Insights

One of the hottest new topics in tech is 5G, the next generation of cellular network technology. When 4G came along, it was a massive breakthrough and gave birth to services like Instagram and Snapchat, which had been completely unthinkable only a couple of years earlier. Now it’s time for the next generation of...

Aziz ‘Com’ Mirza, a Canadian man living in Dubai, has been arrested by authorities and accused of defrauding investors through a string of get-rich-quick schemes, including real estate-backed cryptocurrency Habibi Coin — once dubbed “the Bitcoin of the Middle East.” According to Gulf News, Mirza, who...

What makes a tweet political? We’ll find out when Twitter starts implementing its new rules in late November. In a surprise move, Twitter says it will stop running political ads. But implementing the new policy could involve some messy trade-offs and unintended consequences.Read Full Story

In addition to spending $33 million on lobbying efforts so far this year, the three companies have increased their funding of influential think tanks that help shape federal and state policies. This story was produced by MapLight, a nonprofit organization that reveals the influence of money in politics.Read Full...

Some of the best animated series are written by comedians who also work on late night and do stand-up. Here’s how they create sophisticated humor that works for all ages. A few years ago, Jenny Jaffe needed to carve out some time from her job writing for the Disney series Big Hero 6 so she could...

Facebook says its stance is ideological, not based on financial concerns. Facebook has issued its first public comments about political advertising on its platform after Twitter took the surprising step of banning all political ads on its service. In an interview with Bloomberg (via Business Insider), Facebook chief...

What makes a tweet political? We’ll find out when Twitter starts implementing its new rules in late November. In a surprise move, Twitter says it will stop running political ads. But implementing the new policy could involve some messy trade-offs and unintended consequences.Read Full Story

The platform is selectively censoring emoji in an effort, it says, to curb requests for “nude imagery, sex or sexual partners, or sex chat conversations.” Facebook and Instagram are now censoring what the companies describe as “contextually specific and commonly sexual emojis or emoji...

If you loved ‘The Social Network,’ Sorkin’s take on Facebook’s origin story, you’ll really love this missive to the CEO. What: An open letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg from America’s favorite patriotic curmudgeon, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.Read Full Story

Facebook, once an innocent tool to share ‘what’s on your mind’ has increasingly been weaponized by governments to spread disinformation and manipulate elections — something hundreds of the tech giants’ employees outlined in an open letter this week that urged the company to rethink its stance on political...

WhatsApp has revealed that at least two dozen academics, lawyers, Dalit activists and journalists in India were the target of surveillance by threat operators using security firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. The revelations, reported by news outlet Indian Express, come as the Facebook-owned messaging service filed a...

In March, Mark Zuckerberg shared his grand vision of Facebook’s future that included encrypting all messaging services. It seems that the company is slowly working on making that happen. According to app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook is testing encrypting video and audio calls over Messenger in Secret mode....

Twitter is making a big change to how it handles political ads: It’s getting rid of them altogether (with very few exceptions). Today Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced via tweetstorm that the company has “made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally” because Twitter believes “message...

Identity designers try to create memorable images. Turns out, we are terrible at remembering even the best ones. BMW. Puma. Red Bull. Lego. These brands are so ubiquitous, there’s a good chance you see their logos every single week. But would you be able to draw them from memory?Read Full Story

This article was originally published on SEXTECHGUIDE, an independent publication that looks at the intersection between sex and technology in a non-explicit, as close to a ‘safe for work’ way as possible – including app reviews, adult VR info, sextech devices, privacy, security issues, and much more. It was...

Fake news, Facebook News, Brexit, WhatsApp hacks, and the “enemy of the people.” These are just some of the fast-changing stories that journalists across Europe are striving to cover — oftentimes, finding themselves at the center of that story.  Europe’s newsrooms are facing multiple challenges as they adjust...

Kirsten Green, the VC who bet on Glossier, Away, Bonobos, and Jet.com, is investing in Curated, a platform that connects hobbyists with customers who want to buy products for a new hobby. Kirsten Green, the founder of Forerunner Ventures, knows how to predict retail trends. She’s bet on some of the biggest...

Chelsey Glasson, who recently filed a complaint with the EEOC, talked to Fast Company about her experience at Google during her second pregnancy. Over the summer, an anonymous memo by a Google employee on maternity leave made the rounds on an internal message board. In the post, which was eventually leaked to...

A slew of new coats promise to keep you warm with unique fabrics and technology. These six delivered. Outerwear designers are tasked with creating coats that live up to the elements—a job that is only getting harder as extreme weather conditions become more frequent and winters get worse in many parts of the...

Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, who recently said his company would never get involved with Facebook‘s Libra, has backed a cryptocurrency startup. Dorsey, a longtime Bitcoin advocate, participated in CoinList’s $10 million funding round, alongside several other investors. CoinList, which helps startups raise...

A new kind of Android malware capable of reinstalling itself even after being manually removed has reportedly infected more than 45,000 Android devices over the last six months. The latest findings — disclosed by cybersecurity firm Symantec — come after a similar disclosure by MalwareBytes, which first spotted...

WhatsApp just sued Israel-based security company, the NSO Group, in a US federal court for allegedly injecting malware into over 1,400 targets’ phones through the messaging service. The Facebook-owned company accused the NSO Group of installing malware into phones for surveillance. The court filing says the...

Facebook wants to remind you to see a doctor. It’s working on a suite of “Preventative Health” features designed to help people keep track of their personal maintenance. Is it just me or does this company seem like a bad choice for that role? Facebook today announced it’s working with major health...

Google has announced its search engine will no longer index Flash, the once hugely popular web content format. In the early 2000s, Flash was everywhere on the web. The browser plug-in technology made it easy for web developers to build everything from animated movies to restaurant menus that would look the same from...

As a result of the disappointing Q3 revenue and Q4 forecasts, the stock received five downgrades, causing GrubHub’s share price to plummet. Food delivery company GrubHub has seen its stock price slashed by over a third after it posted disappointing third-quarter earnings today, reports CNBC. The company...

David Marcus, Facebook’s Libra lead, has defended the technology giant’s ‘cryptocurrency’ project saying “the most meaningful innovations that have changed the lives of millions across the world in a profound way have always been met with damning headlines.”  Marcus was speaking at Money 20/20, an...

Customers kept asking the Detroit startup which mattress to buy for its ultra-popular bed frame, so it designed one. Back in 2015, the fledgling Detroit-based furniture brand Floyd launched a minimal, low-slung platform bed. The design was simple—just a few slabs of wood which you would connect with a few...

Microsoft‘s been awarded the controversial Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, a $10 billion planned project to create and maintain an AI-powered, cloud-based weapons platform for the Pentagon. The company’s stocks hit a record intraday high on the back of the news, but shareholders may want...

According to a report by Reuters, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is trying to buy Fitbit. The tech giant has made a bid for the fitness hardware maker, but there’s no confirmation that an acquisition will take place at this time. We don’t know how much Alphabet bid for fitbit either. The partnership makes...

Despite widespread problems of mistrust and disinformation, Facebook is launching a mobile tool to show people what screenings and immunizations they should be getting based on their age and sex. Facebook is launching a new tool in the U.S. that will suggest tests and immunizations—such as a mammogram,...

Among the findings of a new study on the industry: freelance designers are working full-time, but weird, hours. We wouldn’t exactly call it an unbiased source. 99designs is a huge freelance design portal, with a core business model that generates roughly $60 million a year through designers logging in and...

Are you used to browsing Instagram without signing in to check out what your favorite brands are sharing? If so, here’s a change you won’t like one bit. The photo-sharing social network is now locking down its platform by preventing signed-out users from having unlimited access to public profiles. As a result,...

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg and Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), went head to head during  a hearing where Zuckerberg defended his right to allow political ads on his platform — even if they contained lies. “I just think that in a democracy people should be able to see for themselves what...

The move comes after the suicide of a 14-year-old girl who viewed posts about self-harm on the platform before her death. Instagram has announced that it is banning drawings, memes, and cartoons that promote, glamorize, or encourage self-harm and suicide. The ban comes after the father of a 14-year-old girl who killed...

An ambitious plan to fight misinformation and disinformation is moving slower than hoped, frustrating researchers and forcing funders to reconsider their commitment. An unprecedented investigation into disinformation on Facebook has hit turbulence over questions about how much data to release to outside researchers,...

The PHP programming language underpins much of the Internet. It forms the basis of popular content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, as well as more sophisticated web applications, like Facebook (kinda). Therefore, it’s a huge deal whenever researchers identify a security vulnerability within it. A...

It’s about time that the cybersecurity technology that was once only available to wealthy corporations will become accessible for all.  It used to be scary and thought-provoking when a resourceful hacker cracked open a hoard of user information, but the sheer number of massive hacks that happened, in 2018 alone of...

It’s far from the cheapest Chromebook on the market. But Google’s latest is much nicer than bargain models. Beginning in 2013 with the original Chromebook Pixel—the first touch-screen Chrome OS device—and continuing through 2017’s Pixelbook, the Chrome OS laptops that Google has...

Urlora is a linking tool hyper focused on optimizing your linking strategies and getting you all the information you need to run a successful digital ad campaign. You can get in on Urlora’s features right now with over 90 percent off a lifetime subscription starting as low as $39 from TNW Deals.

It was probably only a matter of time before all this scandal caught the attention of product liability lawyers. Juul Labs has been in the news a lot lately—and for all the wrong reasons. After the FDA essentially threatened to seize its products last month if it didn’t revise its safety claims, the...

We’ve known for a while that Nvidia is planning on releasing a pair of new Shield TV devices, but now we have what seems like confirmation: the company today posted a teaser that suggests the devices will arrive on October 28. 10.28.19 👁️ pic.twitter.com/Np0LXKvoTx — NVIDIA SHIELD (@NVIDIASHIELD) October 24,...

Ever had to search for something on Google, but you’re not exactly sure what it is, so you just use some language that vaguely implies it? Google’s about to make that a whole lot easier. Google announced today it’s rolling out a new machine learning-based language understanding technique called Bidirectional...

A group of cybercriminals calling themselves the “Shadow Kill Hackers” has reportedly attacked the City of Johannesburg (South Africa) administration website — and is threatening to upload the stolen data on the internet unless it receives a Bitcoin ransom. The hackers are requesting the city pays over $30,000...

After deprioritizing news in the News Feed and pivoting to video, Facebook is officially back in the news business again. The social media giant is rolling out Facebook News to select audiences in the US starting today, carving a dedicated home screen tab out of its digital real estate for users to explore their news...

All you need to go offline for a day is a printer. Our phones are making us unhappy, and companies like Google are wrestling with how to keep expanding a product like Android without destroying the soul of humanity in the process. The company’s designers have been outspoken on the topic, and they released a...

A mesmerizing 8-minute video shows how AOL, Yahoo, and MSN fell to the current web kingpins over the course of two decades. Today, AOL and Yahoo are near-worthless divisions of a phone company, as Verizon picks their digital bones to assimilate, sell off, or shut down what’s left. But two decades ago, AOL and...

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said the popular microblogging site will never join Facebook’s controversial ‘cryptocurrency’ project. Speaking at a Twitter media event held in New York City yesterday, Dorsey replied “Hell no” when asked if Twitter would join Libra, The Verge reports. The CEO, who also founded...

All you need to go offline for a day is a printer. Our phones are making us unhappy, and companies like Google are wrestling with how to keep expanding a product like Android without destroying the soul of humanity in the process. The company’s designers have been outspoken on the topic, and they released a...