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Anchorage earthquake: Photos and videos show street damage, trembling structures
2018-11-30

Social media was flooded today with images of a violent earthquake that rocket parts of Alaska. Social media was flooded today with images of a violent earthquake that rocked parts of Alaska, damaging buildings and sparking a tsunami warning for Cook Inlet and the Kenai Peninsula. The preliminary 7.0 quake...

Instagram now lets you choose who can — and can’t — see your Stories
2018-11-30

Instagram Stories are great for quickly sharing what’s going on in your life – but sometimes you don’t want all your followers to see them. The app’s new Close Friends feature makes it easier to restrict your Stories to a select group of people, so you don’t have to worry about your boss, your parents, or...

Sheryl Sandberg reportedly ordered oppo research on billionaire George Soros
2018-11-30

Sandberg originally said she had no knowledge of the D.C. oppo research group Definers, but has steadily walked back that statement. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg requested opposition research on billionaire George Soros from a Washington, D.C., opposition research firm, a new report says. Sandberg had previously...

Amazon Prime Health is coming, according to an early investor
2018-11-30

The famed venture capitalist says Amazon might be able to leverage its vast data store to help it serve health care needs. John Doerr, an early investor in both Google and Amazon, believes Jeff Bezos’s company will offer a “Prime Health” for medical and health products, Christina Farr reports at...

The shiny new neighborhood exposing everything that’s wrong with SF
2018-11-30

The “East Cut,” the growing neighborhood around San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, has a new name, a new logo, and a new look. It’s still working on schools. It’s lunchtime on a sunny California day and I’m walking down a street near San Francisco’s tallest building,...

Sketchy apps with more than 2 billion installs allegedly involved in click fraud
2018-11-27

Chinese app developer Cheetah Mobile has been accused of running a major click fraud scam, using its Android apps which have a combined install base of more than 2 billion. BuzzFeed News reported that research from mobile analytics company Kochava found eight apps – seven from Cheetah Mobile and one from Kika Tech...

Here’s how to find your old embarrassing tweets
2018-11-23

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, tricks, guides, and advice on how to get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Have you ever wondered what you tweeted to your 28 followers back in 2009? Was it something along the lines of “Is this thing on?” or “Twitter sucks.” No matter what it...

Google Home Hub is a makeup how-to machine for your vanity
2018-11-22

Google’s smart display is good at playing YouTube videos. YouTube is bulging with makeup tutorials. That leads to a use-case scenario with lots of potential. On a Tuesday morning in November, a crowd of immaculately groomed bloggers gathers at 8 a.m. inside a Sephora store to munch on tiny avocado toasts, their...

Amazon Web Services outage forces major cryptocurrency exchanges offline
2018-11-22

Two major South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges have been forced offline, after critical Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers suffered nationwide failure Thursday morning. AWS, one of the world’s widely used cloud services, was hit with major internal server failures that brought popular digital asset exchanges, Upbit...

Hate speech is still too easy to find on social media
2018-11-22

Shortly after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, I noticed that the word “Jews” was trending on Twitter. As a social media researcher and educator, I became concerned that the violence would spread online, as it has in the past. The alleged synagogue shooter’s activity on the Gab social media site has drawn...

This Japanese extension will disguise Twitter as Slack so you can pretend to work
2018-11-22

Some human experiences are universal; they exist wherever our species may be. For example, games have been played worldwide for millennia, most religions were developed to make sense of our existence, and – potentially most widespread – people finds ways to pretend they’re working when they’re not. So, one and...

It’s time to kill off follower counts on social networks
2018-11-22

Over the past couple of weeks, Twitter and Instagram have begun testing ways to reduce visual emphasis on users’ follower counts. The tweaks aren’t much more than changes in font size and where the text appears. But they represent a shift focus away from personalities’ popularity to the content they create, and...

Google shares which Thanksgiving food tutorials are most popular by state
2018-11-21

For all the Americans out there, food-heavy holiday Thanksgiving hits tomorrow. To commemorate the occasion (and perhaps rat out the newbie cooks in the country), Google’s released a chart showing which states’ residents are searching for Thanksgiving recipe videos on YouTube. The charts break down search traffic...

Amazon says customer names and emails were exposed in a “technical error”
2018-11-21

And just before Black Friday! Some Amazon customers woke up to an email from “Earth’s Most Customer-centric Company” noting that their names and email addresses had been briefly disclosed due to a “technical error.” This being the internet, the affected customers quickly shared...

Waste your Thanksgiving free time designing your own emoji
2018-11-21

This new web app is the useless fun you need in your life this week. Apple designers may pore over the smallest details of emoji, from classics like the poo symbol or the dancing woman to newer additions like New York bagel and bald person. But “Sad squinting crying see-no-evil...

On CNN, Mark Zuckerberg scrambles to rebuild trust
2018-11-21

The Facebook CEO took to the airwaves again Tuesday night to address some of the uglier findings from last week’s New York Times bombshell. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on national TV Tuesday night to assure Washington, Wall Street, and America that you can still trust Facebook.Read Full Story

O’Doul’s new can is pure Instagram bait
2018-11-21

Would you drink nonalcoholic beer? What if it came in this can? Most of us know O’Doul’s as that weird beer in the corner of the bodega cooler. Released in 1990 as a nonalcoholic alternative for people who wanted beer without the booze, it’s since become something of a cultural punching bag. But...

Facebook has found its fall guy for its Definers scandal
2018-11-21

And nope, it’s not Zuck. And that fall guy just happens to be someone who is already leaving the company. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s outgoing head of communications and public policy, has stepped forward to take the blame for the Definers scandal–the last scandal Facebook could squeeze in before...

Why celebrities and athletes are going gaga for this massage gadget
2018-11-21

Has the search for the ultimate massage tool finally come to an end? Fans swear by the Theragun, which promises muscle relief with rapid vibrations. Perhaps you’ve seen it lauded by celebrities such as Chelsea Handler or Diddy. Or, maybe you spotted it on the Maroon 5 world tour (courtesy of Adam...

500,000 Android users downloaded malware made by one developer
2018-11-21

Android malware has been on the rise over the past couple of years, we’ve just seen one of the worst attacks of this kind. ESET security researcher Lukas Stefanko found 13 apps with malware on the Play store, and said that more than 560,000 people downloaded these apps before Google took them down. Oh, and all these...

Google’s Neighbourly app is rolling out across India now, and it’s actually pretty neat
2018-11-21

In May, Google launched Neighbourly, a Q&A app to help you learn more about your neighborhood by asking people who live near you. The company kicked off a trial in India’s financial capital of Mumbai, followed by seven smaller cities. Now that it’s rolled out to New Delhi, and my home base in Bangalore, I’ve...

Facebook launches a dashboard for tracking the time you spend in its app
2018-11-21

We first heard in June that Facebook was working on a feature to help you track and manage the amount of time you spent in its mobile app. Following a delay after the company announced its rollout in August, it’s finally here. Like the new ‘Your Activity’ feature that was introduced in Instagram last week, the...

LinkedIn tests Snapchat Stories-esque feature called ‘Student Voices’
2018-11-21

Well, it’s finally happened. LinkedIn finally ripped off Snapchat’s Stories, meaning it joins the illustrious company of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, WhatsApp, and just about everyone else. The new feature is called “Student Voices,” and resembles Snapchat’s Stories. First spotted by consultant...

Admit it, you totally want this $144K, Mad Men-inspired RV
2018-11-20

Escape the dreariness of modern life by reliving the past. Paging all fans of midcentury modernism! Instagram’s favorite interior design style is merging with another photogenic design phenomenon, the RV (#vanlife, anyone?).Read Full Story

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