Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Facebook has stepped up the enforcement of its own rules, announcing the Facebook and Instagram bans of a host of controversial public figures including Alex Jones, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others. 

It has taken action against these figures and others because Facebook considers them “dangerous,” per a definition in Facebook’s Community Guidelines. It is banning the individuals and affiliated pages from both Facebook and Instagram.

“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.” Read more…

More about Milo Yiannopoulos, Infowars, Alex Jones, Deplatforming, and Tech

The video-sharing website will show 13 pro baseball matchups this current season. It is not yet known when the games will be or which teams will be playing. Read more…

More about Youtube, Mashable Video, Baseball, Major League Baseball, and Entertainment

Sleep can make or break your day. If you wake up feeling energized and refreshed, concentrating and functioning will be a breeze. On the other hand, if you spend most of your nights tossing and turning, the whole day can feel like a challenge. You’ll be fatigued, irritable, and reaching for the nearest caffeine source. 

According to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, sleep deprivation might lead to serious health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and obesity. So it’s something to take seriously. If you need to improve your quality of sleep, it might be time for you to buy a new mattress.  Read more…

More about Home, Sleep, Mattress, Mashable Shopping, and Lifestyle

With Tesla test drives scaled back, your options to check out a Model 3 or Model S sedan are limited enough that you may need to turn to virtual reality to see the car before you buy it. 

Oculus’s new VR headset could become the next best way to check out cars without going to a dealership or car lot — or in Tesla’s case, without buying the car sight unseen.

The Oculus Quest was officially announced this week at Facebook’s F8 conference and when it arrives on May 21 for $399 most of the attention will be on how it performs for gaming apps. For the non-gamers out there, however, the headset can give you a glimpse at what thousands of cars look like. It’s one of the many non-gaming uses for VR that’s getting a boost with the new device. Read more…

More about Tesla, Vr, Vr Headset, Car Showroom, and Oculus Quest

“The future is private,” Mark Zuckerberg declared, as he awkward-laughed his way through his annual keynote at Facebook’s F8 conference. For Zuckerberg, the event was his chance to sell the world on his vision to turn Facebook into a a “privacy-focused” social network.

To make that happen he plans to rebuild many of the company’s core services, including:

• A redesigned Facebook that emphasizes groups and Stories more than News Feed

• A redesigned Messenger app that also allows you to chat with friends on WhatsApp and Instagram (details on how are still sketchy). It will also have a new social tab for interacting with small groups of friends.

• A redesigned Instagram camera that makes it easier to use Stories like you might have once used News Feed Read more…

More about Tech, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook F8 2019, and Tech

Volvo’s performance brand brought its new all-electric sedan, the Polestar 2, to North America on Wednesday. This marked the first time this side of the world got a peek at the first car to use Google to natively power the infotainment system. 

An 11-inch center console screen and a 12.3-inch driver seat screen display an Android Automotive operating system with voice-activated Google Assistant, Google Maps, the Google Play Store, and all its Android Automotive apps. 

With the $63,000 car’s arrival in San Francisco, Google opened up app development for the Polestar 2 and other cars planning to use Google for its infotainment system for everything from mapping to sending texts to listening to audio books.  Read more…

More about Google, Google Maps, Electric Vehicles, Google Assistant, and Polestar

The headline says it all, folks. 

Twitter user @Apex_sH posted a video of his niece’s stunning powers on Tuesday. The girl has the absolutely incredible ability to sic her pet bird on whoever she screams at. 

In the video, she stands on a bed while her bird perches on the bed frame. Then, she turns to face the camera and lets out an unholy shriek. Without any hesitation, her bird launches itself at the poor soul recording the video. 

Here’s a screenshot of that unbridled rage.

More about Twitter, Viral Videos, Birds, Culture, and Web Culture

Anticipating her family’s inevitable questions, Mary Beth Barone prepared an informational pamphlet before going on a date.

“They are a CURIOUS bunch,” she told Mashable through Twitter DM.

Barone, who’s a comedian based in New York, attended a wedding in North Carolina last year and hit it off with another guest, who was from Miami. Barone happened to have a family vacation planned about an hour from Miami a few weeks later, and wanted to sneak away from her family for the date. But there was a flaw in her plan — as the youngest of five siblings traveling with 20 to 30 extended family members, it would be difficult for her to leave without a decent excuse. Barone said she had three options in order to successfully sneak away with the family’s rental car: lie, try to hide it, or over communicate.  Read more…

More about Twitter, Dating, Culture, and Web Culture

In 2000, at the back of my high school physics classroom, there was a computer with access to the internet, and for me, a whole new network of friends.

I was one of the very few people who had access to the password and knew how to navigate a little program we called “America Online.” Sure, plenty of my fellow students knew how to set up a personal AIM account. But I was the only one who actually knew how to use a search engine (thank you, Yahoo! and WebCrawler) to explore a kewl new phenomenon: viral videos.

It was these profoundly useless, morbidly stupid videos — of babies getting attacked by cats, of people getting hit (gently) by motorbikes — that brought me out of isolation and helped me discover community. Read more…

More about Culture, Bullying, Viral Videos, High School, and Culture

Waymo One now lets you stream music through screens in its self-driving cars. 

Those tunes are provided by Google Play Music, the Spotify competitor that offers millions of songs for $9.99 a month. It’s perfect corporate synergy: Waymo and Google have the same parent company, Alphabet. 

Currently, the self-driving taxi service is only offered in the Phoenix area. One of those users posted about their experience on Reddit, saying they had eight different playlist options and a Google-esque “I’m feeling lucky” button to play a random assortment of songs. They did feel lucky, and ended up with 25 minutes of Lorde, Vampire Weekend, The Black Keys, and other artists.  Read more…

More about Streaming Music, Self Driving Cars, Google Play Music, Waymo, and Tech