A hidden feature in Facebook suggests the social networking site is experimenting with a new way to tag friends in comments. Let’s recap: currently, to mention someone, you just need to type ‘@’ and then the person’s name. But a new feature, which is buried deeply within the site, takes a different tack and introduces a new “Mention a friend” button to comments. Clicking this brings up your friends list, which you can scroll through. Tags appear wherever your cursor is, or at the end of the post.
Reddit might have occasionally played host to controversial debates and scandals since its inception in 2005, but in a beautiful turn of events, the members of the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet” are standing united against the common evil: the FCC and its non-sensical plan to slay net neutrality. The front page of Reddit has lit up in red with numerous posts encouraging fellow members to take a stance against the impending collapse of net neutrality. At the time of writing, 22 of the 25 posts appearing on the website’s leading /r/all page are somehow related to net neutrality.
Less than two weeks after Bitcoin broke the $7,500 barrier to hit an all-time high of $7,700, the popular cryptocurrency has yet again surged past the $7,000 mark. Despite a bumpy week which saw Bitcoin price drop to below $6,000 at one point, the cryptocurrency fluctuated around the $6,500 mark, until earlier today it passed the $7,000 threshold for the second time ever. Here are a couple of screenshots from Coin Market Cap that will give you a better idea how Bitcoin has fluctuated over the past seven days:
Instagram now lets users post Stories that are older than 24-hours. Now we’ll all be able to bring up old memories straight to our Stories. The magic of Instagram Stories has always been that you can post portions of your day — as long they were captured in the last 24-hours. Now, the app lets you browse through your library and pick any image or video you want, regardless of when it was taken. All you have to do is slide up from the camera and it will open up your library, just like before, only now the range is limitless.
WhatTheFont is a Shazam for fonts — a designer’s dream. The app is a mobile version of the website previously developed by MyFonts, and recognizes any font you point at with your camera, including a variation of similar fonts to go with it. It also lets you buy the fonts you find directly through MyFonts or even share them on social media. According to Seah Chickering-Burchesky, Senior UX Designer at MyFonts, the app can identify 130,000 fonts with the help of machine learning. The latest version of the app can spot multiple fonts in one image, as well as connected scripts.
When police in London recently trialled a new facial recognition system, they made a worrying and embarrassing mistake. At the Notting Hill Carnival, the technology made roughly 35 false matches between known suspects and members of the crowd, with one person “erroneously” arrested. Camera-based visual surveillance systems were supposed to deliver a safer and more secure society. But despite decades of development, they are generally not able to handle real-life situations. During the 2011 London riots, for example, facial recognition software contributed to just one arrest out of the 4,962 that took place. The failure of this technology means visual surveillance still relies mainly on people sitting in dark rooms watching hours of camera footage, which is totally inadequate to protect people in a city.
By Monday I’d deleted Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn applications off my phone and logged out of all accounts on my laptop: it had begun Hi, my name is Inés and I’m a social media addict. But this week, I decided to go through digital detox by turning off all of my major distractions. The challenge The first day was tough. I would constantly press the Twitter bookmark on Chrome, or type in facebook.com, in the hope that something would show up. Nada. The login page would stare me right in the face saying “Nope.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, along with 115 other artificial intelligence and robotics specialists, has signed an open letter to urge the United Nations to recognize the dangers of lethal autonomous weapons and to ban their use internationally. The letter was released at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017) in Melbourne over the weekend. And although it sounds like a problem in the distant future, Musk – along with the likes of Google’s DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman and Jerome Monceaux of Aldebaran Robotics (which designed the Pepper humanoid robot) – is right to be worried about these weapons right now, and so should we.
Samsung is trying to put out a different sort of fire this year. The South Korean Heavyweight recently confirmed its intention to unveil the new and improved Galaxy Note 8 at a special event in New York on August 23, but it seems the big reveal has already been spoiled. Days after notorious leaker Evan Blass took to Twitterto share render images of the upcoming Note 8, even more photos of the flagship handset surfaced on the internet earlier today, courtesy of leak outlet My Everyday Tech. Interestingly, My Everyday Tech has since removed the leaked photos from its website following a takedown request from Samsung.
