Internet

A little over five years ago, communicating with someone over the Internet meant lines of text and a few ASCII-based emoticons to express emotions that words can't easily say. These days, not only have we gone into audio-visual Internet communication, we have gone beyond them as well. Take, for example, Facebook's latest update to its Messenger chat app that brings all sorts of whimsical expressions, from animated emojis to masks. Because sometimes, a sticker just says its better.

Continue Reading

AT&T's Fixed Wireless Internet service has just expanded into 8 new states, extending connectivity options in more rural regions through the US. Fixed Wireless Internet is designed specifically for AT&T's rural customers, and involves the company installing an antenna on the customer's property that then works with the closest cell tower. The result is wireless Internet that is at least 10Mbps in speed.

Continue Reading

While the US still tries to sort out how Russian cyberattacks played an influence on the recent presidential election, the British Parliament is currently experiencing its own attack from hackers this weekend. News reports say the country's lawmakers have been left unable to use or access their email as a result of a "sustained and determined" cyberattack from unknown individuals.

Continue Reading

Personal medical records showing up in search results is a big problem, and now Google is addressing it. The Internet giant will start pulling these records from results when someone asks them to, helping individuals maintain privacy in a world where hackers are increasingly breaching medical facilities' networks. This marks a change in policy for the company, which recently updated its policy page to reflect the new removal category.

Continue Reading

As part of an effort to focus on what people in individual countries expect of Facebook, today the company announced new controls for users in India. These controls almost entirely concern profile pictures, allowing users to control who can download them, tag themselves in them, or even screenshot them. The hope is that more people will feel comfortable uploading profile pictures, thus helping grow that aspect of community.

Continue Reading

As we've previously reported, this year will bring a major total eclipse and many people in the United States will be able to see it. For everyone who doesn't live in the viewing path, though, or at least those who can't make the trip to see it in person, NASA has you covered. The space agency has announced big plans for livestreaming the event, enabling everyone in the world to watch it live.

Continue Reading

The Supreme Court has ruled that groups of people cannot be hit with blanket social media bans, doing so in response to a North Carolina law prohibiting sex offenders from using any websites that minors may also use. The entire matter started when one North Carolina resident reportedly ran afoul of the law by posting a Facebook status. In its analysis of the issue, the Supreme Court judges found that wholesale social media bans applied to certain groups is a First Amendment violation.

Continue Reading

Creating playlists with your friends can lead to the discovery of a lot of great music, and today Spotify is trying to make that process even easier. Spotify announced today that it has given Facebook Messenger users the ability to create group playlists in-chat. The process of creating a group playlist seems pretty straightforward, as it centers around using Spotify's own Messenger extension.

Continue Reading

Security-minded company ProtonMail has announced that its VPN service 'ProtonVPN' is now out of beta and available to everyone. Even better, particularly for those who are unable to pay, is that ProtonVPN is free. According to the company, its VPN service improves upon the competing products available on the market, utilizing things like a Secure Core architecture to help protect users from attacks, as well as 'seamless integration with' Tor.

Continue Reading

Instagram announced today that the number of people who use Stories on a daily basis has grown significantly since the last time we checked in. Back in April, Instagram announced that Stories had hit 200 million users, but in the roughly two months since then, that number has grown by 50 million people. To celebrate a quarter of a billion users for Stories, Instagram is rolling out new features that allow you to preserve your Live broadcasts for a short time.

Continue Reading

In its quest to get as many Prime subscribers as possible, Amazon has been packing it with more and more services. This year alone we've seen the launches for services like Prime Reload, Prime Reading, and Anime Strike, but today Amazon is going either further by launching a Prime service that is arguably bigger than any of those. Its name is Prime Wardrobe and it promises to "bring the fitting room to you."

Continue Reading

For years, we've walked into retail stores only to pull out our phones and compare the prices we see to those online, generally using a website like Amazon to see if we're getting a good deal. Now that Amazon is beginning to expand into retail spaces of its own, it has to worry about those same pricing comparisons. In a fantastic bit of irony, Amazon could use a new patent to outright prevent people from comparing prices in its own stores.

Continue Reading