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Kaspersky Labs has filed a lawsuit in the United States over a recent ban imposed on the use of its software by government agencies.

The Russian firm is targeting the Trump administration in a lawsuit filed in a lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. It is seeking to overturn a ban on the use of its antivirus products at civilian and military agencies, signed into law by President Trump.

Kaspersky has been refuting claims that it is vulnerable to influence from the Kremlin, and claims the U.S. government deprived it of its rights to due process with the ban.

At one point, Kaspersky offered to hand over source code for its products to independant entities to ensure that there was nothing to worry about. U.S. officials welcomed the offer but said it was insufficient.

Eugene Kaspersky said the company is going to court in order to secure its rights.

What to do when banned without evidence and the right to be heard? Well, we're securing our rights by taking this to the courts. Why? We've done nothing wrong. https://t.co/uPmS0iy2qW
#SecurityWithoutBorders pic.twitter.com/I2X4WcNJb1

-- Eugene Kaspersky (@e_kaspersky) December 18, 2017

After releasing what is the most revolutionary change in iPhones since perhaps their introduction, Apple has been suffering from shortages that accumulated from pre-release production problems.

Lately, however, the queues to buy yourself an iPhone X have been shortening, and some analysts have suggested that this is not due to lower demand but instead Apple has managed to iron out most of the production problems with its suppliers.

All seems to be well in the Appleland, and this would only suggest a new record-breaking Holiday quarter?

Well, hold on for a bit, other analysts say as reported by Pocketnow. Cowen and Company analyst Karl Ackerman has reported that demand for Apple's latest and greatest has actually been lower than initially was expected. According to Ackerman people have gravitated towards previous iPhone models, including iPhone SE that costs barely a third of a brand new iPhone X.

Ackerman says that it's not necessarily the problems with availability that has disincentivized people from buying the $999 flagship.

It's not horrible for Apple, though, as they are still expected to ship nearly 80 million iPhones in the first fiscal year of 2018, that includes the Holiday season. That could very well still be a record amount of iPhones shipped, and with a higher price point it would likely also break revenue records. Current record is 78.3 million iPhones from last year same time.

The future is in virtual reality. Or augmented reality. Or mixed reality.

Clearly people are looking for some other reality than the one we live in. It seems like in the last few years every technology company on the face of the earth has developed some kind of alternative reality device or application.

Of course the largest online video service YouTube is no different, not least because its owned by Google, who likes to innovate with technology. Now YouTube VR, the virtual reality app for YouTube, has been made available on Steam.

You can download the app starting today from the Steam store. The app supports both 360 degree VR videos as well as VR180, a format meant for easier and cheaper to film 180 degree clips. There's also support for traditional video which can be viewed with a VR headset.

To get the entire benefit of the app you obviously need a virtual reality device. Unfortunately at this point the support for such devices is fairly limited as you'll have to have HTC Vive.

There are still bugs and the device support is obviously something to be improved, and that's probably why it was released via Steam Early Access, but one can hope for quick updates in the future.

European streaming music services aren't happy with Apple taking royalties from them, and they've signed a plea for European Commission to pressure Apple, The Verge reports.

According to Spotify, Deezer, and others, Apple shouldn't be taking 30 percent royalties when user purchases their Premium streaming service. The share is the same as for any other subscription purchase on Apple's App Store, but streaming services aren't happy about that.

They claim that this gives Apple's own music service an unfair advantage when they lose 30 percent from already razor thin margins. To avoid this trap they've started offering a link to their own website where you can buy the subscription without Apple taking a share.

Obviously for a user that doesn't really care about who gets the money as long as they get the service an extra step might be all too much. That is why the streaming companies are now pleading EU to stop Apple from collecting shares on competing music subscriptions.

Nine European news agencies have signed on a plea which details that the U.S. online giants should be required to pay for using their content as the copyright holders. They are claiming that the social media companies are abusing content creators to further their own businesses.

The plea claims, according to Yahoo News that Facebook, among others, has become a de facto news aggregator for many people who read content created by these news agencies. However, they say that Facebook doesn't compensate the news agencies in a fair manner for using their content.

Their contention is that the stories written by the news agencies are now part of the core business for Facebook and Google even though they themselves do not participate in creating the content or hold rights for them. Furthermore the payments are too small or nonexistent.

According to them, the profitability of news has been in decline for years because these platforms haven't had to pay for their content that they distribute, meanwhile the profits of said internet companies have been booming.

In Spain this debate was already started in 2014 as Google was required by law, a newly enacted one at that, to pay royalties to Spanish news agencies for linking to their content in their Google News web service. Google instead declined to pay and closed their website in Spain.

The media conglomerates Disney and 21st Century Fox have agreed on a deal in which the former will acquire most of the latter for a whopping $66 billion. After the acquisition Fox will retain control of only the news and sports businesses, including Fox News.

Disney will get a host of immaterial property, including the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises, which also means that this is the first time all Marvel franchises are controlled by the same company. One of the more important TV franchises to move to Disney is The Simpsons, a Fox show that's been running for nearly 30 years.

In addition to immaterial rights, Disney will gain control of the movie studio 20th Century Fox, Fox-owned cable TV networks that include FX and National Geographic, as well as stakes in British pay TV operator Sky and Asian network Star TV.

Disney will also get the 30 percent stake Fox owned of Hulu, which will make Disney the majority owner of the online streaming service with 60 percent ownership. The rest are split with Comcast (30%) and Time Warner (10%).

Rupert Murdoch will gain a five percent stake in Disney and the rest of the payment will be in cash. The cash portion is said to be around $52 billion. Murdoch has been trying to shed some of the extra baggage of less profitable entertainment branches and wants to focus more on news and sports.

You remember the rumors about in-screen fingerprint readers early this year, right? The iPhone X was supposed to have either face detection or a in-display fingerprint sensor that is able to read your fingerprint through the screen.

Back then many would've put their money on fingerprint sensor rather than a 3D face detector. Now we know that Face ID was indeed Apple's choice, for probably good reasons, but the in-display fingerprint sensor is not dead.

In fact, Synaptics, the company behind many a I/O device, has announced a new product that is just that. Even though we saw some early prototypes of in-display sensors from some Chinese manufacturers already before the new iPhone, there never was a good enough product to be inserted in high-end smartphones.

But even earlier Synaptics had developed a sensor by the name of FS9100 that was supposed to work through a 1mm glass. However, it never panned out as the company had hoped, and never really saw the light of the day in smartphones. This meant that some manufacturers had to move the fingerprint sensor to less optimal spots – *ahem* Samsung *ahem*.

Now that the new product has been announced, Synaptics is ready to give it another go. The FS9500, marketed under the name Clear ID, can read your fingerprint through the thick glass of the smartphone display. As a reminder that Apple's Face ID seems to be frustratingly slow, Synaptics said that its new reader is twice as fast as 3D face detection.

YouTube TV is Google's answer, not unlike Sling TV or PlayStation Vue, to people's declining satisfaction with cable TV. Unfortunately it is only available in very limited markets.

Now, however, Google has expanded it to new markets in the U.S. YouTube TV has tweeted that it is now available in 34 new metro areas. That almost doubles the available markets to a total of 83.

The new markets include Green Bay, Tucson, Tulsa, San Diego, San Antonio, New Orleans, Knoxville and Spokane. The complete list can be found from the FAQ at YouTube TV's official site, just scroll all the way down. Or watch the little video embedded within the tweet below.

YouTube TV is an internet only TV service that offers various cable TV channels for $35 a month. A total of some 50 channels, depending on the market, include Bravo, Disney Channel, ESPN, FX, National Geographic, and others. You can both watch the channels live or record the shows for later viewing.

Yesterday there were rumors that Apple was going to close a deal on Shazam. A deal, worth hundreds of millions, was later confirmed as Apple released a statement saying they've acquired the music detection service.

Apple and Shazam have been working together for a while now. After the release of iOS 8, iPhone's search has been integrated with Shazam detection. You can identify a song playing in the background just by pressing a button.

Shazam has a long history in music detection but it became widely recognized after the introduction of their iPhone app nearly 10 years ago.

Apple has not disclosed any financial details of the acquisition but according to early rumors from TechCrunch the deal was valued at $300 million. Even though that's a big number, the company was valued at $1 billion during an investment in early 2015, which is a big drop.

For Apple the app itself might not be super valuable, and perhaps the app is indeed nowadays valued quite a bit less than it was in 2015, but Apple has a huge appetite for AI expertise. In the mobile space the company is mainly fighting against Google, whose AI and machine learning prowess is arguably far above Apple's.

You remember the new Atari gaming device we told you about first in June? The one with a retro look topped by a wooden front panel?

If not, well, you should probably go back and read about it. Now, however, we're getting very close to its release. According to CNET the Ataribox – that's what Atari calls it – is going to be available for pre-order later this week.

Ataribox is slated for Q2 2018 release, so from April to June next year, but later this week, Thursday to be precise, you could make sure you'll get yours as soon as it hits the stores. I also could be that the availability will still be very limited, if Nintendo's retro console is any indication. However, Ataribox is much more expensive at $250 to $300, and might not attract as many casual buyers.

Atari's new gaming device is a retro-spirited gaming console that was clearly inspired by Nintendo's mini NES, unveiled last year. It looks a lot like the original, and very legendary, Atari 2600. The device is primarily meant for retro games, and it comes with dozens of original titles from decades ago, but you can create new games for the AMD and Linux powered device.

Apple has released a new feature in its App Store. The application store now allows users to pre-order apps built for iOS, macOS, and tvOS.

In a nutshell this means that the developers will get an indication of how popular the app seems to be as well as gives them another type of marketing possibility. Pre-orders were first introduces in beta form a year ago. Apple's trial was done with the help of Nintendo whose Super Mario Run was being released.

It was the first app on the App Store that you could pre-order before it became officially available, but now any developer can take advantage of the same hype generating marketing plot.

You can also find a new subcategory within App Store's Games category that promotes some of the games currently in pre-order.

When buying a product that hasn't been released yet, there's clearly always a possibility that you might not end up liking it. It is possible, though, that you'll get a better deal of the app when you pre-order it, so it's definitely a double edged sword.

You can find more about App Store pre-ordering from Apple's official website.

One of the most popular PC media players of all time, VLC, has been on mobile for quite some time, but unfortunately the update schedule has been fairly irregular. In fact, it's been more than a year since the last major update to the Android version.

Now there are some good news for you Android users, though.

VLC has finally released an updated version of their Android software. Previous larger update was the 2.0 that was released last year. Now VLC for Android has been updated to version 2.5.

As you might imagine, v2.5 is a rather major update that bring new features and updated functionality. First of all, VLC now supports Android Auto which adapts the UI while on the road. It also now supports 360 degree videos, a feature first added to desktop VLC November 2016, and with the newest Android Oreo version on board you can also enjoy videos in PiP (picture-in-picture) mode.

The user interface has been also revamped a little. This includes a new day and night modes, video gallery that now shows content information better, and you can even select to play multiple files as a playlist.

Apple, like most companies, do not like taxes. In fact, it tries to avoid them in myriad of ways, but mostly within legal boundaries. However, not always can even the world's highest valued company get away with their tax schemes.

One of these happened for years between Apple and Ireland. The EU member state offered Apple special protections against taxes with agreements that angered the European Commission.

According to EU, Ireland's tax agreement with Apple is considered state aid which is illegal for a EU member state. Both Apple and Ireland have been against EU's decision, and Ireland has refused, or been very slow in the least, to charge Apple the taxes.

Lately EU has been pressuring Ireland to collect the $15 billion in taxes that Apple owes them, even to the extent that it has threatened to sue Ireland. Meanwhile, Apple has been moving their assets to other tax havens, at least to the island of Jersey, Paradise Papers revealed earlier this year – totally unrelated, right?

For Netflix one of the most important moves towards becoming an original content powerhouse, like it is today, was to release House of Cards, one might argue. It was the first truly spectacular tv show part of the Netflix Originals branding.

The series went on to wow the crowd but also managed to achieve the first ever Emmy for Netflix. However, now it has become a burden for Netflix.

The continuation, and ultimately the end, of the show has been in question as the star actor and executive producer of House of Cards, Kevin Spacey, has been in the forefront for all the wrong reasons.

Space was accused by a fellow actor, Anthony Rapp, of sexual harassment that happened in the 80s when Rapp was only 14 years old. After the allegations others followed suit claiming that such inappropriate action were take by Spacey even during the House of Cards set.

Netflix, even though spacing (no pun intended) themselves from the House of Cards lead, has now confirmed that House of Cards will indeed return with another season. It will, however, be the last season.

Obviously the sixth season will have to be largely rewritten, which will take time. At this point there is no schedule for the release, at least not one that Netflix wants public, but Netflix says that filming will start in 2018 and the last season will consist of eight episodes.

Google's Chrome browser is by far the most popular mobile browser on the planet, thanks to world dominated by Android phones. The mobile platform's default browser, however, isn't just popular because it's default, it offers some excellent functionality, which is why people probably don't want to switch to Opera, Firefox, or recently released Android version of Microsoft Edge.

Now the search giant is updating its mobile browser with a new feature, Android Police reports. The information comes from changes in the code recorded by the Chromium team's Gerrit, a collaboration tool for the developers.

According to the changes, the Android version of Chrome is going to soon get HDR metadata support for VP9 codec. What this means is that the default browser on Android phones will likely soon support HDR videos.

HDR, or high dynamic range, offers better and more vivid colors, better contrast, and an all around better picture. It has been touted one of the most important innovations in TVs specifically, even offering more improvement to image quality than resolution upgrade from Full HD to 4K.