ANS_Tech Boss

  Some Google Chromecast users have reported that they are facing random crashes on their Wi-Fi networks. Router vendors have recognised the crashing issue and have started pushing patches from their end to retain a stable experience. The problem is claimed to exist in Google's 'Cast' feature and is reportedly affecting Google Home devices in addition to Chromecast. As explained by the TP-Link engineers in an FAQ listing, the issue exists due to multicast DNS (MDNS) packets that are broadcast through Google Chromecast and Home in a large amount, at a very high speed in a short amount of time. MDNS packets are normally sent in a 20-second interval. "This occurs when the device is awakened from the "sleep mode" and could exceed more than 100,000 packets in a short amount of time. The longer your device is in 'sleep', the larger this packet burst will be. This issue may eventually cause some of the router's primary features to s...

Google is making its voice assistant sound more like humans than robots. The company is working on a new text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2 which is essentially a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text you see on the screen. “The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a vocoder to synthesise time-domain waveforms from those spectrograms,” Google explains in a study titled ‘Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions’. “Our model achieves a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.53 comparable to a MOS of 4.58 for professionally recorded speech. To validate our design choices, we present ablation studies of key components of our system and evaluate the impact of using mel spectrograms as the input to WaveNet instead of linguistic, duration, and F0 features. We further ...

Digmine was first seen in South Korea A new cryptocurrency-mining bot, named “Digmine”, that was first observed in South Korea, is spreading fast through Facebook Messenger across the world, Tokyo-headquartered cybersecurity major Trend Micro has warned. After South Korea, it has since spread to Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, the Philippines, Thailand and Venezuela. It is likely to reach other countries soon, given the way it propagates, the report said. Facebook Messenger works across different platforms but “Digmine” only affects the Messenger’s desktop or web browser (Chrome) version. If the file is opened on other platforms, the malware will not work as intended, Trend Micro said in a blogpost. “Digmine” is coded in AutoIt and sent to would-be victims posing as a video file but is actually an AutoIt executable script. If the user’s Facebook account is set to log in automatically, “Digmine” will manipulate Facebook Messenger in order to send a link to the file to the a...

Bitcoin enthusiasts, beware! There is a new malware on the horizon, and its out to get your cryptocurrency. This cryptocurrency-mining bot, 'Digmine' first surfaced in South Korea and is spreading fast throughout the world, according to  Trend Micro , a Tokyo-headquarted cybersecurity firm. The only way the malware can spread is via the desktop version of Facebook Messenger when used on Google Chrome which helps the perpetrators take over the Facebook account. The malware is disguised to look like a video file being shared over Messenger. After the hackers take over your account, they have access to your friend list which helps spread the malware. What we know so far is that the malware only operates through Google Chrome and opening the infected video file on Messenger running on any other platform won’t result in an infection. After South Korea, Digmine has since spread in Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, the Philippines, Thailand, and Venezuela. It is likely...

iPhone X  users have discovered that family purchases cannot be authenticated via Face ID, according to a post on Apple's iPhone forum. The iPhone X is the first smartphone from  Apple  to sport the new  Face ID  facial recognition technology, and also the first one in a long time to not have Touch ID. The forum post mentions that every family purchase request prompts the user to type in their Apple ID and password. What is Face ID(Read the below Document) As we mentioned, family purchase approval requests  do not seem to work  with Face ID on the new iPhone X. Family Sharing is a feature offered for Apple devices users that wish them to be connected for purchasing subscriptions and apps. Ask to Buy, another one of Apple's features, lets children in the family choose to purchase apps, albeit with the approval of a 'family organiser'. This organiser can then choose to approve or decline the purchase decline from their Apple device. ...

    Earlier this week WhatsApp turned seven years old. It has been an amazing journey and in the coming months we're putting an even greater emphasis on security features and more ways to stay in touch with the people that you care about. But anniversary dates are also an opportunity to look back. When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people's use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple App Store was only a few months old. About 70 percent of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia. Mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft – which account for 99.5 percent of sales today – were on less than 25 percent of mobile devices sold at the time. As we look ahead to our next seven years, we want to focus our efforts on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use. So, by the end of 2016, we will be ending support for WhatsApp Messenger on the following mobile platforms: BlackBerry OS and...

It feels like anything and everything is on sale ahead of Christmas this year. Just check  our deals channel  if you don’t believe me. Of course, that includes apps as well and we have a terrific roundup of freebies for you on Tuesday. There are nine iPhone and iPad apps in total on today’s list, and they’re all premium apps that have been discounted for a limited time. Grab them for free while you can! This post covers paid iPhone and iPad apps that have been made available for free for a limited time by their developers. BGR is not affiliated with any developers. There is no way to tell how long they will be free. These sales could end an hour from now or a week from now — obviously, the only thing we can guarantee is that they were free at the time this post was written. If you click on a link and see a price listed next to an app instead of the word “get,” it is no longer free. The sale has ended. If you download the app anyway, you will be charged by Apple. Copy ...