News written by Matti Robinson (June, 2018)

The revolutionary peer-to-peer technology of the early 2000s, BitTorrent, has been in a decline after the likes of Netflix and Spotify have spread around the western world.

It took a few years before popular trackers, such as the 2003 established The Pirate Bay made it popular. At some point around 2007-2008 BitTorrent accounted for more traffic that HTTP in most regions.

BitTorrent is far from dead, of course, but it's far from the glory days a decade ago.

Rumors surrounding the company behind the technology, BitTorrent Inc., have suggested that there might be a acquisition in the works. Now blockchain entrepreneur and cryptocurrency billionaire, known from the Tron platform and its TRX currency, Justin Sun, has bought the company.

Variety reports, that the acquisition was already finished last week, and BitTorrent has informed their employees about the owner change. According to their information the talks began last Fall, and in January Sun signed a letter of intent to acquire the company.

Some controversy, however, was created by a lawsuit that was later dropped. In the lawsuit Sun claimed BitTorrent was negotiating with others after Sun had signed the letter of intent.

The world's largest electronics contract manufacturer has established a new headquarters in the United States. The Taiwan based Foxconn is known for being the manufacturer of iPhones as well as other leading electronics products.

Foxconn has previously already announced a new display factory in Wisconsin, Reuters reports. Now the company has revealed its new North American HQ in Milwaukee, WI, roughly 30 miles from the plant.

The new U.S. HQ will be established in a seven-story building in downtown Milwaukee which can fit an estimated 500 employees. As expected it will work closely with the display factory and its 13,000 workers.

One might ask, why Wisconsin? Well, short story: money. Wisconsin has offered a three billion dollar offer in tax breaks over the upcoming decade and a half.

As you might know, Apple Maps isn't exactly the pinnacle of navigation and maps services. However, these days it doesn't lead you down a cliff as often as it used to, and most of the time it is perfectly fine for your daily navigation and map search needs.

Today, though, Apple Maps users have encountered unexpected problems with the service. According to reports, Apple's map service is suffering from downtime.

And Apple has acknowledged the issues as well. According to their own statement, all users are affected what seems to be a problem within the service itself.

Apple's System Status support page also shows both Maps Routing & Navigation and Maps Search marked with yellow and the word "Issue." Maps Display and Maps Traffic seem unaffected.

As expected, Apple has said to be working in order to clean this mess up as quickly as possible, and hopefully you'll find again full green list on the status page soon. Meanwhile, you can continue using Google Maps, just like you used before this problem.

Apple introduced yesterday the updated version of macOS. The 10.14 version carries the name macOS Mojave, and brings along a few interesting improvements.

Perhaps the most requested, and most visible, update is the new dark mode. People have been requesting a dark theme for quite a while, and now Apple provides us with a mode with both darker navigation elements and windows but also a custom dark wallpaper of the Mojave desert that obviously inspired the name of the release.

While dark mode might be the most visible new feature, it might be Desktop Stacks that are the most significant. Stacks are like folders, except with a click they explode on your desktop and when you click again they stack up again to clean up your desktop.

There are also improvements to Finder with a new Gallery view to show larger pictures and more metadata details as well as Quick Look now supports quick edits to both pictures and video.

Following Microsoft's suit Apple has updated their screenshots to have a quick link to edit and share straight after a screen grab has been taken.

Continuity on the other hand got a Continuity Camera feature which allows you to use your phone camera to take pictures for macOS devices and embed them easily to documents you are editing.

Apple announced yesterday the new iOS 12 at WWDC in San Jose, California. The new version of Apple's mobile operating system will be available later this fall to all Apple devices released in 2013 and later.

One of the key focus points for Apple has been improving performance. According to the company, iOS 12 brings along speedier operation, more responsive experience and more performance to those apps that truly need it.

Apple has sped up app launch 40-70 percent from previous iteration. Under higher stress the platform performs even better compared to earlier versions being up to twice as fast.

Another big improvement, also extensively demoed on stage, is the AR support in iOS. Apple released a new augmented reality file format called USDZ. This allows companies like Adobe us it in their software, including Photoshop of course. Apple, and Lego, showed off the AR capabilities in a multiplayer games as well with the new Measure tools that allows users measure real life object from their iOS device's screen.

Obviously iOS 12 brings along updated apps with improved functionality. One of these apps is Photos that got a little bit smarter with some AI capabilities. One of the bigger improvements is the grouping of notifications, which has been highly requested for a while now.

One of the more important technology conferences of the year is upon us. Next week Tim Cook and co. will open the World Wide Developer Conference for, well, developers and press. As usual, we are expecting updates to operating systems, including iOS and macOS.

The updates will bring iOS version likely to iOS 12 and macOS to 10.14, and we've even got some leaked screenshots of the latter.

Software developer Steve Troughton-Smith has released some screenshots and even video with the help of 9to5Mac of the upcoming macOS UI. While not many new features are displayed there is one unmistakable difference to previous versions.

That is of course a dark theme.

Dark Appearance, as Troughton-Smith calls it, shows a darker UI theme that has been one of the more requested features for years. It seems to bring along not only darker gray tone in the UI elements and windows but also a new darker background.

Apple is likely to bring two different versions of the background image to accompany each theme.

It certainly looks good, and fortunately we don't have to wait much longer to hear more about it, and hopefully even the release isn't that far off.

By far the largest credit card company in the world has suffered an unexpected problem. Visa's payment network has crashed in the UK and Europe, The Guardian reports.

This means that Visa card payments are not going through in many cases, and the company has acknowledged the faulty system. According to The Guardian, Visa has confirmed the problem and is currently looking into the cause of the outage.

It is not currently known in what portion of the UK and Europe this problem has manifested in, but media and users online have reported problems all across the continent. Some retailers haven't been able to take any Visa transactions while some report only a portion of the customers are affected.

According to FT ATMs are running out of money in some areas because of the crash.

The official statement reads: "Visa is currently experiencing a service disruption. This incident is preventing some Visa transactions in Europe from being processed. We are investigating the cause and working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation."