Microsoft will bid farewell to Internet Explorer and legacy Edge in 2021

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By Tom Warren | Aug 17, 2020, 3:22pm EDT

Microsoft’s services will drop support for IE11 in a year

Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer 11 across its Microsoft 365 apps and services next year. In exactly a year, on August 17th, 2021, Internet Explorer 11 will no longer be supported for Microsoft’s online services like Office 365, OneDrive, Outlook, and more. Microsoft is also ending support for Internet Explorer 11 with the Microsoft Teams web app later this year, with support ending on November 30th.

While it’s still going to take some time to pry enterprise users of Internet Explorer 11 away, Microsoft is hoping that the new Internet Explorer legacy mode in the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser will help. It will continue to let businesses access old sites that were specifically built for Internet Explorer, until Microsoft fully drops support for Internet Explorer 11 within Windows 10. Microsoft’s move to stop supporting Internet Explorer 11 with its main web properties is a good first step, though.

Alongside the support changes, Microsoft is also planning to drop support for its existing legacy version of Microsoft Edge on March 9th, 2021. After the end of support date, the legacy version of Edge will no longer receive security updates. Microsoft has been moving existing Windows 10 users over to new its Chromium-based Edge browser, and the company says new devices and future Windows feature updates will all include the new Edge browser.

Microsoft has been working on killing off Internet Explorer usage and support for years now. The company first unveiled its new Edge browser back in 2015, codenamed at the time Project Spartan. It was the beginning of the end for the Internet Explorer brand. Microsoft has since labeled Internet Explorer a “compatibility solution” rather than a browser and encouraged businesses to stop using the aging browser.

Read the original article at TheVerge.com HERE.

Copley homicide case — Judge OKs testimony on location evidence

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September 26, 2020 | By Kay Stephens

Jury permitted to hear about use of GPS, cellphone data during upcoming trial

HOLLIDAYSBURG — A Blair County jury will be permitted to hear testimony about the use of cellphone records, plus GPS and Facebook data, to draw conclusions about Michael D. Copley’s alleged whereabouts on Dec. 9 and 10, 2015, the night his wife went missing.

Judge Wade A. Kagarise, in a recent ruling, denied a motion seeking to exclude testimony about Copley’s alleged location for lack of supportive details on how computerized software can be used to render conclusions about a location.

Kagarise said he believes the testimony about Copley’s location, as rendered during a June 23 pretrial hearing, reflected “sufficient reliability” based on the expertise and training of James L. Wigley, a U.S. Secret Service investigating analyst who testified.

Defense attorney Richard Corcoran, at that June 23 hearing, told Kagarise that Wigley’s testimony shouldn’t be permitted. Because neither Wigley nor any other witness offered testimony about how the software works, Corcoran said Copley will be disadvantaged in contesting the criminal homicide, aggravated assault, burglary, criminal trespass and related charges filed against him.

Copley is charged with the death of his 29-year-old wife, Catherine Copley. In June 2016, about six months after Catherine Copley was reported missing, her body was found in a garage behind a vacant house on the 400 block of East Pleasant Valley Boulevard. Through a review of cellphone records, plus Facebook and GPS data, investigators concluded that Michael Copley was in the area of the garage on the night his wife disappeared.

During the June pretrial hearing, Wigley testified about his review of the cellphone data and its link to cell towers and wireless internet sites.

Wigley said the data confirmed that Michael Copley’s cellphone was in or near the Altoona garage where her body was later found.

During the hearing, Wigley mentioned a margin of error with this kind of data, and Kagarise acknowledged that in his ruling.

The defense, Kagarise said, is free to cross-examine Wigley on that margin and if desired, to call its own expert witness to counter Wigley.

The judge also acknowledged that Wigley has 25 years in law enforcement and specialized training in the use of software to compile and analyze digital records.

“The defense is alleging that (Wigley) has insufficient knowledge about the way Facebook and Google operate and therefore, he should not be able to testify to the location services evidence,” Kagarise wrote.

“However,” the judge continued, “this court believes that sufficient evidence was presented at the June 23, 2020, hearing to draw a conclusion that not only is the proffered evidence not novel, it is also based on sufficient reliability and based on the proposed expert’s specialized training and knowledge.”

The judge also suggested that jurors will be able to follow Wigley’s testimony based upon their own understanding of cellphones.

Online court records show that Copley has been in the Blair County Prison since March 29, 2018, when he was arrested for assault, an offense leading to a minimum of nine months in prison. Because police filed homicide charges against Copley in October 2018, he has remained in county prison.

Read the original article at AltoonaMirror.com HERE.

Hawk Analytics featured in LEA Podcast, Analyst Talk With Jason Elder

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In this episode of Analyst Talk With Jason Elder, Scott Eicher, retired FBI agent and a Hawk Analytics subject matter expert (SME) in cellular analysis shares how and why you should use cellular analysis in your investigations. Scott provides his perspective on how our society and law enforcement has changed after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001, and the Aurora theater mass shooting in 2012. Scott is currently the Director of Professional Services with Hawk Analytics, Inc.

LISTEN HERE

Google Geofence Case Frees an Innocent Man

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DA drops murder charges against man accused of killing his parents, burning their house in 2018

Author: Jason Braverman (11Alive) | September 2, 2020 |

After obtaining a Google geofence search warrant, the DA’s office dropped charges against the son and is charging Cornelius Muckle with the crime.

ATLANTA — Charges have been dropped against a man accused in 2018 of killing his own parents and setting their house on fire.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office announced that after an independent investigation, the case against Keith Sylvester was dismissed.

Harry Hubbard, 67, and Deborah Hubbard, 65, were found dead in their home on July 3, 2018. Police said the victims were badly burned, and Deborah Hubbard was found with a cord wrapped around her neck. Police said Harry Hubbard also appeared to have been strangled.

“The result of this investigation shows that an assailant, who was unnamed in the original police investigation, was, in fact, in the house of Deborah and Harry Hubbard 20 minutes before a 911 call was placed regarding the fire that caused their deaths,” District Attorney Paul Howard said in a statement to 11Alive News on Wednesday.

Cornelius Muckle is now charged in the murder. He was arrested in Atlanta on Aug. 27 and Atlanta Police say he has no relation to the couple. They said no further information would be released as the “case is pending litigation.”

The DA’s office obtained a Google geofence search warrant. They said it took Google nine months to get the information after it was requested.

Howard said the results identified Muckle as the culprit whose phone was inside the house at the time of the crimes.

They also discovered from the Google warrants that Muckle pawned several items belonging to the Hubbards’ two days after the homicide.

“Based upon this evidence, Muckle was charged in this incident, and the case against Keith Sylvester was dismissed,” Howard said.

Keith Hubbard had been known to talk about his parents’ insurance policy on multiple occasions. In court, his sister learned that Debbie Hubbard’s insurance policy had recently been changed and it was “solely for Keith.”

In December 2018, Atlanta police arrested the son, Keith Sylvester, charging him with murder, arson, aggravated assault, strangulation and insurance fraud.

Speaking to WGRZ-TV reporter Claudine Ewing from the Fulton County Jail in 2019, Keith Sylvester said he was shocked when he was arrested.

“I had been working with the Atlanta Police lead investigator, James Barnett. I had been giving him as much information as possible to help him find out exactly what happened or to have possible leads. All I know is, is he called me on the 28th of December. I was at work, and he was telling me he wanted me to come in the next day for a final interview. He said it was the end of the year and he just wanted to recap or see if I had additional information. I said well if it’s that important I can come in tonight, he said no, just come in tomorrow. So on that Saturday, I went into police headquarters about 5 o’clock when he asked, and basically he asked if I had any more information for him, and I told him I didn’t know anything else, and then he said, ‘That’s unfortunate for you,’ and then he charged me with their two murders.”

Now, those charges are dropped, according to the district attorney.

Cyber security expert, Patrick Kelley says the tracking technology is on most of our devices.

“Google pulled all of the geo-data, basically the maps data where devices were at the time of this event, where the family was murdered,” Kelley said.

Kelley says sharing location information can raise privacy issues.

“Google is pretty tight about giving this information over, even when there’s a warrant- their legal team is notoriously rigid and fights back on user rights,” Kelley said.

Read the original article from 11Alive HERE.

Apple Just Crippled IDFA, Sending An $80 Billion Industry Into Upheaval

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By John Koetsier | Jun 24, 2020 |

That tremor in the Force you felt yesterday probably wasn’t shock at being able to text your car keys in Apple’s new iOS 14 or do real-time offline translation with Siri. Instead, it was Apple’s shot across the bow of an $80 billion industry.

The IDFA is dead.

Long live the IDFA.

Yesterday Apple announced iOS 14, its new mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads. The company did not announce, as mobile marketers expected, the death of the IDFA.

Instead, Apple rendered the Identifier for Advertisers basically useless without actually killing it.

Like Google’s advertising identifier, GAID, Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers helps mobile marketers attribute ad spend. What that means, essentially, is that when a company like Lyft or Kabam runs user acquisition campaigns to gain new mobile customers, a mobile measurement partner like Adjust, Singular, Kochava, or AppsFlyer can help them connect a click on an ad with an eventual app install on a specific device. (Full disclosure: I do some consulting for Singular.) That helps Lyft know that an ad worked, and that whatever ad network they used for it succeeded.

Plus, if the person who installed that app eventually signs up for an account and takes a ride share, Lyft knows where and how to attribute the results of that marketing effort, and connect it to the ad spend that initiated it. Even better, from Lyft’s perspective, it can use the IDFA to tell mobile ad networks essentially: I like users like this; go find me more.

All of that is going away with iOS 14.

Yesterday Apple killed the IDFA without killing the IDFA, by taking it out of the depths of the Settings app where almost no-one could find it — although increasingly people were finding it and turning it off — and making it explicitly opt-in for every single app. If an app wants to use the IDFA, iOS 14 will present mobile users with a big scary dialog like this:

[image]

Would you say “yes” to allowing an app or brand permission to “track you across apps and websites owned by other companies?”

Neither will 99% of consumers.

This is actually a genius move by Apple. Marketers can’t really get upset about losing the IDFA capability, because technically it’s still around. Apple gets to burnish its privacy credentials while not taking huge amounts of flack from brands and advertisers because, after all, who can argue with giving people more rights with their personal data?

And make no mistake: this is a great move for user privacy.

But it’s also a huge problem for a massive industry.

AppsFlyer estimates mobile app install spend at close to $80 billion in 2020, and that estimate was made before COVID-19 threw mobile into high gear for the gaming industry — one of the biggest spenders in the mobile user acquisition space — so it could be low. And while Android accounts for more than twice as many app installs as iOS — 22.5 billion in Q1 2020 versus 9 billion, according to App Annie — the numbers are almost reversed when it comes to spend per platform.

Consumer spend on iOS hit $15 billion in Q1 2020, compared to $8.3 billion on Android, growing 5% year-over-year on both platforms.

That means iOS users are close to twice as valuable to advertisers and publishers compared to Android users. And that means that iOS accounts for a disproportionate share of that almost $80 billion in user acquisition spend. We are talking tens of billion of dollars here, most of which Facebook and Google hoover up into their ad ecosystems.

Now big chunks of those billions are at risk.

Not that advertisers won’t still need to advertise. And not that they’ll completely stop. But it will be harder to advertise if they don’t believe they can effectively measure the results of their ads.

Perhaps most critically, this impacts spend on the two biggest platforms for mobile user acquisition: Google and Facebook. Google and Facebook are perennially at the top of charts for highest return on ad spend for a reason: they typically have more data on more people to make smarter decisions about ad targeting, plus more opportunities to show those ads in high-value contexts.

Now they’re facing some risk to that privileged position.

Two of the ways that Facebook enables smart mobile user acquisition for mobile brands are App Event Optimization (AEO) and Value Optimization (VO). AEO looks for new-to-you people who are similar to customers you already have in your apps at defined stages, while VO looks for people who will spend a certain amount of money in your mobile app. It’s going to be a lot harder for Facebook to run these types of campaigns if Apple refuses to let Facebook know what people do in an app after they install it.

Facebook might be able to do it if the Facebook mobile software development kit is installed in an app’s code, for instance. The Facebook SDK is currently in over 80,000 iOS apps, according to MightySignal, including just over half of the top 200 biggest iOS apps on the planet.

How Apple would react to that is anybody’s guess, but given that Apple has rejected Facebook’s social gaming app at least five times already, it probably won’t be good.

Similarly, Google Ads can be set to find new users for your mobile app based on “tROAS,” or target return on ad spend. To know that its ads are working, Google needs post-install data from users you acquire via Google Ads: data which will be harder to get now, if not impossible. Like Facebook, Google has its own SDK in many mobile apps — 69% of the top 200 grossing iOS apps, and over 115,000 iOS apps in total — so it may be able to get data that way.

But again, this won’t make Apple happy.

And, just because Facebook or Google have their SDKs in a lot of apps doesn’t mean their software is in every app … so there’s a potential barrier to using their mobile user acquisition services for mobile apps at the current level of sophistication coming in the not-to-distant future.

Apple isn’t just completely leaving advertisers up the creek without a paddle, however. After all, the company makes billions annually with its own ad network, Apple Search Ads, which is completely focused on mobile user acquisition on the iOS App Store.

Advertisers who can’t track advertising effectiveness don’t remain advertisers for long.

So Apple has been working on a new privacy-safe framework for mobile attribution — the science of identifying which ads drive what results — for the past two years. It’s called SKAdNetwork, and Apple just updated it.

SKAdNetwork promises to allow advertisers to know which ads resulted in desired actions without revealing which specific devices — or which specific people — took those desired actions.

So, again, you’re a mobile brand and you want users. It’s October 2020, and 70% or more of iOS users are now on iOS 14. You go to an ad network like Vungle or AdColony or Chartboost — or Facebook or Google, for that matter — and kick off an ad campaign. They show your ads to potential new mobile customers, and when one clicks on it and downloads your app from the App Store, Apple itself will handle sending a cryptographically signed notification — a postback — to the ad network. That postback will not include any user or device-specific information, so while it will validate the conversion for marketing purposes, it won’t reveal any personal information of your new app user.

Google and Facebook are now just like any other ad network: lining up to get a smidgen of privacy-safe information from Apple.

Brands have until September to get ready to be able to measure the results of their mobile ad campaigns in this new way. Mobile measurement vendors are planning to help, of course.

Adjust CTO Paul Muller said today that “we will continue to enable our clients to not only view their data for all their campaigns across both iOS and Android, but also to ensure that this data is actionable.”

Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv has already announced “first-to-market” SKAdNetwork support, saying the company’s technology will make it “scalable, simple, and seamless for mobile marketers,” and that Singular has been working on supporting SKAdNetwork for “over a year now.”

Other mobile measurement vendors will no doubt follow suit. Their clients will demand it.

“Apple’s decision to essentially kill off the IDFA, while expected, is fundamentally changing how measurement is handled in mobile advertising,” says former Rovio VP and current mobile consultant Eric Seufert. “It’s impossible to overstate how impactful this change is: almost every large mobile-first business is completely dependent on performance marketing on mobile for revenue growth. Mobile app developers across every vertical are now scrambling to come up with a strategy for continuing operations as iOS 14 rolls out.”

The most interesting thing over the next days and weeks, however, will be how Facebook and Google react to Apple’s announcement. SKAdNetwork has the potential to make their cozy user acquisition advantages somewhat less advantageous. But they also have vast resources and huge amounts of data on billions of people.

We live in interesting times!

Read the original article with images HERE.