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E-commerce behemoth Alibaba has announced the acquisition of mobile browser firm UCWeb in what will be the largest merger in Chinese Internet history.

The company already owned a majority of UCWeb, but increased competition by Tencent and Baidu seems to have forced the move as Alibaba looks to continue expanding into more business for mobile.

Alibaba, which could be valued at nearly $200 billion when it goes public, has spent nearly $10 billion on acquisitions since the beginning of 2013, while rival Baidu has spent $2.4 billion and Tencent has spent nearly $2 billion.

WeChat, the mobile messaging app owned by Tencent and used by a majority of smartphone users in China is the next target of Alibaba, as executives have called it a monopoly. The merged company will create the UCWeb Mobile Business Group "responsible for internet browsers, search services, location-based services, the mobile gaming platform, mobile application distribution and mobile literature services."

Source:
Re/Code

The OnePlus One smartphone, which was initially meant to ship in May, has been delayed again, this time citing security issues.

At $299 unlocked and with specs better than any phone on the market at that price, OnePlus built some hype by only offering the device via invite and through special promotions.

The company is now "perfecting some final issues," but there is no final timetable for its official release.

Via Reddit, Abhisek Devkota (username Ciwrl) explained the delays:

So what "major update" led to the "final issues"?

As you may be aware, a handful of new issues with openSSL were made public on June 5th. We decided to include the correction for those vulnerabilities, in the factory release of the One
A new release means the whole firmware needs to be re-certified (including QA time), but we believe the security benefits outweigh the delay. So yes, there was a new build issued at fairly last minute, but it wasn't due to missing set deadlines or expectations.

Apple may soon be able to bring back over $100 billion in cash they hold overseas as Senate Democrats and Republicans are meeting to consider offering a one-time tax break if corporations repatriate such stashed profits.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Republicans have considered the "tax holiday" and "it enjoys a good deal of support in our conference."

The "holiday" would give American companies a significant cut in the amount of taxes they pay on profits earned abroad, giving them an incentive to bring the money home. The government anticipates a massive surge in revenue that will then be used on transportation-based construction and repair projects through the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Fund will be out of money by August if nothing is done.

Currently, U.S. law states that American companies do not have to pay the standard 35 percent corporate income tax on overseas profits until they are brought back. Most of these earnings never come back due to lower tax rates overseas in places like Ireland.

A similar repatriation holiday was enacted in 2004, at a 5.25 percent tax rate, which brought back home tens of billions of dollars.

Google has kept its acquisition trend going, purchasing the satellite imagery company Skybox Imaging for half a billion.

The search giant says Skybox's "satellites will help keep Google Maps accurate with up-to-date imagery. Over time, we also hope that Skybox's team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief -- areas Google has long been interested in."

Skybox added a bit more to their press release:

Five years ago, we began the Skybox journey to revolutionize access to information about the changes happening across the surface of the Earth.

We've made great strides in the pursuit of that vision.

We've built and launched the world's smallest high­-resolution imaging satellite, which collects beautiful and useful images and video every day. We have built an incredible team and empowered them to push the state­-of­-the-­art in imaging to new heights. The time is right to join a company who can challenge us to think even bigger and bolder, and who can support us in accelerating our ambitious vision.

Skybox and Google share more than just a zip code. We both believe in making information (especially accurate geospatial information) accessible and useful. And to do this, we're both willing to tackle problems head on -- whether it's building cars that drive themselves or designing our own satellites from scratch.

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has denied a report from VICE that its website suffered from a denial of service attack last week.

After comedian John Oliver had a rant about the FCC and net neutrality, he urged people to go to the FCC website and provide the regulator with feedback while opinion from the public was being sought. Not long after this, the commenting section on the FCC website became unusable.

VICE ran a report quoting an FCC source saying that it was actually hacked who brought down the commenting system with a denial of service attack.

Later though, an FCC spokesperson reached out to Engadget to deny the initial report. He said that the commission had no evidence of a malicious attack, and that a high volume of traffic caused the collapse. Engadget also noted that the FCC's commenting system is 17 years old.

VICE is sticking by its original report however, saying that a high-level FCC source had described it as a "database denial of service attack."

When you think about it though, given the age of the FCC's commenting system and combining that with thousands people trying to add comments, would that appear to be a denial of service attack if you were unaware of John Oliver's call to arms?

Google is part of a new coalition aimed at cutting advertising revenue to websites that offer copyright infringing content.

The practice of targeting ads on piracy websites is not new. The goal is straight-forward, to make the operation of these websites a non-profitable risk so that many will end up shutting down, or plans to launch new sites will be abandoned. Police in the UK are already targeting ads on piracy websites.

Search giant Google will join another effort in Italy. It will reportedly sign a Memorandum of Understanding in the country, along with music and movie groups, and others in the advertising business.

A committee comprised of signatories will handle complaints from rights holders that highlight advertisements shown on websites offering pirated content.

Source: TorrentFreak

As of today, we have finally retired our old warhorse -- a forum engine built and maintained by our own development team. We used our old, custom-built forum engine for 13 years and it has served us very well. But as the forum technologies have evolved, it simply became impossible for us to keep up with the modern 3rd party forum engines. After months of evaluation and testing, we have finally switched our forums to run on xenForo, a forum engine built by a group of former vBulletin employees.

Here's the quick summary of what is new:

• responsive layout (=page adapts nicely to mobile, tablet and desktop use)
• support for Facebook, Twitter and G+ logins
• improved private messages
• better editor
• etc..

Ketola has described the main changes in detail in his thread, so read more about changes from there.

As the switch was a pretty massive project, it is inevitable that some bugs are hiding somewhere. If you find anything weird, like 404s, etc, please, let us know!

Twitter's useful TweetDeck app is vulnerable to a cross-site-scripting (XSS) flaw that a lot of people have run in to today.

While browsing today, my TweetDeck tab in Google Chrome came to the front by itself with a message simply saying "XSS in TweetDeck". At the same time, my co-worker Jari sent me a link to a tweet that - when combined with TweetDeck - would automatically Re-tweet the message and spread.

Here is a screenshot of the tweet, before it is inevitably taken offline

It appears that to be affected by it, all you need is for it to appear in your timeline in TweetDeck at least in Google's Chrome browser. In our case, it was re-tweeted by an Adobe account, which then exploited the flaw in Jari's TweetDeck to retweet it, and then it showed up in my timeline and I retweeted it.

Of course, you can manually "un-retweet" it if you visit the actual tweet in a browser and just click the RT button again so it is no longer green. Here is the direct link, which should be safe to open in a browser.

Last year, EA teased the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront, and the gaming company has used E3 to tease the game again this year.

For their latest teaser, DICE put together some pre-rendered custscenes as well as some storytelling from the game makers.

The realism is pretty stunning, and the game is set for release in the Q2 2015.

Check the teaser trailer here:

Sony has used E3 to announce the launch of LittleBigPlanet 3, the sequel to the popular exclusives for PlayStation consoles.

Says the company: "In LittleBigPlanet 3, explore a world filled with creativity as you explore all corners of the Imagisphere, meet the inhabitants of the mysterious planet Bunkum and face the nefarious Newton.

Discover endless surprises that the LittleBigPlanet Community have created and shared for you to enjoy, with new levels and games to play every day. Then if you're feeling inspired, flex your creative muscles with the powerful and intuitive customization tools, to bring your own imagination to life in LittleBigPlanet 3."

The game is set for launch in November on PS4.

View the launch trailer here:

Nintendo has announced at E3 that Star Fox is coming to the Wii U, at some point in 2015.

Additionally, there will be two other Wii U titles developed by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto: Project Giant Robot and Project Guard.

When using the Wii U GamePad, you get a first-person cockpit view from inside the Star Fox Arwing, which includes a new helicopter vehicle.

In Project Giant Robot, you get to build robots and get a cockpit view, fighting your custom robots with buttons and gestures.

Teaser before the announcement:

We got our first glimpse at Mortal Kombat X (10) this week, showing off a game even more brutal than its predecessors.

The hit fighter series has been refreshed for the next generation, and even includes two new characters. There is a new unknown female character with some type of bug fetish, and the second was a massive man using a smaller guy as a partner for duo moves.

Among the finishing moves (and even in-fight moves) are spine breakers, skull crackers, and more organs outside of their bodies than you can imagine.

All of these moves are accentuated by "X-ray" mode, which shows the skeleton of the character you are beating.

Check the trailer here (on the PS4):

Nintendo has displayed why it built NFC (near-field communications) chips into the Wii U controller by unveiling its new amiibo toys.

One of the first games compatible with amiibo will be Super Smash Bros 4. By holding the toy to the Wii U gamepad information can be transferred between the two. Customized settings, achievements and more can be carried by players in the amiibo toys.

Other games that will support amiibo toys soon will be Mario Kart 8, Yoshi's Woolly World and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.

No details were given on how much these trinkets will cost though, but here's a demonstration of how they work.

VLC, one of the most popular media players for desktop and mobile devices, is on the verge of getting Google Chromecast support.

VLC dev Felix Paul Kühne says native streaming support for Chromecast is already being implemented for the mobile versions of the software as we speak.

It has been suggested that iOS will be first to get full support, sometime in July, to be followed by Android, which still has a beta version of VLC.

By offering Chromecast support, the HDMI dongle can be used to playback your movies you have stored on SD drives or internal storage and use your phone as a remote. Pretty good deal.

Nintendo announced that the Wii U console will claim its first Legend of Zelda title in 2015.

A brief trailer for the next Zelda game was shown at Nintendo's E3 press briefing and is embedded below. The Wii U console could certainly use strong titles as soon as possible to turn around its fortunes.

The open-world format for the Wii U Zelda marks a break with the past for the Zelda series, providing the player with total freedom of movement. Lead character Link is set to appear in other titles due to be released this year too, including Super Smash Bros 4.

Give the trailer a glimpse..