Self service repair store

The Competition Commission of India ( CCI ) imposed a Rs 1,337 crore fine on tech giant Google in 2022. India’s market competition watchdog cited the company’s control over the Android platform and even made some demands. Google requested the country’s apex court to revoke the penalty and block the demands made by CCI. The Supreme Court has recently passed its decision and has upheld CCI’s demands over the company. According to Supreme Court’s order, Google will not only have to pay the imposed fine but will also have to allow third-party app stores in the Play Store within the coming week. Reacting to Supreme Court’s order, Google claimed this move will “hurt consumers” and “stall growth” of the Android platform. CCI demands enforced on Google As per the CCI’s demands, Google will no longer be allowed to force phone makers to pre-install the company’s apps on Android devices to use the Play Store. The ruling also force’s the tech giant to enable … [Read more...] about google: Google CCI ruling: Play Store to house other app stores by next week

The Secret Service is reportedly willing to reverse course and disclose visitor records from President Joe Biden’s Wilmington residence, where classified documents were unearthed by the president’s personal attorneys. While the Secret Service claims not to keep visitor logs of everyone who entered Biden’s home, the Secret Service does keep records of those who “come into contact” with the locations the agency protects. It’s those logs the Secret Service is willing to turn over to Congress, according to Fox News. “The Secret Service does not maintain visitor logs at the private residences of protects,” Secret Service’s communications chief, `, stated. “While the Secret Service does generate law enforcement and criminal justice information records for various individuals who may come into contact with Secret Service protected sites, we are not able to comment further as this speaks to the means and methods of our protective operations.” The report appears to contradict the … [Read more...] about Report: Secret Service Able to Disclose Visitor Records from Biden’s Home

Audio player loading… Top Video conferencing software provider Zoom has announced a new “intelligent conversational” live chat solution powered by artificial intelligence. In a keynote event followed by a post (opens in new tab) on the Zoom blog, the company announced Zoom Virtual Agent (opens in new tab) , a chatbot designed to help businesses provide efficient customer service in a cost-effective way, by reducing handle times for human customer support staff. While corporate chatbots are nothing new, Zoom claims that many of these rely on “extensive” manual coding, while its new offering is powered by “proprietary AI” and machine learning in order to naturally process language. Zoom's AI chatbot for enterprise Zoom Virtual Agent supposedly integrates with various live chat, CRM and contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions, and will come packaged as part of Zoom Contact Center , the company’s own CCaaS. The unveiling … [Read more...] about Zoom is bringing AI to live chat customer service

Audio player loading… Nearly six months after the initial launch, Samsung is expanding its Self-Repair Program to include five new repairable devices. Joining the likes of the Galaxy S20 and the Tab S7 Plus are the Galaxy Book Pro 15-inch laptop, Galaxy Book Pro 360 15-in laptop, and the Galaxy S22 line which includes the base model , the S22 Plus , and the S22 Ultra . Samsung is continuing to collaborate with iFixit to provide the repair kits, which are currently available for purchase although the prices are unknown at the time of this writing. At the very least, we can at least look at the prices for the older kits on the Self-Repair Program to get an idea of what users can expect. For example, replacing the charging port on a phone from either the S20 or S21 line costs $66.99. Speculation aside, the prices for the new additions will be available once the repair kit's respective pages go live. Step-by-step instruction guides will … [Read more...] about Samsung is ready to let you repair your own laptops

Audio player loading… While gaming service Stadia shuts down on January 18, Google has announced plans to keep its controller alive. It may not seem like much in light of a whole catalog of cloud streaming games becoming inaccessible, but the controller really was the quiet highlight of Google’s first major step into gaming. While it’s not revealed the full details yet, Google said on Twitter that it will “be releasing a self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller .” Google has promised to share the specifics in time for the shutdown. Currently, the Stadia gamepad can only connect to Google’s platform. Until these recently announced plans, when the service shuts down on January 18, the controller would have become a useless hunk of plastic, nickel, and silicon destined for landfill. Now it appears you will be able to use the controller with other Bluetooth-enabled devices – PC and Android, most likely; maybe Apple devices and even the PS5 , … [Read more...] about The best thing to come out of Google Stadia will live on after the service dies

Epson printers have had a nasty little issue for years. Some models will abruptly brick, even if they seem to be working fine, because the ink pads are supposedly too saturated. Epson has endured bad publicity the past few weeks as users, websites, and right-to-repair activists condemned the company for designing its printers to eventually stop functioning, highlighting just how big of a problem printers continue to be in the fight for the right to repair . According to the Fight to Repair newsletter, Epson printers—including the L360, L130, L220, L310, L365, and potentially others—may suddenly display a message saying that they have reached the end of their service life and then stop printing. Epson told The Verge this week that this is because saturated ink pads could leak ink throughout the devices. Until this week, Epson's support page about the message said : At some point, the product will reach a condition where either satisfactory print quality cannot be … [Read more...] about Epson’s bricked printers highlight the industry’s repairability problem

Further Reading Fairphone 2 hands-on: Modular phones are finally here iFixit's teardowns are handy disassembly guides, and they're great for confirming just what hardware is included inside our gadgets, but most recent consumer electronics don't fare well when it comes time for the site to assign a repairability score. Today's smartphones are typically held together with proprietary screws and a lot of glue, and while there are obvious user-facing benefits to this manufacturing approach, it tends to make the gadgets harder to open, upgrade, and repair. That's not the case for the Fairphone 2, an Android phone built by a Dutch startup that makes repairability and serviceability one of its primary features. iFixit has torn down the phone using just human hands and a Phillips-head screwdriver, and has given the phone a rare 10 out of 10 on its repairability scale because of how easy it is for users to open and fix. The battery and the screen—two components that will most need … [Read more...] about iFixit gives modular Fairphone 2 a rare 10 out of 10 for repairability [Updated]

In the past year, a new term has arisen to describe an online scam raking in millions , if not billions , of dollars per year. It’s called "pig butchering," and now even Apple is getting fooled into participating. Researchers from security firm Sophos said on Wednesday that they uncovered two apps available in the App Store that were part of an elaborate network of tools used to dupe people into putting large sums of money into fake investment scams. At least one of those apps also made it into Google Play, but that market is notorious for the number of malicious apps that bypass Google vetting. Sophos said this was the first it had seen such apps in the App Store and that a previous app identified in these types of scams was a legitimate one that was later exploited by bad actors Pig butchering relies on a rich combination of apps, websites, web hosts, and humans—in some cases human trafficking victims —to build trust with a mark over a period of weeks or months, often … [Read more...] about Pig-butchering scam apps sneak into Apple’s App Store and Google Play

Audio player loading… Remember when tape was en vogue, back in the days before it was displaced by compact discs and then vanished from the consumer market? Well, turns out it's still very much in fashion in the corporate world, where demand for data storage is fast outstripping supply. Fujifilm has announced it will offer its tape-based (opens in new tab) Object Archive solution as a service (you could call it TaaS) for a transparent, one-off fee. You can store up to one Petabyte (that’s one million GB) in a datacenter (opens in new tab) for up to five years for a mere $46,100. That’s $0.77 cents per TB per month, without the additional egress costs, and there’s even an S3 API for Amazon’s popular cloud storage (opens in new tab) service. Here's our list of the best cloud storage management (opens in new tab) solutions around We've built a list of the best cloud storage for photos (opens in new tab) available Check out our list of the … [Read more...] about Here’s the cheapest way to store a huge 1000TB of data online

Audio player loading… Update: As of June 28, Indian authorities have extended the deadline for VPNs to leave or amend logging practices to September 25 (opens in new tab) (link heads to The Indian Express). All VPN services running servers in India must now comply with a new data law that has now officially come into force. According to new CERT-In regulations, security software companies are legally obligated to store users' data - like IP addresses , real names and usage patterns - for up to five years. They will also be required to hand this information over to authorities upon request. Since the government announcement was released on April 28, internet users, privacy advocacy and cybersecurity experts have been expressing concerns on how these regulations will have a negative impact on people's privacy . All this has led to some of the best VPN services taking drastic measures in order not to compromise privacy values and to … [Read more...] about Any VPN with servers in India must now store activity logs on users