Amazon and Netflix yesterday collected the first Academy Awards for streaming services, sharing four gold statuettes between them at this year's Oscars. Amazon Studios bagged a best actor trophy for Casey Affleck's portrayal of a grieving man in "Manchester by the Sea". Bought by Amazon for $10 million at the Sundance film festival, the movie also won best original screenplay. It has earned $46.8 million at domestic theaters, and is set to appear later this year on Amazon's Prime Video service. Scene from "Manchester by the Sea", courtesy K Period Media Amazon also gained another accolade for best foreign language film with Iranian drama "The Salesman," which the company distributed in the United States and Canada. Netflix won Best Documentary in the short-subject category for 40-minute film "The White Helmets", which followed volunteer rescue workers in war-torn Syria. The Netflix Original was directed by Orlando von Einsiedel. According to one former Wall Street analyst, Apple's Academy Award is not too far away either. Venture capitalist and tech ponderer Gene Munster predicted on Friday that Apple will win an Oscar in five years. "We think Apple will win an Oscar in the next five years," Munster wrote in a research note issued by his company, Loup Ventures. "That's how long it will take for Apple to scale its original content spend from less than $200 million today to $5-7 billion." According to Munster, Apple's moves towards making original content to drive user engagement with its ecosystem will turn increasingly towards movies and TV series, as it aims to increase revenues to its Services division, which includes Apple Music and iTunes. Apple has already unveiled plans to launch two unscripted series on Apple Music, "Planet of the Apps", which shares a format similar to talent-based reality shows The Voice, and "Carpool Karaoke", based on the popular James Corden segment from The Late Late Show. In addition, Apple is also working on "Vital Signs", a dark semi-autobiographical drama starring Dr. Dre, which will also be used to promote Apple Music. Tags: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video Discuss this article in our forums

With reference to the upcoming Galaxy S8 at this year's Mobile Wold Congress limited to a March 29 launch date confirmation, Samsung chose to put the focus on two new tablets, the Android-powered Galaxy Tab S3 and the Galaxy Book, which runs Windows 10. Aiming to compete with the iPad Pro, the Tab S3 comes with a 9.7-inch HDR-ready Super AMOLED display running at 2,048 x 1,536 resolution. On the back is a 13 megapixel camera, while a 5 megapixel camera sits on the front, where a fingerprint sensor lives on the home button. The new metal and glass-backed design is 6mm thick, and houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (expandable up to 256GB with a microSD), built-in LTE, and a 6,000 mAh battery with Fast Charging support using the USB-C port. A new Note7-like S Pen stylus is also included. The Galaxy Book was Samsung's other big announcement at MWC. The hybrid tablet-laptop, positioned as a Surface Pro competitor, comes in 10.6-inch and 12-inch versions, with 1,920 x 1,280 and 2,160 x 1,440 resolutions, respectively. The 10.6-inch size features a 2.6GHz Intel Core m3 dual-core processor, 4GB of RAM, up to 128GB of storage, and has a 5 megapixel front-facing camera. The 12-inch Galaxy Book has a 3.1GHz Intel Core i5 dual-core processor, up to 8GB of RAM, and up to 256GB of storage, with a 13 megapixel camera on the back and a 5 megapixel one on the front. Samsung has not yet announced any pricing information for the Tab S3 and Galaxy Book. Meanwhile, Apple is expected to launch new 12.9-inch iPads and a new flagship 10.5-inch model in March. The latter is said to have an edge-to-edge display on the same footprint as the current 9.7-inch iPad. Tags: Samsung, MWC 2017 Discuss this article in our forums

AT&T launched a new unlimited data plan less than two weeks ago, but with more competitive options available from Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, it went back to the drawing board and came up with something better. Starting Thursday, new and existing AT&T customers can choose from two new plans: Unlimited Plus and Unlimited Choice. Unlimited Plus starts at $90 per month for a single line and includes unlimited talk, text, and data at up to 4G LTE speeds. Video can be streamed in HD quality, but Stream Saver mode, which reduces streaming video to around 480p quality, is enabled by default and must be turned off through myAT&T. AT&T Unlimited Plus includes up to 10GB of 4G LTE tethering per line per month, with speeds reduced to a max 128 Kbps for the rest of the bill cycle for eligible devices once the high-speed allotment is exceeded. Two smartphone lines starts at $145 per month, while up to eight additional devices, such as tablets and hotspots, can be added for $20 per month each. The pricing includes monthly access charges, but it is not inclusive of taxes or additional fees. AutoPay and paperless billing are required. For a limited time, AT&T Unlimited Plus customers will receive a $25 bill credit towards DirecTV, DirecTV NOW, or AT&T U-verse each month. The bill credits begin in 2-3 billing periods. The total monthly cost for AT&T Unlimited Plus with DirecTV NOW, for example, would start at $100 per month after discounts. Meanwhile, AT&T Unlimited Choice is a new cheaper option starting at $60 per month for a single line, and includes unlimited talk, text, and data at up to 3 Mbps speeds. Video streams at a max of 1.5 Mbps, aka about 480p. No discount is offered for bundling DirecTV, DirecTV NOW, or U-verse. Two smartphone lines starts at $115 per month, while up to eight additional devices, such as tablets and hotspots, can be added for $20 per month each. The pricing includes monthly access charges, but it is not inclusive of taxes or additional fees. AutoPay and paperless billing are required. For both plans, customers that exceed 22GB of data usage may experience reduced speeds for the remainder of the billing cycle, but only at times and in areas where there is network congestion, which is similar to 22GB, 23GB, and 28GB soft cap policies from Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile respectively. Additionally, AT&T said both plans allow individuals and businesses to make unlimited calls from the U.S. to Canada and Mexico, and send unlimited texts to over 120 countries. AT&T customers on these plans can also use their plan to talk, text, and use data in Canada and Mexico with no roaming charges. AT&T's earlier unlimited data plan started at $100 per month and did not include any tethering, so its new plans offer better value. Meanwhile, Verizon Unlimited starts at $80 per month, Sprint Unlimited starts at $50 per month for a limited time, and T-Mobile ONE starts at $70 per month, inclusive of taxes and fees. Tags: AT&T, unlimited data Discuss this article in our forums

The Mobile World Congress 2017 officially opened today in Barcelona, where some of the biggest names in mobile technology gather annually to show off their latest products. With Apple skipping MWC as in previous years and Samsung choosing to delay the announcement of its next flagship phone, this year's event offers a better opportunity for their smaller rivals to hog the limelight. LG G6 Kicking things off at MWC on Sunday, LG announced the G6, its latest flagship smartphone and the successor to the G5. Dominating the front of the new phone is a 5.7-inch LCD display sporting a resolution of 2880x1440 and an 18:9 aspect ratio – making the screen length double the size of its width – with support for Dolby Vision and HDR10 HDR videos. The unusual screen ratio allows the G6 to display two 1:1 square photos side by side, something LG was eager to promote as a particular benefit for Instagram users. With the phone's bezels taking up minimal space on the front, the power button and fingerprint sensor sit on the back of the phone below the camera, while a virtual home button is located on the main display. LG also made much of the resilience of the G6 compared to previous phones. The front is protected by Gorilla Glass 3, while the back is encased in Gorilla Glass 5. Elsewhere, the rear dual-lens camera boasts Gorilla Glass 4. The device is also IP68-certified waterproof. Other specifications of the LG G6 include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chipset, 4GB RAM and a 3300 mAh battery. The front camera has a 5-megapixel sensor and a 100-degree field of view, while the dual cameras at the back pack 13 megapixels each. No announcement was made regarding pricing or the release date of the handset.  Huawei Watch 2 and Watch 2 Classic Also at MWC on Sunday, the Chinese mobile maker unveiled the Huawei Watch 2 and Watch 2 Classic. The Watch 2 has a plastic chassis, while the Classic is metal. Both are sportier, bulkier successors of the company's original 2015 Watch, despite both of them having smaller 1.2-inch circular displays than the prior model’s 1.4-inch screen. The Watch 2 includes LTE (a Wi-Fi only one will be available), and both timepieces offer GPS, heart rate sensors, and NFC for Android Pay. The watches have two buttons and come with microphones and speakers. Huawei says the 420mAh batteries offer up two days of continuous power, which is double what the original version provided. A new, low-power mode also allows the watches to last up to 25 days, but functionality is limited to showing the time and counting steps. Huawei P10 and P10 Plus Huawei's two new phones bore the names P10 and P10 Plus. The P10 comes with a 5.1-inch 1920x1080 FHD display, while the larger 5.5-inch P10 Plus has a 1440p IPS display. Both come with a dual-lens 20 megapixel rear camera and a front-facing 12 megapixel camera. Like LG, Huawei also touted the photography capabilities of its new phones, pointing to the front and rear Leica-made cameras and the advantages of new motion-tracking facial recognition technology for taking portraits. But it was the company's partnership with Pantone that stood out on the day, with the smartphone to launch in eight different colors, including "greenery" and "dazzling blue". A Huawei Kirin 960 octa-core GPU, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 3,200mAh battery make up the main internals, with the larger 5.5-inch P10 Plus featuring the same specs but with an option for 128GB storage and 6GB RAM. Prices remains unannounced, but neither Huawei phone is expected to become available in the U.S. anytime soon. As expected, Samsung didn't reveal any details about the successor to its Galaxy S7, allowing its new Galaxy Book and Galaxy Tab S3 tablets to fill stage time at this year's MWC. Samsung did however confirm the official launch date of its Galaxy S8 would be March 29. Tags: LG, Huawei, MWC2017 Discuss this article in our forums

Google has responded to multiple reports of users being unexpectedly logged out of their Google accounts, in order to assuage fears that the logouts were security related. The unexpected sign-outs began on Thursday night and continued through Friday, affecting multiple services including Gmail, Chromecast, YouTube, and Google Play. During routine maintenance, a number of users were signed-out from their Google accounts. This may have resulted in you being signed out of your account or seeing a notification about "A change in your Google account" or "Account Action Required". We hear your concerns that this appeared to potentially be phishing or another type of security issue. We can assure you that the security of your account was never in danger as a result of this issue.Google said the issue with its Google Accounts engine also caused some Google Wifi and OnHub devices to automatically revert to factory settings. "Unfortunately, these devices need to be set up again," said Google. "We'd like to share our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience." Instructions on re-setting the Wi-Fi devices can be found here. We know some of you had issues signing in today. Please try again now. Rest easy -- your account's security was not affected.— Google (@Google) February 24, 2017 The reports initially caused some concern among users, coming in just hours after it was revealed that content delivery network CloudFare had been informed of a bug that leaked memory, which could potentially contain private information cached by search engines. Cloudflare worked with the affected search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing, to erase any remnants of the sensitive data from their caches, and the bug has since been patched. Tag: Google Discuss this article in our forums

If you have a 2016 MacBook, you'll want to check out this week's giveaway. We've got a couple Thunderbolt 3 hubs from CalDigit to give to MacRumors readers.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/02/24/macrumors-giveaway-ts3lite-caldigit/

Content delivery network Cloudflare has confirmed the existence of a bug that caused search engines to cache sensitive user data from a variety of well-known apps and websites, including Uber, 1Password, and more. Google researcher Tavis Ormandy discovered and reported the bug to Cloudflare, and the company has since fixed the bug and published a detailed blog post about exactly what happened. According to Cloudflare, the period of greatest impact for the "parser bug" ran from February 13 to February 18, although the extent of the leak stretches back months. The heart of the issue was a security problem with Cloudflare edge servers, which were returning corrupted web pages by some HTTP requests running on Cloudflare's large network. In what the company referred to as "some unusual circumstances," occasionally private information was returned as well, including "HTTP cookies, authentication tokens, HTTP POST bodies, and other sensitive data." It turned out that in some unusual circumstances, which I’ll detail below, our edge servers were running past the end of a buffer and returning memory that contained private information such as HTTP cookies, authentication tokens, HTTP POST bodies, and other sensitive data. And some of that data had been cached by search engines. The bug was serious because the leaked memory could contain private information and because it had been cached by search engines. We have also not discovered any evidence of malicious exploits of the bug or other reports of its existence. As shared in a tweet by Ormandy this week, that data also included private dating site messages from OKCupid, full messages from a "well-known chat service," passwords from password managing apps like 1Password, and more (via Fortune). To expedite a solution, Cloudflare responded to Ormandy's discovery and turned off three minor features of the network -- email obfuscation, Server-side Excludes, and Automatic HTTPS Rewrites -- discovered to be using the same HTML parser chain "that was causing the leakage." In its blog post, the company said that it has "not discovered any evidence of malicious exploits" in relation to the time that the parser bug was active. It also noted that, while serious, the scale of the bug was still relatively low: around 1 in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests through Cloudflare potentially resulted in memory leakage. "That’s about 0.00003% of requests," the company noted. Cloudflare worked with the affected search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing, to erase any remnants of the sensitive data from their caches. The company's chief technology officer, John Graham-Cumming, concluded the blog saying, "We are very grateful to our colleagues at Google for contacting us about the problem and working closely with us through its resolution. All of which occurred without any reports that outside parties had identified the issue or exploited it." Earlier this week, it was reported that Apple cut ties with server supplier Super Micro Computer in order to avoid a potential future scenario where user data might be put at risk, similar to Cloudflare's leak. Early in 2016, Apple was said to have discovered a potential security vulnerability in one of Super Micro Computer's data center servers and effectively ended its business relationship with the network company shortly thereafter. For a technical dive into Cloudflare's parser bug and its origins, check out the company's blog post. Tag: CloudFlare Discuss this article in our forums

Cellebrite director of forensic research Shahar Tal recently tweeted out that the company's Advanced Investigative Service can now unlock and extract the full file system for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus (via CyberScoop). To date, CAIS "supports lawful unlocking and evidence extraction" from the following iPhone generations: 4s, 5, 5c, 5s, 6, and 6 Plus. No mention has been made whether or not the developer has attempted to unlock newer-generation iPhones, including the iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, 7, or 7 Plus. Cellebrite's CAIS now supports lawful unlocking and evidence extraction of iPhone 4S/5/5C/5S/6/6+ devices (via our in-house service only).— Shahar Tal (@jifa) February 22, 2017 At the same time this week, Cellebrite announced the next generation of its "Content Transfer" tool, which will allow retailers and operators to fully duplicate a customer's existing iPhone onto a brand new iPhone at an average content transfer speed of 1GB per minute. The developer said this should reduce wait times in stores while also pleasing anxious customers worried about losing data when upgrading to a new iPhone generation. Cellebrite said the most important settings get transferred in the process, including wallpaper, alarm settings, weather, photos, videos, contacts, and apps. Not included are account passwords, Wi-Fi settings, health data, and website history. The company plans to hold a demonstration of the Full Transfer service for iPhones at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which runs next week from February 27 – March 2. “With content transfer speeds averaging 1 GB per minute, this new service is a complete game changer.” said Yehuda Holtzman, CEO of Cellebrite Mobile Lifecycle. “With Full Transfer, the average iPhone customer with 10GB of personal data can walk out of the store with a mirror-image of their old iPhone in just 10 minutes, offering customer experience that’s far superior to anything else available today.” Although the developer has been most recognizably in the public eye for its relation to the Apple-FBI drama and its smartphone-cracking expertise, Cellebrite also offers a collection of services for retailers and businesses. Cellebrite Touch2 and Cellebrite Desktop power in-store smartphones and desktop computers, respectively, with software that the company claims offers flexibility by operating through a store's existing IT infrastructure to "deliver a fast, consistent service." Earlier in February, Cellebrite found itself at the hands of a hacker when someone stole and publicly released a cache of Cellebrite's most sensitive data, including tools it uses to get into older iPhones. The hacker shared the data on Pastebin, intending to highlight the importance of the inevitability that any brute force tools aimed at bypassing encryption software "will make it out" into the public -- a prime fear of Apple CEO Tim Cook when the FBI originally demanded the company create a backdoor into the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone 5c last year. Tags: Apple-FBI, Cellebrite Discuss this article in our forums

Apple is investigating a melting iPhone 7 Plus that's the subject of a viral video on Twitter, reports Mashable. The owner of the phone, Brianna Olivas, says her phone exploded and started smoking Wednesday morning. Her boyfriend grabbed his phone and started recording the video, which has garnered 21,340 retweets on Twitter. So my IPhone 7 plus blew up this morning was not even using it, literally no explanation for this pic.twitter.com/sQ8CJt4Y69— Bree✨ (@briannaolivas_) February 23, 2017 Olivas tells Mashable her phone wouldn't turn on Tuesday, so she took it to the Apple Store. After a couple of tests, employees told her the iPhone was fine and it soon began working normally again. She charged the phone near her as she slept that night, and the next morning her boyfriend moved the phone to the dresser. As he went to the bathroom he saw the phone smoking and heard it squealing. It soon caught fire and he "quickly grabbed it and threw it into the restroom," where it blew up. Olivas has since turned the phone over to Apple for further testing, with the Cupertino company saying it'll know more within a week. An Apple spokesperson said the company is in touch with Olivas and is "looking into" the matter. Photos via Brianna OlivasExploding smartphones have garnered increased attention since Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 was plagued with widespread reports of exploding devices, prompting an "unprecedented" recall of the popular device. Lithium-ion batteries are more prone to malfunctioning and exploding when manufacturers and suppliers don't take proper care in preparing the batteries for use. For example, Samsung blames the Note 7's battery problems on a flaw that caused two incompatible parts of the battery came together. Related Roundup: iPhone 7 Discuss this article in our forums