Yahoo Replaces Google as Firefox's Default Search

Just from the coming December, Mozilla Firefox will utilize Yahoo search engine as a default, only in the United States on cell phone as well as desktop. On account of this five-year agreement, Yahoo will also start a new search experience in favor of the users of Firefox in the U.S. that would simultaneously make this Firefox to move away from Google.

Such a new kind search experience will provide a clear, fresh and immersive layout that reveals input from the Mozilla group. In Russia, Firefox will employ Yandex Search, while in China this will make use of Baidu as its default. On the other hand, Google, and a lot of other search engines like DuckDuckGo will stay as integral options.

Reasons for changing the partnership-

The Mozilla Company has long earned most of its funds by means of its joint venture with Google that has always been seen as default in Mozilla. In fact, in 2012, information known from a reliable source reveals that 88 percent of Firefox’s revenue came mainly from Google. The deal with Google was going to terminate this year, although, and it seem as either Yahoo has made an offer that Mozilla cannot reject or Google planned to walk away from the contract.

Opinion of Mozilla

CEO of Mozilla, Chris Beard stated that Google has been the default search engine of Firefox global since the year 2004. The renewal time of the deal is in this year, and hence Mozilla took it as a chance to assess its competitive approach and investigate the options. He even added that his company is really eager to work with Yahoo to get a new, expected search experience of Yahoo to the Firefox users in the particular country featuring the best of the Web, and to discover new modern search experience along with the content.

Statements from Yahoo

Similarly, CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer recently perceived that she thinks that search is really a point of investment, prospect and development for the company. Such a joint venture aids to increase their success in search and even provides with an opportunity to serve closely along with Mozilla to get ways to create something more in search matter, communications as well as digital content.

Yahoo engine, in its present form, is supported by Microsoft Bing, certainly, although the company largely alters the results it obtains from Microsoft, in terms of design and in terms of status. There have long been gossips that Yahoo might end this agreement and return back its own particular search engine; however that appears improbable

This collaboration with Firefox will definitely provide Yahoo and even Microsoft a more powerful dominance in the search market. When Firefox usage has turned down over some of the previous years, this yet accounts for minimum 15percent of the browser market in the US. Yahoo at present possesses nearly 10 percent of the search engine of US market. To return back to the Google as default is only a matter of some seconds though some of the users want to go for the default.

GTA 5 Patch Coming to Xbox One Soon!

Grand Theft Auto V – GTV 5, an open world action adventure video game which has been developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games was released in September 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and on 18 November 2014 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. For Microsoft Windows it is scheduled to be released on 27 January 2015.It is the first main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series since the Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008.

It is set within fictional states of San Andreas which is based on Southern California wherein the single player follows three criminals with their efforts in committing heist, are under great pressure from a government agency.

It enables the players to freely roam San Andreas including open countryside as well as the fictional city of Los Santos, based on Los Angeles and the game is played from a first person or a third person view while the world is navigated by a vehicle or on foot.

Players have the capabilities of controlling the three lead protagonists throughout the mode of a single player, switching them during and outside of the mission with the focus on the heist sequence. The mission revolves between shooting and driving gameplay and players who tend to commit crimes may receive a response from law enforcement agencies which is measured by a `wanted’, system which governs the response of their aggression and a patch update is going to be released soon.

Latest Games Envisaged Issues of Download

Since the craze following the release of GTA 5 for the next generation console has begun, several players have envisaged issues in the latest game which had won positive reviews from major gaming sites and many players have postedon the official Rockstar Forum their inability to download the first update thereby being unable to play the online version of the game.

Rockstar has been working to resolve the issue faced by several players stating on 18 November 2014 that `at this time PlayStation 4 users should no longer have issues downloading the patch. All character migrations are now working on PlayStation 4 and affected PlayStation 3 users can play GTA online as normal.

This issue will be addressed for Xbox One and Xbox 360 users tomorrow’. The GTA V draws inspiration from several other past Rockstar titles which include Max Payne 3, Midnight Club, Manhunt and Red Dead Redemption.

Several Unique Features 

There are several unique features in the game wherein when the players are playing as one of the three protagonist, the other two tend to live out their daily lives and one will be surprised in finding what the characters are doing when one switches back into them. The other feature is the character swapping feature which is executed in a Google Earth manner which was displayed at a Game Informer demo, showing a smooth run without any lag.The Xbox One, PC, and PS4 version would be presenting an exclusive feature that is a first person mode and the entire game can be played through the concept of the protagonist. The mode of the gameplay will bring about a new way of playing the game and cars will have detailed interior which would be different from one another while the shooting will be like a FPS game.

Researcher Put Their Focus on the Masque Attack on OS X/iOS

According to the reports released to public by the researchers working at FireEye on 17 November, Mac OS X and iOS operating systems have threat from Masque Attack, which has already come into existence. This report was published within a gap of a week post the discovery of WireLurker by the Palo Alto Networks.

What is Masque Attack? 

Masque attack can easily utilize a drawback in the operating system of Apple, which allows the user to replace one app by another app, as long as both these apps are using the same bundle identifier. One of the threatening issues is that through this attack, all the preinstalled apps on the operating systems (example Mobile Safari) can be easily replaced.

The duplicate apps will be able to track the local data of the original apps, which includes the login details like user id and password. Through this attack, an attacker can easily login into anyone’s account and make transactions from their bank accounts.

These attacks become more easy, has the iOS usually does not put in force certificate matching for apps that come with the same bundle identifier. FireEye researchers were able to verify and identify the vulnerability on both regular iOS and jailbroken. The regular iOS includes iOS 7.1.1, iOS 7.1.2, iOS 8.0, iOS 8.1, and iOS 8.1.1 beta. Attackers can influence the vulnerability through USB ports and even wireless networks.

According to the blog post of FireEye researchers Tao Wei, Hui Xue and Yulong Zhang, Apple is unable to prevent such attacks due to the existing standard interfaces and protections. They are requesting the Company to develop interfaces that are more powerful and give it to professional security vendors.

This way these vendors will be able to protect their enterprise users from all these advanced attacks. This attack will prompt the users to download malicious apps with new names like for example, the new angry bird.

The users of these operating systems are more susceptible to these attacks when they download any app from third party source or by ignoring the un-trusted app message popping on their phones. Users, who have set the Gatekeeping feature on “Anywhere”, actually nullify their protection.

As per FireEye's researchers, WireLurker utilizes very limited form of the attack when hitting the iOS through USB ports.

According to director of software engineering at Arxan, Joe Abbey, WireLurker will be able to deliver the workload only if the user has installed any un-trusted app on MAC, on the other hand for the Masque attack to occur, the user must have downloaded enterprise-provisioning profile.

Companies who have the BYOD policies are more susceptible to Masque attack. According to Abbey, it is recommended that the owners of BYOD policies disable the provisioning profiles, till Apple comes out with a solution.

Masque attacks and WireLurker are additional examples of highly sophisticated and automated attacks, which are growly rapidly. These attacks highlights that we are in serious need of automotive proactive protection and prevention methods.

Hydrogen Powered Audi A7 Sportback H-Tron Quattro Four Door Luxury Saloon

Audi – Progress Through Technology

Audi AG, a German automobile manufacturer is known for its designs, produces, markets, engineers and distribution of luxury automobiles as well as its overseas worldwide activities from its headquarters in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany.

The Audi brand vehicles are manufactured in nine production facilities all over the world. Audi has been a major owned – 99.55% subsidiary of Volkswagen Group right from 1966, which was followed by a phased purchase of Audi AG predecessor, Auto Union from Daimler-Benz. It was re-launched by Volkswagen with the Audi brand with the 1965 introduction of the Audi F103 series. Each of the four rings of the Audi logo represents one of the four car companies which banded together to form Audi’s predecessor company, Auto Union.

The company ethos and core belief – `Progress through Technology’ is what drives the development of every Audi vehicle. Right from driving clinics to picking up latest vehicle there are several ways an Audi lover could strengthen their connection to the brands which portrays the pinnacle of luxury performance.Audi is recognized for its awesome standards, uncompromising quality and relentless performances and though one may be associated with those qualities with this particular brand, the characteristics tend to describe the employees as well who have been instrumental in their contribution to the final design of the brand.

Sportiest Car in Luxury Segment

Audi inspires the revolutionary engineering and progressive design which has become synonymous with the Audi brand together with innovative solutions. The Audi is available for those who tend to enjoy the finer taste in life.

It stands for sportiness, lightweight design together with the quattro permanent all-wheel drive, according to the new chief designer, Marc Lichte. He further states that, `In the Audi prologue, we are expressing this know-how in a new form; we have put the sportiest car in the luxury segment on wheels.

Our team took new approaches in both exterior and interior design’.Audi’2014, Auto Show festivities in Los Angeles would be presenting the design concept on which the future models would be based and called the Audi `Prologue’,would be signalling a marked change in the brand’s design direction under Marc Lichte.

Some of Audi’s models are in the twilight of their production life cycles such as Audi’s A4, A5, A6, A7 and A8 resulting in Lichte having a difficult though a rewarding task ahead of shaping the Audi’s line-up of cars.

Technology Combination of Comfort/Efficiency/Power

Audi design would now be showing progressive technology in a more powerful manner where the two door coupe will be having a flowing elegant shape in a sporty as well as taut design. The architecture melds with display together with the operating concept creating a new kind of unit in the clear and unobstructed interior while the complete front area of the instrument panel has a large touch display with a portion of the user interface operating with a new kind of OLED display which is made of organic LEDs.

The show’s car technology is a combination of comfort, efficiency and power and the 4.0 TFSI provides up to 445 KW of power and 750 Nm of torque, accelerating the Audi prologue from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.7 sec. It has a dynamic all wheel steering wherein the rear wheels have the capabilities of turning up to five degrees, making it responsive as well as stable while driving.

Assassin’s Creed Unity- Stuffed with Bugs and Poor on Computers and Consoles

Assassin’s Creed Unity, which was released with such hype, got a complete blow when 12 hours post the game’s release, it was declared a completely messed up game. The consumers are stating that the games from its looks, looks like was not yet ready and the Company Ubisoft wanted to just get it released as soon as possible.

Some of the drawbacks f the game includes its limitation to 900p on the consoles, the poor draw distance, dramatic decrease in the frame rates, and due to some unexpl

ainable reasons the characters and the faces keeps on disappearing.

Drawbacks: 

There are a completely new thread which has been dedicates to the performance of the Assassin’s Creed Unity on the PC, which is even more than NeoGAF. The creator of this thread had tried to run on the game on Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 but still unable to get the desired results. This thread consists of many posters having the same issue of cut scenes dipping below the 30 fps.

There are some of the screenshots, which display the bug, which have drawn lot of criticism. Ubisoft send the Xbox version of the game to many outlets for overview and the response was dire and indicated that the problems with the Assassin’s Creed Unity is no longer limited to computers only.

As per the Joystiq, both Xbox A single and PS4 versions are having problems with the game-breaking bugs and the dipping in the frame rate. Unbelievably it is true that the frame rate of the Xbox A is more noticeable and the consoles are locked at the maximum of 900p.

According to the reports from PC World, the game Assassin's Creed Unity although available can be rough. They have stated that the game itself is having riddles of self-performance. On similar lines, users have been posting nasty feedback about the game on the NeoGAF.

The company had placed a devious review restriction during the first half of the day of the launch, which actually caused many people to take the plunge and buy the game even without seeing the full review.

Why the game has so many flaws? 

The Ubisoft company is known to have the best of the software engineers, they have the required talent pool and enough finance to make unbelievable games, but going by the looks of Assassin’s Creed Unity, the short turnaround time given to the development team has affected the final product. The game would have had all the advantages if the company would have held back on the release data and given more time for the internal resources to show its effect on the product.

Ubisoft already knew that the game will not be making the people around the world happy and it has certainly brought lot of embarrassment to the company. Although there are times when a game is launched, people give time to the company to run initial updates and patches but the feedbacks and reviews of the game have been extremely ferocious.