It's no secret that Twitter has less than great video quality, but that's finally starting to change. The company has announced a new adjustment to its video tech that reduces how pixelated videos look, improving the experience for people who use the platform to catch the latest movie trailers, video game teasers, and more.
It's no secret that many rural towns across the US lack high-speed Internet options, which is where budding alternatives like 5G hubs and satellite-based ISPs come in. Facebook is now counted among the companies working to expand access to high-speed Internet services in the rural US with a new plan for a tiny county in Virginia.
If you're a YouTube Premium subscriber, you get access to upcoming (and still experimental) features before the company releases them for everyone. One of the latest additions to the experimental features list is support for video downloads on desktop, offering the same offline playback opportunity that has been available on mobile for quite a while.
Comcast offers a low-cost Internet plan for eligible subscribers called Internet Essentials. In an announcement about the plan today, the service provider revealed that it will open the Internet Essentials plan to undergraduate college and university students who received the Federal Pell Grant, enabling them to get online for ten bucks a month.
The age of video conferencing that begun last year has forced many people to re-evaluate not only their computers but also their rooms and home office setups. In addition to actually having a decent webcam, things like disorganized backgrounds and poor lighting add more concerns to already mentally stressed people. The former has been fixed by virtual backgrounds, which sometimes end up to be more distracting, while the latter is being addressed by automatic lighting adjustment, one that is finally coming to Google Meet on Web browsers.
Elon Musk has a lot of ambitious plans, and almost all of those have proven to be controversial to some extent. One of the most debated, however, might be his vision of covering the Earth with Internet-beaming satellites under SpaceX's Starlink program. Although the current state of that service is far from its best, the tech luminary has made it known that it could finally be open to the public as early as next month.
Amazon recently cracked down on companies that engaged in practices leading to inauthentic product reviews, it has been revealed. More than 600 Chinese brands have been permanently banned from the online retailer's platform as a result of these practices, the company confirmed, an action intended to preserve the integrity of reviews presented to customers.
NASA has two interactive tools that enable the public to follow its Mars Perseverance rover as it makes its way around the Red Planet. One of the tools is designed to follow the rover "as though you were standing on the surface of Mars," according to the space agency, while the other tool shows Perseverance and Ingenuity's current location and the stops from their past journeys.
Bringing broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved areas is very important. Internet connectivity brings access to jobs, healthcare, education, and entertainment. People who live in developed nations like the US and other countries typically have plenty of access to broadband in cities, but those in rural areas often go unserved. Project Taara is investigating wireless means to bring fiber-like speeds to underserved and unconnected communities around the world.
Announced almost four years ago, Lens is one of Google's silent workers that power many of the features mobile users might be taking for granted these days. It powers both Google Photos' and Google Assistant's image recognition functionality, but Lens also has its own separate app on mobile. It doesn't have much of an existence outside smartphones, however, but that might soon change as Google works to integrate Lens functionality right inside Search results, at least in Chrome for the desktop.
Around one month after its most recent pause, Twitter has once again opened back up its public verifications tool, allowing anyone with a Twitter account to apply for their own small blue badge. Not all users will see the option to apply for verification initially, though Twitter notes anyone who doesn't yet see the option should keep checking.
Google One, the company's subscription plan that includes cloud storage space, has added a new 5TB plan for those who need more than 2TB but aren't willing to pay for the next highest level, 10TB. The new 5TB option joins the existing smaller plans, including 100GB and 200GB options, as well as the huge 20TB and 30TB plans.