Tech leaders in pursuit of self-optimization are turning to the Oura ring—a sleep tracker endorsed by Jack Dorsey. Last December, Jack Dorsey infamously went off the grid. For 10 days, he meditated in silence at a vipassana retreat in Myanmar, where he reported being deprived of devices and even eye contact....

Google‘s Pixel range of devices have quickly established themselves as some of the most popular flagship phones around. They’ve enter that rarified segment of devices populated by the Apple and Samsungs of the world, but — as much as I like them — this has always seemed like a strange fit to me. There’s no...

Update at 6:30 PM IST: The treaty between the US and the UK to disclose information of individuals suspected of serious criminal acts will not require social media platforms to install backdoors or break end-to-end encryption, a further analysis of the CLOUD Act reveals. While the original reports from Bloomberg and...

The new feature would be part of Uber’s existing Safety Toolkit—a collection of tools that allows Uber riders to learn about safety, share their trip with friends, and report issues. The next time you feel unsafe on your Uber ride, you may have the ability to use the Uber app to record audio of your...

Becoming an effective manager takes time and effort. This is the advice I would give to my younger self. Dear younger me,Read Full Story

Social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ ‘encrypted messages’ with British police as part of a new treaty between the US and the UK, according to multiple reports from Bloomberg and The Times. The accord is expected to be be signed next month, and will force social media...

You can get trained in leveraging all the power of LinkedIn for yourself with the courses in The Complete LinkedIn Marketing & Sales Bundle. Right now, it’s hundreds of dollars off the regular price, only $34 from TNW Deals.

The premiere of the ABC hit show’s 11th season kicked off with a rather awkward brand integration. “Hey Portal, call Dad.”Read Full Story

Good morning Forkers, you know what time it is. It’s Moonday Mornings, Hard Fork’s wrap-up of the weekends top cryptocurrency and blockchain headlines you can’t afford to miss. Check it out. 1. The Ukrainian government is allegedly preparing plans to legalize cryptocurrency in the country, The Block reports. The...

Subscribe to our monthly Byte Me newsletter NOW! Welcome back to Byte Me, our feminist newsletter that makes everyone mad <3 Since we last spoke, Anouk was made the first-ever queen of editorial, Cara’s edgy football club won their division (and she scored a bajillion goals), and Gigi’s mum won a big tech...

Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest have made inroads in preventing their platforms from being overrun with disinformation. But more change is still needed. Social media have become one of the preeminent ways of disseminating accurate information about vaccines. However, a lot of the vaccine information propagated across...

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! For a long time I wasn’t really a fan of smart speakers. The idea was cool, but relying only on audio seemed like a clumsy way to interact with technology. Then, I started using smart speakers with screens. It changed everything....

Our ancestors designed beautiful, useful products out of natural materials that eventually returned to the earth. We should look to them for guidance.In the In the Bronze and Iron Age, the world was a different place. Humans had only just invented flint tools, which allowed them to build homes, weave cloth, and plant...

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. I’ve owned iPhone after iPhone. Ever since my first iPhone 5c, I’ve never backed it up to iCloud — and for no good reason, really. It was just something I refused, which...

A life-free Facebook may be coming. Facebook is a popularity contest. If you post a photo of your dog and no one likes it, it stings. Is there something wrong with your dog? Or because that’s not possible, is there something wrong with you? Not getting likes on a post can lead to a shame spiral that could lead...

Hu-manity.co and other firms want to help people monetize their own medical info, but the potential market raises plenty of ethical concerns for civil liberties advocates. Selling your own health data is completely legal—if you wanted to, you could request a copy of your electronic health record from your...

The healthcare company has been tweeting at users who have mistakenly identified a doctor as a woman seen going off on a racist rant in a viral video. Kaiser Permanente has a message for Twitter users: You have the wrong Heather Patton.Read Full Story

Our insecurities about public bathrooms have evolved over time—and so, too, should the way we design for digital privacy. In 16th-century Paris, the starkly primitive clashed with the beautifully refined. The dainty bourgeois would gather dressed in their finest frocks, wearing tall, veiled, conical headpieces...

The Libra Association really wants us to know that Facebook cryptocurrency is not being created to replace existing currencies. Manager Director Bertrand Perez, speaking at a blockchain conference hosted at the United Nation headquarters in Geneva today, said: “We are not in the area of implementing any monetary...

Nobody reads terms of service agreements. Guard puts a computer to work reading them for us. I don’t need to tell you that we live in a privacy nightmare, in which it seems there’s no social network or app you can truly trust to protect your personal identity and everything you do online. But the worst...

Social media platforms off late have come under criticism for poisoning public discourse, even to the extent of getting labeled as “toxic swamps full of trolls, liars and bots.” But as Facebook and Twitter become a conduit for bad actors to manipulate news, set agendas, and propagate toxic viewpoints, they’ve...

Google is killing one of its products, again. This time it’s the company‘s hyperlocal news app Bulletin. In a letter to users obtained by Android Police, the company states it’s shutting down the app on November 22. The company had introduced the app last year as a pilot in the US and Canada. However, it never...

This article was originally published by Super Jump Magazine, an independent publication all about celebrating great video games and their creators through carefully-crafted, in-depth features produced by a diverse team of games journalists, designers, and enthusiasts. It was founded by games journalist and product...

Facebook has gone ahead and done it. The company begun hiding the number of likes that posts have received, starting today in Australia. You will see “John Doe and others” instead of “John Doe and 15 others” under your post. App researcher Jane Manchun Wong uncovered this test from a beta version of the social...

Microsoft today revealed it’s collaborating with Google to bring the Xbox Action to the Assistant — meaning you’ll soon be able to control your console by saying “Hey Google.” With this update, you can command Google to turn your Xbox on and off, boot up apps, resume paused games, or take screenshots — all...

From Walter Hood’s landscape art to Mel Chin’s climate change warnings, this year’s fellows wield art as a tool for change. 2019’s MacArthur Fellows have been announced, and all 26 awardees are, unsurprisingly, gifted innovators in their respective fields. This year, the prestigious annual...

Facebook, the American tech behemoth known for its “move fast and break things” motto, the mishandling of customer data, and interference in democracy, may not launch its ‘cryptocurrency’ Libra in time after all. “In the last few years, there are a lot of important social issues that Facebook and the other...

The new tools added to its Create with Google platform is all about testing, testing, testing. Today Google is rolling out a new suite of tools called Create with Google, so that agencies, brands, and creatives can make better—and better-performing—ads that will work on Google and YouTube....

In this episode of Fast Company’s podcast Creative Conversation, we’re tackling creative uncertainty and debunking the myth around the “creative genius.” Listen to the latest episode of Fast Company’s podcast Creative Conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RadioPublic,...

Social media, a tool created to guard freedom of speech and democracy, has increasingly been used in more sinister ways. From its role in amplifying political disinformation in elections, to inciting online violence, and lowering the levels of trust in media — Facebook isn’t just a space to share “what’s on...

The International Cricket Council (ICC), the governing body for the sport, announced today it’s partnering with Facebook to show exclusive digital content for ICC tournaments hosted in the Indian sub-continent until 2023. The social network will also show post-match recaps for ICC events hosted elsewhere in the...

Google is making its Android Go — a lightweight alternative of its mobile platform design to run smoothly on low-end phones — even faster. In a new blog post, the company says apps on Android 10 Go will now launch about 10 percent faster than they did on the older version. This improvement in speed has also made...

If all the different types of malware that find a way to sneak into the Google Play Store wasn’t enough, here’s another nasty surprise. A new category of apps called “Fleeceware” has been unearthed on the app distribution platform; these apps were found to abuse the Play Store policies and grossly charge...

Ever fantasize about becoming a spy, wearing miniature and carefully disguised gadgets, and talking to an invisible computer assistant through them? Well, Amazon is going to make that dream come true – to some extent. Along with a ton of other connected devices, the company announced an Alexa-enabled ring (Echo...

Facebook revealed at today’s Oculus Connect event that it’s launching its own social VR platform, a very MMO-like virtual world called Horizon. Horizon is an “interconnected world” where VR avatars can meet, hang out, play games, and build their own environments. In the announcement video, it shows legless...

We’re not at ‘Ready Player One’ yet, but Facebook’s Oculus VR is trying to get us there. Facebook seems further than ever from beaming us into Ready Player One, Ernest Cline’s dorky VR fever dream. But Oculus, the social network’s virtual reality side project, is...

A team of researchers from UC Santa Barbara and Intel took thousands of conversations from the scummiest communities on Reddit and Gab and used them to develop and train AI to combat hate speech. Finally, r/The_Donald and other online cesspools are doing something useful. The system was developed after the researchers...

75% of consumers say that sustainability is important to them. We’re entering a golden age of sustainable online shopping. When e-commerce first emerged, it was hard to find eco-friendly products or brands at all. To find a sustainable alternative to a product, you would have to dig deep into Google and...

Amazon revealed an onslaught of new devices today, and among them was its first ‘high-end’ speaker: the Echo Studio. Amazon is claiming serious audio quality here, as the speaker was designed to go along with the company’s new Amazon Music HD service, which is able to deliver lossless audio. Moreover, it’s the...

The new speaker will sell for $199, significantly less than hi-fi smart speakers from Apple and Google. Research has shown that playing music is still the biggest use of home smart speakers. That may be why Amazon decided to join Apple and Google in offering a smart speaker that’s focused on sounding good.Read...

A new ad sees Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, and the gang stay in touch using Facebook’s new video streaming device. It makes perfect sense. A little sugar with the medicine—or in this case, a spoonful of childhood nostalgia to help the privacy concerns go down. Here we have Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy,...

Nancy Pelosi had barely announced the impeachment inquiry into Trump when Twitter and Instagram became flooded with memes. Here we go. Yesterday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House is launching a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Pelosi had long resisted calls from several progressive...

Google has announced it will not pay European news publishers for the right to show their content on Google News, which will be mandatory under the EU’s new copyright directive that will come into effect next month, The Financial Times reports. France is the first out of the 28 EU member states to implement the new...

How the parent company of Trump’s campaign firm plied its skills on the battlefield and in elections, while working for the U.S., the U.K., and NATO. Revelations of dirty tricks and illicitly-harvested Facebook profiles turned Cambridge Analytica into a global symbol for the dark side of big data. Its actual...

Apply Thru is a voice app for Alexa and Google Assistant devices that users can activate by simply saying “Help me get a job at McDonald’s.” McDonald’s says it has launched the “world’s first” voice-initiated application process, called Apply Thru. The process...

We’ll soon live in a world where you might now be able to tell if the video you are watching actually happened. Google has announced it has released a data set containing 3,000 deepfake videos it has created. Google hopes the release of the videos will allow researchers to develop ways to combat malicious...

Haven’t we seen how this plays out? Boston Dynamics, the robotics lab formerly owned by Google, says its robot dogs—the ones basically straight out of Black Mirror—are now available for “select early customers.”Read Full Story

Last year, the New York Public Library released an experiment to put the full text of novels in its Instagram Stories. Today, an estimated 300,000 people are reading books this way. In August 2018, Instagram followers of the New York Public Library were tapping through their Insta Stories when something unexpected...