Trust

iOS 15 gives you better tools to fight the firehose of notifications — with a catch

Apple’s iOS 15 preview earlier this week gave us a look at an important new feature coming to your iPhone’s notifications: help. A few new tools may act as a life preserver for those of us up to our eyeballs in a sea of notifications every day, regulating which apps and people are allowed to… Read more

How to set up a VPN

Virtual private networks (VPNs) can offer an additional layer of security and privacy for your online activity. Whether you’re working on a public Wi-Fi network and want to escape prying eyes, or you’re worried about privacy in general, a VPN can offer a lot of benefits. In a nutshell, a VPN establishes a secure, encrypted… Read more

With iCloud Plus, Apple’s privacy promise is paired with an upsell

Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge Some privacy may be paywalled Apple has spent considerable time championing itself as a protector of user privacy. Its CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly stated that privacy is “a fundamental human right,” the company has based multiple ad campaigns around its privacy promises, and it’s had high profile… Read more

Google is fighting back against exploitative, slanderous websites

Google is updating its search algorithms to prevent sites from filling search results with unproven slanderous claims about individuals, The New York Times reports. The changes follow a recent series of reports from the Times, which found a vast web of sites hosting unverified and potentially life-ruining claims about individuals, alongside an industry of other… Read more

New iPhone Health app feature gives doctors easier access to data

People with smartphones and wearable devices regularly show up to the doctor’s office with readouts from apps detailing everything from their heart rate to sleep patterns. Now, with the new iOS 15 update this fall, some iPhone users will be able to send data directly from their Health app to their doctors’ electronic medical records… Read more

Is there any way out of Clearview’s facial recognition database?

In March 2020, two months after The New York Times exposed that Clearview AI had scraped billions of images from the internet to create a facial recognition database, Thomas Smith received a dossier encompassing most of his digital life. Using the recently enacted California Consumer Privacy Act, Smith asked Clearview for what they had on… Read more

Will Apple end the newsletter boom?

Today, let’s talk about one of Apple’s many announcements this week at its Worldwide Developer Conference, which some see as a possible threat to the rise of journalism distributed by email. If that sounds self-indulgent, given that it’s coming from a journalist who distributes his work via email, I apologize. But it touches on so… Read more

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is next-gen Uncharted by way of Pixar

Filed under: Games Review The PS5 gets a family-friendly blockbuster There were times during Rift Apart, the latest entry in the Ratchet & Clank series, when I felt like treasure hunter Nathan Drake. Buildings collapsed around me as I made my way through perfectly tuned action set pieces, and I’d manage to jump out of… Read more

Apple’s iCloud Plus bundles a VPN, private email, and HomeKit camera storage

Apple is amping up iCloud with a new set of features called iCloud Plus. The cloud storage service will now come with access to a VPN, burner email addresses, and unlimited storage for HomeKit-enabled home security cameras. The VPN, called Private Relay, will route your internet traffic through two relays in order to mask who’s… Read more

Chrome will soon warn you when you might not want to trust an extension

Google is rolling out new safety features for Chrome which are designed to make it easier to spot dubious downloads and extensions. They build upon the browser’s Enhanced Safe Browsing feature, which launched last year to offer better warnings against phishing sites. When it comes to Chrome extensions, the browser will now show a warning… Read more

Steam now lets developers team up on game bundles

Valve has started letting developers team up to create bundles on the Steam gaming storefront. It outlined the new “DIY collaborative bundles” in a blog post yesterday, describing the feature as a way to collect titles with “common themes.” Steam already offered multi-developer bundles, but only ones that were specially curated by the platform. Now,… Read more

Have autonomous robots started killing in war? The reality is messier than it appears

It’s the sort of thing that can almost pass for background noise these days: over the past week, a number of publications tentatively declared, based on a UN report from the Libyan civil war, that killer robots may have hunted down humans autonomously for the first time. As one headline put it: “The Age of… Read more

Norton Added Ethereum Mining Capabilities to Its Antivirus Software

Home News (Image credit: NortonLifeLock) NortonLifeLock announced yesterday that it’s adding Ethereum mining to its Norton 360 antivirus software with an upcoming feature, Norton Crypto, that “select Norton 360 customers in Norton’s early adopter program” are invited to test. Let’s make this clear from the start: Enthusiasts will probably be better off learning how to… Read more

I broke off a tiny piece of the world with a self-flying drone

With photogrammetry, hundreds of still photos can be transformed into an incredibly realistic 3D model of a real place on Earth — assuming you capture them all. This Memorial Day weekend, a self-flying robot cameraman did that entire job for me. I simply designated where to fly and where not to fly, kicked back in… Read more

Facebook employees call for company to address concerns of Palestinian censorship

Facebook employees are circulating an internal petition calling for the company to investigate content moderation systems that led many Palestinians and allies to say their voices were being censored, the Financial Times reports. The news comes weeks after Israeli airstrikes killed more than 200 people in Gaza, including at least 63 children. Israel and Hamas… Read more