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Google is in talks with Nokia to buy their air-to-ground LTE technology, Bloomberg reports. According to the information acquired by Bloomberg, Google's parent company Alphabet wants to expand its current ISP service to new markets.

Nokia has developed a technology called A2G (air-to-ground) which uses mobile broadband connections to connect airplanes to ground cell towers. This means that you don't have to bounce the connections off of satellites. It improves upon both speed and latency of the connection on planes that traditionally use satellites for internet connectivity.

Google has been looking into bringing fast internet connections to flights. Currently the market leader is Gogo Inflight Internet operated by Chicago-based Gogo.

The search giant has been looking for ways to connect people of the world in myriad of ways. One of these is of course Google Fiber, which has been expanding slowly but surely, but also cross-ISP service Profect Fi as well as more experimental connectivity advancements in Project Loon with high-altitude balloons.

AfterDawn's own official Android app has been updated. The new version, v1.10, is now available.

After the initial launch of our own app, we've focused on fixing bugs that have crashed the app in certain cases. Thus, the new version is mostly a quick bugfix to known problems.

The app's stability rate has been bit over 99 percent, but we obviously aim to make the app as stable as possible.

Furthermore, the new version also improves both, search and "news by tag" listings, making them "infinite". Being infinite means that once you reach the bottom of the news list, the app will load more (older) content for the results, allowing you to search through our entire news database of 19 years.

The app is free, doesn't require any specific persmissions and includes all of our news ever released - ever since 1999.

Get it now:

AfterDawn app for Android

Google only really sells one type of TV product at this moment, albeit in a couple variations. That is of course the immensely popular Chromecast streaming dongle we all know and love.

However, other manufacturers already offer perhaps a more Google-y TV experience than Chromecast already. That is due to the fact that Google has offered its Android TV platform for manufacturers since its inception alongside a now discontinued Nexus Player.

However, Google has been rumored to be releasing a new Android TV product, and that is exactly what we've got for you today. The US regulatory body for communications, FCC, has revealed a product by the name of 4K ATV Stick, manufactured by a Chinese company called Shenzhen SEI Robotics.

Now, it could be just another Android TV device from a no-name Chinese company, but we believe, as do the hawkeyed Ausdroid, that this is in fact the upcoming Google device.

There's a few hints in the pictures provided by the FCC. First and foremost you can't miss the huge Google logo on the front, but perhaps even more importantly the device is fitted with the Google Assistant out of the box.

Hackers that call themselves Prosox and Kuroi'shi have successfully hacked YouTube. They managed to remove the most successful music video of all time, Despacito.

Before removal, hackers managed to change the video's thumbnail images to gang members from the show Casa de Papel.

Despacito, a song by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee was the first video ever to reach more than 5 billion views in YouTube.

Also some other music videos were removed by the same group - all of them were added to YouTube's VEVO music video service.

Just as Spotify entered the stock market in an unusual direct listing that determined its market value at nearly $30 billion, Apple has announced that its 2015 launched service hit a new milestone.

Apple Music, the streaming service launched at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in July of 2015, has reached 40 million subscribers. The company revealed the new subscriber count via Twitter, although from an usual source.

The tweet was posted by Steven Huon, the content boss of Apple France, and not by say Tim Cook, or Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, who revealed just a month earlier at SXSW that Apple Music had 38 million subscribers.

I doesn't necessarily mean Apple managed to rack two million new subscribers within a month – although it has been closing in on Spotify's subscriber acquisition numbers after a shaky start – although it is possible. It could be that Cue has a little bit older data at SXSW.

The world's largest streaming music service, Spotify, started the year with 70 million subscribers. The Swedish service has added 5 million subscribers every three months or so, which would make Spotify's user count somewhere around 75 million at this moment.

WhatsApp is the de facto messaging app in most countries around the world. Only the United States, Canada and handful of other countries prefer Facebook Messenger over WhatsApp. In China, WeChat is the king, but for the rest of the world WhatsApp is the number one messaging app.

Alright, headline might be overstating the issues. WhatsApp doesn't suck, it is actually a brilliant little app. But it has problems that frustrate a lot of its users.

It is naive to think that people could simply switch to a better platform. Forcing all your relatives, coworkers, etc to switch to something else is next to impossible, when they also have their relatives, coworkers, and friends using the same app.

Thus, it is better to think what are the biggest problems with WhatsApp and hope that Facebook - who owns WhatsApp - does something about those issues.

So, my two cents on what I think are the biggest problems with WhatsApp:

Platform lock-in

While you are free to transfer almost all data between Android and iPhone nowadays, WhatsApp is the huge, even monstrous, exception to that rule. There's simply no reasonable way to move your thousands, even hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp messages from iPhone to Android and vice versa.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted in an interview with VOX that company scans through all private messages people send through Facebook Messenger.

Company tells that all the private messages are being scanned by automated systems to detect contents that violate Facebook's Terms of Service. Furthermore, some of the messages detected - or reported by users to Facebook - will be read by human moderators in order to see if the message violates Facebook's TOS.

According to Facebook, the very same tools and methods are used to monitor both, public Facebook posts and seemingly private Messenger discussions.

The king of music streaming, Spotify, completed the public listing process yesterday. The company officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) where the market initially valued the company almost at $30 billion.

Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek wrote a blog post a day earlier thanking hard-working employees for the past years, but more importantly looked in to the future.

The company has been a huge influence in music industry as a whole. During its early years it was the target of artists, activists, and record companies who believed that especially the free tier is the essentially stealing from the artists.

Later Google and Apple have followed suit, and streaming music is overwhelmingly the choice of music media these days. And Spotify has turned millions of non-paying customers into real customers.

The company in fact boasts now a total of over 160 million listeners, of which more than 70 million are paying a monthly subscription fee. The worldwide customer base is unparalleled, although Apple Music is challenging Spotify's numbers in the US.

NYSE recognizes Spotify, that did an unusual direct listing instead of a fancier more traditional IPO, now with a ticker SPOT. Spotify opened with a stock price of $165.90 which is a quarter up from its initial reference price.

Google's URL shortener Goog.gl is shutting down, the company reports. The service that was introduced in 2009 is going to be killed off and you'll have to rely on bit.ly and others.

Google has announced that come April 13th the service will not function anymore and you should switch to a different ULR shortening service. Among the more popular are aforementioned bit.ly as well as ow.ly.

Don't worry though, this doesn't mean that URLs already shortened with Google's service won't work after next Friday. Goo.gl URLs will be working in the future as well but Google just simply doesn't allow you to make new shortened web addresses.

Google retains the Goo.gl console from which you can modify your links until March 2019 when that is shut down. Even after that you'll be able to use already created URLs.

The search giant is suggesting you move to what it calls Firebase Dynamic Links. Google introduces these new type of dynamic links in 2016 and you can check them out on the short below.

Swedish telecom giant Telia has sold its share of Spotify for appx. $272 million (SEK2.3 billion) to institutional investors.

Both companies originate from Sweden and Telia was one of the oldest partners of Spotify, signing up to an exclusive deal back in 2009 to offer Spotify Premium to its customers across the globe. Telia invested $115 million in Spotify in June 2015.

As Spotify has filed for an IPO, Telia decided to sell its shares.

Source: Telia press release

'We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer... we've elected not to do that," Tim Cook.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook has weighed in on the response to the Cambridge Analytica story by criticizing Facebook's use of its users' private data. During an interview with MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Recode's Kara Swisher, which will air on MSNBC soon, Cook suggested that Facebook should have regulated itself properly.

Cook was asked what he would do now if he was Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to which he simply insisted that he would not be in this situation in the first place.

"We've never believed that these detailed profiles of people, that have incredibly deep personal information that is patched together from several sources, should exist," Cook reportedly said, warning such deep information on users can be exploited by advertisers and can even be used "against democracy."

While Cook admits that he usually gravitates toward no regulation because of unintended consequences, he believes that regulation of how firms like Facebook use data is necessary. In Apple's case, the customer is not the product, even though Cook admits the firm could make a lot more money if that was the case.

Pandora takes a leaf out of Spotify's book by introducing personalized soundtracks that are based on your listening tastes.

Personalized soundtracks are currently being tested with a small group of Premium users of the Pandora's services, but will roll out soon to all Premium subscribers. The playlists - similar to Spotify's Daily Mixes - will update every weeik to fit your moods, activities and favorite genres.

Pandora's personalized soundtracks are powered by its Music Genome.

"We apply a state-of-the-art ensemble of 75+ machine learning algorithms spanning bleeding-edge deep learning techniques, raw audio content analysis and collaborative filtering methods for listener preferences," writes Chris Phillips, Chief Product Officer, Pandora.

These new playlists will appear in the "Browse" section under "Featured Playlists" on the mobile app. The more you listen to differentiated music, the more playlists you'll get. Playlists can also be shared with friends who can check them out even if on Free tier service.

Google's Chromecast is the favourite little gadget of many movie freaks. It allows sending video from Netflix, Youtube and hundreds of other video services directly to a TV set, with a click of a button.

But watching downloaded video files via Chromecast has always been somewhat problematic. Many solutions exist, yes: VLC now has an option to cast a video file to a Chromecast and excellent Chrome plugin called Videostream is an excellent solution, too.

But all the options are somewhat complicated for many people. Thus, Google has now added a "Cast a file" option directly to its Chrome browser.

The option is available in latest beta version of Chrome and Google's François Beaufort has already published instructions on how to use it. However, he didn't state which file formats the feature supports, subtitle support information, etc.

Facebook has been under quite a volley of fire recently, thanks to the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Now Mozilla has revealed a new tool to prevent privacy violations.

The world's largest social media company has been tracking its users in myriad of ways, some of which are more nefarious than others. For example, with cookies Facebook has managed to store data on websites its users visit.

Mozilla is branding their web browser as the solution to the privacy breaking madness, and has released a new tool it calls the Facebook Container Extension. As you might imagine it is an extension for the company's Firefox browser.

The extension prevents Facebook from tracking you when you are browsing other sites. This obviously doesn't affect usage within Facebook or even when using Facebook buttons outside the site, such as the like or share buttons, which will be tracked and sold, just like everyone should expect by now.

You can find Facebook Container Extension from Mozilla's web store and if you are new to Firefox and would like to give it a go amidst all the privacy concerns, head to our software section to download it.

With most Android phones, user has two options for screen rotation: "lock the rotation", forcing the screen to remain in portrait mode and "automatic rotation", rotating screen automatically according to device's physical orientation.

Problems arise when you're, for example, watching a video clip on your phone's browser, laying on sofa with phone in slightly tilted position - you move slightly and suddenly the video jumps between landscape and portrait mode.

To avoid such situation, you should be able to lock the screen orientation to whatever mode you prefer.

Luckily there's a solution.

Small, free and ad-free app called Rotation Control does exactly that.

After installing the Rotation Control, you'll see a new row in your phone's quick access/notification area that will allow changing screen orientation quickly between wide variety of modes.