A growing number of companies are compressing and bottling fresh countryside air and selling it online.

A single eight-litre bottle of compressed Canadian air – which comes with a specially designed spray cap and mask – holds around 160 breaths and costs C$32 ($24) per bottle.

He now sells 10,000 bottles a month in China and hopes to grow that number to 40,000. They have just started operating in India, where they hope to sell 10,000 bottles a month.

"Pretty much every shop, restaurant and bar accepts WeChat and/or Alipay these days," said Yuhan Xu, a 30 year-old Shanghai-based radio researcher who has used her smartphone to pay for almost all her purchases since early 2016. "Even a small pancake stall does that," she added. "I don't need to carry cash."

"The younger generation has never read a physical newspaper, and similarly in the future they'll never use cash."

Although Snapchat used to let you replay snaps after viewing, a looping video option under the timer repeats the snap ad nauseam on the recipient's end.

Snapchatters can draw with emoji, or use a magic eraser tool that appears to work in a similar way to the clone stamp or healing brush tool in Photoshop.

Beepi doesn’t exist anymore. After burning through more than $US120 million ($158m) in capital, the start-up failed to raise more cash and shut down in February. Its roughly 270 employees cleared out of the cavernous Mountain View, California, headquarters leaving behind the ping-pong table and putting green.

In 2014 and 2015, mutual funds, hedge funds and others pumped billions into companies that they now see as overvalued, and unlikely to pull off an initial public offering.

Founded in 2013, Beepi caught on in San Francisco by giving people a fail-safe way to sell used cars online. Beepi guaranteed sellers a price, and if it couldn’t find a buyer in 30 days, it purchased the car.

Earlier this week, Burger King released a broadcast television ad that opened with an actor saying, "Ok, Google, what is the Whopper?" thereby triggering any Google Home device in hearing range to respond to the injected request with the first line from the Whopper's Wikipedia page. Google very properly responded to the injection attack by fingerprinting the sound sample and blocking it from triggering responses. However, it seems Burger King and/or its ad agency are either unwilling or congenitally incapable of getting the hint, and has released an altered version of the ad to evade Google's block.

Burger King made waves today after it released a TV ad that purposely triggered the Google Assistant. The ad ends with a person saying "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?"—a statement designed to trigger any Google Assistant devices like Android phones and Google Home to read aloud a description of the hamburger's ingredients.

Apparently Google has made changes so that Burger King's specific recording of the phrase will no longer trigger a voice response. Instead, the Google Home just quietly goes back to sleep, without any response to the query.

For years, studies upon studies have shown how bad sleep weakens the immune system, impairs learning and memory, contributes to depression and other mood and mental disorders, as well as obesity, diabetes, cancer and an early death.

We’ve lost the simplicity of sleep. All this writing, all these websites, all this stuff. I’m thinking, Just sleep. I want to say: ‘Shh. Make it dark, quiet and cool. Take a bath.’”

On March 20 researchers at security shop Radware spotted the malware, dubbed Brickerbot, cropping up in honeypots it sets up across the web to lure interesting samples.

Once inside the operating system, the code starts to scramble the onboard memory using rm -rf /* and disabling TCP timestamps, as well as limiting the max number of kernel threads to one.

Brickerbot then flushes all iptables firewall and NAT rules and adds a rule to drop all outgoing packets. Finally it tries to wipe all code on the affected devices and render them useless – a permanent denial of service.

These delightfully demonic figurines are the creation of Parastone, a company in the Netherlands that specializes in 3-D recreations of classic paintings.

Every person and beast in a Bosch canvas is so well-rendered that their diminutive contortions hold up to intense scrutiny. Most of these characters are taken from Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, but there are a few from elsewhere.

US Patent No. 8,473,532 (the '532 patent), "Method and apparatus for automatic organization for computer files," began its life with publicly-funded Louisiana Tech University. But in September last year, it was sold to a patent troll. A flurry of lawsuits quickly followed.

Within two months of the sale, Micoba had filed nearly a dozen cases in the Eastern District of Texas, suing companies like SpiderOak and Dropbox, alleging they infringed at least claim 13 of the '532 patent.

According to RPX, Micoba is associated with IP Edge, which itself is associated with eDekka (the biggest patent troll of 2014) and Bartonfalls (the winner of our October 2016 Stupid Patent of the Month for its patent on changing the channel).