TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 dives deep into artificial intelligence and machine learning

As fields of research, machine learning and artificial intelligence both date back to the 50s. More than half a century later, the disciplines have graduated from the theoretical to practical, real world applications. We’ll have some of the top minds in both categories to discuss the latest advances and future of AI and ML on stage and Disrupt San Francisco in early September.

For the first time, Disrupt SF will be held in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It’s a huge space, which meant we could dramatically increase the amount of programming offered to attendees. And we did. Here’s the agenda. Tickets are still available even though the show is less than two weeks away. Grab one here.

The show features the themes currently facing the technology world including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Some of the top minds in AI and ML are speaking on several stages and some are taking audience questions. We’re thrilled to be joined by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China and current CEO of Sinovation Ventures, Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobots, Claire Delaunay, Nvidia VP of Engineering, and among others, Dario Gil, IBM VP of AI.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO and chairman of Sinovation, a venture firm based in the U.S. and China, and he has emerged as one of the world’s top prognosticators on artificial intelligence and how the technology will disrupt just about everything. Dr. Lee wrote in The New York Times last year that AI is “poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.” Dr. Lee will also be on our Q&A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees.

Colin Angle co-founded iRobot with fellow MIT grads Rod Brooks and Helen Greiner in 1990. Early on, the company provided robots for military applications, and then in 2002, introduced the consumer-focused Roomba. Angle has plenty to talk about. As the CEO and Chairman of iRobot, he led the company through the sale of its military branch in 2016 so the company can focus on robots in homes. If there’s anyone that knows how to both work with the military and manage consumers’ expectations with household robots, it’s Colin Angle and we’re excited to have him speaking at the event where he will also take questions from the audience on the Q&A stage.

Claire Delaunay is vice president of engineering at Nvidia, where she is responsible for the Isaac robotics initiative and leads a team to bring Isaac to market for roboticists and developers around the world. Prior to joining Nvidia, Delaunay was the director of engineering at Uber, after it acquired Otto, the startup she co-founded. She was also the robotics program lead at Google and founded two companies, Botiful and Robotics Valley. Delaunay will also be on our Q&A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees.

Dario Gil, the head of IBM’s AI research efforts and quantum computing program, is coming to Disrupt Sf to talk about the current state of quantum computing. We may even see a demo or two of what’s possible today and use that to separate hype from reality. Among the large tech firms, IBM — and specifically the IBM Q lab — has long been at the forefront of the quantum revolution. Last year, the company showed off its 50-qubit quantum computer and you can already start building software for it using the company’s developer kit.

Sam Liang is the CEO/Co-Founder of AISense Inc, based in Silicon Valley. Funded by Horizons Ventures (DeepMind, Waze, Zoom, Facebook), Tim Draper, David Cheriton of Stanford (first investor in Google), etc. AISense has created Ambient Voice Intelligence technologies with deep learning that understands human-to-human conversations. Its Otter.ai product digitizes all voice meetings and video conferences, makes every conversation searchable and also provides speech analytics and insights. Otter.ai is the exclusive provider of automatic meeting transcription for Zoom Video Communications.

Laura Major is the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works, where she leads R&D, product design and development and manages the multi-disciplinary engineering team. Prior to joining CyPhy Works, she worked at Draper Laboratory as a division lead and developed the first human-centered engineering capability and expanded it to included machine intelligence and AI. Laura also grew multiple programs and engineering teams to contribute to the development and expansion of ATAK, which is now in wide use across the military.

Dr. Jason Mars founded and runs Clinc to try to close the gap in conversational AI by emulating human intelligence to interpret unstructured, unconstrained speech. AI has the potential to change everything, but there is a fundamental disconnect between what AI is capable of and how we interface with it. Clinc is currently targeting the financial market, letting users converse with their bank account using natural language without any pre-defined templates or hierarchical voice menus. At Disrupt SF, Mars is set to debut other ways that Clinc’s conversational AI can be applied. Without ruining the surprise, let me just say that this is going to be a demo you won’t want to miss. After the demo, he will take questions on the Q&A stage.

Chad Rigetti, the namesake founder of Rigetti Computing, will join us at Disrupt SF 2018 to explain Rigetti’s approach to quantum computing. It’s two-fold: on one front, the company is working on the design and fabrication of its own quantum chips; on the other, the company is opening up access to its early quantum computers for researchers and developers by way of its cloud computing platform, Forest. Rigetti Computing has raised nearly $70 million to date according to Crunchbase, with investment from some of the biggest names around. Meanwhile, labs around the country are already using Forest to explore the possibilities ahead.

Kyle Vogt co-founded and eventually sold Cruise Automation to General Motors in 2016. He stuck around after the sale and still leads the company today. Since selling the company to GM, Cruise has scaled rapidly and seemed to maintain a scrappy startup feel though now a division of a massive corporation. The company had 30 self-driving test cars on the road in 2016 and later rolled out a high-definition mapping system. In 2017 the company started running an autonomous ride-hailing service for its employees in San Francisco, later announcing its self-driving cars would hit New York City. Recently SoftBank’s Vision Fund invested $2.25 billion in GM Cruise Holdings LLC and when the deal closes, GM will invest an additional $1.1 billion. The investments are expected to inject enough capital into Cruise for the unit to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019.

Read Full Article

5 Reasons Why Website Security Is Crucial for a Growing Business

Growing your website’s audience can be difficult, but did you know the effort you put into your website security can result in faster growth?

It’s true. Ensuring your site security features are strong and updated can boost your site traffic in ways you probably never considered.

Let’s look at the various ways your strong security standards can help with your site promotion efforts.

1. Build User Trust

The place where you’ll publish your security efforts to your visitors is your website privacy policy. One example of an embedded security section in a privacy policy is that of the U.S. Department of State. As a government organization, building trust around the website security is critical.

The verbiage that the State Department uses is not so specific that you know what systems or technology they’re using. However, it does explain the extent of their security systems to protect users.

Under the Security section of the Privacy Policy, it reads:

“Such measures include access controls designed to limit access to the information to the extent necessary to accomplish our mission. We also employ various security technologies to protect the information stored on our systems. We routinely test our security measures to ensure that they remain operational and effective.”

That will definitely make visitors feel warm and fuzzy that any information they provide via the site will be protected.

Bank of America actually takes this a step further and links to a full Security Center page on their site.

“These measures may include device safeguards and secured files and buildings as well as oversight of our third party service providers to ensure information remains confidential and secure. Please visit bankofamerica.com/security for additional information.”

That page not only outlines security measures the bank takes to protect users. It also shows awards the bank has received for its security efforts.

The more critical user security is to your business, the more important it is to publish and boast about your security efforts.

2. HTTPS Is Moderately Good for SEO

For some time now, Google has been encouraging website owners to enable HTTPS encryption. As far back as 2014, Google announced HTTPS would be added as one more SEO ranking signal for websites. Since then, there have been a lot of myths about HTTPS floating around.

SEO guru Neil Patel conducted an investigation to see if HTTPS actually made a difference in terms of SEO and found that the impact was only minor. The real effect that HTTPS offers you as a sight owner is making your visitors feel secure.

If you don’t utilize HTTPS on your website, when people visit using Google Chrome they’re going to see an indication in the URL bar that your site is not secure.

This is another opporunity to use security as a way to boost your site’s reputation as a safe place to be online. Again, if you’re just running a blog or some other site that doesn’t really require users to share personal information with you, HTTPS may be overkill.

However, if you’re running a site that requires users create an account and add personal details to a profile, adding HTTPS might be worthwhile—and the slight SEO boost it offers would be an added bonus.

Google offers an HTTPS page dedicated to walking you through the process of adding HTTPS to your site.

3. Gain More Subscribers

For many sites, a thriving newsletter or email list is one of the key ways site owners are able to engage with their readers.

But if you’re going to grow that subscriber list, visitors need to believe that you have their privacy in mind.

Having a good privacy policy published on the site is the first step toward doing that. Insuring you have a security section as menioned previously, is even better.

It’s also a good idea to top it off with a statement on your newsletter subscription page assuring visitors that you take their privacy seriously. And also sharing exactly how you’re going to use the information they provide.

A statement like this works:

“Remember: [Insert Website] maintains complete confidentiality and privacy with your email. We never sell or share email addresses with anyone, under any circumstances. The email is only used for a single newsletter email that you’ll receive once a month, and no more than that.”

What’s interesting is that this isn’t a contract or a signed statement. There’s absolutely no reason visitors have to believe what you’re telling them. However, for many people, simply the fact that you’re willing to publish this statement on your site gives them the confidence to provide you with their name and email address.

This simple statement can boost subscription rates significantly.

4. Open Yourself to More Opportunities

There are some fields where bettery security can help you find more opportunities and success. One example of this would be investigative journalism, where leads are an important part of the process.

Take Edward Snowden, for example. Edward Snowden is the NSA whistleblower who reached out to journalist Glenn Greenwald to help him release insider information about the NSA spying on Americans. He also created his own security app.

How does a whistleblower with Top Secret clearance choose which reporter to turn to? It’s the same criteria anyone uses to transfer personal or sensitive information like security numbers or bank information. The security of the transmission.

If you want people to feel safe communicating with you, then you need to offer them safe forms of communication they can use.

Take Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept contact page as an example.

Glenn provides potential whistleblowers with two secure methods to communicate with him. The first is a Securedrop link, which allows someone to place sensitive files or messages into a repository only accessible by the news organizations that set it up.

The second is Glenn’s own PGP Public Key and Fingerprint. PGP is a very easy and secure method of allowing a person to send you a fully encrypted message that only you can read. This is because only you have the private key to decrypt any message encrypted by the public key.

By providing two levels of security for anyone to reach out to Greenwald privately, it increases the chances of Greenwald landing yet another big Snowden-level scoop.

5. Higher Security Might Be Required

In some industries, like government or banking, your security standards need to be even higher than other sites. If you have people transmitting important financial transactions and information, there’s no room for error.

One small slip can lead to major public embarrassment, as we’ve seen happen frequently in the past few years.

HTTPS Encryption

If you go to any banking website, you’ll find layers of security. Any bank, from the largest national bank to the smallest local credit union, should use HTTPS encryption as the first layer of security.

If your bank or credit union doesn’t use HTTPS, you may want to consider switching to one that takes its online security more seriously.

Security Phrase and Picture

The next level of security is an additional security phrase and picture that you see every time you log in. This security phrase and picture becomes so familiar to you, that you’d know immediately if they were wrong.

Two-Factor Authentication

Another approach to login security is two-factor authentication. Coinbase, the platform where users can purchase Bitcoin, Etherium, or Litecoin, uses this form of authentication.

This means that if someone tries to brute-force guess your password, they’ll never be able to access you account without also obtaining possession of your cellphone. And hopefully you’re using a lock screen, so even having your phone won’t matter.

Yet another level of security is device identification. The security systems will log what devices and device IP addresses you’ve approved to access your account. If the system doesn’t recognize the IP or device you’re logging in with, the bank will email you at your registered email address to obtain your authorization for that device to access your account.

The reality is that financial institutions have been hit hard through the years by hacking and other cybercriminal attacks.

To maintain the trust and continued use of their online systems, banks had no other choice but to layer on security like these to make it nearly impossible for hackers to break into accounts.

Banks do this because they know that if they can win over the trust of the general public, they will also win more business. People want to do business with companies that are more likely to keep their accounts, information, and money, safe and secure.

Start Promoting Your Site’s Security to Visitors

For all of the reasons listed above, your site security should be part of your sales pitch. It should be one of the major reasons you give people for why doing business with you is better.

Are you launching a new website? Then start thinking about security now with our essential security tips you should keep in mind when launching a new website.

Read the full article: 5 Reasons Why Website Security Is Crucial for a Growing Business

Read Full Article

13 Free Bingo Games for Android You Can Play Anywhere

4 Tips for Avoiding Common Issues With Apple Mail Attachments

Apple Mail users can experience a variety of problems with attachments. Graphics and PDFs might show up in the body of a message. Files you send from a Mac may not show up correctly in Windows. Or even worse—your message may not reach the recipient due to its size.

This issue is complicated because people use different email clients and operating systems to exchange messages. Learning more about email attachments will help you avoid some of these problems.

We’ll show you how attachments work and important methods to work around issues.

What Is a MIME?

In its early days, email was only plain text. As time went on, people wanted to exchange multimedia files and more via email.

Thus, a new system was born called MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). It is a standard to expand the limited capabilities of email with many useful features. You can send multiple attachments in a single message, use international character sets other than ASCII code, utilize rich text in the message for various fonts and colors, and send audio, video, and image files.

How Does MIME Work?

The purpose of MIME is to label the contents of the message with a special header. It dictates and describes the segments contained in the message body. This header is then read by the email client to interpret and format the message.

MIME defines a number of header fields. These are MIME-Version, Content-Type, Content-Transfer-Encoding, Content-Disposition, and more. See Wikipedia’s page on MIME for more details.

The presence of the header MIME-Version indicates that the message is MIME-compliant. Content-Type indicates the type of media included in the message body, and Content-Disposition defines the attachment settings.

A Content-Type with image/gif tells the client that the attached image is a GIF and requires an image viewer to see it. Similarly, a Content-Type with multipart/mixed tells the client that the message is a mixture of plain-text and an attachment.

If you open the source of the message, you can examine these headers yourself. Open a message in the Apple Mail app and choose View > Message > Raw Source.

When a user sends a message with an attachment, MIME encodes the various parts of the message into plain text. The encoding process happens quickly in the background. The recipient’s client reads the header, decodes the multiple parts of the message, and displays it to the user.

When Attachments Go Wrong

The role of an email client is simple for both incoming and outgoing messages. It has to encode and decode the messages correctly, create and interpret the HTML tags with proper reference for graphics, and set the correct content-disposition attributes for each attachment.

There is no perfect email app. Every one, including Apple Mail, can suffer from these problems:

• The recipient might have an old email app that does not support a specific form of encoding. Thus, the message and attachment can arrive as a jumbled mess of code.
• An attachment appears inline and not at the bottom of the message.
• People using different operating systems might encounter strange behavior with attachments.
• Some people may not receive the attachment at all. The email apps and services refuse to handle messages above a certain size.

Follow our tips below to avoid these attachment issues.

1. Use Mail Drop and Similar Cloud Services

In macOS 10.10 Yosemite or later, if an outgoing message’s total size is more than 20MB, the Mail Drop feature will automatically kick in. When enabled, it’ll upload the file to iCloud (with a limit of 5GB), remove all attachments from the message, and substitute them with links. The link is temporary, and will expire after 30 days.

By default, Mail Drop is turned on for iCloud. But if you want to allow this feature for non-iCloud email accounts as well, go to Mail > Preferences, click the Accounts tab, and select your non-iCloud email account from the left panel. Under Account Information, check the box for Send large attachments with Mail Drop.

If you don’t want to use Mail Drop, put your files in cloud storage of your choice, and share a link to that file directly with the recipient. Your message will reach them faster and bypass the whole issue of attachment size restrictions.

2. Use Windows-Friendly Attachments

In macOS, some graphics files have an invisible component called a resource fork. This stores file information like type, icon, metadata, image thumbnails, and more. When you share these files via email or with Windows, you’ll see two separate files. One is the data file, and another is the resource fork preceded by a “__” naming convention.

On macOS, you won’t see this file, but other operating systems and email clients don’t know what to do with resource forks. Thus, they appear as extra unreadable files. To prevent this, choose Edit > Attachments > Always Send Windows-Friendly Attachments.

This option also appears as a checkbox at the bottom of the file selection dialog when you click the Attach button on the toolbar. If you frequently send files to people using Outlook Mail in Windows, ensure that you select this option to strip the resource fork from all outgoing graphics.

3. Always Include File Extensions

macOS and Linux have built-in mechanisms to identify file types. They use MIME to define the content type, and UTIs to identify data within documents, apps, and clipboard data. If you have an image file without a file extension, you can double-click it to open in Preview. Other types of files open in their default apps too. Apps have to declare the type of documents they can open and write in their PLIST file.

In contrast, Windows ignore MIME types. It relies only on file extensions. If you remove the file extension, Windows won’t know what to do with that file. For this reason, before you drag a file into a message, ensure that the file has an extension.

To make this easier to see, open Finder > Preferences, click the Advanced button, and select the Show All Filename Extensions check box. When you select this option, Finder will always display filename extensions on the desktop, in folders, and elsewhere. You can then double-check that all attachments have an extension to make life easier for Windows users.

4. Put Attachments at the End of the Message

When you drag and drop a file into an outgoing message, Mail places the icon or a full-size image at the spot where you dropped it. But this might cause an issue with the recipient’s client. Their email app may not support inline graphics, or the user might have turned off inline display.

If you want all attachments to appear at the bottom of an outgoing message, choose Edit > Attachments > Always Insert Attachments at End of Message. But this does not affect whether an attachment appears as an icon or a thumbnail.

If you right-click on an attachment and choose View as Icon, you can make the full-size image show as an icon instead. But this does not affect how Mail sends the message—just how it displays to you.

To fix this, open Terminal and type the following command:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

This will turn off inline images entirely, including images you might have in your email signature. But at least this will prevent any problems on the recipient’s end. To turn on inline images again, enter:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool false

This command is useful, but it’s inconvenient to turn on and off the inline graphics all the time. Alternatively, you can zip files before attaching them. This not only consolidates multiple files into one, but also guarantees that the attachment will appear as an icon in the recipient’s client.

Make Apple Mail Even Better

Solving the attachment issue is tricky. While every email app tries to ensure the best compatibility, you can never be sure what will happen when attachment goes from sender to a recipient. If you follow all these tips, you shouldn’t ever have to worry about it.

If you’re a devoted Apple Mail user, check out some tips on how to make Apple Mail a better email app.

Read the full article: 4 Tips for Avoiding Common Issues With Apple Mail Attachments

Read Full Article

Shadow announces a new box for its cloud gaming service

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is updating its physical box that lets you connect to your cloud computer instance. Shadow Ghost is a tiny device that provides all the ports and wireless technologies that you need to plug to a TV or a monitor and start playing.

Shadow has been building a cloud computing service for gamers. For $35 per month, you get a gaming PC in a data center near you. Shadow gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, an Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU that performs more or less as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It’s a full Windows 10 instance and you can do whatever you want with it.

The company started with a dedicated box from day one. The first Shadow box was an oddly-shaped black box with a few USB ports and DisplayPorts. This way, you could replace your PC at home with this box and use the same peripherals.

When you turn it on, it feels like you’re booting up your gaming PC, but you’re actually just starting a computer with a low-powered CPU that connects to your gaming PC in the cloud.

Over the past few months, Shadow has slowly decorrelated the service from the physical device in your home. When you subscribe, you don’t get a box by default. You can install the Shadow app on your existing computer, phone or tablet and start playing.

If you still want the box to connect to your Shadow instance without an existing PC, you can rent it for $10 per month or purchase it for $140. It could be particularly useful for a TV for instance.

Compared to the previous generation, Shadow Ghost is completely silent as the fan is gone — that was my main complaint with the first Shadow box. You won’t need as many dongles either as there’s an HDMI port by default (instead of a DisplayPort) and it supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s also much more energy efficient as it should consume three times less power than the existing Shadow device.

Shadow Ghost will be available for the same price at some point during the last quarter of 2018. The service itself is currently available in France, Germany, the U.K., Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. In the U.S., the company has a data center near San Francisco and another one on the East Coast.

Read Full Article

How to Set Up Sync in Vivaldi and Synchronize Your Browsing Data

Most major browsers offer some method for syncing browsing data between devices, and now Vivaldi has joined the crowd.

Vivaldi is a beautiful web browser for power users with a lot of features, including a customizable user experience, fast startup and page loading, quick commands, and notes. You should consider switching to Vivaldi if you haven’t already.

The Sync feature in Vivaldi is still in the experimental stage, but we found it to work well so far. You can download Vivaldi for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Vivaldi is not available on mobile devices but you can run Vivaldi on a Raspberry Pi 3.

Today we’ll show you how to start using the experimental Sync feature.

What Does Vivaldi Actually Sync?

Currently, Vivaldi supports synchronizing the following items:

• Bookmarks
• Speed Dials
• Settings (Only some setting are currently synced. They are working on syncing additional settings.)
• Stored webpage passwords
• Stored autofill information
• History (Currently, only typed URLs are stored in History.)
• Remove Sessions (These allow you to access tabs open on other computers and we will show you how to access them.)
• Extensions
• Notes

Step 1: Enable the Sync Feature in Vivaldi

To enable the Sync feature, type the following in the address bar in Vivaldi and press Enter.

vivaldi://experiments

Then, check the Sync box on the Experimental Features page.

Step 2: Create a Vivaldi Account

To set up Sync, click the Vivaldi menu icon in the upper-left corner of the window. Then, go to Tools > Settings.

Click Sync in the left pane.

You need a Vivaldi account to use the Sync feature. If you don’t already have an account, click Create an Account.

Fill out the form on the Join the Vivaldi Community page.

Check the I have read and agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy box and click Register.

You’ll receive an email asking you to verify your email address. Click the link in the email.

Step 3: Log Into Your Vivaldi Account

Once you’ve verified your email address, return to the Sync page in Vivaldi’s settings.

Enter the User Name and Password you chose during registration and click Login.

Step 4: Choose What to Sync and Enable Encryption

On the Sync page, Synchronize All Data is checked by default.

If you don’t want to sync all your data, uncheck the Synchronize All Data box. Then, uncheck the checkboxes under Data to Sync for any data you don’t want to sync.

For extra protection, in case your login credentials become compromised, check the Encrypt Data Using a Separate Password box under Sync Encryption.

Enter a password in the Encryption Password box. You must make your encryption password different from the password you chose for your Vivaldi.net account. Vivaldi won’t allow you to use the same password for both.

Click Start Syncing.

Some messages display at the top of the Sync settings page.

While the data is syncing, you’ll see a message saying, “Waiting for sync data to be committed.” When the sync process is finished, Vivaldi tells you, “Sync data successfully committed to server.”

Step 5: Decrypt the Data in Your Sync Account

If you’ve assigned an encryption password to your data in your Vivaldi.net account, you must enter your Encryption Password and click Decrypt when you log out and log back in.

Then, choose what you want to sync again and click Start Syncing.

Step 6: Open Tabs From Other Synced Computers

Once your data is synced, you can access open tabs from Vivaldi running on another synced computer.

Click the cloud icon on the right side of the browser’s title bar and move your mouse over the computer with the tab you want to access. Then, click the tab you want to open from the submenu. You can also select Open All to open all tabs from the other computer.

How to Clear the Data From Your Vivaldi Account

Changing your password periodically is a good idea for keeping your data protected. To change the password on your Vivaldi.net account, you must clear the data from your account on the server.

To clear your data, go to Tools > Settings on the Vivaldi menu and then click Sync in the left pane.

Scroll down to the bottom of the Sync screen on the right and click Clear Data on Server.

Vivaldi wants to make sure you really want to clear your synced data.

If you’re sure, click Clear Sync Data on the Clearing Synchronized Data dialog box.

A message displays while your Sync data is cleared.

Now, you can log in to your account again and encrypt your data with a different password.

How to Reset and Restart Sync in Vivaldi

If you’ve cleared your Sync data from your account while you’re logged in on another computer, you’ll see the Sync Disabled dialog box when you open Vivaldi on the other computer.

You can log in again on the other computer and sync the data from that computer into your Vivaldi.net account.

Click Go to Sync Settings on the Sync Disabled dialog box.

You can sync again by clicking Restart Sync on the Sync settings screen.

If restarting sync doesn’t work, you can log out of your account.

Then, enter your User Name and Password and click Login.

If you’ve assigned an encryption password to your data in your Vivaldi.net account, you must enter your Encryption Password and click Decrypt when you log back in.

Then, choose what you want to sync again and click Start Syncing.

Vivaldi Sync: A Seamless Browsing Experience

If you’ve switched to Vivaldi from one of the other major browsers, and you’ve been missing the ability to sync your browsing data between computers, try Vivaldi’s Sync feature.

It works well so far. When you make a change to synced data on one computer, it’s quickly synced to your other computers that are signed in to your Vivaldi.net account.

Vivaldi is a capable Chrome alternative and it’s getting better every day. So what’s stopping you?

Read the full article: How to Set Up Sync in Vivaldi and Synchronize Your Browsing Data

Read Full Article

Netflix Wants to Stop Paying the Apple Tax

At the moment, if you sign up for Netflix through the iOS app, Apple gets a 30 percent cut of the money. This is how Apple was able to make $11.5 billion in revenue from the App Store in 2017. However, Netflix is now saying enough is enough.

Understandably, Netflix would like to avoid handing over 30 percent of your subscription to Apple. Which is why the streaming service is testing a way of avoiding paying the Apple tax. Which essentially means forcing users to sign up on the web instead.

Redirecting Users to the Netflix Homepage

According to multiple reports, in a months-long test, some users have been directed away from signing up for Netflix through an in-app iOS purchase. Instead, they’re being redirected to the Netflix homepage on their web browser of choice.

This simple maneuver helps Netflix avoid giving away up to 30 percent of its subscription fees to Apple. By merely directing people to sign up on the web Netflix gets to keep all of the cash for itself. Which it will undoubtedly spend making more Netflix Originals.

Netflix looking to bypass the Apple Store 30% is not surprising, Amazon has done a good job at this, but it brings up an interesting debate about the value of a marketplace and what is fair as a cut for the marketplace provider.

Physical retail cut is 40-50% generally..

— Ben Bajarin (@BenBajarin) August 21, 2018

Netflix has confirmed it has been testing cutting Apple out of the equation. A customer support agent reportedly told TechCrunch that the test has been running since June, and is now live in 33 countries. However, the test is set to end on September 30.

Netflix issued a statement saying, “We are constantly innovating and testing new signup approaches on different platforms to better understand what our members like. Based on what we learn, we work to improve the Netflix experience for members everywhere.”

Can Netflix Cut Apple Out of the Loop?

The key for Netflix will be figuring out whether the extra cash it gets to keep makes up for any potential loss in revenue caused by the extra step in the sign-up process. Cutting Apple out of the loop for good will be a gamble, even for a company as big as Netflix.

Apple isn’t the only company which takes a cut of in-app purchases. Which is why Fortnite for Android isn’t available through Google Play. Whatever happens, we know the gatekeepers will be fine, as Apple recently become the first $1 trillion company.

Read the full article: Netflix Wants to Stop Paying the Apple Tax

Read Full Article

How to Force the Google Play Store to Update on Android

How to Remotely Sign Out of Your Social Media Accounts

If you’ve misplaced a device logged in to your social media accounts, a surefire way to end that access is to change your password. If you don’t want to change your password just yet (as advisable as that may be), a few social media sites also make it easy to remotely log out of any sessions with the click of a button.

How to Remote Sign Out of Facebook

If you’re worried that someone else is using your Facebook account, you can remotely log out of any Facebook active sessions by doing the following:

1. Go to Settings > Security & Login.
2. Under Where You’re Logged In, you’ll see a list of all the instances of where you’ve been logged into Facebook and when. Information includes location, time, device type, and browser.
3. Click the three dots button next to the instance you want to remove and click Log out. If you want to log out of all of the sessions, scroll down to the end of the list (you may have to click See More) and click Log out of all sessions. 

Facebook also offers a way to make sure your account is secure. When you click on the three dots button and click Not You, the site will guide you through a series of steps to better secure your account, including changing your password and allowing you to review your recent activity to see if there are any changes you don’t recognize.

How to Remote Sign Out of LinkedIn

LinkedIn also makes it easy to see all active sessions and log out:

1. Click on your profile picture and go to Settings & Privacy.
2. On the first tab that opens up, under Login and security click Change next to Where you’re signed in.
3. This will show you all active sessions of your account. To log out of any of those sessions, click Sign out.

How to Remote Sign Out of Pinterest

Signing out of active sessions on Pinterest is also an easy task:

1. Go to Settings and scroll down to Security and click Show sessions.
2. You’ll see a list of your current and recent sessions listed by location, device, and date.
3. To remotely log out of any of these sessions, click End activity.

How to Remote Sign Out of Twitter

Twitter doesn’t actually offer any features to remotely log out of your accounts. Instead, if you have any concerns, you’ll have to change your password.

You can, however, revoke access to various apps by going to Settings & privacy > Apps and clicking Revoke Access to any apps you no longer want accessing your account.

How to Remote Sign Out of Instagram

Instagram also doesn’t make it possible to remotely log out of your account. Instead, you’ll have to change your password. You can do this by going to Settings > Password. This will send an email to your associated email account with a link to reset your password. (It can sometimes take a while for the email to show up).

Other Measures to Protect Your Social Media

In addition to remotely ending active sessions, there are plenty of other security measures worth considering including two-factor authentication, getting notifications of unfamiliar activity, revoking access to apps and checking your social logins.

Read the full article: How to Remotely Sign Out of Your Social Media Accounts

Read Full Article

How to Quickly Sort the Cards in a Trello List

Think of Trello as a deck of cards and you will get the picture. Like a card deck, you can shuffle cards, move them around, or stack them on top of one another. But how do you sort a bunch of Trello cards automatically, and without tiring your hands?

The little command is hidden within the Trello menu.

The ability to sort cards in different ways allows you to organize them in specific sequences. For instance, when you have a bunch of cards in a Trello board, you can sort by date created and bring the oldest cards to the top. Or rearrange them by any due dates.

The method to sort cards is easy:

1. Click the Menu icon (three horizontal dots) in the top right of a list.
2. Select Sort By and then click on one of the options under the Sort List.

Sorting options will vary according to the parameters added to the card. If Power-ups like Custom Fields are enabled, you can sort them according to the variables you may have entered there. If there are no Power-Ups enabled, then you will see the basic options above. Also, you will not have the option to sort a list by due dates if no cards have due dates on them yet.

Also, there is no way yet to “unsort” the cards once you have sorted them in a particular order.

Try it out now. Set a deadline for your cards and sort them to understand which one is looming around the corner. It’s just one way to use Trello more creatively for your life goals.

Read the full article: How to Quickly Sort the Cards in a Trello List

Read Full Article