Google’sProject Fi wireless service is getting a major update today that introduces an optional always-on VPN service and a smarter way to switch between Wi-Fi and cellular connections.
By default, Fi already uses a VPN service to protect users when they connect to the roughly two million supported Wi-Fi hotspots. Now, Google is expanding this to cellular connections, as well. “When you enable our enhanced network, all of your mobile and Wi-Fi traffic will be encrypted and securely sent through our virtual private network (VPN) on every network you connect to, so you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing that others can’t see your online activity,” the team writes in today’s announcement.
Google notes that the VPN also shields all of your traffic from Google itself and that it isn’t tied to your Google account or phone number.
The VPN is part of what Google calls its “enhanced network” and the second part of this announcement is that this network now also allows for a faster switch between Wi-Fi and mobile networks. When you enable this — and both of these features are currently in beta and only available on Fi-compatible phones that run Android Pie — your phone will automatically detect when your Wi-Fi connection gets weaker and fill in those gaps with cellular data. The company says that in its testing, this new system reduces a user’s time without a working connection by up to 40 percent.
These new features will start rolling out to Fi users later this week. They are off by default, so you’ll have to head to the Fi Network Tools in the Project Fi app and turn them on to get started. One thing to keep in mind here: Google says your data usage will likely increase by about 10 percent when you use the VPN.
Google’sProject Fi wireless service is getting a major update today that introduces an optional always-on VPN service and a smarter way to switch between WiFi and cellular connections.
By default, Fi already uses a VPN service to protect users when they connect to the roughly two million supported WiFi hotspots. Now, Google is expanding this to cellular connections as well. “When you enable our enhanced network, all of your mobile and Wi-Fi traffic will be encrypted and securely sent through our virtual private network (VPN) on every network you connect to, so you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing that others can’t see your online activity,” the team writes in today’s announcement.
Google notes that the VPN also shields all of your traffic from Google itself and that it isn’t tied to your Google account or phone number.
The VPN is part of what Google calls its “enhanced network” and the second part of this announcement is that this network now also allows for a faster switch between WiFi and mobile networks. When you enable this — and both of these features are currently in beta and only available on Fi-compatible phones that run Android Pie — your phone will automatically detect when your WiFi connection gets weaker and fill in those gaps with cellular data. The company says that in its testing, this new system reduces a user’s time without a working connection by up to 40 percent.
These new features will start rolling out to Fi users later this week. They are off by default, so you’ll have to head to the Fi Network Tools in the Project Fi app and turn them on to get started. One thing to keep in mind here: Google says your data usage will likely increase by about 10 percent when you use the VPN.
The big news today is that — finally — we have Amazon’s selection of cities for its dual second headquarters (Northern Virginia and NYC). Then some notes on China. But first, semiconductors and open sourcing analysis.
We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the authors: Danny at danny@techcrunch.com or Arman at Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com if you like or hate something here.
Pivot: Future of semiconductors, chips, AI, etc.
Last week, I focused on SoftBank’s debt and Form D filings by startups. On Friday, I asked what I should start to analyze next. There were several feedback hotspots, but the one that popped out to me was around next-generation chips and the battle for dominance at the hardware layer.
As a software engineer, I know almost nothing about silicon (the beauty of abstraction). But it is clear that the future of all kinds of workflows will increasingly be driven by capabilities at the hardware/silicon level, particularly in future applications like artificial intelligence, machine learning, AR/VR, autonomous driving, and more. Furthermore, China and other countries are spending billions to go after the leaders in this space such as Nvidia and Intel. Startups, funding, competition, geopolitics — we’ve got it all here.
Arman and I are now diving deeper into this space. We will start to post once we have some interesting things to share, but if you have ideas, opinions, companies or investments in this space: tell us about them, as we are all ears: danny@techcrunch.com and Arman.tabatabai@techcrunch.com.
Open-source analysis at TechCrunch
Since I launched this daily “column” last week, I have included the text near the top that “We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch.” One of those forms is what might be called open-source journalism. Definitions are fuzzy, but I take it to mean working “in the open”: allowing you, the audience of this column, to engage in not just feedback around finalized and published posts, but to actually affect the entire process of analysis, from sourcing and ideation to data science and writing.
I am thankful to work at a publication like TechCrunch where my readers are often working in the exact sectors that I am writing about. When I wrote about Form Ds last week, a number of startup attorneys reached out with their own thoughts and analysis, and also explained key aspects of how the law is changing around SEC disclosure for startups. That’s really powerful, and I want to apply it to as many fields as possible.
This thesis is ultimately intentional — now I have to operationalize it. There aren’t good tools (yet!) that I know of that allows for easy sharing of data and notes that doesn’t rely on a hacked together set of Google Docs and Github. But I’m exploring the stack, and will publish more things publicly as we have them.
Amazon HQ2 – the future of corporate relations with cities
Amazon’s long process for selecting an HQ2 is finally over, and the official answer is two: Northern Virginia and NYC. Tons of words have been spilled about the search, and I am sure even more analysis will strike today about what put those two locations over the top.
To me, the key for mayors is to start using these reverse searches (where a company seeks a city and not vice versa) as leverage to actually get resources to fund infrastructure and other critical services.
Take Boston’s bid for GE’s new headquarters. Yes, the city offered property tax rebates of about $25 million , but GE’s move also pushed the state to fund a variety of infrastructure improvements, including the Northern Avenue bridge and new bike lanes. That bridge adds a critical path for vehicles and pedestrians in Boston’s central business district, yet has gone unfunded for years.
Ideally, governments could debate, vote, and then fund these sorts of infrastructure projects and community improvements. The reality is that without a time-sensitive forcing function like a reverse RFP process, there is little hope that cities and states will make progress on these sorts of projects. The debates can literally go on forever in American democracy.
So if you are a mayor or economic planning official, use these processes as tools to get stuff done. Use the allure of new jobs and tax revenues to spur infrastructure spending and get a rezoning through a recalcitrant city council. Use that “prosperity bomb” to upgrade old parts of the urban landscape and prepare the city for the future. A healthier, more humane city can be just around the corner.
Talking about second headquarters, the technology industry clearly has separated into poles, one based around the United States and the other based around China. Two articles I read recently gave good insights of the benefits and challenges for China in this world.
Byford provides an overview of the lineage of Chinese mobile OSes, and also notes that what might look like design gaffes in Western consumer eyes might be critical needs for Chinese buyers:
But what is true today is that not all Chinese phone software is bad. And when it is bad from a Western perspective, it’s often bad for very different reasons than the bad Android skins of the past. Yes, many of these phones make similar mistakes with overbearing UI decisions — hello, Huawei — and yes, it’s easy to mock some designs for their obvious thrall to iOS. But these are phones created in a very different context to Android devices as we’ve previously understood them.
The article is perhaps a tad long for what it is, but Byford’s key viewpoint should be repeated as a mantra by any person connected to the technology sector today: “The Chinese phone market is a spiraling behemoth of innovation and audacity, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. If you want to be on board with the already exciting hardware, it’s worth trying to understand the software.”
Of course, while China may be a huge country, its leading technology companies do want to globalize and expand their user bases outside of the Middle Kingdom’s borders. That may well be a challenging proposition.
Writing at Factor Daily, Shadma Shaikh dives into the failure of WeChat to break into the Indian market. The product lessons learned by WeChat’s owner Tencent could be applied to any Silicon Valley company — cultural knowledge and appropriate product design are key to entering overseas markets.
Shaikh gives a couple of examples:
Another design feature in the app allowed users to look up and send add-friend requests to WeChat users nearby. During initial onboarding when users were just checking app’s features, many would tap the “people nearby” feature, which would switch on location sharing by default – including with strangers. Once location sharing with strangers was switched on, it wasn’t very intuitive to turn it off.
“Women used to get a lot of unwarranted messages from men, which was a major turn off and many of them left the platform,” Gupta says. “China probably didn’t have this stalking problem.”
And
In China, where the internet was cheaper than in India in 2012, sending video files of, say, 4 MB was not a challenge. WhatsApp compresses a 5 MB photo to 40 kilobytes. WeChat did not compress the files and took many minutes and data to send and receive media files.
Internationalization will never be easy, but the lessons that Silicon Valley has slowly learned over the past two decades will need to be learned again by Chinese companies if they want to export their software to other countries.
Reading Docket
Eliot Peper’s new science fiction novel Borderless
Daniel J Hopkins’ The Increasingly United States (about how U.S. elections are more national and less local than ever before).
Snapchat is doubling down on its biggest differentiator by turning its personalized avatar Bitmoji into a revenue stream and a new source of content. Snapchat is launching a Bitmoji merchandise store you can customize with you and your friends’ cartoonified faces, Bitmoji Stories comic strips featuring you and friends’ avatars in fun scenes, and a new Friendship profile that collect all the content you and a friend have saved from your Snap message thread.
The new features could help earn Snapchat money to reduce its still-massive quarterly losses, get Snap’s brand out in public, and give people new ways to spend more time on Snapchat when it’s otherwise been losing users.
Snapchat, The Ecommerce Company
The Bitmoji merchandise store opens Thursday in the US on iOS only with $2 stickers, $15 coffee mugs, $16 standard t-shirts and notebooks, $22 triblend t-shirts $27 sweatshirts and more that you can personalize by adding their Bitmoji, one of their friends’, them and a friends’ playing together, or any two of their friends. Phone cases, towels, and pillows are also available. You can access the Bitmoji store from Snap Store in the Settings menu of Snapchat’s app. Snapchat first launched its Snap Store in Ghostface Chillah logo merchandise back in February to sell Dancing Hot Dog dolls, ghost pool floats, and puppy selfie filter shirts.
The new merch could help Snap show off its name and brand, reminding people to use the app since they can’t get the true Bitmoji anywhere else. Snap could also use the revenue given it lost $325 million last quarter and might have to take outside investment or be acquired as it may not break even before running out of cash.
Snap Comics
Back before it settled on the idea of turning personalized emoji into stickers you could use in chat, Bitmoji parent company Bitstrips started as a comic strip creator. You could make an avatar and then create little scenes for them to star in. The idea was inspired by co-founder Jacob ‘BA’ Blackstock’s school days when he and friends would draw comic strips when they were bored. Now Snap is getting back to Bitmoji’s roots.
Bitmoji Stories launch tomorrow in the US. A Snapchat spokesperson tells me “Bitmoji Stories will tell lighthearted stories in the form of short comic strips. Bitmoji Stories are created by Snap (from the Bitmoji content team), and will star the Snapchatter solo or with a friend.” They’ll be constantly updated with new advantures, and they’re quite reminiscent of lifelike avatar startup Genies’ scenes. By creating a new form of Discover content in-house, Snapchat could draw more time and therefore more ad views out of its audience. And since there’s no outside publisher to pay, Snapchat can keep all the ad revenue.
Snap’s big competitors have largely failed to field a viable Bitmoji competitor. A year ago I wrote that “Facebook seriously needs its own Bitmoji”, and in May, we broke the news that Facebook Avatars were in the works — though the prototypes were pretty ugly.. Each day Facebook delays, Bitmoji becomes more entrenched as the avatar standard. Two weeks ago, Google launched its own Gboard Mini avatars that you can automatically create with a selife, rather than having to configure them manually like on Snapchat. But when it comes to an illustrated version of you, even tiny missteps can make you look monstrous. Plus, people love wasting time customizing avatars. Snap’s version still regins supreme.
Besties Are Snap’s Best Shot
And lastly, today Snapchat begins globally rolling out its Friendship profiles. Accessible by clicking on a friend’s Bitmoji (or blank avatar if they haven’t made one) from Chat, Stories, Discover, or search, Snapchat says they “make it easy to find your favorite memories and the important information you’ve saved over time.” That includes, photos, videos, messages, and links saved from your otherwise ephemeral chats, plus a quick way to see that bestie on the Snap Map.
None of these features is so seismic as to change the overall momentum of Snapchat, which has been struggling lately with shrinking user counts, a battered share price, and non-stop executive departures. Its VP of Content Nick Bell left yesterday. Having talked with him, he’s one of the smartest minds in modern mobile content, and Snap’s hopes to get rid of the clickbait and messy design of Discover may be more difficult without him.
The strategy of focusing on best friends is smart, though. The one thing Facebook and Instagram can’t copy is Snapchat’s tight social graph of just your closest pals. Those competitors allowed their networks to bloat with acquaintances, family, and colleagues that can make people less comfortable openly sharing. Now that they’ve copied Snapchat’s Stories broadcasting to a wider audience, Snap must refocus on best friends if it wants to stay unique and turn its smaller size and graph into an asset instead of a liability.
Snapchat is doubling down on its biggest differentiator by turning its personalized avatar Bitmoji into a revenue stream and a new source of content. Snapchat is launching a Bitmoji merchandise store you can customize with you and your friends’ cartoonified faces, Bitmoji Stories comic strips featuring you and friends’ avatars in fun scenes, and a new Friendship profile that collect all the content you and a friend have saved from your Snap message thread.
The new features could help earn Snapchat money to reduce its still-massive quarterly losses, get Snap’s brand out in public, and give people new ways to spend more time on Snapchat when it’s otherwise been losing users.
Snapchat, The Ecommerce Company
The Bitmoji merchandise store opens Thursday in the US with $2 stickers, $15 coffee mugs, $16 t-shirts and notebooks, $27 sweatshirts and more that you can personalize by adding their Bitmoji, one their friends’, them and a friends’ playing together, or any two of their friends. Phone cases, towels, and pillows are also available. You can access the Bitmoji store from Snap Store in the Settings menu of Snapchat’s app. Snapchat first launched its Snap Store in Ghostface Chillah logo merchandise back in February to sell Dancing Hot Dog dolls, ghost pool floats, and puppy selfie filter shirts.
The new merch could help Snap show off its name and brand, reminding people to use the app since they can’t get the true Bitmoji anywhere else. Snap could also use the revenue given it lost $325 million last quarter and might have to take outside investment or be acquired as it may not break even before running out of cash.
Snap Comics
Back before it settled on the idea of turning personalized emoji into stickers you could use in chat, Bitmoji parent company Bitstrips started as a comic strip creator. You could make an avatar and then create little scenes for them to star in. The idea was inspired by co-founder Jacob ‘BA’ Blackstock’s school days when he and friends would draw comic strips when they were bored. Now Snap is getting back to Bitmoji’s roots.
Bitmoji Stories launch tomorrow in the US. A Snapchat spokesperson tells me “Bitmoji Stories will tell lighthearted stories in the form of short comic strips. Bitmoji Stories are created by Snap (from the Bitmoji content team), and will star the Snapchatter solo or with a friend.” They’re quite reminiscent of lifelike avatar startup Genies’ scenes. By creating a new form of Discover content in-house, Snapchat could draw more time and therefore more ad views out of its audience. And since there’s no outside publisher to pay, Snapchat can keep all the ad revenue.
Besties Are Snap’s Best Shot
And lastly, today Snapchat begins globally rolling out its Friendship profiles. Accessible by clicking on a friend’s Bitmoji (or blank avatar if they haven’t made one) from Chat, Stories, Discover, or search, Snapchat says they “make it easy to find your favorite memories and the important information you’ve saved over time.” That includes, photos, videos, messages, and links saved from your otherwise ephemeral chats, plus a quick way to see that bestie on the Snap Map.
None of these features is so seismic as to change the overall momentum of Snapchat, which has been struggling lately with shrinking user counts, a battered share price, and non-stop executive departures. Its VP of Content Nick Bell left yesterday. Having talked with him, he’s one of the smartest minds in modern mobile content, and Snap’s hopes to get rid of the clickbait and messy design of Discover may be more difficult without him.
The strategy of focusing on best friends is smart, though. The one thing Facebook and Instagram can’t copy is Snapchat’s tight social graph of just your closest pals. Those competitors allowed their networks to bloat with acquaintances, family, and colleagues that can make people less comfortable openly sharing. Now that they’ve copied Snapchat’s Stories broadcasting to a wider audience, Snap must refocus on best friends if it wants to stay unique and turn its smaller size and graph into an asset instead of a liability.
Elavon, a U.S. Bank-owned payment processing company, and National Australia Bank have participated in the $100 million Series C for Poynt, a developer of smart payment terminals and an open operating system that powers any payment terminal worldwide.
Palo Alto-based Poynt was launched in 2014 by Osama Bedier, the former vice president of Wallet and Payments at Google. Prior to joining Google in 2011, Bedier had been the head of platform, mobile and new ventures at PayPal.
In four years, Poynt has brought in a total of $133 million from backers such as Google Ventures, Matrix Partners, Oak HC/FT, Webb Investment Network and Nyca Partners. In the last 16 months, it has shipped some 150,000 terminals. The company says total payment volume will exceed $25 billion in the next year.
“Our vision is to transform retail by becoming that innovation platform for payment terminals everywhere,” Bedier wrote in a statement. “We give developers a technical canvas to build the experiences merchants and their customers have come to expect and ultimately, make visiting your local store the personal experience it was always meant to be.”
With the investment, Poynt plans to bring its technology to Asia, Europe and South America.
Facebook has fixed a bug that let any website pull information from a user’s profile — including their ‘likes’ and interests — without that user’s knowledge.
That’s the findings from Ron Masas, a security researcher at Imperva, who found that Facebook search results weren’t properly protected from cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. In other words, a website could quietly siphon off certain bits of data from your logged-in Facebook profile in another tab.
Masas demonstrated how a website acting in bad faith could embed an IFRAME — used to nest a webpage within a webpage — to silently collect profile information.
“This allowed information to cross over domains — essentially meaning that if a user visits a particular website, an attacker can open Facebook and can collect information about the user and their friends,” said Masas.
The malicious website could open several Facebook search queries in a new tab, and run queries that could return “yes” or “no” responses — such as if a Facebook user likes a page, for example. Masas said that the search queries could return more complex results — such as returning all a user’s friends with a particular name, a user’s posts with certain keywords, and even more personal demographics — such as all of a person’s friends with a certain religion in a named city.
“The vulnerability exposed the user and their friends’ interests, even if their privacy settings were set so that interests were only visible to the user’s friends,” he said.
A snippet from a proof-of-concept built by Masas to show him exploiting the bug. (Image: Imperva/supplied)
In fairness, it’s not a problem unique to Facebook nor is it particularly covert. But given the kind of data available, Masas said this kind of data would be “attractive” to ad companies.
Imperva privately disclosed the bug in May. Facebook fixed the bug days later by adding CSRF protections and paid out $8,000 in two separate bug bounties.
Facebook told TechCrunch that the company hasn’t seen any abuse.
“We appreciate this researcher’s report to our bug bounty program,” said Facebook spokesperson Margarita Zolotova in a statement. “As the underlying behavior is not specific to Facebook, we’ve made recommendations to browser makers and relevant web standards groups to encourage them to take steps to prevent this type of issue from occurring in other web applications.”
It’s the latest in a string of data exposures and bugs that have put Facebook user data at risk after the Cambridge Analytica scandal this year, which saw a political data firm vacuum up profiles on 87 million users to use for election profiling — including users’ likes and interests.
Months later, the social media giant admitted millions of user account tokens had been stolen from hackers who exploited a chain of bugs.
For example, in the video below a machine learning algorithm learned that it could rack up points not by taking part in a boat race but by flipping around in a circle to get points. In another simulation “where survival required energy but giving birth had no energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle that consisted mostly of mating in order to produce new children which could be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children).” This led to what Krakovna called “indolent cannibals.”
It’s obvious that these machines aren’t “thinking” in any real sense but when given parameters and a the ability to evolve an answer, it’s also obvious that these robots will come up with some fun ideas. In other test, a robot learned to move a block by smacking the table with its arm and still another “genetic algorithm [was] supposed to configure a circuit into an oscillator, but instead [made] a radio to pick up signals from neighboring computers.” Another cancer-detecting system found that pictures of malignant tumors usually contained rulers and so gave plenty of false positives.
Each of these examples shows the unintended consequences of trusting machines to learn. They will learn but they will also confound us. Machine learning is just that – learning that is understandable only by machines.
One final example: in a game of Tetris in which a robot was required to “not lose” the program pauses “the game indefinitely to avoid losing.” Now it just needs to throw a tantrum and we’d have a clever three-year-old on our hands.
The only person who should know which sites you visit is you. But as recent scandals have shown, there are countless organizations trying to get their hands on your data. If you want to make your web history truly private, Windscribe VPN offers unlimited protection on all your devices. Right now, you can get one year on the Pro plan for $12 via MakeUseOf Deals.
The best way to avoid being tracked across the web is simply to disappear. You can think of Windscribe as your invisibility cloak.
This highly-rated service has a network of masking servers around the world. When you connect via your desktop or mobile device, no-one can detect your IP address or physical location. To ensure you leave no trace, Windscribe employs a strict no-logging policy.
Windscribe also protects you from cybercriminals and other malicious threats. Your data is encrypted with a strong AES-256 cipher, and a firewall stops your details leaking should your connection drop.
Of course, using a VPN isn’t just about privacy. Windscribe lets you bypass local restrictions to enjoy great content on sites such as Netflix and Hulu. The service even blocks online ads ,and provides support for torrenting.
The Pro plan gives you unlimited data on any number of devices. Windscribe is available to download on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android.
Unlimited Protection for $12
A one-year Pro subscription is worth $108, but you can now get 12 months of Windscribe VPN for just $12.
Email is one of the quintessentially important elements of using the internet. From signing up for websites and services to serving as a place for tasks, reminders, and notes, these web apps turn email into a much more powerful tool.
For most of these apps, it doesn’t matter whether you use Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, or any of the other popular email service providers. A couple of them are based on Gmail, and we do think that’s the best email app too. Regardless, the email service shouldn’t be a big issue, as long as you use one of the popular options.
Dear Ele (Web): Schedule Email Reminders to Yourself or Others
Dear Ele lets you send delayed emails to anyone, without installing anything. The idea is to send a reminder through an email that doesn’t rely on any app.
Here’s how it works. You open your inbox, compose a new message, and type an email to Dear Ele that includes a certain time frame. For example:
4hours@dearele.com
3days@dearele.com
tomorrow2pm@dearele.com
wednesday@dearele.com
nextweek@dearele.com
nextmonth@dearele.com
As you can see, each of the email addresses makes it pretty clear when the email will be sent. Along with that, you can add a CC or BCC so that the reminder goes out to multiple people, without needing any of them to be using the same reminder or to-do app. You can also add the Dear Ele email in the CC or BCC.
Dear Ele is a free, simple, and effective solution to an everyday problem. The free version allows 100 reminders a month, while you’ll have to pay to unlock more reminders. But if you’re using it that frequently, you should instead look at specialized apps. In fact, Google Calendar’s new Reminders function is awesome.
QuickSend (Web): Send an Email Without Logging Into Your Inbox
Commit this name to your memory. If you’re using someone else’s computer or phone, and need to send an email urgently, QuickSend is the best solution we’ve seen in a long time.
To send a message, you add the recipient’s email address, the sender’s email address, the subject, and compose the message. When you’re done, send it. It’s really as simple as that, making it one of the best no-signup services for everyday use.
QuickSend isn’t as instantaneous as regular email. In our tests, the email landed in the recipient’s inbox about 10-15 minutes after it was sent. While that’s not bad, it loses the speed of email. But hey, at least you are protected and can use a public computer safely for your email.
Speaking of privacy, don’t worry, QuickSend encrypts all data, so no one can intercept or read the email apart from the intended recipient.
BurnerMail (Chrome, Firefox): Easiest App for Disposable Emails
When you sign up for any service on the internet, it’s good security and privacy practice to use a disposable email address instead of your primary email account. BurnerMail is the easiest app for this.
Download the BurnerMail extension for Chrome or Firefox to begin. Set up an account with your primary email, which BurnerMail will protect. Whenever you go to a website which asks for an email address to sign up, BurnerMail will offer to create a disposable email account. Sign up with that, and the emails go to your primary inbox.
But once you’re done with that service, or if you don’t want the emails cluttering up your inbox, click the extension and disable that disposable email. It’s really that simple. So even if the service leaks your email address, you won’t get bombarded with more spam.
AhhLife (Web): Regular Reminders to Write a Journal Entry
Most productivity and lifestyle experts recommend writing a journal regularly as an exercise to center yourself and take stock. AhhLife puts the journal in your inbox, making you write an email that serves as a journal entry.
It’s a simple and easy solution, and it’s completely free. You can set the frequency of the reminders, choosing whether to write a journal every day, every few days, every week, or so on. And you can choose the reminder email’s time too, for morning or evening entries. Once you get the reminder, just reply to it.
AhhLife saves all your entries in a dashboard that you can access on its web app. It’s a neat and clean design to revisit what you’ve chronicled. It only supports text entries though, so you can’t attach photos and videos.
The only barrier to AhhLife is that it uses a Google account exclusively, so you can’t use other email services. Instead, you can use Journal Jerk, one of the best journaling and diary apps, which works with multiple email providers.
EmailThis.Me (Web): Save and Read Articles In Inbox
EmailThis.Me takes any article on the web, strips unnecessary and cluttering elements, and presents a clean read in your inbox. You don’t need any app to access what you want to read, and it works perfectly on both desktop and mobile.
Since its launch, EmailThis.Me has worked to improve support for many sites that try to thwart such apps that strip elements for a clean read. While there are extensions available for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, you might want to use the simple bookmarklet instead. It works perfectly and doesn’t add extra load to your browser’s resources.
Naturally, this isn’t an exhaustive list of email apps and tools. You are more likely to find better extensions and add-ons for particular browsers and services, like the best Chrome extensions to super-power Gmail.
But there are always exceptions. In fact, we’ve already talked about a few such tools that you can use with any service or browser, so check out these other universal email tools to make your life easier.
Today, Google’s YouTube VR app arrives on the $199 Oculus Go, bringing the largest library of VR content on the web to Facebook’s entry-level VR device.
YouTube brings plenty of content in conventional and more immersive video types. It’s undoubtedly the biggest single hub of 360 content and native formats like VR180, though offering access to the library at large is probably far more important to the Oculus platform.
One of the interesting things about Oculus’s strategy with the Go headset is that gaming turned out to be the minority use case following media consumption. If you find it hard to believe that so many people are out there binging on 360 videos it’s because they probably aren’t. Users have kind of co-opted the device’s capabilities to make it a conventional movie and TV viewing device, there are apps from Netflix and Hulu while Facebook has also built Oculus TV, a feature that’s still in its infancy but basically offers an Apple TV-like environment for watching a lot of 2D content in a social environment.
At the company’s Oculus Connect conference this past year CTO John Carmack remarked how about 70 percent of time spent by users on the Go has been watching videos with about 30 percent of user time has gone to gaming. Oculus has positioned itself as a gaming company in a lot of ways via its investments so it will be interesting to see how it grows its mobile platform to make the video aspect of its VR business more attractive.
With YouTube, the company has pretty easy access to effortlessly bringing a bunch of content onboard, this would have been a great partner for Oculus TV, but a dedicated app brings a lot to users. It wasn’t super clear whether Google was going to play hardball with the YouTube app and keep standalone access confined to its Daydream platform, as the company’s homegrown VR ambitions seem to have grown more subdued, it looks like they’ve had some time to focus on external platforms.
Tinder is preparing to roll out more gender options in its app in India. The company will announce shortly that users will be able to edit their profile in order to choose a different option for their gender identity, instead of just “Man” or “Woman,” as well as toggle a setting that will display their gender on their profile in Tinder’s app.
These same options have been live in the U.S. since November 2016, when the dating app added options for transgender and gender non-conforming people.
The news was published earlier today to Tinder’s blog ahead of a planned announcement, a spokesperson said. It plans to share more information later tonight, they noted. (We’ll update if that’s the case).
In the post Tinder published, the company admits it hasn’t always “had the right tools” to serve its community in the past, and is now trying to learn to be a better ally to transgender and gender non-conforming people using its app. On this front, Tinder says it’s expanding its support team and educating its staff about the issues that these communities face in India.
Additionally, the company is opening up its support channels and inviting back users who were banned after being unfairly reported by others due to their gender. Tinder users will be able to email the company with a link to their Facebook profile in order to have their request reviewed by Tinder’s team, in order to be let back in. To what extent banned users will want to return, of course, is less clear at this point.
Tinder has not fared well with the trans community in particular, as some users in the past have been banned from the app even when using the identifiers for trans people and displaying this on their profile.
For the U.S. launch of the expanded gender options, Tinder had worked with organizations like GLAAD, activists and others.
In India, it worked with users and consultants, including an LGBTQ organization working for the health and human rights of the LGBTQ community since 1994, The Humsafar Trust, as well as LGBTQ author and inclusion advocate, Parmesh Shahani.
The post also pointed users to Umang, a Mumbai-based support group run by The Humsafar Trust, which offers mental health counselling, legal support, community support and events. And it linked to the clinical and counselling unit of The Humsafar Trust.
The group also runs a helpline Monday through Friday, 10 AM to 8:30 PM at +91 9930095856, and is available on Whatsapp.
“Every new person in your life expands your horizons in some way. Inclusion and acceptance drive this expansion, and we want Tinder to reflect the world that surrounds us every day. No one will ever be banned from Tinder because of their gender,” said Tinder.
The move is notable not just because of arrival of these important and inclusive features, but because of how critical the Indian market is for dating apps. So far, it seems straight Indian men have been flocking to Tinder and other apps in large numbers, but they’ve had trouble diversifying their user base. To address this problem, Tinder and others have focused efforts on recruiting the millions of young, educated India users who have left home to go live and work in cities.
Tinder – like all major tech companies – sees India as a key market, because of the rapid smartphone adoption and the population’s size. It even launched its Bumble-inspired “My Move” feature there first, back in September.
The Xbox One is finally adding keyboard and mouse support for gamers who prefer to play that way. This is happening more than two years since Microsoft first suggested keyboard and mouse support was on its way. So, this is definitely a case of better late than never.
Xbox One Keyboard and Mouse Support
Microsoft officially announced it was adding Xbox One keyboard and mouse support in September. Since then, selected gamers have been testing it out. And now, as part of XO18, Microsoft has detailed which games are getting mouse and keyboard support.
ICYMI, Larry and Jeff just dropped a ton of mouse & keyboard news during the #X018 episode of Inside Xbox. Here is a quick recap:
1. 14 additional games confirmed to support mouse and keyboard input – including Fortnite – some starting as soon as next week. pic.twitter.com/P9kPVdYCa7
Fortnite and Warframe are the first two Xbox One games to support keyboard and mouse, and both should receive updates on November 14. These are both free-to-play shooters, with Fortnite being the game that all kids love and most parents don’t quite understand.
Bomber Crew, Strange Brigade, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, War Thunder, X-Morph: Defense, and Deep Rock Galactic will add support in November. And Children of Morta, Vigor, Warface, Wargroove, DayZ, Minion Masters, and Moonlighter will follow in the future.
With mouse and keyboard support having arrived on the Xbox One, Microsoft is hoping to take advantage of the situation. The company has partnered with Razer to develop an official line of Xbox keyboards and mice. The first of which will be unveiled at CES 2019.
Keyboard and Mouse Support for More Games
PC gamers who switch to consoles often have trouble adapting to a controller. So, given the crossover between PC and Xbox One games, this makes perfect sense for Microsoft. Now it’s up to developers to implement mouse and keyboard support into more games.
Cloudflare has launched a mobile app for its 1.1.1.1 DNS service. This makes it easier for smartphone users (on Android and iOS) to use. Cloudflare’s DNS service, which is designed to improve privacy and performance, can also be used on your desktop.
What Is Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS Service?
In April 2018, Cloudflare launched its DNS service, catchily monikered 1.1.1.1. This is a DNS resolver that anyone can use for free. We previously detailed how to set it up on Windows and Mac, and explained how 1.1.1.1 solves some big privacy issues.
Using Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service should help you keep your browsing habits private from your ISP and other interested parties. It should also help improve performance, allowing you to load websites faster than you can using your ISP’s default DNS server.
Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS Lands on Mobile
After a successful beta, Cloudflare has launched its 1.1.1.1 DNS service as a mobile app for Android and iOS. Cloudflare describes 1.1.1.1 as “the world’s fastest and safest DNS resolver” which is focused on a combination of privacy and performance.
Once you install 1.1.1.1 you can turn it on or off with just a few clicks. When it’s turned on your internet usage will be funnelled through a secure connection. This makes sure no one can snoop on your DNS queries, whether it’s your ISP or the government.
By making use of Cloudflare’s global network, the company claims 1.1.1.1 can improve your internet performance. Either way, 1.1.1.1 is free (for life), and Cloudflare promises to “never sell your data or use it to target ads”. Unlike some ISPs.
Download: Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 on Android | iOS (Free)
Microsoft has slowly but surely pushed the command line aside in the Windows interface. This is not without reason; it is an antiquated and mostly unnecessary tool from an era of text-based input. But many commands remain useful, and Windows 8 and 10 even added new features.
Here we present the essential commands every Windows user needs to know.
In case you’re not sure how to access the Windows command prompt, forgot basic Windows commands, or would like to know how to see a list of switches for each command (aka prompt codes), you can refer to our beginners guide to the Windows command line for instructions.
Prefer this tutorial in video form? We’ve got you covered:
Most files in Windows are associated with a specific program that is assigned to open the file by default. At times, remembering these associations can become confusing. You can remind yourself by entering the command “assoc” to display a full list of file name extensions and program associations.
You can also extend the command to change file associations. For example, “assoc .txt=” will change the file association for text files to whatever program you enter after the equal sign. The “Assoc” command itself will reveal both the extension names and program names, which will help you properly use this command. You can probably do this more easily in the GUI, but the command line interface is a perfectly functional alternative.
Deleting files on a mechanical hard drive doesn’t really delete them at all. Instead, it marks the files as no longer accessible and the space they took up as free. The files remain recoverable until the system overwrites them with new data, which can take some time.
The cipher command, however, wipes a directory by writing random data to it. To wipe your C drive, for example, you’d use the command “cipher /w:c”, which will wipe free space on the drive. The command does not overwrite undeleted data, so you will not wipe out files you need by running this command.
You can use a host of other cipher commands, however, they are generally redundant with BitLocker enabled versions of Windows.
Drivers remain among the most important software installed on a PC. Improperly configured or missing drivers can cause all sorts of trouble, so its good to have access to a list of what’s on your PC. That’s exactly what the “driverquery” command does. You can extend it to “driverquery -v” to obtain more information, including the directory in which the driver is installed.
You can use this command to identify differences in text between two files. It’s particularly useful for writers and programmers trying to find small changes between two versions of a file. Simply type “fc” and then the directory path and file name of the two files you want to compare.
You can also extend the command in several ways. Typing “/b” compares only binary output, “/c” disregards the case of text in the comparison, and “/l” only compares ASCII text.
So, for example, you could use the following:
fc /l "C:\Program Files (x86)\example1.doc" "C:\Program Files (x86)\example2.doc"
The above command compares ASCII text in two word documents.
This command relays the IP address that your computer is currently using. However, if you’re behind a router (like most computers today), you’ll instead receive the local network address of the router.
Still, ipconfig is useful because of its extensions. “ipconfig /release” followed by “ipconfig /renew” can force your Windows PC into asking for a new IP address, which is useful if your computer claims one isn’t available. You can also use “ipconfig /flushdns” to refresh your DNS address. These commands are great if the Windows network troubleshooter chokes, which does happen on occasion.
Entering the command “netstat -an” will provide you with a list of currently open ports and related IP addresses. This command will also tell you what state the port is in – listening, established or closed.
This is a great command for when you’re trying to troubleshoot devices connected to your PC or when you fear a Trojan infected your system and you’re trying to locate a malicious connection.
Sometimes, you need to know whether or not packets are making it to a specific networked device. That’s where ping comes in handy.
Typing “ping” followed by an IP address or web domain will send a series of test packets to the specified address. If they arrive and are returned, you know the device is capable of communicating with your PC; if it fails, you know that there’s something blocking communication between the device and your computer. This can help you decide if the root of the issue is an improper configuration or a failure of network hardware.
This is a more advanced version of ping that’s useful if there are multiple routers between your PC and the device you’re testing. Like ping, you use this command by typing “pathping” followed by the IP address, but unlike ping, pathping also relays some information about the route the test packets take.
The “tracert” command is similar to pathping. Once again, type “tracert” followed by the IP address or domain you’d like to trace. You’ll receive information about each step in the route between your PC and the target. Unlike pathping, however, tracert also tracks how much time (in milliseconds) each hop between servers or devices takes.
Powercfg is a very powerful command for managing and tracking how your computer uses energy. You can use the command “powercfg hibernate on” and “powercfg hibernate off” to manage hibernation, and you can also use the command “powercfg /a” to view the power-saving states currently available on your PC.
Another useful command is “powercfg /devicequery s1_supported”, which displays a list of devices on your computer that support connected standby. When enabled, you can use these devices to bring your computer out of standby — even remotely. You can enable this by selecting the device in Device Manager, opening its properties, going to the Power Management tab and then checking the Allow this device to wake the computer box.
“Powercfg /lastwake” will show you what device last woke your PC from a sleep state. You can use this command to troubleshoot your PC if it seems to wake from sleep at random.
You can use the “powercfg /energy” command to build a detailed power consumption report for your PC. The report saves to the directory indicated after the command finishes. This report will let you know of any system faults that might increase power consumption, like devices blocking certain sleep modes, or poorly configured to respond to your power management settings.
Windows 8 added “powercfg /batteryreport”, which provides a detailed analysis of battery use, if applicable. Normally output to your Windows user directory, the report provides details about the time and length of charge and discharge cycles, lifetime average battery life, and estimated battery capacity.
This is, of course, redundant with the already easily accessed shutdown button, but what’s not redundant is the “shutdown /r /o” command, which restarts your PC and launches the Advanced Start Options menu, which is where you can access Safe Mode and Windows recovery utilities. This is useful if you want to restart your computer for troubleshooting purposes.
This command will give you a detailed configuration overview of your computer. The list covers your operating system and hardware. For example, you can look up the original Windows installation date, the last boot time, your BIOS version, total and available memory, installed hotfixes, network card configurations, and more.
Use “systeminfo /s” followed by the host name of a computer on your local network, to remotely grab the information for that system. This may require additional syntax elements for the domain, user name, and password, like this: “systeminfo /s [host_name] /u [domain]\[user_name] /p [user_password]”
You will need to run the command prompt with administrator privileges and enter the command “sfc /scannow”. If SFC finds any corrupt or missing files, it will automatically replace them using cached copies kept by Windows for this purpose alone. The command can require a half-hour to run on older notebooks.
You can use the “tasklist” command to provide a current list of all tasks running on your PC. Though somewhat redundant with Task Manager, the command may sometimes find tasks hidden from view in that utility.
There’s also a wide range of modifiers. “Tasklist -svc” shows services related to each task, use “tasklist -v” to obtain more detail on each task, and “tasklist -m” will locate .dll files associated with active tasks. These commands are useful for advanced troubleshooting.
Tasks that appear in the “tasklist” command will have an executable and process ID (a four- or five-digit number) associated with them. You can force stop a program using “taskkill -im” followed by the executable’s name, or “taskkill -pid” followed by the process ID. Again, this is a bit redundant with Task Manager, but you can use it to kill otherwise unresponsive or hidden programs.
Virtually all Windows 8/8.1 computers ship from the factory with a recovery image, but the image may include bloatware you’d rather not have re-installed. Once you’ve un-installed the software you can create a new image using the “recimg” command. Entering this command presents a very detailed explanation of how to use it.
You must have administrator privileges to use the “recimg” command, and you can only access the custom recovery image you create via the Windows 8 “refresh” feature.
In Windows 10, system recovery has changed. Windows 10 systems don’t come with a recovery partition, which makes it more important than ever to back up your data.
CMD Commands Recommended by Readers
These are the commands our readers use regularly:
nbstat: “For looking up names of computers on your network.” (Vferg)
netstat -ano | find “est”: “To get a list of processes with established CP connections.” (Eric)
tasklist | find “[process id]”: “To get the name of the executable associated with the particular process id that I’m interested in.” (Eric)
cacls: This command is “most handy to manually access hidden files and folder. (A41202813)
net use: “To map drives of networked CNC machines.” (Jimbo)
chkdsk /f C: “Checks your C: partition hard disk for errors and fixes bad sectors.” (Kai M)
Schtasks: To schedule tasks. (Teddy)
Command and Conquer Your Windows PC
This article can only give you a taste of what’s hidden within the Windows command line. When including all variables, there are literally hundreds of commands. Download Microsoft’s command line reference guide (in Edge or Internet Explorer) for advanced support and troubleshooting.
With Windows 10, Microsoft has moved from the command prompt to PowerShell. While you can still access the Windows command line, it may be time to switch. Note that you can use command line commands in the Windows PowerShell.
Google notes that the VPN also shields all of your traffic from Google itself and that it isn’t tied to your Google account or phone number.
