As Apple, Google, Snap, and Facebook wrestle for positioning to lure developers and creators to build augmented reality experiences for their respective tools, Facebook is looking at a learning approach for its Spark AR platform.
Help me, George Clooney. You're my only hope. If that mash-up of cultural references doesn't make sense, it will momentarily.
At the opening of its virtual Lens Fest, taking place Dec. 8-10 and open to the public, Snap is furthering its facilitation of AR development with new tools for Lens Studio version 3.3 and a planned investment into its AR creator community.
In the realm of social media, all roads lead to one destination: cracking the code of continuous partial attention dopamine hits. We learned this back in the days of Vine, before Twitter foolishly killed it. And I pointed my lens at the emerging trend back in 2016 when I highlighted Musical.ly for Mashable, just before it was snapped up by China's Bytedance for $1 billion and merged into what is now TikTok.
Messages is arguably the most important app on your iPhone, which is why it's always exciting when Apple pushes out new features for it. With the iOS 14 update, there a few critical changes as well as interface improvements and customization options that make the experience even more personalized than it already was.
Google is making its Phone app, the default dialer for Pixel and Android One devices, available to many other smartphones via the Play Store. If you're enticed to replace your factory-installed dialer to take advantage of the spam-filtering capabilities, you don't want to miss out on other features like the ability to customize canned responses for declining calls.
Even though the Music app took a backseat during Apple's initial iOS 14 announcements, there's a lot going on in the updated app. Some of the new features and changes apply only to Apple Music subscribers, while others apply to your own music library, so there's something for everyone.
The future of TikTok in the U.S. is all but certain. Microsoft, Walmart, or Oracle could save the day by buying the company, TikTok may win its lawsuit, or China's new restrictions could halt everything — but all could fail. Just like Vine before it, TikTok could be on its way out, only for opposite reasons. But will it matter if TikTok gets banned in the States? With the competition heating up, likely not.
Google's 2020 Pixel Buds are one of the hottest true wireless earbuds of the year. With their unique, circular design, they stand out from the long-stemmed AirPods look you get from other wireless earbuds. The design is also sleek and minimal, making them the perfect candidate to use as a personal hearing aid.
So, you're trying to show a friend or two a hilarious Reel you liked or saved on Instagram, but where is it? Unlike TikTok, Instagram doesn't make it clear where you're supposed to find your liked and saved Reels. Luckily, we can help.
Whenever you're browsing a grid of photos and videos in the Photos app, whether you're in the Photos, Albums, or Search tab, all media is cropped within the confines of tiny square thumbnails. But it doesn't have to be that way.
For a hacker, there are a lot of advantages to creating a fake network. One advantage forces nearby devices to use their real MAC address if you happen upon a network that's stored in their preferred network list.
The original iPhone SE was, for some, the perfect iPhone. It brought back the popular one-handed form factor of the iPhone 5 but packed in the internals of the then-new iPhone 6S. Now, the second-generation iPhone SE is here for 2020, but can it live up to what made the first-generation iPhone SE so popular?
It's not so difficult to stay at home during the coronavirus lockdown when there's so much free entertainment to take advantage of. That seems to be the M.O. for many studios and streaming services, as they've made so many shows and movies available to the public for free. That said, they aren't running charities here. These deals won't last forever, so make sure to jump on board before it's too late.
Anything from work or a missed flight to a worldwide pandemic (COVID-19, anyone?) can make it difficult or nearly impossible to see your loved ones. You can make phone calls or send iMessage, text, or email messages, but nothing compares to seeing family and friends right in front of you. That's where FaceTime comes in.
If left unattended, a hacker with a USB Rubber Ducky and physical access to the computer can infiltrate even the most secure computer. Such attacks often go undetected without the use of a tool like USBRip, which can provide you with assurance that your device hasn't been compromised.
Compromised uTorrent clients can be abused to download a malicious torrent file. The malicious file is designed to embed a persistent backdoor and execute when Windows 10 reboots, granting the attacker remote access to the operating system at will.
Apple Maps has had a rough lifecycle. After completely dropping the ball during its inception, Apple has been slowly improving its usability and feature set. After six and a half years, users still prefer third-party apps in iOS 12 over Apple Maps, with Google Maps stealing a large 67% market share. But iOS 13 for iPhone may finally close the gap.
You may have recently seen a plethora of Instagram users, including celebrities and politicians, sharing a screenshot declaring that the platform will implement a new "rule" where it would own and could use your photos and videos however it wishes. The screenshots are part of an internet hoax, one that's been around in one way or another since 2012, but what can Instagram actually do with your media?
Microsoft.com is one of the most extensive domains on the internet with thousands of registered subdomains. Windows 10 will ping these subdomains hundreds of times an hour, making it challenging to firewall and monitor all of the requests made by the operating system. An attacker can use these subdomains to serve payloads to evade network firewalls.
While modern browsers are robust and provide a lot of functionality, they can be unlocked to do some pretty spectacular things with browser extensions. For hackers and OSINT researchers, these tools can be used to defeat online tracking, log in to SSH devices, and search the internet for clues during an investigation. These are a list of my top ten favorite browser extensions for hackers — and how to use them.
Music streaming services make it difficult to transfer your favorite songs and artists from one service to another and for a valid reason: they don't want you to leave. But when it comes to switching, playlists are a big concern, because who wants to do it all over again? Luckily, if you're moving from Spotify to Apple Music, you can use a third-party app to take playlists with you.
You're in constant communication with your friends and family. The only issue? Nobody uses the same app. Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp — you have contacts spanning all three, and the resulting balancing-act to keep in touch can be overwhelming. That's why Facebook — who owns all three apps — is coming out with a way to call and message friends across all three platforms from one place.
Auditing websites and discovering vulnerabilities can be a challenge. With RapidScan and UserLAnd combined, anyone with an unrooted Android phone can start hacking websites with a few simple commands.
When Facebook introduced Stories in 2017, many users despised the Snapchat-like feature on their main page. However, despite the outcry, Facebook doesn't plan to let you remove it. But you don't have to settle for this. With the help of some third-party apps, you no longer have to deal with Stories.
ARP spoofing is an attack against an Ethernet or Wi-Fi network to get between the router and the target user. In an ARP-spoofing attack, messages meant for the target are sent to the attacker instead, allowing the attacker to spy on, deny service to, or man-in-the-middle a target. One of the most popular tools for performing this attack is Ettercap, which comes preinstalled on Kali Linux.
On April 26, 2019, Sinemia posted a note on its website stating it has ceased all operations in the United States. It's not known if it continues to work in other countries or if US users will be getting any refunds, particularly, for annual subscribers.
Over the years, Magic Leap's long-cultivated shroud of mystery led some onlookers to buy into the company's dream before even trying the device, while for others, the secrecy seems to have stoked the kind of resentment and overcorrecting critique usually reserved for the mighty Apple.
One could argue that, at least for the moment, software development is more important to the augmented reality experience than hardware. Since a viable augmented reality headset has yet to emerge for the broader, mainstream consumer market, currently, the same devices that make texting and selfies possible are leading the charge to enable easy-to-use AR experiences.
While there are over 100 cool features iOS 12 has to offer, there are some things Apple has made more annoying on iPhones or just has not addressed yet.
Net neutrality is dead and your internet service providers can collect all the data they want. While VPNs are a great way to protect some of that privacy, they're not perfect. There is another option, though, called Noisy, which was created by Itay Hury. It floods your ISP with so much random HTTP/DNS noise that your data is useless to anyone even if they do get it.
Leaked databases get passed around the internet and no one seems to notice. We've become desensitized to the data breaches that occur on a daily basis because it happens so frequently. Join me as I illustrate why reusing passwords across multiple websites is a truly awful practice — and compromise hundreds of social media accounts in the process.
When you want to post a breathtaking landscape or picture-perfect portrait that you just took with your DSLR camera to Instagram, Facebook, or some other social platform, there's an easy way to do so — even if you don't have a computer handy, which is typical when you're out and about.
Electronic warfare tactics work by jamming, disrupting, or disabling the technology a target uses to perform a critical function, and IoT devices are especially vulnerable to attacks. Wireless security cameras like the Nest Cam are frequently used to secure critical locations, but a hacker can surgically disable a webcam or other Wi-Fi connected device without disturbing the rest of the network.
We're all aware that Google collects a notable portion of our data. Thanks to the increasing awareness, Google has added a number of privacy controls to limit data collection. But Google doesn't just collect personal data for no reason — many of your favorite apps will use this info to improve their services and add new features.
Snapchat is an app built on sending quick-to-disappear pictures to your friends and family. Sure, this is the primary function of the app, but sometimes users want longer-lasting Memories while interacting with Snapchat. While My Story allows snaps to stick around for 24 hours, they still disappear in time. This is where Memories come in handy.
The augmented reality industry made great strides in 2017, but its apex is not even in sight. In terms of software, augmented reality is approaching meaningful mainstream awareness, thanks mostly to Apple and ARKit. Meanwhile, on the hardware side, AR is very much in its infancy, with headsets mostly limited to enterprise customers or developer kits and the majority of smartphones lacking the sensors necessary to achieve much more than parlor tricks.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is the de facto wireless protocol choice by many wearables developers, and much of the emerging internet of things (IoT) market. Thanks to it's near ubiquity in modern smartphones, tablets, and computers, BLE represents a large and frequently insecure attack surface. This surface can now be mapped with the use of Blue Hydra.
Your iPhone has a lot of personal information contained within it, so of course you want your device to be secure. You don't want that information getting into the wrong hands — or any hands other than your own, for that matter.
We started with our system manager in the previous lesson in our series on building dynamic user interfaces, but to get there, aside from the actual transform, rotation, and scaling objects, we need to make objects out of code in multiple ways, establish delegates and events, and use the surface of an object to inform our toolset placement.
