We’ve all made the mistake of starting a free trial and forgetting to cancel it before the billing period kicks in. Now, MasterCard will protect against this. The company announced a new policy that will require merchants to get authorization from you before hitting you with recurring charges for subscriptions. It will also require companies to provide you with monthly updates with pricing and clear instructions on how to cancel if you need it. Read full story here: MasterCard Won’t Let Companies Automatically Bill You After Free Trials | Engadget
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Microsoft Will Stop Supporting Windows 7 One Year From Today | CNET
Starting Jan. 14, 2020, exactly one year from Monday, Microsoft will no longer support Windows 7. That means no more updates or security fixes for the operating system. Microsoft will continue to provide security updates for Windows 7 to business customers that pay for support, according to ZDNet, but not individual users. Read full story here: Microsoft Will Stop Supporting Windows 7 One Year From Today | CNET
Read MoreGasoline Prices In Most Of Canada Set To Experience ‘Extreme Volatility’ | CTV News
CALGARY — Plunging world oil prices have delivered a Christmas miracle of lower gasoline prices across most of Canada but a fuel price expert says motorists should fill up now because prices are expected to be volatile in 2019. Dan McTeague, a senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com, says gasoline prices are at near-18-month lows because of global oil prices that have tumbled over the past two months on worries of an economic downturn, a U.S.-China trading tiff and concerns that members of the OPEC oil cartel won’t live up to…
Read MoreiPhone: Apple’s Cut-Price Battery Offer Only Has A Week Left To Run | Digital Trends
If you’ve been meaning to take advantage of Apple’s deal on a replacement iPhone battery, then you’d better hurry. It only has a week left to run. The Cupertino, California-based company slashed the cost of its iPhone battery replacement service after admitting last year that it deliberately slowed down some of its handsets to stabilize performance as the battery ages. But Apple plans to revise the cost upward at the start of 2019. Read full story here: iPhone: Apple’s Cut-Price Battery Offer Only Has A Week Left To Run |…
Read MoreFacebook Bug Exposed Up To 6.8M Users’ Unposted Photos To Apps | TechCrunch
Reset the “days since the last Facebook privacy scandal” counter, as Facebook has just revealed a Photo API bug gave app developers too much access to the photos of up to 5.6 million users. The bug allowed apps users had approved to pull their timeline photos to also receive their Facebook Stories, Marketplace photos, and most worryingly, photos they’d uploaded to Facebook but never shared. Facebook says the bug ran for 12 days from September 13th to September 25th. Facebook tells TechCrunch it discovered the breach on September 25th, and…
Read MoreThree Simple Words Provide Smart Cities with Precise Location | Digital Trends
The old system of addresses that cities have relied on for hundreds of years just isn’t cutting it any more. Originally intended to help with taxation and policing, the aging way of assigning street numbers to buildings isn’t precise enough for today’s — and tomorrow’s — intelligent services. “For smart cities, there’s a real need to address more specific locations,” Giles Rhys Jones, the chief marketing officer for What3Words, told Digital Trends. What3Words is a London-based startup behind a geocoding location system that’s used by Mercedes-Benz, the United Nations, and…
Read MoreMore Companies Are Chipping Their Workers Like Pets | Engadget
The trend of blundering into the void of adopting new tech, damn the consequences, full speed ahead, continues this week. The Telegraph tells us about “a number of UK legal and financial firms” are in talks with a chip company to implant their employees with RFID microchips for security purposes. “One prospective client,” The Telegraph wrote, “which cannot be named, is a major financial services firm with “hundreds of thousands of employees.” Read full story here: More Companies Are Chipping Their Workers Like Pets | Engadget
Read MoreScientists Are Redefining The Kilogram | CBC News
Just as the redefinition of the second in 1967 helped to ease communication across the world via technologies like GPS and the internet, experts say the change in the kilogram will be better for technology, retail and health — though it probably won’t change the price of fish much. The kilogram has been defined since 1889 by a shiny piece of platinum-iridium held in Paris. All modern mass measurements are traceable back to it — from micrograms of pharmaceutical medicines to kilos of apples and pears and tonnes of steel or cement.…
Read MoreIn A Data Driven Tomorrow, Does Privacy Need To Survive the Future? | Digital Trends
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” It was an argument we heard a lot in the years following Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s famous claim that privacy was no longer a social norm. A lot has changed in the eight years since. The web has evolved, new tools make it easier to protect our privacy online, and scandals with social networks and other online entities have made privacy itself a hot topic once again. Read full story here: In A Data Driven Tomorrow, Does Privacy Need To Survive the…
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