, requiring cutting down on framerate or resolution. This has reportedly led to some issues and frustration from devs trying to get certain games running on the lesser machine.

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Logitech G502 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming Mouse

20% Off

Logitech G502 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming Mouse

Gaming!
Uses exclusive ultra-fast wireless tech to make sure your mouse is faster than you are, can be sued alongside special software for highly-customizable performance, and has 11 buttons to mess around with, a hyper-fast scroll wheel, and RGB lighting too .

A recent example of a game performing differently on Series S is the Evil Dead game, which launched without a 60fps performance mode on the cheaper machine. Resident Evil Village also limits the game to only 45fps at 1440p and 30fps if you turn ray tracing on.

Hopefully, a few extra bits and bobs of memory can help devs working on Xbox ports not feel as hamstrung by the weaker Xbox Series S.

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Business

Telstra launches new bundle mobile plans

Telstra launches new bundle mobile plans

Telstra has announced a shake-up of its mobile plans that target families with multiple services.

The new bundle plans are available to customers with at least one service on an eligible ‘upfront’ mobile plan, with individual SIM cards that allow for additional devices.

Customers are able to add up to five of these new bundle plans to their existing accounts to connect kids’ smartphones, tablets or mobile broadband hotspots.

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The new $47 mobile bundle plans come with 15GB of data, and unlimited standard national calls and texts.

A $10 data bundle plan gives you 10GB of data and is suitable for tablets and hotspots.

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Telstra inks five-year deal with Microsoft

Telstra and Microsoft have signed a five-year agreement they say will help accelerate Australia’s digital transformation.

The deal is also one of the largest partnerships Microsoft has established with a telecommunications provider globally.

“Our strategic partnership with Microsoft is on a scale not seen before in Australia,” Telstra CEO Andrew Penn said in a statement on Tuesday.

As pressure grows on existing networks from remote working, high-definition streaming, online education and gaming, more bandwidth is coming.

Telstra will become Microsoft’s largest supplier of its network capacity requirements on terrestrial fiber in Australia, while Microsoft will become an anchor tenant on Telstra’s new ultra-fast intercity fiber network.

Microsoft technology will be used by Telstra to pitch new solutions for the manufacturing, retail, agriculture, utilities and finance sectors.

Telstra and Microsoft have also pledged to support hybrid ways of working and to reduce the environmental footprint as the Australian economy goes digital.

The deal accelerates Telstra’s migration of its internal information technology workloads to the public cloud, with Microsoft Azure as a preferred partner of the telecom giant’s ‘multi-cloud’ approach.

Microsoft will also explore increasing its capacity on Telstra’s Asia-Pacific subsea cable network.

Through these investments, Microsoft says it will be able to achieve unparalleled connectivity across key telecommunications routes in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region.

Microsoft and Telstra will work together over the coming months to finalize the expanded partnership.

– with Marion Rae, AAP

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