To close out the week that Google spun out of Safer Internet Day, the company summarized the progress of its Vulnerability Reward Program in 2018. In total, $3.4 million in rewards were issued last year to 317 security researchers from around the world.

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Major tech leaders like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian started warning their Twitter followers late Monday to disable FaceTime on their Apple devices in light of a major software bug that Apple has acknowledged.

As explained by 9to5Mac, the bug is pretty bad. It lets you initiate a call to anyone via FaceTime and to immediately start hearing audio from the other person you’re calling before they’ve either accepted or rejected the call. As if you’re just — turning on a microphone at will in the room of almost anyone you’d want to listen to. Apple actually disabled the Group FaceTime capability on Monday as it [...]

Samsung Pay is causing some severe battery drain on some Samsung devices, with some users claiming battery usage as high as 60% in some cases. Samsung is yet to acknowledge these Samsung Pay issues officially. more…

The post Samsung Pay is causing major battery drain on some devices appeared first on 9to5Google.

Google is getting better at hardware, but the company still manages to have tons of issues with its yearly smartphone releases. In the latest string of reports, many Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL owners are reporting problems with call quality.

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