With everyone sheltering at home, gaming is even more popular than ever. And it was already popular. In 2019, mobile gaming was valued at $64.4 billion, PC gaming brought in $29.6 billion, and on the desktop, $15.4 billion. There are now over 2.5 billion gamers on the planet. That's a lot of playing.
As government officials scramble to contain the new coronavirus outbreak with bans on large gatherings, travel restrictions, and school closures, the rest of us have to worry about how we're going to safely purchase water, toilet paper, groceries, and other household goods during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the main goals of Google Wifi (and Nest Wifi after it) is to make managing your internet connections as simple as possible. A great example of this is how easy it is to prioritize one device and allot it more bandwidth when your network is bogged down with other traffic.
As the COVID-19 virus continues to spread, counties, cities, and states are closing down businesses, events, and schools that aren't absolutely necessary. Some companies around the US are recommending or requiring employees to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. If you're stuck at home, there are apps and services to help you make it through a lockdown.
Smartphones are inherently bad for privacy. You've basically got a tracking device in your pocket, pinging off cell towers and locking onto GPS satellites. All the while, tracking cookies, advertising IDs, and usage stats follow you around the internet.
With Android 10, there are now three options when an app asks to access your location: Allow, Deny, and Allow While In Use. That last one prevents apps from seeing your location unless you're actively using them, and it's the default now. But when you first update, most of your apps will still be allowed to access your location in the background — at least, until you do something about it.
The camera system on the iPhone has never been better. Apple's iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max sport some of the best shooters on the market. But no level of quality makes up for the fact that shady apps can access your cameras for nefarious reasons. You can take control of the situation, however, and block any app you want from using your rear and front-facing cameras.
If you have two or more accounts logged into Instagram at any given time, you likely know how confusing it can get. You could like content, post pics, and share stories from the wrong account, as well as perform embarrassing searches that show up in the history of a shared work profile. Switching accounts is easy to forget once you open the app, so do it beforehand instead.
After closing its office last year, enterprise AR company Daqri has moved on to the final stage of its lifecycle with the liquidation of its assets.
Whatever it is you're into, Facebook Groups are a great way to connect with others that share your interests. And beyond matching you up with like-minded people, Groups also give you access to deals on items, help you organize play dates with families in the same area, and so much more.
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.
Although not quite as common today with the always-connected world we live in, you still might be having bandwidth wars in your home right now. If the internet connection in your area is mediocre, you know the feeling well. Google Stadia recommends having a 25 Mbps connection for playing in 4K, so you can expect to need at least that much to maintain a smooth, high-quality gaming session.
It would be an understatement to say that Android 10's gestures are a controversial change. A lot of people just don't like change, plus the back gesture can be a bit tricky to activate sometimes — even after Google added a sensitivity setting for it. Thankfully, a third-party developer has a unique solution.
In iOS 13, Apple added the ability to use Memoji and Animoji for your contact photo and then share your name and photo with others through iMessage. It works excellent for contacts that use iMessage, but those that don't are stuck with old pictures or gray monograms. With a few simple steps, however, any contact in your list can have their own Memoji, Animoji, or colored monogram.
While Apple's Live Photos feature was introduced back on the iPhone 6S, the rest of the world hasn't entirely caught up. Many apps don't accept the feature, making it difficult to share your fun memories with friends, family, or followers. You can strike Twitter off that list, though, as the app now completely supports Live Photo sharing.
With big-name tech companies like Apple and Facebook gearing up to push out their own smartglasses in the coming years, engineering conglomerate Bosch has been working on the optical components that could help the competition catch up.
Apple Card is the iPhone OEM's big leap into the credit card market. Its low barrier to entry and ease of use make it an appealing option, especially for those who often pay for goods with Apple Pay. To get the best rewards possible, make sure you use the Apple Card at stores where you can get 3% cash back.
The Facebook app only supports one account being logged in at a time — but what if you need one for work and one for your personal life? That would normally involve logging out and logging in every time you need to switch accounts, but your OnePlus device offers a much better solution.
One of the more interesting power-related features for OnePlus phones is the ability to schedule a time to turn it, off then back on again. While OnePlus phones typically run blazingly fast, you can still benefit from the RAM clearing and process killing that a reboot provides. And since you can schedule this to happen overnight, you can wake up to a refreshed, restarted phone every morning.
One of the longest-running cat and mouse games in Android has to be that of Google's SafetyNet feature and specific apps that can trip the flag. Many developers have resorted to using Magisk to create their modules since it can systemlessly pass SafetyNet in most cases. However, EdXposed is having some issues passing SafetyNet right now, which affects more than just your mods.
The spatial computing world of Magic Leap is no longer limited to the rarefied tones of Sigur Rós and Sennheiser's Ambeo Augmented Audio app. Now, the entire music universe will be at your augmented reality fingertips.
If you're a beta tester, you know Apple released iOS 13.3 this week, bringing with it stability for multitasking as well as minor changes throughout the OS. It seems Apple doesn't want the rest of us to go without this critical patch, as the company releases iOS 13.2.2 today, Thursday, Nov. 7.
The iPhone's home screen gets its signature aesthetic from a grid of icons that seamlessly blend in to almost any background. It's a somewhat minimalistic look, but that's interrupted by cluttery text labels for apps and folders. Fortunately, there's a way to remove these labels, but you'll have to be jailbroken to pull it off.
The legal drama surrounding Chinese startup Nreal and Magic Leap continues, and now we finally have an update.
Apple added the option to install custom fonts and use them in different apps on iOS 13. The rollout has been a bit confusing, with Apple announcing partnerships with vendors such as Adobe, but also limiting the feature to work with only certain apps. Nonetheless, you can now download and install custom fonts on your iPhone.
I'm a notification minimalist. When I get alerts, I want to deal with them ASAP. If the time is not right and I want to reference the notification later, snoozing was always the best course of action. But in Android 10, Google tucked away snoozing, so here's how to get it back.
Microsoft is quickly adding dark mode to its full line of apps. Microsoft To Do is the latest to receive this treatment, and it looks great. Now you can tick items off your to-do list without straining your eyes or draining extra battery life.
Facebook Messenger Lite is more than just a battery-friendly version of the full-fledged Messenger app for Android. It's still packing some pretty neat features and it's so much snappier than its bloated counterpart. All of the essentials are present, down to the ability to give your contacts nicknames.
While the tech industry is hot in pursuit of mainstream smartglasses for consumers, another early maker of enterprise-focused AR hardware has apparently met its end.
One core theme with each new iteration of iOS is the introduction of at least one or two features that fans have been hoping to see for years. With iOS 13, that feature is swipe typing, a first for the native iOS keyboard. While some of us have been getting our glide-typing fix with apps like Gboard for years, you might find swiping isn't quite your style. Luckily, the feature is easy to disable.
Apple revealed its newest line of iPhone models on Tuesday, Sept. 10, at its "by innovation only" event in Cupertino. While the release date for iOS 13 wasn't announced at the event, Apple issued a press release with the date. If you missed the event, you can still watch it from your computer, smartphone, Apple TV, and any other device that YouTube works on.
Sometimes, you'll see a comment on Instagram that you really need to share. Maybe it's something funny, possibly offensive. Whatever the case, the only thing to do is screenshot it and share that, right? Hopefully, not for long. Instagram is currently testing a feature that would allow you to share comments with others via a direct message and maybe even to stories and other apps.
In Tidal, you could always share a link to your favorite playlist, song, artist, album, or video via a text message, email, or social media post. But if you wanted to share to Instagram Stories or Facebook Stories, you were out of luck. That all changes with Tidal's new sharing features on Android and iOS.
Every summer for the last 26 years, hoards of hackers have descended on the Las Vegas Strip for DEFCON, the biggest hacker conference in the US. There's a wealth of talks every season (DEFCON 27 has at least 95 scheduled), and there have been some essential topics to learn from in past discussions. We've dug through the last ten years and found the 15 most popular talks you should watch.
There's something extremely satisfying about hunting down your online adversaries and knocking them out with a well-placed shot, which probably explains why shooting games are still one some of the most popular time killers for iOS and Android.
Samsung has the Bixby key, Pixels have the Google Assistant squeeze gesture. It's nice having a hardware button just for your assistant so you don't have to say "OK Google" or press an on-screen button. If your phone doesn't have such a shortcut, though, you can remap an existing hardware button to trigger the Google Assistant.
The fifth annual Amazon Prime Day is upon us. Starting July 15, Amazon will offer thousands of deals on products across its site, kicking off at 3 a.m. EDT. This year, it will only run for 48 hours, so you have even less time to act. To save you some of that time, we made a list of the best deals for smartphone accessories.
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.
With so much of our personal data floating around the web, it's nearly impossible to get away from spam calls, texts, and emails. Unfortunately, this isn't just limited to the online world — filling in your contact information in a raffle ticket with the hope of winning that shiny new car in the mall, for instance, can often result in getting swamped with spam texts containing sketchy loan offers.
