Today on social media I came across a very cool Nike MAG Iron Man themed shoes similar to the Nike MAG shoes Michael J. Fox (Marty McFly) wore in the 1989 Back to the Future 2 film. The shoes were so popular that a limited quantity of 1,500 pairs were auctioned on eBay on September […]
You’d think Facebook would be faster at copying itself. Five years after Facebook Messenger took a cue from WhatsApp and Voxer to launch voice messaging, and four months after TechCrunch reported Instagram was testing its own walkie talkie feature, voice messaging is rolling out globally on Instagram Direct today. Users can hold down the microphone button to record a short voice message that appears in the chat as an audio wave form that recipients can then listen to at their leisure. Voice messages are up to one-minute long, stay permanently listenable rather than disappearing, and work in one-on-one and group chats on iOS and Android. The feature offers an off-camera asynchronous alternative to the video calling feature Instagram released in June. It will have to compete with Viber, Zello, and Telegram as well as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp for the use case. Hands-free Direct messaging could make Instagram a more appealing chat app for drivers, people on the move with their hands full, or users in the developing world who want a more intimate connection without having to pay for the data for long audio or video calls. It could also be a win for users in countries with less popular languages or ones that aren’t easily compatible with smartphone keyboards, as they could talk to friends instead of typing. The launch deepens Facebook’s entry into the voice market. From its first voice messaging and VOIP features back in 2013 to its new voice control system Aloha that works on its recently launched Portal video chat screen, Facebook has long taken an interest in the accessibility of voice but only got serious about building it across its products in 2018. Along with Instagram video calling, today launch raises the question of whether Portal and Instagram will team up. That could make Portal more useful…but also risks making Instagram less cool by tightening its ties to Facebook. ... Read More
Google+ was a bit of a disaster for the company when it was still alive, and now that it’s walking dead, it’s becoming even more of a stone around its neck. After disclosing a major security bug in October that affected just under half a million users, it announced that the service would shut down in August 2019. But things are getting worse. Today, the company announced a new privacy hole, one that it found last month, that left some data from about 52.5 million users up for grabs from apps that used the Google+ API. Because every bug seems to move up the Google+ shutdown date, Google also today announced that the service will now close in April 2019. All Google+ APIs will shut down within the next 90 days. The new bug, which was only live for about six days in early November, is related to the Google+ People API. It allowed apps that requested the permission to view profile information from users — like their names, email address, occupation, gender, birthday, relationship status and age — to access this information, even when that data was set to non-public. It gets worse, though; apps that had access to this data also had access to profile data that had been shared with the user by other Google+ users but that wasn’t shared publicly. Google says that it doesn’t have any evidence that developers ever realized that they had access to this data (the advantage of running a social network that few people still use, I guess) or that the data was misused in any way. It also stresses that these apps only had access to this data for six days. The bug was introduced, detected and fixed within the period of one week, from November 7 to 13 of this year. The last time around, Google was heavily criticized for waiting far too long to disclose the bug. This time, people in the know inside the company tell me that they decided to react quickly after going through the internal disclosure process, in part because the company wants to show more transparency. “We understand that our ability to build reliable products that protect your data drives user trust,” the company writes in a blog post today. “We have always taken this seriously, and we continue to invest in our privacy programs to refine internal privacy review processes, create powerful data controls, and engage with users, researchers, and policymakers to get their feedback and improve our programs. We will never stop our work to build privacy protections that work for everyone.” ... Read More
Elon Musk doesn’t respect the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), he said in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that aired Sunday night. Musk told CBS’s Lesley Stahl that none of his tweets have been censored since reaching a settlement with the SEC in September. He said that no one has to read his tweets before he hits send. He also explained he’d personally picked his successor as Tesla’s chairperson, before undercutting her authority by saying he could “get anything done that I want.” Musk has criticized the SEC before, but not quite like this The Tesla CEO announced in a tweet this August that he wanted to take his electric car company private, and that he had “funding secured” from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. The... Continue reading… ... Read More
Soulja Boy is stepping back from “cranking it,” and pivoting to an entirely new field this week: selling his own video game consoles and refurbished tech accessories. Soulja has been a gamer his entire life, so it’s only natural for him to want to launch his own systems, and this week, he’s done just that. He now sells two different consoles on his website SouljaWatch.com, both of which bear his namesake: the SouljaGame Console and the SouljaGame Handheld. Soulja Boy claims that the console is capable of running PlayStation, NeoGeo, PC, Sega, Game Boy Advance, and NES games, as well as “SouljaGames.” The website states that the console comes with 800 games preinstalled onto the console. According to the site, the handheld runs Switch,... Continue reading… ... Read More
Just Cause 4 debuts at No.6... Read More
Typhoon Studios co-founders Alex Hutchinson and Reid Schneider describe the vision for their indie game, and how it will stand alongside AAA titles... Read More
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