An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The UHD Alliance, a collection of companies who work together to define display standards, has announced Filmmaker Mode, a new TV setting that's designed to show films as they were originally mastered, with as little post-processing as possible. Although the mode will affect multiple settings like frame rate, aspect ratio, overscanning, and noise reduction, its most important element is that it turns off motion smoothing, which creates that horrible "soap opera effect" that makes even the most expensive films look cheap. LG, Vizio, and Panasonic have all expressed an interest in including the new mode in their TVs.

Of course, it's always been possible to turn off this setting (we've got a guide on how to do so right here) but TV manufacturers have an annoying habit of referring to the same setting by different names, confusing the process. LG calls it "TruMotion," Vizio calls it "Smooth Motion Effect," and Panasonic calls it "Intelligent Frame Creation," for example. The difference with Filmmaker Mode is that it will have the same name across every TV manufacturer, and the UHD Alliance also says that it wants the setting to be enabled automatically when cinematic content is detected, or otherwise easily accessible via a button on the TV remote. Over a dozen high profile directors have expressed support for the new mode, including Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and JJ Abrams.

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian about the questionable decision in the 1950s to get rid of Sydney's trams in favor of private cars. From the report: In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams -- some only a few years old -- were rolled to the workshops in the city's eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze. Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney's tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision.

The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to "burning hill" at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network "the largest organized vandalism in our nation's history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. "When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn't how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia. The trams are slowly returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. "The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7 billion at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open," the report says.

"The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney's transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast 'congestion-busting' WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s -- and ruthlessly carried out -- to prioritize motor transport."

With TVs now delivering images faster than movies, TV manufacturers have tried to make up for that discrepancy via a digital process called motion smoothing. Whether you've realized it or not, you've likely watched a movie in motion smoothing, as it's now the default setting on most TVs sold in the United States. Bilge Ebiri from Vulture says that while this feature was well-intentioned, "most people hate it." He argues: "Motion smoothing transforms an absorbing movie or narrative TV show into something uncanny. The very texture of what you're watching changes. The drama onscreen reads as manufactured, and everyone moves like they're on a daytime soap -- which is why it's sometimes called the 'soap-opera effect.' In other words, motion smoothing is fundamentally ruining the way we experience film." From the report: Motion smoothing is unquestionably a compromised way of watching films and TV shows, which are meticulously crafted to look and feel the way they do. But its creeping influence is so pervasive that at the Cannes Film Festival this May -- the same Cannes Film Festival that so valorizes the magic of the theatrical experience and has been feuding with Netflix for the past two years -- the fancy official monitors throughout the main festival venue had left motion smoothing on.

That seems like a funny oversight, but it's not surprising. "There are a lot of things turned on with these TVs out of the box that you have to turn off," says Claudio Ciacci, lead TV tester for Consumer Reports, who makes sure to switch smoothing off on the sets he evaluates. "It's meant to create a little bit of eye candy in the store that makes customers think, at first glance, Hey, look at that picture, it really pops. But when you finally have it at home, it's really not suitable." He notes that most people don't fiddle much with their settings because motion smoothing isn't easy to find on a TV menu. (It's also called something different depending on the manufacturer.) Which gets to the heart of the problem: As more and more people watch movies at home instead of in theaters, most won't bother trying to see the film as it was intended to be seen without the digital "enhancements" mucking it up. "Once people get used to something, they get complacent and that becomes what's normal," Morano says. And what films were supposed to look like will be lost. Mark Henninger, editor of the online tech community AVSForum, suggests TV manufacturers "just put a couple of buttons on the remote that are direct surface level -- TV, movie, sports, or whatever." The industry's reluctance, he says, has as much to do with uncertainty as anything else. "Manufacturers don't know who to listen to. They don't know if it should be the reviewers, their own quality-assurance lab, or user complaints."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Malicious apps from a campaign called "Agent Smith" have been downloaded to 25 million Android devices, according to new research by cyber-security firm Check Point. The apps, most of them games, were distributed through third-party app stores by a Chinese group with a legitimate business helping Chinese developers promote their apps on outside platforms. Check Point is not identifying the company, because they are working with local law enforcement. About 300,000 devices were infected in the U.S.

The malware was able to copy popular apps on the phone, including WhatsApp and the web browser Opera, inject its own malicious code and replace the original app with the weaponized version, using a vulnerability in the way Google apps are updated. The hijacked apps would still work just fine, which hid the malware from users. Armed with all the permissions users had granted to the real apps, "Agent Smith" was able to hijack other apps on the phone to display unwanted ads to users. That might not seem like a significant problem, but the same security flaws could be used to hijack banking, shopping and other sensitive apps, according to Aviran Hazum, head of Check Point's analysis and response team for mobile devices. There was also a "dormant" version of "Agent Smith" in 11 apps on the Play Store, which could have been triggered into action by a banner ad containing the keyword "infect." The apps have since been removed from the Play Store, but had over 10 million downloads.

The Google Earth team recently released a beta preview of a WebAssembly port of Google Earth. The new port runs in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, including Edge (Canary version) and Opera, as well as Firefox. From a report: The port thus brings cross-browser support to the existing Earth For Web version, which uses the native C++ codebase and Chrome's Native Client (NaCl) technology. Difference in multi-threading support between browsers leads to varying performance. Google Earth was released 14 years ago and allowed users to explore the earth through the comfort of their home. This original version of Google Earth was released as a native C++ based application intended for desktop install because rendering the whole world in real time required advanced technologies that weren't available in the browser. Google Earth was subsequently introduced for Android and iOS smartphones, leveraging the existing C++ codebase through technologies such as NDK and Objective-C++. In 2017, Google Earth was released for the Chrome browser, using Google's Native Client (NaCl) to compile the C++ code and run it in the browser.

Opera Software, the company behind the Opera browser, today launched a custom version of its browser dedicated to online gamers and streamers on Windows platform. From a report: Named Opera GX, the browser comes with dedicated features that let users limit the browser's access to computer resources such as CPU (processor) and RAM (memory). The idea is to provide gamers with a way to navigate the web while leaving resources available for games or streaming applications that the gamer might also be running at the same time. "Running a game might require a lot of effort from your machine. Even more so if you are streaming while you play," said Maciej Kocemba, product director of Opera GX. "Before Opera GX, gamers often shut down their browsers to not slow down their gaming experience. We came up with the GX Control feature to make people's games run more smoothly without requiring them to compromise on what they do on the Web." Besides the GX Control Panel that lets users manage CPU and RAM usage limits, Opera GX also comes with Twitch integration, meaning users can log into their Twitch accounts via the browser's sidebar.

Despite sharing a common Chromium codebase, browser makers like Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi don't have plans on crippling support for ad blocker extensions in their products -- as Google is currently planning on doing within Chrome. From a report: The three browsers makers have confirmed to ZDNet, or in public comments, of not intending to support a change to the extensions system that Google plans to add to Chromium, the open-source browser project on which Chrome, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi are all based on.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft started testing a new Microsoft Edge browser based on Chromium a little while ago. The company has been releasing new canary and dev builds for the browser over the last few weeks, and the preview is actually really great. But if you watch YouTube quite a lot, you will face a new problem on the new Edge. It turns out, Google has randomly disabled the modern YouTube experience for users of the new Microsoft Edge. Users are now redirected to the old YouTube experience, which lacks the modern design as well as the dark theme for YouTube, as first spotted by Gustave Monce. And when you try to manually access the new YouTube from youtube.com/new, YouTube simply asks users to download Google Chrome, stating that the Edge browser isn't supported. Ironically, the same page states "We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge." The change affects the latest versions of Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev channels. It is worth noting that the classic Microsoft Edge based on EdgeHTML continues to work fine with the modern YouTube experience.

Few home-grown Google products have been as successful as Chrome. Launched in 2008, it has more than 63% of the market and about 70% on desktop computers, according to StatCounter data. Mozilla's Firefox is far behind, while Apple's Safari is the default browser for iPhones. Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers are punchlines. From a report: Google won by offering consumers a fast, customizable browser for free, while embracing open web standards. Now that Chrome is the clear leader, it controls how the standards are set. That's sparking concern Google is using the browser and its Chromium open-source underpinnings to elbow out online competitors and tilt entire industries in its favor. Most major browsers are now built on the Chromium software code base that Google maintains. Opera, an indie browser that's been used by techies for years, swapped its code base for Chromium in 2013. Even Microsoft is making the switch this year. That creates a snowball effect, where fewer web developers build for niche browsers, leading those browsers to switch over to Chromium to avoid getting left behind.

This leaves Chrome's competitors relying on Google employees who do most of the work to keep Chromium software code up to date. Chromium is open source, so anyone can suggest changes to it, but the majority of programmers who approve contributions are Google employees, and any major disagreements get settled by a small circle of senior Google employees. Chrome is so ascendant these days that web developers often don't bother to test their sites on competing browsers. Google services including YouTube, Docs and Gmail sometimes don't work as well on rival browsers, sending frustrated users to Chrome. Instead of just another ship slicing through the sea of the web, Chrome is becoming the ocean.

"When you turn on the setting in your browser that says 'Do Not Track', you probably expect to no longer be tracked on most websites you visit. Right? Well, you would be wrong," explains DuckDuckGo's blog.

Their recent study found "a quarter of people have turned on this setting" -- representing hundreds of millions of web surfers -- and that most of them were unaware that in fact, "no law requires websites to respect your Do Not Track signals, and the vast majority of sites, including most all of the big tech companies, sadly choose to simply ignore them."

Now they've written draft legislation -- "the Do-Not-Track Act of 2019" -- to "serve as a starting point" for legislators to close this loophole. SearchEngineLand reports: If the act picks up steam and passes into law, sites would be required to cease certain user tracking methods, which means less data available to inform marketing and advertising campaigns. The impact could also cascade into platforms that leverage consumer data, possibly making them less effective. For example, one of the advantages of advertising on a platform like Google or Facebook is the ability to target audiences. If a user enables DNT, the ads displayed to them when browsing those websites won't be informed by their external browsing history...

This proposal is quite far from being signed into law, but the technology is already built into Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and Internet Explorer. With the adoption of GDPR just a year behind us and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's proposed legislation to regulate "big tech companies" drawing more attention to digital privacy issues in Washington, the Do-Not-Track Act could be a realistic outcome.
DuckDuckGo says they're announcing their draft legislation because "It is extremely rare to have such an exciting legislative opportunity like this, where the hardest work -- coordinated mainstream technical implementation and widespread consumer adoption -- is already done....

"We hope the Do-Not-Track Act of 2019 serves as a useful guide to start thinking seriously about this amazing legislative opportunity."

Google said today it will start giving European Union smartphone users a choice of browsers and search apps on its Android operating system, in changes designed to comply with an EU antitrust ruling. From a report: Starting Thursday and following a software update, users in the EU opening Google's mobile app store will be presented with a choice of alternatives to Google search and Chrome. The Alphabet unit said options will vary by market, but Microsoft's Bing and Norway's Opera are notable competitors in the European search and browser market respectively.

The changes could help Google avoid additional fines after being scrutinized by the EU for almost a decade. The European Commission, the bloc's antitrust body, last year fined Google $4.8 billion for strong-arming device makers into pre-installing its Google search and Chrome browser, giving it a leg up because users are unlikely to look for alternatives if a default is already preloaded. The EU ordered Google to change that behavior and threatened additional fines if it failed to comply. In a statement, FairSearch, a group that includes Czech search engine Seznam.cz and Oracle, rejected the changes as insufficient. "It does nothing to correct the central problem that Google apps will remain the default on all Android devices," the group said. FairSearch filed one of the first complaints to the EU on Android.

It's a browser feature few users will have heard of, but forthcoming versions of Chrome, Safari and Opera are in the process of removing the ability to disable a long-ignored tracking feature called hyperlink auditing pings. From a report: This is a long-established HTML feature that's set as an attribute -- the ping variable -- which turns a link into a URL that can be tracked by website owners or advertisers to monitor what users are clicking on. When a user follows a link set up to work like this, an HTTP POST ping is sent to a second URL which records this interaction without revealing to the user that this has happened. It's only one of several ways users can be tracked, of course, but it's long bothered privacy experts, which is why third-party adblockers often include it on their block list by default.

Until now, an even simpler way to block these pings has been through the browser itself, which in the case of Chrome, Safari and Opera is done by setting a flag (in Chrome you type chrome://flags and set hyperlink auditing to 'disabled'). Notice, however, that these browsers still allow hyperlink auditing by default, which means users would need to know about this setting to change that. It seems that very few do.

Opera has updated its eponymous web browser for the desktop with a crypto-makeover and a number of additional features. From a report: The Norway-headquartered browser maker has also launched a marketing campaign to cash in on the EU regulatory order that requires Google to give Android users in Europe more options to choose their preferred browser. Dubbed 'Reborn 3,' the latest version of Opera for Windows, macOS, and Linux includes a native cryptocurrency wallet, which follows Opera's Android app getting this feature in December. The wallet keys and transactions are synced between the desktop and mobile browsers with the latter also serving as a way for the user to authenticate their identity, the company said. [...] Additionally, Opera is speeding up the free VPN feature, after adding this feature to its Android app last month.

x_t0ken_407 quotes BleepingComputer: A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it. As it is considered a privacy risk, browsers previously allowed you to disable this feature. Now they are going in the opposite direction.

Hyperlink auditing is an HTML standard that allows the creation of special links that ping back to a specified URL when they are clicked on. These pings are done in the form of a POST request to the specified web page that can then examine the request headers to see what page the link was clicked on.
The article concludes that "Firefox and Brave win the award" for people who want this click-tracking capability disabled -- since "only Brave and Firefox currently disable it by default, and do not appear to have any plans on enabling it in the future."

Remember when Microsoft announced they'd be switching to Google's open source Chromium browser for developing their own Edge browser? At the time Google announced "We look forward to working with Microsoft and the web standards community to advance the open web, support user choice, and deliver great browsing experiences."

Now MSPoweruser reports Microsoft has indeed started collaborating on Chromium -- making suggestions like caret browsing and a native high-contrast mode -- and at least one of Microsoft's suggestions is already coming to Chrome. it looks like there is one feature that Chromium approved which will be making its way to Chrome soon. According to a new bug (via Techdows) filing on Chromium, Google is working on bringing text suggestions for hardware keyboard to Chrome soon. The feature will allow users to get suggestions as they type which is currently available on Windows 10 and on Microsoft Edge.

Google has just started working on the feature and has set the priority to 2 which suggests that the feature should be available sooner than later.

Opera has added a free VPN service to its Android browser. The Norwegian browser maker, which went public last year, also addressed concerns about potential hidden costs of using its free VPN offering. From a report: As users become more cautious about their privacy, many have explored using VPN services. According to a GlobalWebIndex estimate, more than 650 million people worldwide use such tools to mask their identity online and fend off web trackers. Opera has long recognized this need; in 2016, it launched Opera VPN, a standalone VPN app for iOS and Android. A few months later, it baked that feature into its desktop browser. Last year, however, the company discontinued Opera VPN. Now, Opera is integrating the VPN service into its Android browser. Opera 51 for Android enables users to establish a private connection between their mobile device and a remote VPN server using 256-bit encryption. Users can pick a server of their choice from a range of locations. Unlike several other VPN apps, Opera's offering does not require an account to use the service.

Microsoft this week revamped Skype's browser-based client with a slew of new features. From a report: The Seattle company this week announced the rollout of a major Skype for Web update, which introduces high-definition video calling, a redesigned notifications panels, a revamped media gallery, and more. It's available on any PC running Windows 10 and Mac OS X 10.12 or higher with the latest versions of Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. The bulk of the new capabilities debuted in preview last October, but they're available widely starting this week. Skype for Web does not support Safari, Firefox, and Opera browsers, Microsoft has confirmed.

Opera has unveiled a major redesign for its browser that's expected to ship in version 59. As Peter Bright writes via Ars Technica, "the new appearance adopts the same square edges and clean lines that we've seen in other browsers, giving the browser a passing similarity to both Firefox and Edge." From the report: The principles of the new design? "We put Web content at center stage," the Opera team writes on its blog. The design is pared down so that you can browse "unhindered by unnecessary distractions." Borders and dividing lines have been removed, flattening out parts of the browser's interface and making them look more uniform and less eye-catching. The new design comes with the requisite dark and light modes, a welcome trend that we're glad to see is being widely adopted.

Being Web-centric is not a bad principle for an application such as a browser, where the bulk of the functionality and interest comes from the pages we're viewing rather than the browser itself. At first blush, I think that Opera has come up with something that looks good, but it does feel like an awfully familiar design rationale. [...] Opera plans to ship the R3 release in March, and a developer preview can be downloaded today to give the new appearance a spin. The new design isn't the only notable feature of R3; it also integrates a crypto wallet for Ethereum transactions. In conjunction with Opera on your phone, this feature can be used to securely make online payments to sites using Coinbase Commerce for their payment processing.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung's mobile internet browser, if you ask its users, is pretty great. A lot of folks even say it's better than Chrome. That appreciation has manifested in the app hitting a very exclusive Play Store milestone: Samsung Internet Browser now has more than one billion installs. That impressive figure puts the browser's install base ahead of those of Firefox and Opera combined. Now, there are a couple of caveats here: for one, Samsung's browser comes pre-loaded on Samsung devices, of which each activation counts as an "install." What's more, both Firefox's and Opera's Play Store listings report that each browser has "100,000,000+" installs, which, because of the somewhat silly way figures are reported on Android's app marketplace, means their combined installs total anywhere between 200 million and 999,999,998. Still, though, Samsung's browser is on more devices than the both of 'em.

For the past two days, some Windows 10 users from around the world have been reporting that they are unable to connect to Windows Update. When they attempt to do so, Windows 10 will complain that they are unable to connect to the update service. From a report: We first learned about this problem yesterday when our member Opera contacted us stating that they, and many others, were having issues connecting to Windows Update. When they tried updating, Windows would report that it could not connect to the update service. The wording of the error, shown below, indicates that this is an Internet connectivity issue, but others are not so sure. "We couldn't connect to the update service. We'll try again later, or you can check now. If it still doesn't work, make sure you're connected to the Internet" Unfortunately, there is no clear cut answer as to what is causing this issue and some feel it is related to a botched Windows Defender update and others state that this could be a DNS issue.