The Apple Beat: The iPhone reaches 1 Billion units sold

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Apple's iPhone has reached a major milestone. The company has confirmed that there have been 1 billion iPhones sold.

“Last week we passed another major milestone when we sold the billionth iPhone. We never set out to make the most, but we’ve always set out to make the best products that make a difference. Thank you to everyone at Apple for helping change the world every day," Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier today.

This achievement is rare in consumer technology, most specially in mobile phones since manufacturers usually launch various new models each year. The iPhone has been, Apple's singular mobile handset since 2007 and really represents one product that has been painstaikingly refined and iterated on a yearly basis.

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LastPass patches up two major vulnerabilities

No product is flawless, even those password managers you use. LastPass has its own issues to deal with, including two major security exploits from the program’s browser extensions. The good thing is these have been patched already. The company released an update regarding both bugs. One is an exploit discovered by researcher Mathias Karlsson where a URL parsing bug could be used to trick LastPass into divulging passwords for specific sites. You might accidentally click on the spoof URL and think you’re off to Twitter but this malicious page is already stealing your passwords and then quietly pass you on to the social network without knowledge that this happened. It took LastPass a day to resolve this and even gave Karlsson a US$1,000 bounty for the discovery.

Another bug was an exploit found by Google Security Team researcher Travis Ormandy. This affects the Firefox extension but thankfully, this has been fixed, too. What this could do is lure you to a malicious site and then have the site execute LastPass actions to do things like delete items without your knowledge. LastPass is dishing out some important reminders to its users with these discoveries: don’t click links from people you don’t know, use different passwords for different accounts, and if there’s two-factor identification make sure to activate that.

Source: LastPass | Via: Engadget

Google introduces family sharing on Google Play

Google is the latest company to introduce a family sharing feature into its ecosystem. Family Library allows up to six people from your clan to share purchases from the Google Play Store. These include everything from apps, movies, TV shows, games, and books. Of course, there are certain restrictions, too. Music sharing is through the Google Play Music family plan, which is a different expense and option.

Now, you can have one account to setup Family Library. You’ll select which credit card to use as your family’s method of payment or your family members can still select to use their personal cards or gift cards. But this feature also allows for purchase approval, which can help prevent children from buying apps or in-app purchases without your go signal.

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Window quickly closing for free Windows 10 upgrades on eligible PC's

Microsoft reminds us that we have two more days to update eligible Windows Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines to the free Windows 10 update.

This Friday, July 29^th marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Windows 10. In the year since launch, consumers and businesses have installed Windows 10 on more the 350 million devices worldwide. It is also the end of the free upgrade grace period. Microsoft has given the world a whole year to upgrade and that window closes for good on the 29th.

Windows 10 users who have already upgraded and are enjoying the new features of the OS are getting the biggest update in a few days. The Windows 10 Anniversary update officially available August 2^nd, will bring all new features to Cortana, Microsoft Edge, Windows Ink, Windows Hello and to compatible devices. 

Windows users can visit Windows.ca to learn more or click on “Upgrade now” in the “Get Windows 10 app” on their PC to upgrade today.