Google’s lead data regulator in Europe has opened a formal investigation into its processing of personal data in the context of its online Ad Exchange, TechCrunch has learnt.
This follows a privacy complaint pertaining to adtech’s real-timing bidding (RTB) system filed under Europe’s GDPR framework last year.
The statutory inquiry into Google’s adtech that’s being opened by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), cites section 110 of Ireland’s Data Protection Act 2018, which means that the watchdog suspects infringement — and will now investigate its suspicions.
The DPC writes that the inquiry is “to establish whether processing of personal data carried out at each stage of an advertising transaction is in compliance with the relevant provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation, including the lawful basis for processing, the principles of transparency and data minimisation, as well as Google’s retention practices”.
We’ve reached out to Google for comment.
As we reported earlier this week complaints about the RTB system used by online advertisers have been stacking up across Europe.
The relevant complaint in this instance was lodged last fall by Dr Johnny Ryan of private browser Brave, and alleges “wide-scale and systemic breaches of the data protection regime” by Google and others in the behavioral advertising industry.
Where Google is concerned the complaint focuses on its DoubleClick/Authorized Buyers ad system.
In a nutshell, the RTB complaints argue the system is inherently insecure — and that’s incompatible with GDPR’s requirement that personal data is processed “in a manner that ensures appropriate security”.
Commenting on the Irish DPC opening an inquiry in a statement, Ryan said: “Surveillance capitalism is about to become obsolete. The Irish Data Protection Commission’s action signals that now — nearly one year after the GDPR was introduced — a change is coming that goes beyond just Google. We need to reform online advertising to protect privacy, and to protect advertisers and publishers from legal risk under the GDPR”.
Similar complaints against RTB have been filed in the UK, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
Ireland is leading the investigation of Google’s adtech as the company designates Google Ireland as the data controller for EU users.
These top two browsers come with awesome features, extensions, and hacks. It’s easy to switch between them seamlessly if you keep your data in sync across them. Let’s explore nine ways to do that and make Chrome and Firefox work in harmony.
1. Use a Common Password Manager
Many popular password managers come with a Chrome extension as well as a Firefox add-on. LastPass, 1Password, Keeper, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and Roboform are a few of your best options.
For any password manager you pick, install the corresponding Chrome and Firefox extensions. After you do that, filling forms and passwords in both browsers is painless. All you need to remember is the master password. And there’s zero effort involved in syncing your data!
If you don’t want to install the extensions, you can still use the service’s web portal to access your passwords anytime. You can even import your passwords from Chrome and Firefox into the third-party password manager you use.
2. Sync Your Bookmarks
Raindrop is one of the best options for carrying your list of favorite websites with you everywhere. Its free tier lets you gather unlimited bookmarks, turn them into collections, and carry them across unlimited devices. With a paid subscription, you can do a lot more—create nested collections, remove broken links and duplicates, and so on.
EverSync is another way to back up your favorites and keep them in sync on Chrome and Firefox. And how can we forget Pocket? It’s one of the slickest and most-loved digital bookmarking services around.
If you have a Google account, you can also use Google Bookmarks to access your favorite websites from any browser. We must warn you that it’s not as advanced as the other options above, but it just might work for you. Your Google Bookmarks are different from the Chrome bookmarks that sync with your Google account if you have set up Chrome sync.
3. Switch to a Common Speed Dial
Call it the speed dial, the new tab page, or the homepage. Whatever you call it, that start screen keeps your most-used websites and functions handy at all times. It’s like the catchall bowl by the door that keeps your keys, coins, and wallet ready to go.
You can tweak the start screen in both Chrome and Firefox with the in-built settings. But, we recommend using a third-party solution to keep it in sync across all browsers. FVD Speed Dial is a good option here. It allows you to create speed dial groups, customize backgrounds, back up your dials, and so on.
Want alternatives to FVD Speed Dial? Try Speed Dial 2 or Yay! Another Speed dial!. The latter can sync your bookmarks too! And did you know you can build a custom start screen yourself with Start.me?
4. Install Common Extensions
Wherever possible, install extensions that have both Chrome and Firefox versions. Doing so will keep interfaces and workflows the same even when you switch between the two browsers. Here are a few sample extensions to begin with:
Evernote Web Clipper (Chrome | Firefox): To capture items from the web and add them to your Evernote account
The Camelizer (Chrome | Firefox): To display price history and get discount alerts while shopping
OneTab (Chrome | Firefox): To reduce tab clutter and save browser memory
5. Port Useful Features
Consider yourself trapped in Chrome due to a specific feature or two? Find certain Firefox features or extensions irreplaceable? The good news is that with a few smart extensions you can import the features you need from one browser to the other.
For example, you can bring the popular hierarchy-based tab management style of Firefox’s Tree Style Tab add-on to Chrome with Tab Tree. The latter displays active tabs in a tree format, which is accessible from the extension’s toolbar button. A more popular alternative to Tab Tree is Sidewise Tree Style Tabs. Unfortunately, the extension hasn’t seen an update in a while.
Want more extension ideas along similar lines? Try:
Just Read: To add a distraction-free reading mode to Chrome
Download Statusbar: To display the progress of downloads in the status bar in Firefox
Take your Chrome and Firefox integration further by dressing them up in matching garb. Choose themes that come from the same developer or that have the same source of inspiration. For example, if you use Dark Theme for Firefox, also install its Chrome counterpart, Dark Theme for Chrome. With the Stylish extension, you can also come up with a custom theme to use on both the browsers.
Like Chrome’s material design look? Bring that to Firefox with MaterialFox or ChromeFox.
7. Memorize Common Keyboard Shortcuts
Certain keyboard shortcuts are standard across various browsers including Chrome and Firefox. For example, in both these browsers, Ctrl + T opens a new tab and Ctrl + D bookmarks the current page. Learn and use all common shortcuts like these to speed up your workflow. With the Shortkeys browser extension, you can even remap shortcuts as you please to match them across the two browsers.
8. Share a Notepad
Whether you want to create a to-do list or jot something down, having a digital notepad at the ready is important. A web-based app like Writer, Simplenote, or Laverna is a good choice for this. It will auto-sync your notes. Keep the app in a pinned tab for quick reference.
You may not pay much attention to how your browser responds at every step, but it becomes a part of your workflow. For smooth switching between Chrome and Firefox, tweak them to respond in the same fashion. Here are a few ways you can do that:
Use the same primary search engine and keyword shortcuts.
Set up a common homepage.
Use the same Downloads folder.
Tweak tab behavior for similarity.
Have a common social media dashboard and workflow.
Also, check our lists of the best Chrome extensions and the best Firefox add-ons. They’ll give you more ideas on how to keep Chrome and Firefox (or any two browsers of your choice) in perfect sync.
Do Your Browsers Walk Hand in Hand?
Make it easy on yourself to go back and forth between your favorite browsers for a time-saving and seamless browsing experience.
Whether you side with the anti-piracy brigade or the “free movies for everyone” brigade is irrelevant. Yes, torrent sites do facilitate illegal file sharing, but they also provide a way to obtain legitimate copyright-free content.
The Pirate Bay used to the be world’s top torrent site, but a string of legal battles means the site is now a shadow of its former self.
If you want some of the best alternatives to The Pirate Bay for free torrents, keep reading.
Downloading Torrents: A Warning
MakeUseOf does not condone using torrents to obtain content illegally. Using the following sites for illegal purposes is done entirely at your own risk. MakeUseOf takes no responsibility for any legal problems you encounter.
In almost every country in the world, it is illegal to download torrents of copyright-protected movies, games, TV shows, and music if you do not already legitimately own the content. Doing so is intellectual property theft. Using torrents for illegal downloads can put you at risk of losing your internet connection, receiving a fine, or even getting a custodial sentence.
RARBG has become one of the most well-established names in the torrenting world. The site focuses on high-quality video releases and has a vast amount of content available.
RARBG also offers a rudimentary but effective way to find new files thanks to its “Top 10” lists across a variety of categories.
The site’s popularity has led to it become one of the most-visited domains on the web. It consistently ranks in the top 350 on Alexa.
1337x is one of the most well-designed alternatives to The Pirate Bay; you can easily filter the different types of torrent files using the button at the bottom of the screen.
The site has endured various legal battles. It’s not been available in Google Search results since a 2015 request from Feelgood Entertainment. It is, however, still searchable through privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo.
1337x.to has developed a reputation for providing access to obscure and hard-to-find torrents.
The YIFY group (also known as YTS), was a group dedicated to releasing torrents of popular movies. The videos were renowned for being high-quality with small file sizes.
Perhaps predictably, legal action from Motion Picture Association of America saw the group get shut down in 2015. YTS.AM is the rebirth of the YIFY group and is commonly regarded as its natural successor.
The site offers some of the most reliable torrent downloads. Much of its index was created during a period when users were paid $1 for every fake link they reported—though we can’t see any information that suggests the offer is still in place.
Torlock also claims to offer a strict privacy policy. The developers do not log any of your actions and don’t track you around the web. The same cannot necessarily be said for other torrent download sites.
Lastly, it appears like Torlock is one of the few free torrent sites that care about legality. It promises to respond to all DCMA takedown notices within three days.
KickassTorrents isn’t the site it once was. It’s a far cry from the time when The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents were duking it out to be the number one torrent site on the web. Indeed, in 2014, KickassTorrents was the most popular torrent site in the world.
The site’s demise began in 2016 after US authorities seized the domain, but it’s since risen from the ashes.
Although the library of torrent files in the site’s index has shrunk from its peak, KickassTorrents remains a reliable site that’s easy to navigate and download the files that you need.
Another site that’s grown in popularity over the last couple of years, LimeTorrents is definitely worth checking out if you’re struggling to find a particular torrent that you want.
Navigation is straightforward—there are filters for Movies, Music, TV shows, Games, Apps, and Anime, as well as specialist tools such as top torrent lists, a cloud search, and torrent health trackers.
Zooqle is a relative newcomer on the list of best torrent sites, but it’s become instantly popular thanks to its 4.2 million verified torrents, 6.9 PB of data, and a solid mix of software and video content.
Perhaps uniquely, the Zooqle community of users has played a significant role in the way the site looks and behaves. The result is an easy-to-navigate home page and—for anyone who creates an account—live RSS feeds and subscriptions.
Music lovers should check out the content available on Torrentz2.eu. The metasearch engine combines results from dozens of search engines to offer you an extensive list of files.
Of course, the Torrentz brand name has been around for more than a decade. It was the second most popular torrent site on the web in both 2012 and 2015 before being shut down.
Today, this Pirate Bay alternative keep a low profile and specializes in audio files.
If you want added security, Torrentz2 is also available as an onion site through the Tor router.
Like the YIFY group, EZTV was a group that created torrent files and made them available on other popular torrent sites.
When KickassTorrents ran into legal difficulties, EZTV decided to take the operation in-house and launched its own alternative to The Pirate Bay.
From a design standpoint, the site is not as easy to use as some of its rivals; it is the quality and variety of the torrents that keeps people coming back.
Formerly known as Torrents.me, the site acts as an aggregator for many of the other best torrent sites on the web. It includes results from The Pirate Bay, 1337x, RARBG, and more.
Uniquely, Torrents.io offers search trends for various torrents on charts of the homepage. The data gives you some fresh insight into the most popular torrents in the world at any given moment.
Foreign Language Torrents
If English isn’t your primary language, don’t worry. Here are three non-English torrent sites:
Mejor Torrent (Spanish): The user interface isn’t great, but with 25 million users it’s comfortably the most popular Spanish torrent site in the world.
LostFilmTV (Russian): Despite the English-sounding name, LostFilmTV is the most popular torrent site for Russian content after the closure of Rutracker.
Torrent9 (French): Torrent9 boasts more than two million French torrents. It’s popular in France, Belgium, and Canada.
The Best Pirate Bay Alternative
The 10 sites in our list should be enough to find the torrent that you want. But which is the best Pirate Bay alternative? It’s not an easy choice—torrent sites are continually changing and evolving. If we had to pick, we’d say the design and number of torrents on 1337x give it the edge.
You should always use a VPN when downloading torrents. We recommend ExpressVPN and CyberGhost.
Seeing the Activate Windows 10 watermark in the corner of your desktop? While it’s a minor annoyance, it can sometimes appear even if you’ve activated Windows properly. And this annoyance can get in the way of what you’re working on.
We explain what Windows activation means and how you can remove the “activate Windows 10” watermark.
What Is Windows Activation?
Before we proceed, we should first briefly explain what Windows activation is. See our Windows 10 activation FAQ for much more information.
While you’re allowed to install Windows 10 on any PC free of charge, doing so does not activate the operating system. Activation checks in your copy of Windows with Microsoft to make sure it’s genuine. You have two main ways to activate Windows 10: with a product key, or through a digital license.
You receive a product key if you buy a Windows 10 license from Microsoft or another retailer. If you purchased your PC ready-built, it also likely came with a product key. Conversely, those who upgraded to Windows 10 from a copy of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 have a digital license and don’t need a product key for activation.
Windows 10 allows you to link your digital license with your Microsoft account, which makes reactivating it in the future much easier (as we’ll see).
Using Non-Activated Windows 10
As it turns out, a non-activated copy of Windows 10 works almost exactly the same as an activated one, with a few minor limitations.
You’ll see the “activate Windows 10” watermark in the bottom-right corner of your screen, plus a message in Settings letting you know that Windows isn’t activated. Additionally, you can’t use any of the items in the Personalization category of Settings. This prevents you from changing the wallpaper, color, Taskbar, and similar settings.
If you don’t mind this, however, Windows 10 otherwise functions perfectly fine. You’ll still receive system updates and don’t have to deal with any nagging popups.
Now that you understand activation, let’s take a look at some of the most common reasons this watermark appears. We’ll then dive into how to remove the “activate Windows 10” watermark in other ways.
Review Your Activation Status
To find out why you have the “activate Windows 10” watermark on your system, head to Settings > Update & Security > Activation.
Here you’ll see the status of your computer and what you can do to activate it and remove the watermark. Let’s review some of the common ones. You may need to search for your specific error code if your issue isn’t mentioned here.
1. Enter a Valid Product Key
You can see in the above screenshot that Windows 10 is not activated because the previous version of Windows wasn’t activated either. In this virtual machine, we upgraded an unlicensed copy of Windows 7 to Windows 10 and never entered a product key during installation.
Because of this, Windows 10 is not activated and thus shows the watermark. A similar situation would happen if you installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 on a machine and didn’t enter a product key upon installation.
The easy way to resolve this and remove the Windows 10 watermark is to enter a genuine product key, if you have one. Thankfully, Windows 10 accepts any valid Windows 7, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10 key. If you still have the sticker on your old Windows 7 computer, it should work to activate Windows 10.
Click Change product key and enter your 25-digit product key to activate Windows. If you enter a valid key that hasn’t already been used too many times, Windows 10 should activate and remove the watermark.
Another common activation issue occurs when you make significant upgrades to your computer, such as replacing the motherboard. Windows 10 ties your digital license to your PC’s components, so when you make major changes, it no longer recognizes it as your computer.
To resolve this, you can run the Windows activation troubleshooter. This will allow you to re-link your Microsoft account to your computer and activate Windows again. Head to Settings > Update & Security > Activation again and click Troubleshoot. Once the troubleshooter starts, click I changed hardware on this device recently. This will prompt you to log into your Microsoft account.
If you haven’t linked your digital license to your Microsoft account prior to the hardware change, this won’t work. You can try contacting Microsoft support to get it sorted out, but there’s no guarantee of success.
3. Review Enterprise Activation
A less common problem, but one still worth mentioning, occurs in a business situation. If Windows was activated from an enterprise server, and it loses contact with that server, Windows will show the “activate Windows 10″watermark after some time.
When you visit the Activation menu, you’ll see a message such as We can’t activate Windows on this device because we can’t connect to your organization’s activation server. In this case, you need to reconnect your computer to your company’s network and reactivate it. You can try using a company VPN to do this if you can’t physically connect it.
4. Purchase a New Windows 10 Key
If you don’t have a valid Windows key, never connected a digital license to your Microsoft account, and your issue doesn’t lie with enterprise activation, your only (legitimate) option left is to buy a new product key for Windows 10.
You can do this right from the Activation menu in Settings; click Go to Store. Here you can buy a product key for Windows 10 Home ($140) or Windows 10 Pro ($200) depending on which version you have installed.
If you don’t want to pay this much, have a look around the web for alternative retailers. For example, Walmart has an OEM copy of Windows 10 Home for $100 at the time of writing. You may be able to find even steeper discounts from third-party sites, but you run the risk of buying a phony key. Follow our tips for getting a cheap and legal Windows license for some ideas.
Once you do activate Windows 10 with a new key, head back to the Activation menu and makes sure it states that your activation is linked to your Microsoft account. If it doesn’t say this, click the Add an account button below. Sign into your Microsoft account so you can reactivate more easily in the future if needed.
Other Windows 10 Activation Issues
The above list of activation scenarios isn’t exhaustive. For example, you might have a mismatched product key and edition of Windows installed. A key for Windows 10 Home won’t activate Windows 10 Pro.
Additionally, Microsoft limits the number of times you can use one product key to activate Windows. If you’ve used the key a lot in the past, it’s possible that you’ve exhausted it.
Workarounds to Remove the “Activate Windows 10” Watermark
If none of the above methods to activate Windows worked for you, and you don’t want to buy a license, you may wonder how to get rid of the “activate Windows 10” watermark without actually activating it.
We’ll briefly cover a few workarounds for this, but you should know that they aren’t guaranteed to solve the problem. They may work for some time, then revert in the future. So take them with a grain of salt and know that the best way to remove the “activate Windows 10” watermark is by activating it.
5. Try Universal Watermark Disabler
Winaero offers a tool called Universal Watermark Disabler, which is the closest solution for a Windows 10 watermark remover that we’ve found. Simply download and open it, then choose Install from the dialog box. This will sign you out of your computer.
After you sign back in, the watermark should be gone.
6. Disable Windows 10 Tips
Some people have reported that heading to Settings > System > Notifications & actions and disabling both Show me the Windows welcome experience… and Get tips, tricks, and suggestions… will disable the Windows 10 watermark after a restart.
Your mileage may vary with this, but it’s worth a quick try.
Methods That Don’t Work
Around the web, you’ll see two common methods that claim to remove the “activate Windows 10” watermark. While you’re welcome to try these, don’t expect either one to work for any length of time.
The first tells you to run a batch command that includes the command taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe. All this does is restart File Explorer and the process that runs under it. It’s not directly related to the watermark, so even if this makes the watermark disappear temporarily, it will most likely come back.
Second is a Registry edit. This one instructs you to find a key called PaintDesktopVersion and set it to 0. However, this value is usually already set to 0 (including on our test non-activated Windows 10 machine), so it won’t have any effect.
You should avoid downloading random software that claims to disable watermarks or activate Windows for you, as they could include malware. Be careful about trying other methods that require modifying or deleting system files, since doing so can cause problems to your system. These aren’t worth the risk just to remove a small watermark.
Banish the “Activate Windows 10” Watermark
We’ve taken a look at what Windows activation is, where this watermark comes from, and several ways to remove it. Ultimately, the most reliable way to permanently remove the Windows 10 watermark is activating the OS. And you don’t necessarily have to buy a new key to do this, as we’ve seen.
While the workarounds may prove helpful for a time, the watermark might come back after you try one of them. If you don’t mind the lack of personalization options, living with the watermark is perfectly acceptable too.
Google today unveiled a new look for its mobile search results which gives sites a way to showcase their own branding, instead of looking like every other blue link. Before, the search results were blue and the source — a publisher’s site, for example — would appear below in a smaller, green font. Now, it’s the publisher who gets top billing. With the refresh, the source for the search result appears on top and includes the site’s own icon.
The revamp is subtle, but one that will likely please publishers as it gives them a way to stand out. After all, web searchers who are already familiar with the publisher’s site may choose to click through (or rather, tap through) to their link out of a personal preference — even if it’s further down on the results page.
In addition, the website branding can help web searchers better understand where the information is coming from — like an official site or well-known news publication, for example.
The update also impacts how Google Search ads appear.
Before, the word “Ad” would display in a small green box ahead of the source link. Now, the word “Ad” appears in a bolded, black font where the website icon would otherwise be. In a way, it’s a bit noticeable that the top search results link is an ad because your eyes are drawn to the blue link — and because the word “Ad” no longer has a box around it.
Google says the new design will help it prepare for the search changes ahead as it enables the company to add more action buttons and previews to the search result cards, while still retaining attribution back to the source.
Facebook’s former teen-in-residence Michael Sayman, now at Google, is back today with the launch of a new game: Emojishot, an emoji-based guessing game for iOS, built over the past ten weeks within Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120.
The game, which is basically a version of charades using emoji characters, is notable because of its creator.
By age 17, Sayman had launched five apps and had become Facebook’s youngest-ever employee. Best known for his hit game 4 Snaps, the developer caught Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, earning him a demo spot on stage at Facebook’s F8 conference. While at Facebook, Sayman built Facebook’s teen app Lifestage — a Snapchat-like standalone project which allowed the company to explore new concepts around social networking aimed at a younger demographic.
Lifestage was shut down two years ago, and Sayman defected to Google shortly afterward. At Google, he was rumored to be heading up an internal social gaming effort called Arcade where gamers played using accounts tied to their phone numbers — not a social network account.
At the time, HQ Trivia was still a hot title, not a novelty from a struggling startup — and the new gaming effort looked liked Google’s response. However, Arcade has always been only an Area 120 project, we understand.
To be clear, that means it’s not an official Google effort — as an Area 120 project, it’s not associated with any of Google’s broader efforts in gaming, social or anything else. Area 120 apps and services are instead built by small teams who are personally interested in pursuing an idea. In the case of Emojishot, it was Sayman’s own passion project.
Emojishot itself is meant to be played with friends, who take turns using emoji to create a picture so friends can guess the word. For example, the game’s screenshots show the word “kraken” may be drawn using an octopus, boat and arrow emojis. The emojis are selected from a keyboard below and can be resized to create the picture. This resulting picture is called the “emojishot,” and can also be saved to your Camera Roll.
Players can pick from a variety of words that unlock and get increasingly difficult as you successfully progress through the game. The puzzles can also be shared with friends to get help with solving, and there’s a “nudge” feature to encourage a friend to return to the game and play.
According to the game’s website, the idea was to make a fun game that explored emojis as art and a form of communication.
Unfortunately, we were unable to test it just yet, as the service wasn’t up-and-running at the time of publication. (The game is just now rolling out so it may not be fully functional until later today).
While there are other “Emoji Charades” games on the App Store, the current leading title is aimed at playing with friends at a party on the living room TV, not on phones with friends.
Sayman officially announced Emojishot today, noting his efforts at Area 120 and how the game came about.
“For the last year, I’ve been working in Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental products. I’ve been exploring and rapidly prototyping a bunch of ideas, testing both internally and externally,” he says. “Ten weeks ago, we came up with the idea for an emoji-based guessing game. After a lot of testing and riffing on the idea, we’re excited that the first iteration — Emojishot — is now live on the iOS App Store…We’ve had a lot of fun with it and are excited to open it up to a wider audience,” Sayman added.
He notes that more improvements to the game will come over time, and offered to play with newcomers via his username “michael.”
The app is available to download from the U.S. iOS App Store here. An Android waitlist is here.
Facebook’s former teen-in-residence Michael Sayman, now at Google, is back today with the launch of a new game: Emojishot, an emoji-based guessing game for iOS, built over the past ten weeks within Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120.
The game, which is basically a version of charades using emoji characters, is notable because of its creator.
By age 17, Sayman had launched five apps and had become Facebook’s youngest-ever employee. Best known for his hit game 4 Snaps, the developer caught Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, earning him a demo spot on stage at Facebook’s F8 conference. While at Facebook, Sayman built Facebook’s teen app Lifestage — a Snapchat-like standalone project which allowed the company to explore new concepts around social networking aimed at a younger demographic.
Lifestage was shut down two years ago, and Sayman defected to Google shortly afterward. At Google, he was rumored to be heading up an internal social gaming effort called Arcade where gamers played using accounts tied to their phone numbers — not a social network account.
At the time, HQ Trivia was still a hot title, not a novelty from a struggling startup — and the new gaming effort looked liked Google’s response. However, Arcade has always been only an Area 120 project, we understand.
To be clear, that means it’s not an official Google effort — as an Area 120 project, it’s not associated with any of Google’s broader efforts in gaming, social or anything else. Area 120 apps and services are instead built by small teams who are personally interested in pursuing an idea. In the case of Emojishot, it was Sayman’s own passion project.
Emojishot itself is meant to be played with friends, who take turns using emoji to create a picture so friends can guess the word. For example, the game’s screenshots show the word “kraken” may be drawn using an octopus, boat and arrow emojis. The emojis are selected from a keyboard below and can be resized to create the picture. This resulting picture is called the “emojishot,” and can also be saved to your Camera Roll.
Players can pick from a variety of words that unlock and get increasingly difficult as you successfully progress through the game. The puzzles can also be shared with friends to get help with solving, and there’s a “nudge” feature to encourage a friend to return to the game and play.
According to the game’s website, the idea was to make a fun game that explored emojis as art and a form of communication.
Unfortunately, we were unable to test it just yet, as the service wasn’t up-and-running at the time of publication. (The game is just now rolling out so it may not be fully functional until later today).
While there are other “Emoji Charades” games on the App Store, the current leading title is aimed at playing with friends at a party on the living room TV, not on phones with friends.
Sayman officially announced Emojishot today, noting his efforts at Area 120 and how the game came about.
“For the last year, I’ve been working in Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental products. I’ve been exploring and rapidly prototyping a bunch of ideas, testing both internally and externally,” he says. “Ten weeks ago, we came up with the idea for an emoji-based guessing game. After a lot of testing and riffing on the idea, we’re excited that the first iteration — Emojishot — is now live on the iOS app store…We’ve had a lot of fun with it and are excited to open it up to a wider audience,” Sayman added.
He notes that more improvements to the game will come over time, and offered to play with newcomers via his username “michael.”
The app is available to download from the U.S. iOS App Store here. An Android waitlist is here.
The dominoes continue to fall for Huawei in the wake of a Trump-led U.S. trade ban. An internal memo from ARM lays out the chip giant’s decision to hit pause on “all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements,” per the BBC.
While based in Cambridge, England, the company believes itself to be impacted by the trade issue due to its use of technology originating in the States. The move is just another indication of how complex the issue of extracting U.S.-based technology from these devices will ultimately be. If upheld, many believe it could ultimately doom Huawei.
Huawei offered TechCrunch a fairly standard response to the news, once again chalking things up to politics. “We value our close relationships with our partners, but recognize the pressure some of them are under, as a result of politically motivated decisions,” it wrote. “We are confident this regrettable situation can be resolved and our priority remains to continue to deliver world-class technology and products to our customers around the world.”
Google was among the first to respond to Huawei’s inclusion on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “Entity” trade blacklist, pulling support for Android. Other partners, including Microsoft have remained largely silent on the matter.
While Android and iOS have locked up the market for smartphone operating systems, a feature phone platform that has the distinction of being the world’s third biggest mobile OS is announcing a hefty round of funding to continue its expansion. KaiOS, which makes the OS that powers devices like Nokia’s feature phones and Jio’s devices out of India, has raised $50 million from Cathay Innovation (which led the round) and previous investors Google and TCL Holdings.
The funding takes the total raised by KaiOS — which has now shipped 100 million devices across 100 countries — to $72 million. It comes less than a year after Google invested $22 million in the the business — a strategic round that also marked KaiOS beginning the process of creating native integrations of different Google services like Maps and (more recently) Assistant into the platform.
KaiOS is not disclosing its valuation but Sebastien Codeville, its CEO, confirmed to be that it is “definitely up.” (Pitchbook put it at a very modest $43.75 million last year on the back of Google’s earlier round.)
We actually knew a little about this round back in February, at MWC in Barcelona, when KaiOS announced new handset partners and a raft of new features. A spokesperson for KaiOS told TechCrunch that the delay in closing the deal and making it public was due to a need to coordinate with different stakeholders.
As it turned out, KaiOS’s timing for this announcement turned out to be pretty interesting. The big news this week in mobile is what kind of an impact Huawei will face in the wake of a US regulation barring it from doing business in the US. One development in that story has been just how serious Huawei is about building its own operating system to replace Google’s Android and its related services.
This is big news because while Huawei is currently the world’s second-biggest mobile phone maker, we haven’t seen any platform gain reasonable mobile phone traction against the hegemony of iOS and Android outside of China — including the failure of Firefox OS, which retreated from the market only to reemerge, phoenix-like, as KaiOS two years ago — in part because of the extensive ecosystems that have coalesced around these two.
But while all eyes are on smartphones, KaiOS’s funding and general growth represents an interesting alternative for markets, carriers and consumers that might be in the market for what KaiOS refers to as “smart feature phones.”
Today, the company counts companies like Reliance Jio, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Orange, MTN and Qualcomm among its partners, and it’s been building an interesting, two-pronged strategy for targeting people both in developed and developing markets.
As Sebastien Codeville, the CEO of KaiOS, describes it, in emerging markets (which are KaiOS’s primary target), its devices are being purchased by first-time phone users, or those that have had very basic, non-data mobile phones and are upgrading without the big step and expense of smartphones. “We are bringing people to internet usage with a device they are familiar with,” he said of the form factor. “Other key characteristics are a long battery life, a keyboard, and a more resistant touch panel.”
The developed market, he added, was an interesting opportunity because of the amount of professionals and others who want pared-down devices for weekend use to unplug from their daily grind.
Many had left feature phones for dead with the growth in popularity of devices like the iPhone, app stores and of course apps themselves. But research from Counterpoint found that feature phones still accounted for almost 25 percent of all handset shipments in Q3 of last year, working out to a $28 billion dollar market opportunity in the years ahead. Today there are some 1.5 billion feature phone users, an interesting number to consider as smartphone sales continue to feel the crunch.
While Android and iOS have locked up the market for smartphone operating systems, a feature phone platform that has the distinction of being the world’s third biggest mobile OS is announcing a hefty round of funding to continue its expansion. KaiOS, which makes the OS that powers devices like Nokia’s feature phones and Jio’s devices out of India, has raised $50 million from Cathay Innovation (which led the round) and previous investors Google and TCL Holdings.
The funding takes the total raised by KaiOS — which has now shipped 100 million devices across 100 countries — to $72 million. It comes less than a year after Google invested $22 million in the the business — a strategic round that also marked KaiOS beginning the process of creating native integrations of different Google services like Maps and (more recently) Assistant into the platform.
KaiOS is not disclosing its valuation but Sebastien Codeville, its CEO, confirmed to be that it is “definitely up.” (Pitchbook put it at a very modest $43.75 million last year on the back of Google’s earlier round.)
We actually knew a little about this round back in February, at MWC in Barcelona, when KaiOS announced new handset partners and a raft of new features. A spokesperson for KaiOS told TechCrunch that the delay in closing the deal and making it public was due to a need to coordinate with different stakeholders.
As it turned out, KaiOS’s timing for this announcement turned out to be pretty interesting. The big news this week in mobile is what kind of an impact Huawei will face in the wake of a US regulation barring it from doing business in the US. One development in that story has been just how serious Huawei is about building its own operating system to replace Google’s Android and its related services.
This is big news because while Huawei is currently the world’s second-biggest mobile phone maker, we haven’t seen any platform gain reasonable mobile phone traction against the hegemony of iOS and Android outside of China — including the failure of Firefox OS, which retreated from the market only to reemerge, phoenix-like, as KaiOS two years ago — in part because of the extensive ecosystems that have coalesced around these two.
But while all eyes are on smartphones, KaiOS’s funding and general growth represents an interesting alternative for markets, carriers and consumers that might be in the market for what KaiOS refers to as “smart feature phones.”
Today, the company counts companies like Reliance Jio, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Orange, MTN and Qualcomm among its partners, and it’s been building an interesting, two-pronged strategy for targeting people both in developed and developing markets.
As Sebastien Codeville, the CEO of KaiOS, describes it, in emerging markets (which are KaiOS’s primary target), its devices are being purchased by first-time phone users, or those that have had very basic, non-data mobile phones and are upgrading without the big step and expense of smartphones. “We are bringing people to internet usage with a device they are familiar with,” he said of the form factor. “Other key characteristics are a long battery life, a keyboard, and a more resistant touch panel.”
The developed market, he added, was an interesting opportunity because of the amount of professionals and others who want pared-down devices for weekend use to unplug from their daily grind.
Many had left feature phones for dead with the growth in popularity of devices like the iPhone, app stores and of course apps themselves. But research from Counterpoint found that feature phones still accounted for almost 25 percent of all handset shipments in Q3 of last year, working out to a $28 billion dollar market opportunity in the years ahead. Today there are some 1.5 billion feature phone users, an interesting number to consider as smartphone sales continue to feel the crunch.
One of the bigger developments in customer services has been the impact of social media — both as a place to vent frustration or praise (mostly frustration), and — especially over messaging apps — as a place for businesses to connect with their users.
Now, customer support specialist Zendesk has made an acquisition so that it can make a bigger move into how it works within social media platforms, and specifically messaging apps: it has acquired Smooch, a startup that describes itself as an “omnichannel messaging platform,” which companies’ customer care teams can use to interact with people over messaging platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and Messenger, as well as SMS and email.
It had also been a longtime partner of Zendesk’s, powering the company’s own WhatsApp Business integration and other features. The two already have some customers in common, including Uber. Other Smooch customers include Four Seasons, SXSW, Betterment, Clarabridge, Harry’s, LVMH, Delivery Hero and BarkBox.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Zendesk SVP class="il">Shawna Wolverton said in an interview that that the startup’s entire team of 48, led by co-founder and CEO Warren Levitan, are being offered positions with Zendesk. Smooch is based out of Montreal, Canada — so this represents an expansion for Zendesk into building an office in Canada.
Its backers included iNovia, TA Associates and Real Ventures, who collectively had backed it with less than $10 million (when you leave in inflated hills surrounding Silicon Valley, numbers magically decline). As Zendesk is publicly traded, we may get more of a picture of the price in future quarterly reports. This is the company’s fifth acquisition to date.
The deal underscores the big impact that messaging apps are making in customer service. While phone and internet are massive points of contact, messaging apps is one of the most-requested features Zendesk’s customers are asking for, “because they want to be where their customers are,” with WhatsApp — now at 1.5 billion users — currently at the top of the pile, Wolverton said. (More than half of Zendesk’s revenues are from outside the US, which speaks to why WhatsApp — which is bigger outside the US than it is in it — is a popular request.)
That’s partly a by-product of how popular messaging apps are full-stop, with more than 75 percent of all smartphone users having at least one messaging app in use on their devices.
“We live in a messaging-centric world, and customers expect the convenience and interactivity of messaging to be part of their experiences,” said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk founder, CEO and chairman, in a statement. “As long-time partners with Smooch, we know first hand how much they have advanced the conversational experience to bring together all forms of messaging and create a continuous conversation between customers and businesses.”
While the two companies were already working together, the acquisition will mean a closer integration.
That will be in multiple areas. Last year, Zendesk launched a new CRM play called Sunshine, going head to head with the likes of Salesforce in helping businesses better organise and make use of customer data. Smooch will build on that strategy to bring in data to Sunshine from messaging apps and the interactions that take place on them. Also last year, Zendesk launched an omnichannel play, a platform called The Suite, which it says “has become one of our most successful products ever,” with a 400 percent rise in its customers taking an omnichannel approach. Smooch already forms a key part of that, and it will be even more tightly so.
On the outbound side, for now, there will be two areas where Smooch will be used, Wolverton said. First will be on the basic level of giving Zendesk users the ability to see and create messaging app discussions within a dashboard where they are able to monitor and handle all customer relationship contacts: a conversation that was inititated now on, say, Twitter, can be easily moved into WhatsApp or whatever more direct channel someone wants to use.
Second, Wolverton said that customer care workers can use Smooch to send on “micro apps” to users to handle routine service enquiries, for example sending them links to make or change seat assignments on a flight.
Over time, the plan will be to bring in more automated options into the experience, which opens the door for using more AI and potentially bots down the line.
Indonesia is the latest nation to hit the hammer on social media after the government restricted the use of WhatsApp and Instagram following deadly riots yesterday.
Numerous Indonesia-based users are today reporting difficulties sending multimedia messages via WhatsApp, which is one of the country’s most popular chat apps, while the hashtag #instagramdown is trending among the country’s Twitter users due to problems accessing the Facebook-owned photo app.
Wiranto, a coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, confirmed in a press conference that the government is limiting access to social media and “deactivating certain features” to maintain calm, according to a report from Coconuts.
Rudiantara, the communications minister of Indonesia and a critic of Facebook, explained that users “will experience lag on Whatsapp if you upload videos and photos.”
Facebook — which operates both WhatsApp and Instagram — didn’t explicitly confirm the blockages , but it did say it has been in communication with the Indonesian government.
“We are aware of the ongoing security situation in Jakarta and have been responsive to the Government of Indonesia. We are committed to maintaining all of our services for people who rely on them to communicate with their loved ones and access vital information,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
A number of Indonesia-based WhatsApp users confirmed to TechCrunch that they are unable to send photos, videos and voice messages through the service. Those restrictions are lifted when using Wi-Fi or mobile data services through a VPN, the people confirmed.
The restrictions come as Indonesia grapples with political tension following the release of the results of its presidential election on Tuesday. Defeated candidate Prabowo Subianto said he will challenge the result in the constitutional court.
Riots broke out in capital state Jakarta last night, killing at least six people and leaving more than 200 people injured. Following this, it is alleged that misleading information and hoaxes about the nature of riots and people who participated in them began to spread on social media services, according to local media reports.
Protesters hurl rocks during clash with police in Jakarta on May 22, 2019. – Indonesian police said on May 22 they were probing reports that at least one demonstrator was killed in clashes that broke out in the capital Jakarta overnight after a rally opposed to President Joko Widodo’s re-election. (Photo by ADEK BERRY / AFP)
For Facebook, seeing its services forcefully cut off in a region is no longer a rare incident. The company, which is grappling with the spread of false information in many markets, faced a similar restriction in Sri Lanka in April, when the service was completely banned for days amid terrorist strikes in the nation. India, which just this week concluded its general election, has expressed concerns over Facebook’s inability to contain the spread of false information on WhatsApp, which is its largest chat app with over 200 million monthly users.
Indonesia’s Rudiantara expressed a similar concern earlier this month.
“Facebook can tell you, ‘We are in compliance with the government’. I can tell you how much content we requested to be taken down and how much of it they took down. Facebook is the worst,” he told a House of Representatives Commission last week, according to the Jakarta Post.
A multi-month hunt for political disinformation spreading on Facebook in Europe suggests there are concerted efforts to use the platform to spread bogus far right propaganda to millions of voters ahead of a key EU vote which kicks off tomorrow.
Following the independent investigation, Facebook has taken down a total of 77 pages and 230 accounts from Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain and Poland — which had been followed by an estimated 32 million people and generated 67 million ‘interactions’ (i.e. comments, likes, shares) in the last three months alone.
The bogus mainly far-right disinformation networks were not identified by Facebook — but had been reported to it by campaign group Avaaz — which says the fake pages had more Facebook followers and interactions than all the main EU far right and anti-EU parties combined.
“The results are overwhelming: the disinformation networks upon which Facebook acted had more interactions (13 million) in the past three months than the main party pages of the League, AfD, VOX, Brexit Party, Rassemblement National and PiS combined (9 million),” it writes in a new report.
“Although interactions is the figure that best illustrates the impact and reach of these networks, comparing the number of followers of the networks taken down reveals aneven clearer image. The Facebook networks takedown had almost three times (5.9 million) the number of followers as AfD, VOX, Brexit Party, Rassemblement National and PiS’s main Facebook pages combined (2 million).”
Avaaz has previously found and announced far right disinformation networks operating in Spain, Italy and Poland — and a spokesman confirmed to us it’s re-reporting some of its findings now (such as the ~30 pages and groups in Spain that had racked up 1.7M followers and 7.4M interactions, which we covered last month) to highlight an overall total for the investigation.
“Our report contains new information for France, United Kingdom and Germany,” the spokesman added.
Examples of politically charged disinformation being spread via Facebook by the bogus networks it found include a fake viral video seen by 10 million people that supposedly shows migrants in Italy destroying a police car (but was actually from a movie; which Avaaz adds that this fake had been “debunked years ago”); a story in Poland claiming that migrant taxi drivers rape European women, including a fake image; and fake news about a child cancer center being closed down by Catalan separatists in Spain.
There’s lots more country-specific detail in its full report.
In all, Avaaz reported more than 500 suspicious pages and groups to Facebook related to the three-month investigation of Facebook disinformation networks in Europe. Though Facebook only took down a subset of the far right muck-spreaders — around 15% of the suspicious pages reported to it.
“The networks were either spreading disinformation or using tactics to amplify their mainly anti-immigration, anti-EU, or racist content, in a way that appears to breach Facebook’s own policies,” Avaaz writes of what it found.
It estimates that content posted by all the suspicious pages it reported had been viewed some 533 million times over the pre-election period. Albeit, there’s no way to know whether or not everything it judged suspicious actually was.
In a statement responding to Avaaz’s findings, Facebook told us:
We thank Avaaz for sharing their research for us to investigate. As we have said, we are focused on protecting the integrity of elections across the European Union and around the world. We have removed a number of fake and duplicate accounts that were violating our authenticity policies, as well as multiple Pages for name change and other violations. We also took action against some additional Pages that repeatedly posted misinformation. We will take further action if we find additional violations.
The company did not respond to our question asking why it failed to unearth this political disinformation itself.
Ahead of the EU parliament vote, which begins tomorrow, Facebook invited a select group of journalists to tour a new Dublin-based election security ‘war room’ — where it talked about a “five pillars of countering disinformation” strategy to prevent cynical attempts to manipulate voters’ views.
But as Avaaz’s investigation shows there’s plenty of political disinformation flying by entirely unchecked.
One major ongoing issue where political disinformation and Facebook’s platform is concerned is that how the company enforces its own rules remains entirely opaque.
We don’t get to see all the detail — so can’t judge and assess all its decisions. Yet Facebook has been known to shut down swathes of accounts deemed fake ahead of elections, while apparently failing entirely to find other fakes (such as in this case).
It’s a situation that does not look compatible with the continued functioning of democracy given Facebook’s massive reach and power to influence.
Nor is the company under an obligation to report every fake account it confirms. Instead, Facebook gets to control the timing and flow of any official announcements it chooses to make about “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” — dropping these self-selected disclosures as and when it sees fit, and making them sound as routine as possible by cloaking them in its standard, dryly worded newspeak.
Back in January, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandbergadmitted publicly that the company is blocking more than 1M fake accounts every day. If Facebook was reporting every fake it finds it would therefore need to do so via a real-time dashboard — not sporadic newsroom blog posts that inherently play down the scale of what is clearly embedded into its platform, and may be so massive and ongoing that it’s not really possible to know where Facebook stops and ‘Fakebook’ starts.
The suspicious behaviours that Avaaz attached to the pages and groups it found that appeared to be in breach of Facebook’s stated rules include the use of fake accounts, spamming, misleading page name changes and suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior.
When Avaaz previously reported the Spanish far right networks Facebook subsequently told us it had removed “a number” of pages violating its “authenticity policies”, including one page for name change violations but claimed “we aren’t removing accounts or Pages for coordinated inauthentic behavior”.
So again, it’s worth emphasizing that Facebook gets to define what is and isn’t acceptable on its platform — including creating terms that seek to normalize its own inherently dysfunctional ‘rules’ and their ‘enforcement’.
Such as by creating terms like “coordinated inauthentic behavior”, which sets a threshold of Facebook’s own choosing for what it will and won’t judge political disinformation. It’s inherently self-serving.
Given that Facebook only acted on a small proportion of what Avaaz found and reported overall, we might posit that the company is setting a very high bar for acting against suspicious activity. And that plenty of election fiddling is free flowing under its feeble radar. (When we previously asked Facebook whether it was disputing Avaaz’s finding of coordinated inauthentic behaviour vis-a-vis the far right disinformation networks it reported in Spain the company did not respond to the question.)
Much of the publicity around Facebook’s self-styled “election security” efforts has also focused on how it’s enforcing new disclosure rules around political ads. But again political disinformation masquerading as organic content continues being spread across its platform — where it’s being shown to be racking up millions of interactions with people’s brains and eyeballs.
Plus, as we reported yesterday, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute into pre-EU election content sharing on Facebook has found that sources of disinformation-spreading ‘junk news’ generate far greater engagement on its platform than professional journalism.
So while Facebook’s platform is also clearly full of real people sharing actual news and views, the fake BS which Avaaz’s findings imply is also flooding the platform, gets spread around more, on a per unit basis. And it’s democracy that suffers — because vote manipulators are able to pass off manipulative propaganda and hate speech as bona fide news and views as a consequence of Facebook publishing the fake stuff alongside genuine opinions and professional journalism.
It does not have algorithms that can perfectly distinguish one from the other, and has suggested it never will.
The bottom line is that even if Facebook dedicates far more resource (human and AI) to rooting out ‘election interference’ the wider problem is that a commercial entity which benefits from engagement on an ad-funded platform is also the referee setting the rules.
Indeed, the whole loud Facebook publicity effort around “election security” looks like a cynical attempt to distract the rest of us from how broken its rules are. Or, in other words, a platform that accelerates propaganda is also seeking to manipulate and skew our views.
What’s the cord-cutting equivalent to ditching your kitchen? Uber’s upcoming subscription to unlimited free food delivery. Uber is preparing to launch the $9.99 per month Uber Eats Pass, according to code hidden in Uber’s Android app.
The subscription would waive Uber’s service fee that’s typically 15 percent of your order cost. Given that’s often $5 or more, users stand to save a lot if they order in frequently. But Uber could still earn money on menu item markups, cover costs with a flat order fee that protects against someone ordering a single taco, and most importantly, build loyalty and scale at a time of intense food delivery competition.
The Uber Eats Pass was first spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, the notorious reverse engineering specialist who’s become a frequent TechCrunch tipster. She managed to generate screenshots from Uber’s Android app code the reveals a prototype of the feature. “Get free delivery, any restaurant, any time” is says, showing the amount of money you could have or already saved.
A Uber spokesperson did not dispute the legitimacy of the findings and told TechCrunch “We’re always thinking about new ways to enhance the Eats experience.” They declined to provide further details, which could hint that a launch is imminent but some details are still subject to change. For now we don’t know exactly what perks come with an Eats Pass or where it will be launching first.
At $9.99 per month, the Uber Eats Pass would cost the same and work similarly to Postmates Unlimited and DoorDash DashPass. If they all seem like good deals, you see why they’re less about immediate revenue and more about customer lock-in. You’re a lot less likely to order GrubHub or Caviar if you’ve already pre-paid to cover your Uber Eats delivery costs. And whichever apps emerge from this battle will have instituted the scale and steady behavior to raise prices or just enjoy large lifetime value from each subscriber.
Exploring new business opportunities could help perk up Uber’s share price which closed at $41.50 today two weeks after IPOing at an opening price of $42. There are fears that intense competition across both ride sharing and food delivery could make for an expensive road ahead for the newly public company. Any way it can gain an edge on its rivals keep users from straying to them is important. The logistics giant is already experimenting with allowing restaurants to offer discounts in exchange for promoted placement in the app, which is the first step to Uber becoming an ads company where businesses pay for extra exposure.
If Uber combined Eats Pass with its car service subscription Ride Passes, you have the foundation for a sort of Uber Prime experience — one where you pay an upfront subscription fee that scores you perks and discounts but also makes you likely to spend a lot more on Uber. That bundle could be even more central to Uber than Amazon, which has few direct rivals in the west. People will need to eat and get around for the foreseeable future. Subsidizing loyalty now could be costly in the short-term, but poise Uber for years of lucrative business down the line.
EA is giving The Sims 4 away for free on PC for a limited time. This is The Sims 4 Standard Edition, so you just get the base game without any of the expansions. Still, even getting the base game for free is surely an offer that’s too good to turn down.
How to Get The Sims 4 for Free on PC
You can get The Sims 4 for free until May 28, 2019. It’s available for both Windows and Mac, and all you need is an Origin account. Which is also free. Once downloaded the game will be yours to keep, even after May 28 has come and gone.
You can grab your free copy of The Sims 4 either through the Origin client or the online storefront. However, some users are reporting issues claiming their free copy through the Origin client, so just visit The Sims 4 page on the Origin storefront.
Once there, you should see a banner saying, “The Sims 4 is FREE for a limited time”. If so, just click “Get it Free” and you’ll be able to download The Sims 4 to keep forever. If you can’t see the banner then you’re too late and you’ve missed out on a nice freebie.
As The Sims 4 was released in 2014, the minimum specs shouldn’t be a problem. On Windows, The Sims 4 will work on XP (SP3) and upwards with just 2GB of RAM. On Mac, The Sims 4 will work on macOS X 10.7.5 and upwards with at least 4GB of RAM.
Is EA About to Announce The Sims 5?
EA isn’t being completely charitable here. Giving The Sims 4 away for free may entice you to invest in the various expansion packs, which will cost you cold, hard cash. Or perhaps EA is gearing up to announce The Sims 5 and hoping to generate interest ahead of time.
Even though The Sims 4 has been out for a number of years perhaps you’re still playing The Sims 3 for reasons known only to you. If so then here are the big differences between The Sims 3 and The Sims 4. Possibly just in time for The Sims 5 to supersede both.
According to the game’s website, the idea was to make a fun game that explored emojis as art and a form of communication.
The subscription would waive Uber’s service fee that’s typically 15 percent of your order cost. Given that’s often $5 or more, users stand to save a lot if they order in frequently. But Uber could still earn money on menu item markups, cover costs with a flat order fee that protects against someone ordering a single taco, and most importantly, build loyalty and scale at a time of intense food delivery competition.
