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Comcast’s public WiFi hotspots will remain free for the rest of 2020
Comcast's public WiFi hotspots will remain free to anyone for the remainder of 2020.
Facebook tests easier sharing for its Pinterest-like Collections feature
Facebook is testing changes that make it easier to share Collections publicly.
DuckDuckGo shares a list of thousands of web trackers that gather your data
Over the past couple of years, the privacy-focused browser DuckDuckGo has been compiling a data set of web trackers. The company calls it Tracker Radar. Today, DuckDuckGo is sharing that data publicly and open sourcing the code that generates it.
UK begins testing unsupervised autonomous transport pods
Shoppers at a UK mall have the opportunity to try out autonomous transport pods this week which -- in a UK first -- operate entirely without supervision. The driverless pods are being tested at the Cribbs Causeway mall in Gloucestershire, and run between 10AM and 4PM every day for a week, transporting passengers around the premises and along shared pedestrian spaces.
An old Instagram hoax is back, and it's duping celebrities
An Instagram hoax that first circulated in 2012 is back, and celebrities from Usher to Waka Flocka Flame, Julianne Moore, Julia Roberts and Rob Lowe have allegedly fallen for it. The post claims Instagram is changing its rules and everything you've ever posted will become public, NBC News reports.
Facebook simplifies its Group privacy settings
Facebook wants to make it easier to understand its Group privacy settings. It's doing away with public, closed or secret settings. Instead, Groups will be "private" or "public." Facebook claims this will simplify who can find a Group and see its members and posts.
Apple taps renowned artists for AR art walks
Apple has been pushing its way into the world of augmented reality for years. Now, it wants to get more users involved. Working with artists like Nick Cave, an American fabric sculptor and performance artist, Apple has installed AR art in public spaces in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Users in those cities can sign up for a free Today at Apple experience called [AR]T. It involves an interactive walk to tour the AR installations, an in-store session that teaches the basics of creating AR using Swift Playgrounds and an AR installation in the store.
Facebook will rank comments to make conversations more meaningful
Facebook wants to make conversations on public posts more meaningful. Today, it will start ranking comments to promote those that are most relevant to users. It will give priority to comments that have interactions from the original poster, as well as comments or reactions from friends of the person who created the post.
Facebook revives 'View As Public' profile feature
Today, Facebook announced two changes that could make it easier to manage your publicly visible info. First, Facebook is bringing back the "View As Public" feature that allows users to preview their profiles as they appear to the general public. The company is also adding an "Edit Public Details" button directly on profiles.
Samsung leak exposed source code, passwords and employee data
Samsung was reportedly leaking sensitive source code, credentials and secret keys for several internal projects. According to TechCrunch, independent security researcher Mossab Hussein discovered dozens of exposed files in a GitLab used by Samsung engineers and hosted on a company-owned domain. The projects were reportedly set to "public" and not protected with a password.
iOS update adds security-focused USB restricted mode (updated)
Apple just released iOS 11.4.1 with an improved Find My AirPod feature and some stability fixes. It also appears to include USB Restricted Mode, a feature that was part of the 11.4.1 and iOS 12 betas. Though it wasn't in the release notes that popped up on your iOS device, we have confirmed that the mode is included.
Facebook notifies 14M users of a bug affecting their posts’ default privacy
Facebook is notifying 14 million users around the world about a bug that changed their privacy setting default to public, which could have led to them accidentally broadcasting updates that were meant for friends only. The bug surfaced in mid-May, and the platform is now urging users who were affected to review their settings in case they'd been inadvertently switched.
Recommended Reading: What if there were a PBS of social networks?
The Case for a Taxpayer-Supported Version of Facebook Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic What if there were a publicly-funded social network open to all that provided a diverse world view rather than an echo chamber catered to one's deeply-held principles? Sounds like a great idea. The Atlantic makes the case for the PBS of social networks, including why it's needed and what it might look like.
The first self-driving taxis are cruising around Singapore
Uber announced that it will start self-driving trials in Pittsburgh later this month, but it was beat to the punch by a much less well-known company. Starting today, nuTonomy will offer rides to Singapore residents in specially equipped Mitsubishi i-MiEV or Renault Zoe electric vehicles. As with Uber, passengers won't be alone with a robotic driver like Silicon Valley's hapless Jared. A nuTonomy engineer will be along to monitor the vehicle, and a safety driver will "assume control if needed to ensure passenger comfort and safety," the company wrote.
Public is an app that opens your group chats to an audience
A couple of months ago, former Twitter exec Michael Sippey unveiled Talk Show, an app that let you broadcast your text conversations in public. Now there's yet another app in town that does something very similar. It's called Public, and the creator is Avner Ronen, who is probably better known as the founder of Boxee, a streaming set top box that was also a web TV platform (Boxee eventually sold to Samsung a few years ago). Like its name suggests, all of the conversations on Public are, well, public. Think of it as a group discussion with an audience.
Cuba approves its first free public WiFi
Public internet access in Cuba usually comes at a steep price -- a local may have to use a week's wages just to spend an hour emailing their family overseas. However, they now have a much, much more reasonable option. The country's state-run telecom, ETECSA, recently approved the country's first free public WiFi. Cubans who can reach a cultural center in Havana can now use the shared DSL line of a well-known artist (Kcho) as much as they want. The 2Mbps connection is pokey by most standards, but the no-cost approach means that locals don't have to give up what spending power they have just to get online.
Russia lets anyone use Earth-sensing data from its civilian satellites
The US government has been willing to loosen its grip on satellite data, but what about the info from other countries? Don't worry, that's opening up as well. Russia has declared that the Earth-sensing data it collects from civilian satellites is now available to the public, not just the government -- if you want to track St. Petersburg's urban sprawl, you probably can. Officials are keen to tout the advantages for Russian businesses that rely on maps, but the move should also help anyone who wants a more complete picture of how the world works. [Image credit: AP Photo]
GoPro files for an IPO to grow its media empire
Look, it was no surprise that GoPro has been planning to go public for a while now -- it said as much back in February. Things are finally getting officially official, though: the company just filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, so you can expect to see the ticker symbol GPRO on NASDAQ in due course. There's no shortage of financial types digging through the document as we type (bits to note: the company managed to turn a pretty profit last year, and it shipped a net total of nearly 4 million cameras in 2013), but the story is clear -- GoPro is a big deal, and it's going to get even bigger.
Facebook is trying to save you from embarrassing posts
One of the first things I do before I post anything on Facebook is to make sure I know exactly who will see it. If it's a vacation photo of me and my husband, I restrict it to friends and family. If it's just a link to something funny on the internet, I might post it for all the world to see. It's fairly obvious, to me at least, what's meant to be public and what's not. However, that's because I took the time and energy to navigate through Facebook's privacy settings and learn how to protect my updates. Not everyone has the foresight or the luxury to do that -- especially if you joined in college, when such issues might not have mattered so much. It turns out Facebook is all too aware of this problem, and is trying to hammer out some possible solutions.
Microsoft makes MS-DOS and Word for Windows source code public
Microsoft believes the children are our future, and to prove it, it's teamed up with the Computer History Museum to make source code available for two groundbreaking programs: MS-DOS and Word for Windows. In a blog post that outlined the deal, Roy Levin, managing director of Microsoft Research, said the company granted the museum permission to make the code public for MS DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, "... to help future generations of technologists better understand the roots of personal computing." MS DOS, originally code named "Chess," took root in 1980 when IBM asked Microsoft to produce an OS to run on its computers. Word for Windows was released in 1989, and with in four years had captured half of the revenue of the word-processing market, according to Levin. Both programs marked the beginnings not only of great successes for Microsoft, but also the PC industry as we know it today. The museum's Chairman, Len Shustek, had this to say about the effort: "We think preserving historic source code like these two programs is key to understanding how software has evolved from primitive roots to become a crucial part of our civilization." The move marks an ongoing effort to make landmark software code available to the public; the museum released the source for the 1989 version of Photoshop early last year.
