Web design news

• Phillips smart bulbs could compromise your Wi-Fi network

  06-02-2020 22:47
  
  A new report this week revealed that your cool smart light bulbs from Philips are potentially vulnerable to hackers — in fact, your whole Wi-Fi network could be compromised. So take our word for it: update now. This news comes from cybersecurity research firm Checkpoint, which published a blog post exposing the flaw. When this was originally pointed out several years ago, companies found a way to stop what was at the time a bulb-hopping attack. Checkpoint says that, while this fix was dep
  
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• Court orders moratorium on black box AI that detects welfare fraud amid human rights concerns

  06-02-2020 22:19
  
  The Hague District Court in The Netherlands yesterday ordered the Dutch government to halt its use of a black box AI system designed to predict welfare fraud. The ruling was issued over privacy concerns and is being heralded as a civil rights victory by activists and privacy advocacy groups. The particular program, System Risk Indication (SyRI), uses government data to predict whether welfare recipients are “likely” to commit welfare fraud. In use for years, the Dutch government has
  
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• Instagram will now let you remove pity follows — here’s how you can do it

  06-02-2020 20:01
  
  Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Whenever I travel, the easiest way to connect with fellow travelers is through Instagram. But after some weeks, those follows might be redundant. To reduce clutter on your timeline, Instagram has launched a new feature today that lets you check people you’ve least interacted within the past 90 days. Here’s how you can do it: Open the Instagra
  
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• How Google used AI to supercharge Maps in 2019

  06-02-2020 19:42
  
  Google Maps celebrated its 15th birthday today by announcing a new milestone: in the last year, the company mapped as many buildings as it did in the previous decade. The service reached this landmark through a two-step process. Firstly, staff worked with Google’s data operations team to manually trace common building outlines. They then trained machine learning models to recognize the edges and shapes of buildings. Another recent deployment of machine learning enabled
  
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• Steam users clocked almost 2.5 million years of game time in 2019

  06-02-2020 19:21
  
  Valve today released details about Steam in 2019, and if you were even remotely worried that users would be neglecting Steam in favor of its competitors… don’t be. The platform saw a lot of action this year, in terms of how much time gamers spent on it and how much stuff is changing. The primary purpose of this particular year in review is to show just how much Steam has changed in the last year — which, to be fair, it has done. The whole platform feels like it got a facelift
  
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• This indoor cycling app is making me suffer, and it’s highly effective

  06-02-2020 17:40
  
  Welcome to Riding Nerdy, TNW’s fortnightly dive into bicycle-based tech, where we go into too much detail and geek out on all things related to pedal-powered gadgets. In November last year, I started using Zwift, an online gaming-come-indoor cycle training platform. Whilst still remaining very much in a niche, over the past few years its popularity has exploded in the cycling world. But it’s not the only option, and it certainly wasn’t the first digital tool designed to take t
  
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• I’m the CEO and I sit in the middle of the office — here’s why

  06-02-2020 16:59
  
  Part of my job as the CEO of a company that helps growing businesses find office space, is to look at spaces, to think about how to lay them out, and to discuss options with clients. So when it came time, some years ago, for me to envision and build out the right office space for me and my colleagues, I dared to dream differently and put my theories into practice. I put my seat right in the middle of the office.  In my experience, CEOs are typically concerned that they won’t find pri
  
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• TNW Answers: What we learned from online propaganda expert, Samuel Woolley

  06-02-2020 16:13
  
  TNW Answers is a live Q&A platform where we invite interesting people in tech who are much smarter than us to answer questions from TNW readers and editors for an hour. Social media, a tool created to guard freedom of speech and democracy, has increasingly been used in more sinister ways. From its role in amplifying political disinformation in elections, to inciting online violence, and lowering the levels of trust in media — Facebook isn’t just a space to share &ldquo
  
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• Twitter posts first billion-dollar quarterly revenue despite political ad controversy

  06-02-2020 15:59
  
  Twitter Inc. broke expectations to earn more than $1 billion in revenue last quarter, a first for the social media giant. Profit numbers disappointed, however, with the Jack Dorsey-led company posting $119 million, down from $255 million in the previous quarter. On Thursday, Twitter‘s share price was up 4.8 percent in pre-market trading on the back of the news, reports finance portal MarketWatch. The number of monetizable active daily Twitter users also swelled by 7 million to hit 152 mil
  
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• This AI-powered neural network accurately predicts extreme weather events

  06-02-2020 15:51
  
  Researchers from Rice University have developed a deep learning system that can predict deadly heat waves and winter storms before they happen. The system was trained on hundreds of pairs of maps that showed surface temperatures and air pressures. These included the hot and cold spells that typically lead to extreme weather events. Each pair showed these conditions in the same geographical area, but several days apart. After training, the system was applied to maps that it had never seen b
  
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• Damn, Apple’s new CarKey feature sounds cool as fuck

  06-02-2020 15:11
  
  I’ve never really been that into cars, but occasionally something crops up and grabs my attention. You know, like noise-canceling inside a vehicle, Sony announcing its own electric concept car, and, now, the fact that you’ll soon be able to use your iPhone in place of car keys. Yeah, how fucking cool is that? First reported on by 9to5Mac — who found the information in the developers’ beta of iOS 13.4 — the new feature is called, and wait for it, CarKey. Yes, A
  
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• Today’s smart sex toys are gimmicky and expensive, just like early smartphones

  06-02-2020 14:52
  
  This article was originally published on SEXTECHGUIDE, an independent publication that looks at the intersection between sex and technology in a non-explicit, as close to a ‘safe for work’ way as possible – including app reviews, adult VR info, sextech devices, privacy, security issues, and much more. It was founded by ex-TNW European Editor Ben Woods, and can be found on Twitter and Facebook.   It might feel like the sex tech of today is already
  
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• Here’s what tech founders had to say about their leadership mistakes

  06-02-2020 14:49
  
  Founding a tech startup is a risky business. Entrepreneurs endure countless challenges. Delegating is not always as easy as it sounds, neither is resolving conflicts between employees. Hiring is never straight-forward, nor is it easy to appease all your co-workers and employees at the same time. [Read: How to identify the gaps in your own leadership style] With this in mind, Growth Quarters spoke to several tech entrepreneurs about their leadership mistakes and the powerful lesso
  
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• This SEO training can make you the high-paid expert who truly knows digital marketing.

  06-02-2020 14:00
  
  Start down the path to a high-paying SEO career with the training found in The Pro Google SEO and SERP Certification Bundle, now only $29 (over 90 percent off) from TNW Deals.
  
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• Learn from the screw-ups of your fellow entrepreneurs on Growth Quarters, our new sub-brand

  06-02-2020 13:30
  
  When people come to me for advice on how to start or grow a company — or on entrepreneurship in general — my first piece of advice is always this: Ignore my advice.  Why? Because the worst kind of advice is from people (like me) who have done something a certain way, and because it worked, now consider themselves to be the leading authority and in a position to ‘give advice’ to younger people who are probably smarter than themselves. When somebody starts off their s
  
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• Japan’s central bank looks to Europe for guidance on China’s digital yuan

  06-02-2020 12:29
  
  A central bank “think tank” will meet for the first time in mid-April to discuss the viability of launching their own digital currencies, Nikkei reports. Top execs from the central banks of Europe, Canada, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK — as well as the Bank of International Settlements — formed the group in January to set governance standards digital currencies. It will reportedly discuss how central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can make intern
  
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• 3 privacy issues to consider before bringing an Amazon Echo into your house

  06-02-2020 11:59
  
  Amazon Echo and the Alexa voice assistant have had widely publicized issues with privacy. Whether it is the amount of data they collect or the fact that they reportedly pay employees and, at times, external contractors from all over the world to listen to recordings to improve accuracy, the potential is there for sensitive personal information to be leaked through these devices. But the risks extend not just to our relationship with Amazon. Major privacy concerns are starting to emerge in the w
  
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• UK financial regulator seeks cryptocurrency and blockchain expert

  06-02-2020 11:19
  
  One of the UK’s main financial industry regulators is looking to better understand cryptocurrency. According to a job listing posted earlier today, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the independent agency that oversees and regulates financial product offerings in the country, wants to hire a cryptocurrency expert. [Read: UK regulator wants crypto-derivatives ban to protect ‘ill-suited’ investors] The candidate More specifically, the FCA is looking for someone w
  
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• Satoshi Nakaboto: ‘Bitcoin keeps ascending towards $10,000’

  06-02-2020 10:51
  
  Our robot colleague Satoshi Nakaboto writes about Bitcoin every fucking day. Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Nikola Tesla used to say: Let’s make it rock! Bitcoin price We closed the day, February 05 2020, at a price of $9,613. That’s a respectable 4.68 percent increase in 24 hours, or $430. It was the highest closing price in one hundred and thirty-four days. We’r
  
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• Apple now allows you to make universal purchases for Mac and iOS apps

  06-02-2020 06:56
  
  It’s quite annoying when you have to pay two times to use the same app on Mac and iOS. Thankfully, you won’t have to do that anymore. Apple has added the ability for developers to enable universal purchases with the new XCode 11.4 beta dev tool. As developer Steve Troughton-Smith pointed out on Twitter, if this option is enabled by the app developer, you can purchase an app on iOS and use it on Mac, and vice versa. He also noted that this feature inclusion was unexpected,
  
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• Twitter’s default settings could be exposing identifying information

  06-02-2020 02:58
  
  Twitter recently disclosed an “incident” in how the service handles phone numbers. The announcement declared that it had shut down “a large network of fake accounts” responsible for uploading lists of phone numbers and then using Twitter’s own API to match them to individual usernames. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), this is precisely the type of activity used to create reverse-lookup tools: the types of services that match specific users, or
  
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• How to have different names in Discord servers

  06-02-2020 01:23
  
  Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Discord servers have become a staple of digital life, not just for gamers (their original intended audience), but for just about everyone. You can find a Discord server for almost anything now, from lifestyle groups to political debate servers. With so many diverse groups, there’s no reason to have one identity for all of them. I mean, it’s t
  
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• Scientists built an AI to figure out what the universe is made of

  06-02-2020 00:32
  
  A multi-university team of researchers from Japan recently used the world’s fastest astrophysics-simulation supercomputers to develop an AI system capable of predicting the structure of the universe itself. The scientists hope that in doing so they’ll unlock the mysteries surrounding dark matter and dark energy. Dubbed “Dark Emulator,” the AI system parses gigantic troves of astrophysics data and uses the information to build simulations of our universe. It taps into a m
  
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