‘Mario Kart’ is coming to smartphones

The latest Nintendo IP to make its way to mobile devices is a popular one. The Japanese company just announced that it’s bringing Mario Kart to both Android and iOS. The game is going to be called Mario Kart Tour and it’ll be released within the next financial year, which puts that between April 2018 and March 2019. Nintendo is keeping mum about what we can expect from the game but we’re confident the title will be a popular one as this particular franchise is one of Nintendo’s biggest.

As Fortune points out, the company was careful in wording the release to be a mobile-only release instead of saying which platform it’ll be available on. Nintendo has previously been releasing its mobile games on iOS before Android but the wording suggests both platforms might get it simultaneously. What do you think? Is this something you’d want to play?

Source: The Verge

Google took down over 700,000 malicious Android apps in 2017

There are over 3,500,000 “approved” applications in the Google Play Store but not all of these are useful or fun, a bunch of them are designed to wreak havoc on users lives and that’s where Google has been hard at work to take these bad apps out. The company recently announced it has taken down over 700,000 apps from the Play Store, which is a 70 percent increase from the total removals they’ve done in 2016. “Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier,” Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn wrote in a blog post. “99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them.”

Google claims they’re able to do this with the company’s “new machine learning models and techniques.” It made it easier for them to detect the bad apps as well as any of the copycat apps that try to deceive users. Google says they’ve taken down a quarter of a million of these impersonating apps in 2017. They’ve also kept “tens of thousands” of apps with inappropriate content (those that have pornography, hate, illegal activities, and extreme violence) out of the app store. Machine learning has helped the human reviewers make sure these apps and developers were kept away from the Play Store. They’re also working on keeping Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs) out of the Store, even though these are as Ahn says “small in volume.” Of course, they aren’t 100% successful and have had a few bad apps slip into its system but Google promises they’re working to improve their methods and machine learning models so that they keep these apps out.

Source: The Verge + Inquirer.net

You’ll need Windows 10 to run Microsoft Office 2019

With Microsoft Office 2019 set to come out in the latter half of the year, Microsoft made an important announcement about the productivity suite. The latest version will need users who aren’t subscribed to Office 365 to have machines running on Windows 10. Obviously, this move is the company’s attempt to get businesses to subscribe to its Office 365 business. They have even extended support for Windows 10 enterprise and education customers running versions 1511, 1607, 1703, and 1709 an additional six months to update to the latest supported versions of Windows 10. The support lifecycle for Office 2019 is changing, too. It gets five-year mainstream support and “approximately two years of extended support.”

Office 2019 will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook client apps as well as server versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business. Preview copies are going to be released in the middle of 2018. The software is intended for organizations that aren’t using the cloud Office 365 versions. It must be noted that Office for Mac won’t be affected by this change as it’s a different product with its own release schedule.

Source: The Verge

Telegram’s been taken out of the Apple App Store because of ‘inappropriate content’

Telegram, a messaging app that was one of the first to introduce end-to-end encryption, has been taken out of the Apple App Store for “inappropriate content.” What kind of content we can’t say but as Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov tweets, “We were alerted by Apple that inappropriate content was made available to our users and both apps were taken off the App Store. Once we have protections in place we expect the apps to be back on the App Store.”

There is no word yet when the app will be back but it was taken down perhaps in violation of some of iOS guidelines that say there needs to be filters for objectionable material, mechanisms to report these, and the ability to block users from the service. There’s a possibility that some questionable content made it through the filters Telegram has in place. The app has been criticized in the past for the secretive nature of its messages for being the “app of choice” for terrorists.

Source: The Verge