Quibi will launch with 50 shows on April 6

Short-form video service Quibi is announcing its full launch lineup today — exactly once month before launch.

True to its name (which stands for “quick bites”), Quibi will focus on short videos that you can watch on your phone. Its content will include “movies in chapters” (longer, scripted stories broken into chapters that are between seven and 10 minutes long), as well as unscripted shows, documentaries and daily hits of news/entertainment/inspiration.

The company, which is led by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, says there will be 50 shows live at launch, including:

• “Most Dangerous Game,” a dystopian action thriller starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz
• “Survive,” a drama starring Sophie Turner about the aftermath of a plane crash, based on a novel by Alex Morel
• “Chrissy’s Court,” in which Chrissy Teigen presides over small-claims court
• “Murder House Flip,” in which homeowners try to renovate homes that are infamous for murders committed inside
• “Thanks a Million,” a reality series where celebrities (including executive producer Jennifer Lopez) give $100,000 to regular people who must them pay it forward
• “Last Night’s Last Night,” Entertainment Weekly’s daily recap of late-night shows
• “The Replay by ESPN,” offering daily episodes covering sports news

Quibi says it will release a total of 8,500 episodes across 175 shows in its first year.

Using the company’s “Turnstyle” technology, viewers will be able to switch seamlessly between watching videos in portrait and landscape mode. In fact, some shows are designed specifically to offer different-but-complementary viewing experiences in different viewing modes.

The service will cost $4.99 per month with ads or $7.99 per month without ads. Quibi is also announcing today that it’s offering a 90-day free trial — but you’ll need to sign up on the Quibi website before the official launch on April 6.

Quibi execs Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman explain their big vision

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How women are revolutionizing Rwanda | Agnes Binagwaho

How women are revolutionizing Rwanda | Agnes Binagwaho

In 1996, Agnes Binagwaho returned home to Rwanda in the aftermath of its genocide. She considered leaving amid the overwhelming devastation, but women in her community motivated her to stay and help rebuild -- and she's glad she did. In an inspiring talk, Binagwaho reflects on her work as Rwanda's former Minister of Health and discusses her new women's education initiative for the country, which strives to create one of the greatest levels of gender equality worldwide.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

The 5 Best Android Apps to Reduce Image Size

Practically everyone nowadays uses their phone or tablet to take and store photographs. They are a very useful tool to share your images quickly via social media and messaging apps. Sometimes, an image may be too large to share. You may even wish to only share part of a picture and not the whole thing.

There is a range of apps available that can alter the dimensions of an image, whether that is via cropping or resizing the picture. There are also several apps at your disposal to reduce the actual file size of an image. Read on to discover which apps suit your needs.

1. Pixlr

Pixlr is a very popular photo editor for Android users. Not only can it resize and crop your photos, but it also has a wealth of other handy features available. This is an excellent app for beginners, too. It has a nice user interface that is easy to navigate and the controls are straightforward and simple to use. What’s not to like?

The home screen features a number of options when you launch the app. You can use your camera to take a picture, which you can then edit using one of Pixlr’s many functions. There is an option to edit the existing photos on your device or stored on your cloud. You can create a collage of images that can be customized to get a number of different styles. There are even some decorative elements within the Templates tool.

Once you have selected your image within the app, cropping couldn’t be easier. Opening the “tools” menu offers a range of nifty tricks, with the cropping function being the first to choose from. Selecting the crop tool presents you with a number of options. “Free mode” lets you choose the cropping area, while there are also several aspect ratios to choose from. There are also plenty of effects to play with, so you can customize your snaps.

Download: Pixlr for Android (Free, with premium version available)

2. Adobe Photoshop Express

If you are looking for something a little more advanced, then check out Adobe’s Express version of their world-famous Photoshop app. Designed for editing your pics on the go, this is a great app with bags of functionality. Adobe has provided tonnes of features to give your shots that professional edge, even though the app is mobile-native.

The app allows you to select images from your device, cloud, Lightroom (another Adobe app) or your Adobe asset library. You can also take a picture with the phone camera and edit it there and then. Once you have selected the image you would like to work with, a seemingly limitless range of options will present themselves. Filters, borders, and stickers are all available to add fun-factor to your pics.

The crop tool offers a wide selection of aspect ratios that you can use, some of which are incredibly helpful. There are the “usual suspects”, so you can crop the image to 16:9 or 6:4 for example. Adobe goes one step further than many apps, though. You can choose from “Facebook Page Cover”, “Youtube Channel Art”, and even “Kindle” automatic cropping sizes! With this level of functionality, Adobe Photoshop Express really stands out from the crowd.

Download: Adobe Photoshop Express for Android (Free)

3. Lit Photo Compress and Resize

Lit Photo’s Photo Compress and Resize app is a super-easy way to compress, crop, and resize images. This makes sending photos over email, Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger, a cinch. The app is great in terms of navigation, with all of the app’s functions displayed upon launch.

As mentioned, there are three main jobs the app can do. Selecting one of the options offers further customization in terms of resizing the image. Compression mode allows you to compress the image in terms of quality, measured by percentage, or by size, measured in megabytes. This reduces the file size.

If you want to change the dimensions of the picture, then you achieve this via the Resize option. Again, this allows various methods of resizing. You can do so via pixel count, which allows you to maintain the aspect ratio or not, depending on what you want to do with the image. Handily, resize also allows you to compress the image within the same option. You can double down on reducing the size of the file in one fell swoop.

Finally, there is the crop tool. This is pretty limited, as it only has five cropping ratios available. However, there are plenty of other ways to crop an image. So, if you can live with only a small selection of auto-crop features, then this is an excellent app.

Download: Lit Photo Compress and Resize for Android (Free, with premium version available)

4. Codenia Image Size

Codenia offers a practical-yet-simple solution to image resizing. The app has plenty of features that you will find in a lot of similar apps. There are plenty of customizable options in the “photo editor” section, which allow you to make various adjustments to the appearance of your picture.

Where Codenia Image Size really shines, though, is its image resizing function. The screen contains all of the information you need alongside the image itself. Below the toolbar at the top of the app screen is a box that contains information about the original image. This details the original dimensions of the pic, the date it was taken, and the dpi.

Below the information box sit the controls for altering the image height and width, up to a maximum of 6000 pixels. You can input the required dimensions yourself or select from preset dimensions, accessed via a pop-up menu. You can also lock the aspect ratio to ensure the image looks the same despite the size change.

Below the pic itself, which sits in the center of the screen, is the information on file size. This is incredibly useful as it lets you see the original file size of the picture and the resulting file size once you have finished editing.

Download: Codenia Image Size for Android (Free, with premium version available)

5. Resize Me

XnView is a well-known PC software developer in computer-user circles. It has been a go-to simple image editor for years and their mobile Resize Me app offers excellent tools for reducing file size. If an easy-to-use image resizing app is on your list of downloads, then this is all you need.

Launching the app allows you to select a photo from your album, take a new one, or batch convert a bunch of snaps. The first two options work in the same way once you have selected or taken a picture. You have options to flip horizontally and vertically, as well as rotating the picture.

Cropping is easy too, with a “free crop” tool present along with a range of preset ratios to crop to. The final option allows you to select the size for saving the picture, presented as a list. The first few options include a percentage value next to the dimensions, so you can see the difference in file size once the reduction is applied.

The batch converter is where the app really stands out, though. With this tool, you simply select a swathe of photos to alter and then select the new dimensions. Very easy and very useful if you want to alter a load of snaps in one go.

Download: Resize Me for Android (Free, with premium version available)

Which Image Resizer Is Right for Your Needs?

A quick flick through the Android app store will reveal a glut of resizing apps. Many of them offer exactly the same thing, so if you select one of the above apps you can save some drive space as well as reducing the size of your images. A great all-rounder will service a number of photo-editing needs.

Are you looking to take your photographs to the next level? Check out the best apps to animate your photos on Android and iPhone.

Read the full article: The 5 Best Android Apps to Reduce Image Size

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Mark Cuban backs ChatableApps, developer of a hearing assist app that removes background noise

ChatableApps, a U.K. startup commercialising the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr Andy Simpson, has quietly picked up seed backing from Mark Cuban. The company has built a smartphone app that provides hearing assistance by removing background noise in near real-time.

Alongside Simpson, the company’s co-founders are Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan Sliney and George Boyle — the original team behind the music discovery app Soundwave (acquired by Spotify) — and later joined by CEO Giles Tongue, formerly of wearable tech startup NURVV, who has been tasked with taking the business forward.

“Dr Andy Simpson is our CSO [chief science officer] and inventor,” Tongue tells me. “He brings together the auditory neuroscience, auditory perception, neural signal processing and artificial Intelligence, is an AI maverick and contrarian thinker, and this unusual intersection are what has led to the creation of our proprietary ground up neuroscience-led AI. His prolific research had over 400 citations before he went into stealth mode”.

Since then the team have been busy (although largely flying under the radar). Chatable’s hearing assistant app is available in the Play Store in open beta but is still considered “pre-launch”.

“We’re in a constant cycle of pre-clinical validation, which is going amazingly,” says Tongue. “We’ve heard ‘life changing,’ and had tears in the eyes… of early adopters”.

Chatable’s O’Driscoll says the company’s technology and approach is “completely unique,” as it doesn’t use noise filtering or other DSP techniques. “It’s actually a deep learning neural net approach to speech and noise separation that doesn’t apply filters to the original audio but rather it listens and re-prints a brand new audio stream in near real time which is a mimic of just the vocal components of the original audio,” he tells me.

Describing Chatable as a “click and go” universal hearing aid, O’Driscoll says the app has been engineered to work on any modern day £100 smartphone and with regular ear buds. “The app produces a clear and loud voice so is easy for the user to hear a conversation, and features two sliders, one to turn up volume, the other to control background noise,” he explains.

More broadly, Tongue believes the “global hearing epidemic” is the biggest health issue at scale that AI can solve, and that Chatable has an opportunity to help millions of people in a life changing way. According to the World Health Organisation there are 466 million people with disabling hearing loss. “I believe Chatable has the power to be the first app able to address a global health epidemic using an everyday smartphone,” he says.

Meanwhile, Chatable plans to generate revenue on a subscription basis, charging £9.99 per month. This is certainly designed to ensure the startup is sustainable and can continue to invest in its product for the long term (for example, an iPhone version of the app is currently in private beta. However, I hope the price can be brought down over time so that it becomes truly affordable to everybody that needs it.

AudioTelligence raises $8.5M Series A to bring its ‘autofocus for sound’ to voice assistants

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Business Greetings

Business Greetings

You Can Now Ask Alexa About the US Election

It’s an election year in the United States, with the 2020 US presidential election due to be held on November 3, 2020. A lot needs to happen between now and then, but how are you going to keep up with all of the latest news? Amazon thinks Alexa has the answer(s)…

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Alexa Knows Everything About the 2020 US Elections

In a post on Day One, Amazon details all of the ways you can stay up-to-date on the 2020 US presidential election with Alexa. The company claims that “Alexa has already answered millions of questions on politics since the beginning of the year.”

This is all thanks to “a knowledge graph that utilizes powerful AI and machine learning to encode billions of facts in real time.” Which means that Alexa has “a deep knowledge of election-related information” that you, the voters, can make use of.

Looking to stay up-to-date on #Election2020? Ask Alexa! https://t.co/vVFixDZcr5

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) March 2, 2020

Alexa can “share the latest polls, tell you about candidate positions, recap debates, and much more.” With “sources such as the Associated Press, Ballotpedia, RealClearPolitics and Factba.se” all helping to keep Alexa—and subsequently, you—informed.

10 Things to Ask Alexa About the 2020 US Elections

There are a wide range of questions you can ask Alexa about the 2020 US presidential election. And with queries related to the debates, candidates, endorsements, and registering to vote, you don’t even have to wait until polling day to get involved:

• “Alexa, when is the next debate?”
• “Alexa, what happened in the last debate?”
• “Alexa, where does [candidate] stand on [education/healthcare/etc.]?”
• “Alexa, who endorses [candidate]?”
• “Alexa, how many delegates does [candidate] have?”
• “Alexa, who can I vote for in [state]?”
• “Alexa, how can I register to vote?”
• “Alexa, when are the polls open?”
• “Alexa, who won in [state?]”
• “Alexa, what are the election results today?”

While asking Alexa for the latest news on the election is serious, Amazon’s virtual assistant does claim to have a sense of humor. To test her skills in that department, here are the funniest questions you can ask Alexa. Unless you know of anything funnier.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

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The 8 Best Chrome Privacy Extensions for Better Security

Google Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser. But it isn’t the world’s most private browser—not by a long shot. Chrome receives consistently poor reviews regarding its approach to privacy. As the world’s largest advertising company, Google is a prime position to exploit the millions of Chrome users around the globe.

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Thankfully, you can take steps to increase your Google Chrome privacy using extensions. Here are the 8 best privacy extensions for Google Chrome.

1. uBlock Origin

Ads are everywhere online. They keep the internet ticking over in many ways, keeping many of the major sites and services you use every day completely free. With ads comes tracking. Tracking scripts follow you around the internet, logging your activity and using that data to streamline the ads you see.

uBlock Origin lets you block many of those intrusive third-party tracking scripts. The extension features several handy pre-built third-party tracking lists you can toggle on and off. You can also easily whitelist other sites and services (as many websites rely on advertising income to stay afloat and do not display offensive ads!) as you browse the web.

The bonus to uBlock Origin is its malware and malvertising blocking. uBlock Origin can block known malicious domains, as well as domains known to display malicious advertising and other nasties.

Download: uBlock Origin (Free)

2. Blur

Blur is a handy app that offers two important functions.

First up, Blur is a password management extension. It creates a strong, unique password for each online account you open, boosting your security and privacy. The extension saves your password, encrypting the password data using super-strong AES-256.

Second, Blur creates a layer of protection between you and the services you sign-up for. It works like this: any time you need an email address to sign up for a service, Blur provides a one-off masked email address and you use this as your login. Any emails or alerts sent to you from the service still come through to your regular email inbox. But if there is a data breach, and a hacker gets your one-off address, your real address is protected. The hacker only gets your Blur address.

Blur also comes in two flavors. The Premium version also offers credit card masking, which is like email masking, but offers protection for your credit and debit cards. Furthermore, you can also use Blur masked phone numbers to add another layer of privacy to your Chrome experience.

Download: Blur (Free)

Also, check out our article on the best password managers!

3. HTTPS Everywhere

The HTTPS Everywhere extension makes sure that every website you visit uses the much stronger HTTPS protocol instead of regular HTTP. HTTPS encrypts your internet connection to a website, making sure your browsing session is secure and private. The regular HTTP connection does not offer the same protection.

In 2018, Google announced that Chrome would begin using the stronger HTTPS protocol to give users more privacy and security. Many sites are now configured to use HTTPS. However, there are still millions of websites that are not and will default to HTTP. Google Chrome will display a warning when you attempt to access a site using HTTP rather than HTTPS and ask if you want to proceed. And that is exactly where the HTTPS Everywhere extension is useful—for those millions of sites still using HTTP.

Download: HTTPS Everywhere (Free)

4. Unshorten.link

The Unshorten.link Chrome extension provides a simple but useful service. It unshortens any shortened link. When a link is shortened, it is easier to hide a malicious URL, and therefore easier to trick someone into clicking something they shouldn’t.

Once installed, Unshorten.link reroutes you to its secure page when you click a shortened link. There you can see the actual target URL and decide whether the link is safe or not.

Download: Unshorten.link (Free)

5. DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials

DuckDuckGo is the privacy-focused alternative to Google Search. Where Google uses your data to serve you targeted adverts, DuckDuckGo does the opposite. If you want an instant privacy boost, switching to DuckDuckGo for your internet searches is a great easy option.

You can take it one step further, however, and install the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials Chrome extension. The Privacy Essentials extension features options for script and tracker blocking, makes sure you always visit the HTTPS version of a site and introduces a handy privacy grading for each site you visit. The privacy grading ranges from A-F and it helps you understand the level of privacy to expect on a website at a glance.

Download: DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials (Free)

6. Disconnect Facebook

Facebook is well known for its privacy issues. Like Google, Facebook monetizes your data and sells it to advertisers. But it isn’t just on the Facebook site that the social media giant hoovers up your data. Any site that features a social login option is also selling your data. Similarly, sites with social media plugins that allow you to Like or Tweet create the same issue.

Disconnect Facebook blocks Facebook from tracking you around the internet and increases your privacy when you’re not using the social media site.

Download: Facebook Disconnect (Free)

7. Privacy Badger

Privacy Badger is a script and tracker-blocking Chrome extension developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Privacy Badger is not specifically to block ads, but it may well block some advertisements from displaying.

The EFF has a very strong focus on protecting privacy, and Privacy Badger receives frequent updates to make sure it is blocking as many trackers as possible. Once installed, you can click the Privacy Badger icon and see what level of tracking is taking place on each site you visit. Trackers are color-coded depending on their status, such as being an intrusive third-party tracker and so on.

Download: Privacy Badger (Free)

8. Click&Clean

Click & Clean is a great privacy tool to keep your browser free of personal and private data. You can clear any existing browser data with a single click, immediately cleaning your browser.

Click & Clean’s drop-down menu features loads of options. You can select the data you want to clean manually or have it clean everything. Another handy Click & Clean feature is that it lets you access the data other Chrome extensions are using and storing. You might find that an extension is hiding private data without informing you.

Finally, you can also use Click & Clean to wipe any data Google Chrome holds after you use Incognito Mode. A common misconception is that Incognito Mode stops any data storing in your browser. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case.

Download: Click&Clean (Free)

Or Try a Privacy-Focused Alternative Browser

Chrome has some great features. But it is also a bit of a privacy issue and can be a system resource hog at times, too. If you want to boost your privacy truly, VPN Proof suggests switching to an alternative browser, such as Mozilla Firefox. Firefox has several excellent privacy features built into the browser, and many of the same Chrome privacy extensions are also available for Firefox.

In addition to better security, Firefox is superior when it comes to its important privacy tweaks and settings.

Read the full article: The 8 Best Chrome Privacy Extensions for Better Security

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What Is a SOCKS Proxy and How Do You Use It?

What’s a SOCKS proxy? There are all kinds of proxies and protocols on the internet, but none have such an amusing name like SOCKS, which is short for “SOCKets”.

Let’s break down the most common proxy, SOCKS5, and why it’s used so often.

What Is a SOCKS or SOCKS5 Proxy?

SOCKS proxies are normally used by installing them as a browser extension or configuring a torrent client to use a VPN provider’s proxy server.

A SOCKS proxy works by channeling your traffic through a proxy server, which then passes the information on to the intended destination. The SOCKS protocol achieves this by first establishing a TCP connection with the proxy server. Then, your computer can send data to the proxy server, which then passes the data onto its destination.

For example, let’s say you want to visit a website hosted in another country. The website blocks anyone connecting from outside the country. To get around this block, you can use a SOCKS proxy located within the host country.

When you connect to the website via your proxy, the website sees the proxy server’s IP address instead of your own. Because the server is within the host country, the website sends the proxy server its data, which then sends the data on to you.

How Does It Differ From “Regular” Proxy Servers?

But hold on a minute! What we’ve just done is describe how a “normal” proxy server works. You’ve probably seen them around the internet; websites that offer free proxy servers to avoid geo-blocks or hide your identity. These are called “HTTP proxies” because they use the HTTP protocol.

So, what’s the difference between an HTTP proxy and a SOCKS proxy?

SOCKS Proxies Work With More Protocols

For one, an HTTP proxy server only works with the HTTP protocol. SOCKS, however, has no such allegiance. It can operate with many protocols, which happens to also include HTTP.

In computer science terms, we call a SOCKS proxy “low-level” and the HTTP proxy “high-level”. These “levels” refer to how specialized the software is. The higher the level, the more specialized the software is.

For example, let’s take the languages of the world. If we were to look at the “levels” that make up the French language, we can categorize it like this:

Languages of Planet Earth > European Languages > French

In this case, the “high-level domain” is French. It’s a specialized category over every language on Planet Earth. Someone who specializes in French can only speak French; similarly, HTTP proxies can only interact with the HTTP protocol.

The “low-end”, on the other hand, has wider application. The SOCKS protocol is like someone who understands all European languages. It has no specialization and can handle more protocols, including HTTP. This is similar to someone who knows every language in Europe, including French. As a result, SOCKS is best for handling other protocols like POP for email.

SOCKS Proxies Skirt Around Firewalls

Because SOCKS uses TCP to connect to a server, it doesn’t have to go through the same routes as HTTP traffic. As such, if there’s a firewall monitoring the HTTP ports, SOCKS can skirt around it even if it’s using HTTP. This is good for browsing restricted content without the firewall blocking the websites.

HTTP Proxies Handle HTTP Requests Better

The specialized nature of an HTTP proxy isn’t all bad, however. An HTTP proxy can process incoming HTTP data better than a SOCKS proxy. This is because the HTTP proxy specializes in one protocol, so it’s armed with more tools for HTTP processing than a SOCKS proxy.

For example, if you want to scrape the internet for specific pages, a SOCKS proxy isn’t idea. It doesn’t have the special tools to manage the pages as they come down the line, which means you’ll end up with a vast dump of irrelevant web pages.

An HTTP proxy, however, does have the tools for web scraping. You can tell it to search for webpages of a specific nature (such as toy pages for the ultimate Christmas shopping) and it will only deliver what matches the conditions.

What Is SOCKS5?

If you do some cursory browsing about SOCKS servers, you’ll see the term “SOCKS5” appear. The 5 at the end is simply the version number for the SOCKS protocol, much like how we have Windows 7, 8, and 10.

At the time of writing, SOCKS5 is the latest version of the SOCKS protocol. It improves on SOCKS4 by supporting UDP as well as TCP and offers more authentication methods. It’s also faster than SOCKS4. SOCKS5 may one day be replaced itself by such technologies as Shadowsocks which is used by Mullvad VPN.

What Is an SSH SOCKS Proxy?

One of the biggest flaws of a SOCKS proxy is the lack of encryption. If someone uses a protocol that doesn’t use encryption, an intruder can look at the data as it leaves the computer for the server. For this reason, you never want to use public Wi-Fi hotspots to conduct private business.

Fortunately, users can take matters into their own hands and use SSH encryption to hide their data. By establishing an SSH tunnel between their computer and the proxy server, the user can hide their details from prying eyes.

How to Use a SOCKS5 Proxy

If all this sounds like something you’d like to try, setting up a SOCKS5 proxy isn’t too difficult.

To start, you need a server to act as your proxy. You can set one up yourself, or you can find a free SOCKS5 proxy to use instead. If you’re stuck for a server to use, why not try the Spys One SOCKS5 proxy list for some ideas?

Once you have a paid or free SOCKS proxy, you’ll need to feed the details into a program to use it. These days, most modern-day browsers allow you to enter the details of a proxy server for it to use. On top of this, operating systems like Windows 10 accept proxy addresses and reroutes all sent data to it.

Once you’ve set up the server, give it a test run by loading a webpage. Not all proxy servers will work, so if yours fails to connect, try another server or double-check the proxy settings. If a webpage does load, go to WhatIsMyIPAddress and see if the IP and country match the proxy server you’re connecting to. If it does, you’re surfing on SOCKS5!

Free SOCKS5 Proxy: FoxyProxy Add-On

A good place to get started with a free SOCKS proxy is using the FoxyProxy Add-on for the Firefox Browser. FoxyProxy is 100% free. On top of that, you can also configure a SOCKS5 proxy if you sign up for a VPN service that includes a proxy as part of its free-trial subscription.

Download: FoxyProxy Firefox Add-On (Free)

Free VPN SOCKS5 Providers

Some other ways are to use a VPN service that offers a proxy as an option. To get the proxy for free, just sign up for a free trial subscription. For example, CactusVPN and Windscribe VPN both offer zero-cost trial versions of their VPN service.

Download: Windscribe Chrome Extension (Free)

Using Proxies for Enhanced Security

HTTP proxies are the most commonly used proxy servers, but SOCKS5 does have its advantages. They can handle more protocols and get around firewalls, making them a valuable tool for someone who wants privacy without much work.

A practical application of proxy technology that’s completely free and doesn’t require installation is a proxy search engine. A proxy search engine runs all search queries through a proxy which can keep your private information out of the hands of criminals and snoops.

Image credit: Funtap/Depositphotos

Read the full article: What Is a SOCKS Proxy and How Do You Use It?

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The 5 Best Open-Source Password Managers

If you use a computer to get online, then you’ve probably created a number of accounts across various websites. Some of us are juggling dozens. You may even have hundreds. A password manager can help you, your family members, and your work colleagues avoid the unsafe practice of using the same few passwords everywhere.

Most of the well-known options are proprietary web services that require you trust a profit-driven company with your online house keys. Open-source password managers keep these credentials in your hands only. You can install or self-host all the options on this list on your own machine. Which one is right for you?

1. KeePass

KeePass is the granddaddy of open-source password managers, having been around since the days of Windows XP. KeePass stores your passwords in an encrypted database that you can access via a password or digital key. You can import and export passwords in a wide variety of formats. Plus a larger number of plugins and variations have sprung up over the years, such as KeeWeb and KeePassX.

Since KeePass is primarily a Windows app, there are quite a few adaptations out there for other platforms. KeePassX is a cross-platform version primarily intended to provide a more Linux-friendly version. If you use the GNOME desktop environment, you may want to check out Password Safe, which will look more at home with the rest of the interface. Committed open source enthusiasts can even run the app on a Purism Librem 5.

KeeWeb is a web app that you can run inside a web browser (we recommend using Firefox and optimizing its privacy settings) or download as a standalone electron app, allowing you to access your KeePass database regardless of which machine you’re on (assuming you have a copy of your database available).

KeePass can also function as your team password manager. The simple approach is to store the database somewhere accessible to everyone on the team, with only the IT administrator having permission to change the file.

Download: KeePass Password Safe (Free)

2. Bitwarden

Are you a LastPass user looking for a more transparent alternative? Check out Bitwarden. This is a web service that you can access from any computer with a web browser. There are also mobile apps available for Android and iOS.

If you head over to Bitwarden’s website and sign up, you will run open source software but still save your passwords on the company’s servers. That’s not going to sit well with everyone, which is why you can self-host your own instance.

While Bitwarden is great for individual use, the service is just as suitable for small groups or large businesses. You can share passwords and a few files across various user groups, secure access with multifactor authentication, and audit logs. An API is available for you to integrate Bitwarden with your organization’s tools.

Bitwarden runs on servers, in your browser, on your desktop, on smartphones, and via the command lines. Source code is available for all of these versions, under the GNU General Public License 3.0 (GPL 3.0) or GNU Affero General Public License (APGL).

Bitwarden vs. LastPass

The biggest difference between Bitwarden and LastPass is that Bitwarden is open source with its code made available on GitHub. That means its code is fully auditable for potential backdoors and other security issues. On top of that, Bitwarden offers self-hosting options, meaning you can run it on your own server or computer without dealing with the security hazard of using a middleman.

Download: Bitwarden (Free)

3. Passbolt

Passbolt is a self-hosted password manager designed specifically for teams.

Passbolt integrates with online collaboration tools such as your browser, email, or chat client. You can self-host the program on your own servers in order to maintain complete control of the data, which is encrypted using GnuPG.

The project is licensed under the APGL. At times when you need more functionality, you can extend Passbolt by building on top of the JSON API.

Teams without the expertise or infrastructure to self-host can use a cloud version that Passbolt provides. The developers behind Passbolt are based in Luxembourg.

Download: Passbolt (Free)

4. Psono

Psono is another option for teams looking for open-source enterprise password management software. This is a self-hosted solution that offers an attractive web-based client written in Python, with source code available under the Apache 2.0 license.

In addition to sharing passwords, you can also manage files or folders. Browser extensions are available for both Mozilla Firefox (our preferred browser) and Google Chrome.

Psono is free for small teams, but larger companies will need to pay based on the number of users. Psono appears to come from a single developer, but at least the website is open about this. Such is the reality for many open-source tools. But with the code fully available, you’re free to extend or maintain the software as you wish.

Download: Psono (Free)

5. Teampass

Teampass is a team-oriented password manager with a few characteristics that warrant a place on this list. One is an offline mode, where you export your items to an encrypted file that you can use in locations without an internet connection.

Teampass isn’t the prettiest app, but the layout is functional in a way that many might prefer. You can quickly define roles, user privileges, and folder access. You can then organize folders using a tree view.

Teampass is another tool that comes from a single developer. The software is licensed under the GPL 3.0, so you’re free to make whatever changes you like, as long as you don’t use the code in a proprietary product.

The software is free to use, but you have the option to pay for support.

Download: Teampass (Free)

The Best Open-Source Password Managers: Summary

The number of self-hosted password managers available today mean you no longer have to trade away control for convenience. You can run software on your own servers, with code that you can audit, and access passwords via a web browser or smartphone. The end experience is comparable to LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane, or any other proprietary service that requires you trust another company to safeguard your credentials.

Each of these open-source password managers encrypts your data. They also give you the choice to secure your encrypted data using multifactor authentication via apps (like Duo or Google Authenticator) or dedicated devices such as YubiKey.

Is self-hosting as easy as signing up for a cloud service? No. But a committed home user who knows how to follow instructions can set up any of these services. A company with resources to hire experienced web admins and developers may find this to be an easier approach than trying to convince a service provider to add in any extra features they require.

Open-source password managers aren’t the only way of securely storing credentials. There are other options out there, such as security-focused password managers. And for those concerned about how passwords are transmitted, for the open-source community, there are a variety of open-source VPN providers.

Read the full article: The 5 Best Open-Source Password Managers

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GIMP vs. Photoshop: Which One Is Right for You?

Photoshop is the most popular image-editing app on the market, and GIMP is the best free alternative. However, deciding between the two can be difficult.

Both Photoshop and GIMP have their pros and cons, so which is right for you? Essentially, which image editor you choose to use depends on what you need it for.

In this article, we pit GIMP versus Photoshop, and help you figure out which of these two image editors is best.

If You Love Linux, Use GIMP

While not everyone will need to contend with this system requirement, there is one situation where GIMP is still the undisputed champion: on Linux.

You can find workarounds to use Adobe Photoshop on Linux, but it’s a hassle. If you’ve gone to the effort of setting up your own Linux system, you’ve also demonstrated that you know how to handle the complexities of open source software.

You’ve proven that you know how to use forums to troubleshoot these programs, too.

Additionally, if you’re using Linux, there’s a good chance that you’re against the idea of paying for software when there is a decent, open source alternative. In all three of these instances, GIMP is definitely the best app for you.

If You Love Your Phone, Use Photoshop

Over the last few years, Adobe has adapted its advanced photo-editing tools for smartphones. The first iterations of these apps weren’t that great, largely because the processing power of smartphones wasn’t strong enough.

Adobe’s latest attempts, however, have seen big improvements:

• As part of this collection of apps, Lightroom Mobile brings the best features of Lightroom to your smartphone. It’s available for iOS and Android.
• Photoshop Fix and Photoshop Mix add some of Photoshop’s most useful features to your phone, so you can edit your work on the go.
• Even better, the work that you do on your phone syncs back to all your devices through Adobe Cloud.

If you take a lot of pictures with your phone, or you want the ability to work while you’re away from your home or the office, then Photoshop is the best choice for you.

If You’re on a Budget, Use GIMP

Photoshop is an expensive app, and there’s no getting around this.

With the special Lightroom and Photoshop bundle, the price is currently $9.99/month. If you want to use Photoshop as a single-app monthly subscription, however, it jumps to $20.99/month.

Even worse, the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite is $52.99/month. That’s a lot of money, even for a professional designer. And the price keeps going up every year.

If you don’t need what Photoshop offers, or you only use it occasionally, it can be very hard to justify this expense. In cases like these—where you’re trying to weigh Adobe Photoshop versus GIMP—GIMP is the better app.

After all, when it comes to price you can’t beat free.

If You’re a Professional, Use Photoshop

If you can write Photoshop off as a business expense—or even better, get your work to pay for it—then Photoshop is the obvious tool to use.

Photoshop is also considered an industry standard app for many design-related businesses. Because of this, it’s the main tool of choice for professionals.

If you’re working with someone else, especially if you’re working remotely, they might send you a PSD file or another proprietary Adobe file format. If you don’t have the tools to handle this file, it’ll create issues for you at work.

As such, there’s very little reason to use GIMP if you’re a professional designer. Here’s a breakdown of what Photoshop can do that GIMP can’t.

If You Don’t Need It All the Time, Use GIMP

GIMP, despite its limitations in comparison to Photoshop, is a very powerful tool that is better than many other free photo-editing apps.

For some, mobile apps like Apple’s Photos or Instagram’s filter features will be enough for your photo-editing needs. However, very few of these apps allow you to do in-depth edits, such as selections, masks, and composite editing. GIMP does.

If you occasionally need a powerful photo-editing tool, and you don’t require PSD files to do your work, then GIMP is probably the best app for you.

If You’re a Designer, Use Photoshop

If you’re a professional designer then GIMP isn’t really an option. While the open-source app is good for quick logo mockups, unfortunately it doesn’t hold a candle to the full force of Adobe Creative Cloud.

Additionally, GIMP’s lack of CMYK support is an absolute deal breaker when you’re designing for print. Being able to design images using a CMYK color profile is a necessity for a designer. Without it, you’re hamstrung.

If You Dislike Adobe, Use GIMP

While this particular point might seem a little niche, there are people who don’t like Adobe as a company. One of the reasons for this upset is the Adobe Flash Player, and its proliferation on the web.

While Adobe is retiring the product, Flash will still be around until everyone collectively stops using it. As such, it’s vulnerable to exploits. There’s also the ever-increasing price of a Creative Cloud subscription, which is definitely not cheap.

If you hate Photoshop because of Adobe’s other products, or its subscription-based decisions, then GIMP is the better option for you.

If You’re a Photographer, Use Photoshop

Editing is just one part of post-processing for photographers. You also have to sort through the hundreds of photos that you’ve taken.

On a good day during a few hours of shooting, you can easily capture 500 images or more. A large chunk of these photos will be sketches or failed shots, but there will be at least five to 10 images that are worthy of further inspection. You just have to find them within that cluster.

With Adobe Creative Cloud:

• You can bundle Photoshop with a subscription to Lightroom.
• Both of these apps are good for sorting through lots of images and pulling out keepers.
• You also get a powerful RAW processor in Photoshop that simply doesn’t come with GIMP.

Even when you compare GIMP to Photoshop Elements—another imaging app—Adobe still comes out on top.

For editing an image here or there, GIMP is great. However, if you’re a serious photographer, you need to invest in Photoshop.

GIMP vs. Photoshop: Which Is Right for You?

Choosing between Adobe Photoshop and GIMP gets a lot easier when you consider what you need to use the app for.

If you’re a professional designer or photographer, then Photoshop is the obvious tool. However, if you use Linux, are on a budget, or only need to use the app occasionally, then GIMP is your best bet.

If you do choose GIMP over Photoshop, we’ve detailed how to install the best GIMP brushes and how to install the best GIMP plugins.

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Mobile banking app Empower Finance just closed a $20 million Series A round

Another afternoon, another round of funding for a mobile banking app. This time, it’s Empower Finance, a San Francisco-based company that’s headed up by former Sequoia Capital partner Warren Hogarth and which just closed on $20 million in Series A funding from Icon Ventures and Defy Ventures.

David Velez, who is the founder and CEO of Nubank, the largest fintech in Latin America, also joined the round.

We’d first written about the company in 2017, when Hogarth was just getting the business off the ground. Fast-forward a bit and Empower now employs 35 people and has attracted more than 600,000 active users to its platform, says Hogarth. What has drawn them in: the company’s promise of combining AI and actual human financial planners to help millennials in particular accrue some wealth, including, more newly, through its own checking account product and through a savings account that’s currently promising 1.60% in annual percentage yield with no minimums, no overdraft fees and unlimited withdrawals.

It’s all part of an overall offering that crunches through account holders’ bank and credit card accounts, and recommends how much they save into which account, how much they should spend given their overall picture, various ways they can cut costs and where and when they’ve surpassed their pre-configured budgets.

Of course, the company has so much competition it’s dizzying, but like the various upstarts against which it’s battling for mindshare, the opportunity that Empower is chasing is enormous, too. Though companies like Chime can seem overpriced given how fast investors have marked up their rounds — Chime’s newest financing, announced in December, was done at a $5.8 billion post-money valuation, which was four times more than the company was worth at the outset of 2019 — digital banks are still tiny fish in an ocean of institutional financial services, representing something like 3% of the market.

They’re gaining more market share by the day, too, including by charging far lower fees for much more.

In Empower’s case, users pay $6 a month, but Hogarth says they also save $300 a year in additional fees they would pay a brick-and-mortar bank. He insists that on average, it also helps them save $1,300 more annually, too.

As for all those other companies — Mint, Acorns, the list goes on — Hogarth sounds surprisingly sanguine. “If you look at it from the outside, it looks crowded. But the consumer financial services in the U.S. is a $2 trillion business, and we haven’t had a fundamental shift since maybe Schwab came along 30 years ago.”

Indeed, says Hogarth, because Empower and its rivals are mobile and branchless and don’t have legacy software to contend with, they’re able to take 60 to 70% of the cost structure out of the business.

What that means on an individual company level is that even if each upstart can attract 2 to 3 million customers, they can get to a multibillion-dollar market cap. At least, that kind of math is “why there’s so much interest in this space,” says Hogarth.

It’s also why people like Nubank’s Velez, who have seen this story play out in Europe and Latin America and who are seeing the early phases of it in the U.S., are apparently keeping the money spigot open for now.

Empower had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Sequoia, followed by a $4.5 million round led by Initialized Capital.

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Pex buys Dubset to build YouTube ContentID for TikTok & more

Social networks are in for a rude copyright awakening. A new European Union law called Article 17 essentially eradicates safe harbor and requires that they’ve made their “best effort” to get licenses from rights holders for all content on their platform. If a user uploads a video with a popular song in the background, tech platforms can’t just take it down if requested. They’ll be liable if they didn’t already try to get permission.

That’s good news for musicians and film producers who are more likely to get paid. But it could hurt influencers and creators whose clips and remixes might be blocked or have their revenue diverted. It will certainly be a huge headache for content sharing sites.

That’s where Pex comes in. The profitable royalty attribution startup founded in 2014 scans social networks and other user generated content sites for rightsholders’ content. Pex then lets them negotiate licensing with the platforms, request a take down, demand attribution, and/or track the consumption statistics. It’s collected a database of over 20 billion audio and video tracks found on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter and more. It’s like an independent YouTube ContentID.

Today that business gets a big boost as Pex is acquiring Dubset, which has spent 10 years tackling the problem of getting remixes and multi-song DJ sets legalized for streaming on services like Spotify to some success. The $11.3 million-funded Dubset does fingerprinting of 45 million tracks from over 50,000 rights holders down to the second so the artists behind the source material get paid.

Pex has come a long way from when CEO Rasty Turek tried build a Shazam for video. “It took me years to figure out how to do it technically, but there was no market for it” he tells me. Turns out that the technology was perfect for spotting illegal usage of copyrighted songs.

Now Pex will gain Dubset’s connections to tons record labels and other rightsholders in what two sources close to the deal says is an acquisition priced between $25 million and $50 million. “There are very few companies in the music business that have successfully licensed as much catalog as Dubset, and the music rights database they’ve built is massive and rare” Pex CEO Rasty Turek tells TechCrunch exclusively before the deal’s formal announcement tomorrow.

Together, they’ll be pushing Pex’s new Attribution Engine that establishes a three-sided marketplace for content. Instead of just working with rightsholders, the fresh tech can plug directly into big platforms and instantly identify copyrighted audio and visual files as short as one second. It can even suss out cover versions of songs via melody matching, as well as compressed, cropped, and modified variations. Creators can also use it to ensure the source material they’re remixing or turning into memes is given proper attribution or a cut of revenue.

The Attribution Engine earns money by facilitating the licenses and payments between platforms, rightsholders, and creators. It’s free to register content with the service as well as for platforms to perform

The Attribution Engine is free for rightsholders to register their content and free for platforms to run identification scans on what’s uploaded to them. using our asset lookup service. The hope is that by creating a simpler path to cooperation and revenue sharing, more rightsholders will make their content accessible for use on social networks or in remixes. It could also grant platforms protection from Article 17 liability since they’ll be able to say that Pex made it best effort to get content usage approval from rights holders.

“Basically every platform in the world that operates in the EU will have to identify all copyrighted content on their platform as it comes in or go back and identify all of it” says Dubset chief strategy office Bob Barbiere. “Dubset was really built to serve at the DJ or content creator level . . . doing it purely for the purposes of mix and remix content. Pex does it in a much bigger way for the platforms.”

For up-and-coming platforms like TikTok competitors Dubsmash or Triller, Pex’s business model is a gift. They don’t have to pay for the ID service until they’re ready to cut licensing deals with rightsholders when Pex adds a fee on top. Trying to build this stuff from scratch could be slow and hugely expensive, given YouTube’s still perfecting its ContentID system eight years in.

Pex will have to manage the careful balance of staying ahead of regulation but not so far that it’s building technology people won’t need for a long time. European Union states have until June 21st 2021 to implement Article 17 with local laws. “We don’t want others to out-innovate us, but we also don’t want to out-innovate ourselves out of existence by being too early and then waiting for the market to catch up to us” Rasty explains.

Image via HelpCloud

The internet needs this kind of infrastructure because we’re still at the beginning of the age of the remix. TikTok has proven how recontextualizing a song or vocal track with new visuals can create chains of jokes and content that go massively viral. The app productizes the Harlem Shake phenomenon, whereby people promote their own takes on a piece of content, drawing attention to the original and all the other versions. But these webs of remixes could be severed if platforms and rightsholders can’t forge licensing agreements.

“I hope that thanks to Pex, 20 years from now people will not have to think about copyright” Turek concludes. “Any content they produce and distribute on the open internet will be automatically attributed to them and generate revenue if they so choose.” That could allow more people to turn their passion for creation into their profession, whether they’re building an app, writing a song, or remixing a song into a meme for an app.

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Twitter CEO’s weak argument why investors shouldn’t fire him

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey might not spend six months a year in Africa, claims the real product development is under the hood, and gives an excuse for deleting Vine before it could become TikTok. Today he tweeted, via Twitter’s investor relations account, a multi-pronged defense of his leadership and the company’s progress.

The proclamations come as notorious activist investor Elliott Management prepares to pressure Twitter into a slew of reforms, potentially including replacing Dorsey with a new CEO, Bloomberg reported last week. Sources confirmed to TechCrunch that Elliott has taken a 4% to 5% stake in Twitter. Elliott has previously bullied eBay, AT&T, and other major corporations into making changes and triggered CEO departures.

…Focusing on one job and increasing accountability has made a huge difference for us. One of our core jobs is to keep people informed. We want to be a service that people turn to… to see what’s happening, to be a credible source that people learn from.

— Twitter Investor Relations (@TwitterIR) March 5, 2020

Specifically, Elliott is seeking change because of Twitter’s weak market performance, which as of last month had fallen 6.2% since July 2015 while Facebook had grown 121%. The corporate raider reportedly takes issue with Dorsey also running fintech giant Square, and having planned to spend up to six months a year in Africa. Dorsey tweeted that “Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!)”, despite cryptocurrency having little to do with Twitter.

Rapid executive turnover is another sore spot. Finally, Twitter is seen as moving glacially slow on product development, with little about its core service changing in the past five years beyond a move from 140 to 280 characters per tweet. Competing social apps like Facebook and Snapchat have made landmark acquisitions and launched significant new products like Marketplace, Stories, and Discover.

Dorsey spoke today at the Morgan Stanley investor conference, though apparently didn’t field questions about Elliott’s incursion. The CEO did take to his platform to lay out an argument for why Twitter is doing better than it looks, though without mentioning the activist investor directly. That type of response without mentioning to whom it’s directed, is popularly known as a subtweet. Here’s what he outlined:

On democracy: Twitter has prioritized healthy conversation and now “the #1 initiative is the integrity of the conversation around the elections” around the world, which it’s learning from. It’s now using humans and machine learning to weed out misinformation, yet Twitter still hasn’t rolled out labels on false news despite Facebook launching them in late 2016.

On revenue: Twitter expects to complete a rebuild of its core ad server in the first half of 2020, and it’s improving the experience of mobile app install ads so it can court more performance ad dollars. This comes seven years late to Facebook’s big push around app install ads.

On shutting down products: Dorsey claims that “5 years ago we had to do a really hard reset and that takes time to build from… we had been a company that was trying to do too many things…” But was it? Other than Moments, which largely flopped, and the move to the algorithmic feed ranking, Twitter sure didn’t seem to be doing too much and was already being criticized for slow product evolution as it tried to avoid disturbing its most hardcore users.

On stagnation: “Some people talk about the slow pace of development at Twitter. The expectation is to see surface level changes, but the most impactful changes are happening below the surface” Dorsey claims, citing using machine learning to improve feed  and notification relevance

Yet it seems telling that Twitter suddenly announced yesterday that it was testing Instagram Stories-esque feature Fleets in Brazil. No launch event. No US beta. No indication of when it might roll out elsewhere. It seems like hasty and suspiciously convenient timing for a reveal that might convince investors it is actually building new things.

On talent: Twitter is apparently hiring top engineers “that maybe we couldn’t get 3 years ago”. 2017 was also Twitter’s share price low point of $14 compared to $34 today, so it’s not much of an accomplishment that hiring is easier now. Dorsey claims that “Engineering is my main focus. Everything else follows from that.” Yet it’s been years since fail whales were prevalent, and the core concern now is that there’s not enough to do on Twitter, rather than what it does offer doesn’t function well.

On Jack himself: Dorsey says he should have added more context “about my intention to spend a few months in Africa this year”, including its growing population that’s still getting online. Yet the “Huge opportunity especially for young people to join Twitter” seemed far from his mind as he focused on how crypto trading was driving adoption of Square’s Cash App

“I need to reevaluate” the plan to work from Africa “in light of COVID-19 and everything else going on”. That makes coronavirus a nice scapegoat for the decision while the phrase “everything else” is doing some very heavy lifting in the face of Elliott’s activist investing.

Photographer: Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On fighting harassment: Nothing. The fact that Twitter’s most severe ongoing problem doesn’t even get a mention should clue you in to how many troubles have stacked up in front of Dorsey

Running Twitter is a big job. So big it’s seen a slew of leaders ranging from founders like Ev Williams to hired guns like Dick Costolo peel off after mediocre performance. If Dorsey wants to stay CEO, that should be his full-time, work-from-headquarters gig.

This isn’t just another business. Twitter is a crucial communications utility for the world. Its absence of innovation, failure to defend vulnerable users, and an inability to deliver financially has massive repercussions for society. It means Twitter hasn’t had the products or kept the users to earn the profits to be able to invest in solving its problems. Making Twitter live up to its potential is no sidehustle.

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