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Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has noted that there will be an uphill battle in Japan for the streaming service, a nation where CDs remain king.

The company has just expanded to the world's second-largest music market - bringing 40 million streamable tracks, but in Japan 84 percent of sales are of physical discs (CDs and vinyl) compared to just 39 percent globally.

Record labels in Japan have been slow to offer their music through streaming services, and most industry watchers believe that Spotify will only be able to launch with half (or less) of the songs that currently populate Japan's Oricon Top 100. Shockingly, digital sales in Japan are actually half of their peak, which was seen in 2008 and is now less than $500 million annually.

In an effort to attract Japanese consumers, Spotify has integrated the service into Facebook (hoping for word of mouth posts) and has also added lyrics to tracks for Spotify Japan, hoping to get fans of karaoke more involved.

Google unveiled the new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones in an event in San Francisco today.

The Pixel smartphones are thought to be the first in a line of Google products to replace the popular Nexus series, and start at $649.

They both pack a quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 SoC, 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, a 12.3 MP camera and 8 MP front camera, Bluetooth 4.2 support, a USB-C connector and a fingerprint sensor.

The Pixel features a 5-inch 1080p HD AMOLED display and comes with 32GB storage, and a 2,770 mAh battery. The more expensive option, the Pixel XP, upgrades the screen to a 5.5-inch Quad HD display, comes with 128GB of storage and packs a 3,450mAh battery.

These will be the first phones to feature Google's new Assistant and support rapid charging. Google estimates that 15 minutes of charging is enough for 7 hours.

Oh and for the record, they both have a standard 3.5mm headphone jack!

Mozilla has initiated what is called Project Mortar and aims to replace the current plugins with a new solution. It hopes to decrease the cost of development and maintenance of Firefox.

One of the ways is using other browsers' solutions and the company is already experimenting by porting a couple popular ones. It has ported already the PDF viewer PDFium and the Flash player Pepper Flash.

In order to enable stronger focus on advancing the Web and to reduce the complexity and long term maintenance cost of Firefox, and as part of our strategy to remove generic plugin support, we are launching Project Mortar.

Project Mortar seeks to reduce the time Mozilla spends on technologies that are required to provide a complete web browsing experience, but are not a core piece of the Web platform. We will be looking for opportunities to replace such technologies with other existing alternatives, including implementations by other browser vendors.Senior director of engineering at Mozilla, Johnny Stenback to Betanews

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved the new Ethernet standard proposed by the NBASE-T Alliance lead by Cisco and other industry leaders. The new standard improves the speed with current cables.

The standard IEEE 802.3bz allows up to 2.5 and 5 gigabit traffic in what are now one gigabit networks using Cat 5e and Cat 6 cables. According to Cisco, in the past 15 years, Cat5e and Cat6 cables have been installed in excess of an estimated 70 billion meters – that's more than 40 million miles.

The new standard allows networks to be upgraded without massive rewiring which brings obviously costs. As wireless connections have evolved to challenge the wired connections it is important to get wired connection a speed boost if they want to survive.

Even though the new standard doesn't require new cables, the networking equipment has to replaced with a new one that supports 802.3bz.

World's largest music streaming service Spotify has reportedly started talks about acquiring a competing streaming service SoundCloud. According to Financial Times, Spotify is closing in on a deal but there's no word on the price.

The Swedish streaming giant has tried to buy SoundCloud already twice but the companies haven't managed to agree on a price. Last summer SoundCloud finished another financing round with another 100 million dollars. Spotify attempted to buy SoundCloud quickly after but negotiation hit a wall quickly.

According to the new reports the negotiations have gone further this time but the deal is anything but signed.

SoundCloud has managed to create a lively community of creators which is probably Spotify's main interest. The co-founder of Spotify, Niklas Zennström, sees consolidation of independent streaming services almost inevitable to survive against the device manufacturers (e.g. Apple) that rely on other forms of revenue.

SoundCloud was valued at $700 million after the latest round of investments.

Modern web browsers offer amazing functionality, speed, and performance. One of the best features without question is the session recovery. This allows us to continue where we left of as if we never closed the browser, even in case of computer crashing. There is a definite drawback though.

Serve the Home's Sergei Bobik has noticed that especially Firefox likes to write excessive amounts of data on your drive in case recovery is needed. It can potentially amount to tens of gigabytes a day.

Also it not only eats your storage but slowly kills your SSD, if that is what you use. SSD's only allow certain amount of writes before they expire. Thus, having programs constantly writing on them is not good for their lifespan.

This seems to happen with Firefox even though it is not used. Bobik noticed that within 45 minutes of having Firefox open it had written over gigabyte of data to an SSD. At this pace tens of gigabytes per day can be accumulated. In his recent calculations the same problem seems to be in Chrome as well and it could backup restoration data more than 24 GB/day.

There's an easy fix to improve your SDD's lifespan and reduce storage used by Firefox. You can change the frequency of the data writeup, by default it is done every 15 seconds. Switch the browser.sessionstore.interval parameter by typing about:config in your Firefox address bar. Notice that the time is in milliseconds (15 000 = 15 seconds, 300 000 = 5 minutes).

Elon Musk has revealed new plans for his space exploration company SpaceX. For a while we have known that the mad scientist plans to get humanity to Mars but when and how?

Now Musk has told us some very (and others not so) specific steps SpaceX is taking in order to make it possible for people to travel to Mars and make it a place they call home. The aim is to make the travel as "cheap" as a median mortgage in the US and to take just a couple of months.

If you haven't been following Musk's obsession with space exploration this might sound completely crazy. However, even NASA's new budget allows it to explore more and further making human missions to Mars a definite possibility in our lifetime.

Musk also unveiled plans for the spaceship, and the rocket carrying it to space. The ship is called Big Fucking Spaceship, I kid you not. It is obviously currently only a vision of what it takes to make travel affordable enough, including room for hundred or more people.

The development will take decades but Musk believes that within from 40 to 100 years we'll be sending Matt Damon to grow some crops.

There's not a lot of places that can be more vile than a YouTube comment section. And every day thousands upon thousands of illegal videos are uploaded to YouTube. All this needs to be cleaned up while maintaining YouTube as a free and open platform to voice your views.

YouTube, though, knows that there's a problem with unmoderated nature of the comment section as well as videos that do not serve a purpose that YouTube was made for, and now they've come up with a solution. Enter YouTube Heroes.

YouTube has introduced an initiative which recruits community volunteers to police the comments and content. These people which will be given the moniker YouTube Heroes will gain more power as they've flagged more videos and comments, as well as entered more captions.

There's no money to be made here but YouTube promises some perks like exclusive videochats, workshops, and even personal contacts within YouTube. These are things that not even channels with millions of subscribers have access to.

Obviously there's a million different problems with giving a badge and a gun to seemingly random YouTube users. They even get to mass flag videos like it's a good thing that less effort goes into flagging a video.

As we yesterday reported, inside information had it that Yahoo's alleged hack was real and that the company was only waiting to come forward and confirm it. Now, a day later, the internet giant has indeed confirmed what seems to be the largest hack of this type in the history of the internet.

According to Yahoo the hack that happened in late 2014 managed to collect information from its user accounts. The hacker, which the company believes to be a "state-sponsored actor", stole information from over 500 million users.

Thus far the largest hack has been attributed to MySpace, which affected around 427 million accounts. Yesterday as the numbers were still unclear suggestions of 200 million or hundreds of millions were circulating.

According to Yahoo among the leaked information are:

• Names
  
• Email addresses
  
• Telephone numbers
  
• Dates of birth
  
• Hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt)
  
• In some cases encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers

Last month a hacker by the name of Peace claimed to possess information of millions upon millions of Yahoo accounts. At that point Yahoo did not comment on whether or not the leak had actually happened but said they would investigate. Now new information has it that the leak has happened.

Re/code's Kara Swisher suggests that the leak has indeed happened even though Yahoo has yet to confirm the fact. Furthermore Swisher is saying that Yahoo has the information but is trying to come up with a good strategy before reveling it to the public.

The hacker claimed to have information, such as usernames, easily decrypted passwords, as well as personal information like email addresses and birth dates of over 200 million users. The extent of the leak was not confirmed by Re/code's sources but they said it was "widespread and serious."

This might complicate things the acquisition by Verizon. Obviously the new owner of Yahoo would rather not have a burden of such a huge problem and this might affect the $4.8 billion price tag.

Apple's equipment has never come cheap, and there has always been a cheaper hardware version of the same product. This means couple of things. First, Apple knows their real power is in the software and secondly that profits are off the roof.

The new iPhone is certainly not an exception in this manner. The software can only be found on Apple's iPhones and the profits are going to be one of the highest in the industry with the most expensive version costing nearly a grand.

According to new information from IHS Markit though shows that the high price is not all for nothing. Teardown of the iPhone 7 revealed that the phone is more expensive to build than ever before. According to the estimate it cost 18% more than iPhone 6S with $224.80 (including materials and manufacturing costs). Even still it retails the phone starting at $649, almost three times as much.

Although Apple has had to increase the build costs for more innovative design and better components to ultimately fend off the Android flagships the IHS researchers say that profits are still far better than for Samsung, which puts around $265 worth of hardware in their flagship Galaxy S7.

It seems that Apple has pulled a good release this time around, selling out several models before launch, and might be in for a new upward trajectory.

After more than two months of sitting on the throne of the top grossing mobile app it has now come time for Pokémon GO to give someone else a try. Niantic's super popular augmented reality game has been losing players, and thanks to a new update, the new king is Clash Royale.

Supercell's newest game Clash Royale took the top spot in the top grossing iPhone apps in the US after this week's patch that brought a slew of new features. Challenges as well as new troops meant that players have been spending money on gems like there's no tomorrow.

Even though the 74 streak Pokémon GO had at the top spot is impressive it is nowhere near what Supercell's mega hit Clash of Clans managed, as SensorTower notes. It does though still hold the number one spot in at least 8 other countries.

Pokémon also still holds the top place in Google Play Store revenue.

As promised, Apple has released the new version of its desktop operating system for all to download. The new OS carries an entirely new name, macOS Sierra, and brings a few interesting features.

The new version was introduced at WWDC in June and shortly after, in early July, Apple released the public beta for early adopters. Now over two months of testing later macOS Sierra can be downloaded – first time ever – from the Mac App Store.

The most significant new feature of the free update is voice assistant Siri which can now be found on the desktop. If enabled it can be found as a separate icon in the taskbar. In addition to Siri, Sierra brings a new universal clipboard, Apple Pay for web, new emojis, as well as better optimization for storage and iCloud.

As the rumors have had it, Google is having a press conference on October 4 and plans on introducing new Android devices. Or at least one, a smartphone that will be branded Pixel.

The press conference thus revolves around mobile devices and we will hear news about both the new device(s) as well as updates to the world's leading mobile operating system, Android. Currently it is not known whether the company intends to release multiple devices and perhaps tablets in addition to phones.

The biggest news we currently have is that Nexus will be replaced by Pixel. Previously the company has branded all of its own phones (manufactured by others) as Nexus devices but this is about to change. The new phone, or phones, will share the Pixel brand with tablets and laptops that Google has introduces in past years.

We might, and probably will, learn more about Daydream applications on new devices. The VR framework is said to come to not only a multitude of existing and upcoming smartphones but maybe even to a completely new standalone VR headset developed by Google.

That's what we have currently. See you on the 4th – or the day we have perhaps significant leaks.

Apple's removal of the headphone jack from the latest iPhones seemed to many a huge mistake. However, it can be argued that it is a move that others will follow. After all it is an antiquated analog connector from years past.

It does sound crazy though that Samsung would be trying to develop a completely new separate port for headphones but that is exactly what Digital Music News reports. The report claims that Samsung is thinking of introducing a connection that would not be compatible with Apple's newest devices.

It seems like conspiracy theory but Apple's and other competing manufacturers' aren't really on the same page in a lot of things. Apple has approached connectors and connectivity in general in a very closed fashion.

What seems odd though is that the new USB Type-C connection in many of the new Android flagships would seem to be a way more sensible choice. Why would Samsung replace a headphone jack with another one instead of following Apple suit.

Also Apple would probably not be hurt too much from a incompatible connector since it's trying to move more and more to wireless.