Author Archives: Carol Edwards

I ended CES by finishing a book. It was Uncanny Valley, a memoir from New Yorker contributor Anna Wiener, which comes out on Tuesday. 

It’s not a polemic, and, despite the many (thinly veiled) references to well-known tech companies, it’s not a dishy tell-all about Silicon Valley. 

Instead, it’s a measured, personal, and deeply human look at the tech industry. Wiener moves from a low-paying publishing job to a start-up in New York City, and then takes another job at a data analytics company in San Francisco. In the Bay Area, she finds everything you might expect, including hubris, misogyny, and offensively priced condos.  Read more…

More about Ces, Uncanny Valley, Tech, Big Tech Companies, and Consumer Tech

Here we go again. 

Attorney General William Barr is pressuring Apple to help law enforcement unlock two iPhones that once belonged to the now deceased Royal Saudi Air Force lieutenant who attacked the Pensacola Naval Air Station on Dec. 6 of last year. Barr claimed in a Monday press conference that, without Apple’s help, investigators will likely remain unable to access  the devices’ contents. 

We’ve heard similar dubious claims from the government before.  

The issue at hand, according to Barr, is that Apple designed the phones to be “virtually impossible to unlock…without the password.” As such, the Attorney General today asked Apple to “help” unlock the phones.  Read more…

More about Apple, Encryption, Iphones, Tech, and Cybersecurity

Who could possibly be more trustworthy than Tom Hanks — America’s most trusted man, aka Forest Gump, Mr. Rogers, and Woody from Toy Story? Amazon and Google, apparently.

Despite their many of scandals over the past year, the two tech giants nearly topped the list of the most trusted brands in the U.S., behind only the U.S. Postal Service, according to a report published Monday by market research firm Morning Consult.

The report is based on online surveys conducted for nearly 2,000 brands over two months, with an average of 16,700 interviews per brand.

Across age groups, 39 percent and 38 percent of people trust Amazon and Google “a lot” to do the right thing, respectively. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the 36 percent of people who trust “extreme weather warnings” and the 34 percent of people who trust Tom Hanks. Read more…

More about Tech, Google, Amazon, Tom Hanks, and Big Tech Companies

Yusaku Maezawa, a 44-year-old Japanese fashion entrepreneur, has opened worldwide applications for the role of his “life partner.” Read more…

More about Tech, Space, Mashable Video, Relationships, and Spacex

The actor is protesting Mark Zuckerberg’s policy allowing political ads that contain lies and propaganda to remain on the site.  Read more…

More about Tech, Facebook, Celebrities, Mashable Video, and Mark Hamill

TL;DR: Brush up on your Spanish with a lifetime subscription to Language Zen for $79, a 84% savings. 

Learning a new language as an adult is no easy feat. It’s a little bit easier when you have a personal tutor, but who has the time or money to commit to that? That’s what’s so cool about Language Zen. Think of it as your own personal language tutor — but the cool tutor you want to be friends with and not the one your parents forced you to meet with during high school. Catch our drift?

Language Zen is an app that adapts to your learning styles and plays to your strengths and weaknesses while also focusing on topics you’re actually interested in. Here’s how it works: when you start the program, it evaluates what you know and don’t know in order to focus more heavily on the things you need to work on. So, whether you’re a total beginner, know a few basic words and phrases, or just need to brush up your skills, this learning program works for you. Oh, and the more you use it, the smarter it gets.  Read more…

More about Apps, Apps And Software, Mashable Shopping, Language Learning, and Tech

On Monday afternoon, YouTuber NikkieTutorials released a video titled “I’m Coming Out,” where she tells her over 12 million subscribers for the first time that she is trans. 

“Filming this video scary, but it’s so liberating and freeing,” said NikkieTutorials, whose real name is Nikkie De Jager. “I’ve been wanting to share this side of myself to all of you for so long but I could never figure out the timing.”  

“Yes I am transgender,” De Jager said, “But at the end of the day I am me.”

De Jager went on in the 17-minute video to praise her mother and explain more about her childhood and her transition. She explained that in the 11 years she’d had her channel — and grew to one of the most subscribed beauty gurus on the platform — she had wanted to express this side of herself. She had not because she said she wanted the channel to be about her art.  Read more…

More about Lgbtq, Influencers, Youtubers, Beauty Guru, and Nikkietutorials

TL;DR: Get help cleaning pesky grime off just about anything with a Brush Hero® hose set for $44.99, a 10% savings. 

So, you finally decided Peloton was just too expensive and took the leap and bought a brand new road bike instead. Hey, the great outdoors are better than staring at a screen anyway. But after just a few rides in, the dirt and grime have overtaken everything from your chain to your spokes to your seat post. It’s grungy and gross, even though it’s just a few weeks old. That’s what you get for exercising. 

Fortunately, there’s a way to clean all the hard-to-reach places and blast away grime from every nook and cranny of your brand new set of wheels. And no, it’s not by getting on your hands and knees with a towel.  Read more…

More about Shark Tank, Cleaning, Mashable Shopping, Culture, and Consumer Tech

We’re less than two weeks into 2020, and I think I’ve already ruined it.

A new app called Doublicat allows users personalize GIFs by morphing their own faces onto them, commonly known online as a deepfake. I, a true trailblazer at heart, decided to take on the mission of trying out Doublicat, just so y’all can know what you’re getting into. You can thank me (or hate me) later.

To start, the app prompts you to take a selfie so it has something to overlay on the GIF. It then scans your face. According to the company, the photo itself is deleted from the servers right after it’s processed, but the app saves representations of facial features. Doublicat told Mashable that it does not share data with anyone. Read more…

More about Gifs, App, Cursed, Deepfake, and Doublicat

The Force is not with Facebook. 

On Sunday, Star Wars icon Mark Hamill took to Twitter to announce that he would be deleting his Facebook account in protest of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to allow political advertisements including lies and propaganda on the site. 

Hamill is the latest in a number of high-profile celebrities to condemn Zuckerberg’s actions — with company like actor Sacha Baron Cohen who penned an op-ed on social media site regulation for the Washington Post in late November 2019.

“So disappointed that Mark Zuckerberg values profit more than truthfulness that I’ve decided to delete my Facebook account,” Hamill tweeted. “I know this is a big ‘Who cares?’ for the world at large, but I’ll sleep better at night. #PatriotismOverProfits”  Read more…

More about Facebook, Mark Hamill, Zuckerberg, Culture, and Celebrities