The word of the year for 2015 has been unveiled and, in an arguably depressing state of affairs, it isn’t even a word.

This year, an emoji has been selected. “Face with tears of joy”-the laughing and crying emoji — has been selected as Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. Despite it not even being a word, or in the dictionary. The judges picked the joyful image due to the “sharp increase in popularity of emoji” around the world last year. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders.

The word of the year is partly selected based on real-time language analysis and the increased emoji use around the world meant picking one was the obvious choice, the company said.
According to the dictionary boffins — last year it picked ‘vape’ as the word of 2014, 2013 was ‘selfie’-the decision on the specific emoji was made based on stats from mobile keyboard creator. The company said the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji was the most used emoji around the world.

GOOGLE AND ASUS CHROMEBIT-
A Desktop on an HDMI Stick
The US$85 Chromebit is a 75 gram (or 2.6 ounces) stick that you can plug into any HDMI port — whether that’s a regular computer screen or that large TV in your living room. It comes with 16GB of on-board and 2GB of RAM.
In many ways, it’s a larger, bulkier version of the old Chromecast stick. Just like that device, it comes with a dedicated charger, but unlike the Chromecast, it also features a USB port. While most people will likely want to use a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to connect to the Chromebit, the USB port allows you to plug in wired peripherals as well (and with a USB hub, you could even plug in multiple devices).
Because it’s a full Chrome OS machine, you can pretty much run any web app on it. It’ll let you play movies and TV shows from Google Play, Netflix or Hulu, just like any other Chrome OS device, for example.
You could probably use the Chromebit as a somewhat cumbersome media centre in your living room if you wanted to, but it’s really at home in a school, enterprise, or maybe call centre. As long as the work only involves web apps (or maybe a remote connection to a more fully-featured machine), the Chromebit is up for the job and can turn any screen into a usable desktop.

GMAIL WILL SOON WARN USERS WHEN EMAILS ARRIVE OVER UNENCRYPTED CONNECTIONS
Soon, you may see a warning in Gmail that tells you that an email has arrived over an unencrypted connection.
Gmail already defaults to using HTTPS for the connections between your browser and its servers, but for the longest time, the standard practice for sending email between providers was to leave them unencrypted. If somebody managed to intercept those messages, it was pretty trivial to snoop on them.
Over the last few years, Google and other email providers started to change this and today, 57 percent of messages that users on other email providers send to Gmail are encrypted (and 81 percent of outgoing messages from Gmail are, too). Gmail-to-Gmail traffic is always encrypted.
Why does all of this matter? Unencrypted email makes for a great target. The good news is that email security is getting better. A joint research project found that 94 percent of inbound messages to Gmail can now be authenticated, which makes life harder for phishers.

ANONYMOUS HACKERS DECLARE WAR ON ISLAMIC STATE
French hackers from Anonymous say they have taken thousands of Islamic State-supporting Twitter accounts offline, after declaring “war” on the group following the Paris attacks.
In a video posted on YouTube, a representative wearing a hood and the activist group’s distinctive Guy Fawkes mask said the violence that left 129 people dead “can’t go unpunished”.
The statement said: “That’s why Anonymous activists from all over the world will hunt you down. Yes, you, the vermin who kill innocent victims, we will hunt you down like we did to those who carried out the attacks on Charlie Hebdo.
“We are going to launch the biggest ever operation against you – expect very many cyber-attacks.
“War is declared. Prepare yourselves. Know this, the French people are stronger than you and will come out of this atrocity even stronger.”
Anonymous first emerged in 2003 and has become known for a series of well-executed public attacks on corporations, religious and governmental bodies.