Category Archives: Blog

The Festival of Lights is upon us.

Revelers are frying latkes and lighting candles at sundown for eight nights to celebrate Hanukkah through Monday evening. 

They’re also playing dreidel — a four-sided top spun as a holiday game — in AR and texting Hanukkah-themed stickers thanks to a boatload of apps themed for the Jewish holiday.

Here are a few of our favorite Hanukkah apps to download this week:

Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel I spun you with AR

iGevalt is a free App for iOS and gives you the bare bones dreidel experience. You can’t keep score or have multiple players since there’s no built-in profile settings. Even so, it’s still a fun and entertaining experience. While some AR apps are limited as to where they work, in my testing, iGevalt worked on both a physical table and my closed laptop lid on the train. Read more…

More about Apps, Technology, Apps And Software, Hanukkah, and Tech

False advertising is not a good look, Samsung.

Photographer Dunja Djudjic is accusing the world’s largest smartphone maker of using one of her photos and presenting it on their website as a photo taken with its Galaxy A8 Star phone. 

In a post on DIY Photography, Djudjic explains how Samsung is using her photos, taken with a DSLR camera, to showcase the Galaxy A8’s portrait mode. The photographer made the discovery after noticing one of her pictures uploaded to the photo community EyeEm was sold through its partner, Getty. 

Excited to see who purchased the photo and find out how they were using it, Djudjic executed a reverse image search. That’s when she discovered the image being used on the Samsung Malaysia website, presented as a photo taken with the Galaxy A8 Star. Read more…

More about Samsung, Stock Photos, Galaxy A8, Tech, and Big Tech Companies

Experts share their advice for parents on how to raise kids with a healthy relationship to technology. Read more…

More about Amazon, Supported, Parenting, Meditation, and Amazon Echo

Quora, the question-and-answer site that bludgeons users into signing up, has been hit with a major data breach.

In a blog post titled “Quora Security Update,” the site revealed that the data of approximately 100 million users may have been compromised as a result of unauthorised access to its systems on Friday.

“We’re still investigating the precise causes and in addition to the work being conducted by our internal security teams, we have retained a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us. We have also notified law enforcement officials,” Quora co-founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo wrote in the blog post. Read more…

More about Tech, Security, Data, Data Breach, and Quora

I’d heard about 5G. But I didn’t know just how fast it would be until I was watching myself miss free throws in real time.

On Monday, Verizon opened the doors to its 5G Experience pop-up shop in downtown Los Angeles. In the space, visitors tested out Verizon’s 5G Home network. 

Internet service providers say 5G will be hundreds of times faster than 4G, and at least four and a half times faster than wireless broadband. Last year, average download speeds for broadband were around 65 MbpsVerizon promises its “5G Ultra Wideband” — despite sounding like a pair of maternity pants — will deliver speeds between 300 Mbps and up to 1 GB per second. Read more…

More about Verizon, 5g, Tech, Innovations, and Big Tech Companies

For most of us, it’s a long trip to see the works of Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch Golden Age painter behind Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Google is making those works accessible on your phone with its Arts and Culture app, where you can use augmented reality to visit a virtual art gallery full of Vermeer’s works.

The pocket gallery is accessible in the Meet Vermeer section of the app, which compiles all of the painter’s works in one multi-room exhibition, in what’s been described as “the first ever international online retrospective” of Vermeer. Read more…

More about Tech, Google, Art, Augmented Reality, and Ar

In films like Armageddon, Hollywood has tried (and failed) to take on the question of what would happen if a comet or asteroid plunged into the oceans on Earth, but what has scientific research actually determined it may look like?

America’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has posted a new video illustrating what could happen if an asteroid crashed into one of our oceans, and it’s fascinating.

Based on data collected by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists Galen R. Gisler and John M. Patchett, referred to as the Deep Water Impact Ensemble Data Set, these simulations show asteroids of various sizes entering the water from different angles. It’s the scale and size of the aftermath that’s the truly stunning part. Read more…

More about Asteroids, Asteroid, Oceans, Scientists, and Science

Shady developers have found a new way to trick users into spending ridiculous sums of money on worthless services.

The scheme, which was discovered by Redditors and reported by the welivesecurity blog, uses TouchID to trick users into in-app purchases, which can be as high as $99.99. 

The blog uncovered two such examples, both from purported fitness apps. In both cases, the apps instruct users to hold their finger over their iPhone’s home button in order to “scan” their fingerprint for health data. While the “scan” is happening, though, the app triggers an in-app purchase, which is then authenticated via TouchID and completed before the  user even realizes what is happening. Read more…

More about Tech, Apple, App Store, Tech, and Consumer Tech

Despite what you may have heard, Netflix is not removing Friends – at least not yet.

The panic started when users saw a note of imminent expiry next to Friends on the Netflix mobile app, but Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos told The Hollywood Report that it’s a rumor.

We’ve had scares like this in the past, like when The Office was allegedly leaving and, well, didn’t. Read more…

More about Entertainment, Twitter, Television, Netflix, and Friends

Tumblr just thoroughly pissed off a whole bunch of adults, and now has to face the wrath of their memes.

After the website known for its lighthearted content, artwork, and yes, porn, announced it will be banning all adult content from its platform on Dec. 17, lots of Tumblr-loving adults got Very Mad Online.

The drastic new policy comes weeks after Tumblr’s iOS app was temporarily removed from the App Store due to child pornography.

The site, which previously allowed all sorts of NSFW content will now limit “adult content” such as “photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts,” per a statement. Read more…

More about Tumblr, Social Media, Porn, Web Culture, and Culture