The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Moving the Manage Subscriptions menu so that it’s just one click away from your App Store profile might seem like a minor change, but it was needed: As more mobile apps have adopted subscriptions as a means of generating revenue, it’s become critical to ensure consumers know how to turn off their subscriptions.
Plus, Apple is expected to launch some subscriptions of its own, namely for its streaming video and news services.
Don’t panic! Instagram says it’s “aware of an issue that is causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now” and is “working to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
The latest figures out of NPD show a continued uptick in smartwatch sales here in the States. The category has been a rare bright spot in an overall flagging wearable space, and the new numbers show gains pretty much across the board.
Founded in 1999 by brothers Evan and Gregg Spiridellis after they saw “an animated dancing doodie streaming over a 56K modem,” JibJab’s big break came during the 2004 presidential campaign, when its satirical “This Land” racked up more than 80 million views.
Eight has been focused on bed temperature for a while, first by offering a smart mattress cover and then a smart mattress that allows owners to adjust the surface temperature and even set different temperatures for different sides of the bed. But The Pod goes even further, with a smart temperature mode that will change bed temperature throughout the night to improve your sleep.
Clever-Commit is an assistant that learns from your code base’s bug and regression data to analyze and flag potential new bugs as new code is committed.
Pon Radhakrishnan, India’s minister of state for finance and shipping, published a series of puzzling tweets today after Pratik Sinha, a co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, accessed a Google document of prepared statements and tinkered with the content.
Among the statements tweeted out, Radhakrishnan said Prime Minister Modi’s government had failed the middle classes and had not made development on improving the country’s general welfare. Sinha’s edits also led to the official BJP Assam Pradesh account proclaiming that the prime minister had destroyed all villages and made women slaves to cooking.
And then you can get a Union Minister to tweet that "working for the middle class is low on the agenda of Modi Govt"
These are the opposite of the partisan messages that the accounts intended to send.
The messages were held in an unlocked Google document that contained a range of tweets compiled for the Twitter accounts. Sinha managed to access the document and doctor the messages into improbable statements — which he has done before — in order to show the shocking lack of security and processes behind the social media content.
How do you get a Union Minister to tweet what you want? Well, you go and edit the trending document made by BJP IT cell, and then you control what they tweet. Thread.
Here's the video of this morning when their trending document got automagically updated :-)
Sinha said he made the edits “to demonstrate how dangerous this is from the security standpoint for this country.”
“I had fun but it could have disastrous consequences,” he told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “This is a massive security issue from the point of view of a democracy.”
Sinha said he was able to access the document — which was not restricted or locked to prevent changes — through a WhatsApp group that is run by members of the party. Declining to give specifics, he said he had managed to infiltrate the group and thus gain access to a flow of party and government information and, even more surprisingly, get right into the documents and edit them.
What’s equally as stunning is that, even with the message twisted 180 degrees, their content didn’t raise an alarm. The tweets were still loaded and published without any realization. It was only after Sinha went public with the results that Radhakrishnan and BJP Assam Pradesh account begin to delete them.
The Indian government is rightly grilling Facebook and Google to prevent its platform being abused around the election, as evidence suggested happened in the U.S. presidential election and the U.K.’s Brexit vote, but members of the government themselves should reflect on the security of their own systems, too. It would be too easy for these poor systems to be exploited.
As autonomous driving eventually transforms cars from transportation devices to mobile theaters or conference rooms we will need better audio inside them. And we’ve already seen that VCs like Andreessen Horowitz say ‘audio is the future.’
So it’s interesting that Swedish sound pioneer Dirac has completed a new $13.2 million round of financing led by current investors. Previous investors included Swedish Angel network Club Network Investments, Erik Ejerhed and Staffan Persson.
Dirac makes sophisticated audio technology for customers including BMW, OnePlus, Rolls Royce, Volvo, and Xiaomi.
Its platform is used by those firms for everything from capture to playback – regardless of device size or form factor.
“As consumer devices decrease in size and expand in complexity, digital signal processing is
the key to unlocking their full audio potential and creating premium sound experiences,” says
Dirac CEO Mathias Johansson. “With this new funding, we can take our approach to digitizing
sound systems even further – creating more intelligent and adaptive audio processing solutions that establish new standards in both audio playback and capture across a variety of
applications.”
Dirac has now appointed former Harman International executive Armin Prommersberger as CTO and opened a Copenhagen Research Development Center.
Johansson says new 5G networks are set to create new use-cases for current and emerging technologies, including audio.
As autonomous driving eventually transforms cars from transportation devices to mobile theaters or conference rooms we will need better audio inside them. And we’ve already seen that VCs like Andreessen Horowitz say ‘audio is the future.’
So it’s interesting that Swedish sound pioneer Dirac has completed a new $13.2 million round of financing led by current investors. Previous investors included Swedish Angel network Club Network Investments, Erik Ejerhed and Staffan Persson.
Dirac makes sophisticated audio technology for customers including BMW, OnePlus, Rolls Royce, Volvo, and Xiaomi.
Its platform is used by those firms for everything from capture to playback – regardless of device size or form factor.
“As consumer devices decrease in size and expand in complexity, digital signal processing is
the key to unlocking their full audio potential and creating premium sound experiences,” says
Dirac CEO Mathias Johansson. “With this new funding, we can take our approach to digitizing
sound systems even further – creating more intelligent and adaptive audio processing solutions that establish new standards in both audio playback and capture across a variety of
applications.”
Dirac has now appointed former Harman International executive Armin Prommersberger as CTO and opened a Copenhagen Research Development Center.
Johansson says new 5G networks are set to create new use-cases for current and emerging technologies, including audio.
Around 37 percent of Americans were subjected to severe hate and harassment online in 2018, according to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League, up from about 18 percent in 2017. And more than half of all Americans experienced some form of harassment, according to the ADL study.
Facebook users bore the brunt of online harassment on social networking sites according to the ADL study, with around 56 percent of survey respondents indicating that at least some of their harassment occurred on the platform — unsurprising, given Facebook’s status as the dominant social media platform in the U.S.
Around 19 percent of people said they experienced severe harassment on Twitter (only 19 percent? That seems low), while 17 percent reported harassment on YouTube, 16 percent on Instagram and 13 percent on WhatsApp.
Chart courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League
In all, the blue-ribbon standards for odiousness went to Twitch, Reddit, Facebook and Discord, when the ADL confined their surveys to daily active users. nearly half of all daily users on Twitch have experienced harassment, the report indicated. Around 38 percent of Reddit users, 37 percent of daily Facebook users and 36 percent of daily Discord users reported being harassed.
“It’s deeply disturbing to see how prevalent online hate is, and how it affects so many Americans,” said ADL chief executive Jonathan A. Greenblatt. “Cyberhate is not limited to what’s solely behind a screen; it can have grave effects on the quality of everyday lives — both online and offline. People are experiencing hate and harassment online every day and some are even changing their habits to avoid contact with their harassers.”
And the survey respondents seem to think that online hate makes people more susceptible to committing hate crimes, according to the ADL.
The ADL also found that most Americans want policymakers to strengthen laws and improve resources for police around cyberbullying and cyberhate. Roughly 80 percent said they wanted to see more action from lawmakers.
Even more Americans, or around 84 percent, think that the technology platforms themselves need to do more work to curb the harassment, hate and hazing they see on social applications and websites.
As for the populations that were most at risk to harassment and hate online, members of the LGBTQ community were targeted most frequently, according to the study. Some 63 percent of people identifying as LGBTQ+ said they were targeted for online harassment because of their identity.
“More must be done in our society to lessen the prevalence of cyberhate,” said Greenblatt. “There are key actions every sector can take to help ensure more Americans are not subjected to this kind of behavior. The only way we can combat online hate is by working together, and that’s what ADL is dedicated to doing every day.”
The report also revealed that cyberbullying had real consequences on user behavior. Of the survey respondents, 38 percent stopped, reduced or changed online activities, and 15 percent took steps to reduce risks to their physical safety.
Interviews for the survey were conducted between December 17 to December 27, 2018 by the public opinion and data analysis company YouGov, and was conducted by the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. The nonprofit admitted that it oversampled for respondents who identified as Jewish, Muslim, African American, Asian American or LGBTQ+ to “understand the experiences of individuals who may be especially targeted because of their group identity.”
The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, according to a statement from the ADL.
If you have been experiencing issues with the Like or Retweet count on Twitter and are desperately seeking validation, here it is: yes, it’s Twitter, not you (probably). The company confirmed today that it is working on a fix for a problem with notifications that’s been messing with Like counts.
Some people around the world are experiencing an issue with notifications, Likes, and Retweets. We’re working on resolving this and will follow up soon. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Many users around the world have reported seeing the number of Likes on their tweets fluctuate continuously, making them wonder if accounts were being suspended in mass or if Twitter was deleting them.
Here’s the word thing happening with Twitter right now (they said they’re going to fix it)
Twitter did not say when the issue began, but based on a careful study of Twitter search results, and not on my own desperate longing for validation from internet strangers, the issue has been going on for almost a day.
Apple has made a small but important change to iOS that will allow users an easier way to manage their app subscriptions. In the latest release of the mobile operating system (iOS 12.1.4 and 12.2 beta), the company has relocated the “Manage Subscriptions” setting so it’s only one click away when you tap on your profile in the App Store, instead of being buried more deeply within the settings.
This may seem like a minor change, but it was a much-needed one.
As more mobile apps have adopted subscriptions as a means of generating revenue, it’s become critical to ensure consumers knew how to turn their subscriptions off. And, based on a reading of many angry App Store app reviews, many people don’t know how to do this. Most assume that they should reach out to the developer to have their subscription disabled – after all, it’s the developer who’s charging them.
It’s not really the customer’s fault for being unaware of how the process works, as Apple had made getting to the subscription management screen far more difficult than it should be.
In iOS Settings, for example, you would have to click iTunes & App Store –> Apple ID: –> View Apple ID –> then scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen to find the hidden setting.
In the iOS App Store app, it was a bit simpler.
You would first have to tap your profile icon on the top right of the Home page, then your Apple ID, then scroll down to the bottom of the page again.
By comparison, Google Play put subscriptions in its top-level navigation with no scrolling or extra clicks required.
With the iOS update, when you now tap your profile icon in the App Store, “Manage Subscriptions” is right there – and it’s accessible without scrolling. That’s a huge help in making this critical feature more accessible.
Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t made a similar change to simplify the path to subscription management in iOS’s main Settings.
The change was first spotted by MacStories Editor-in-Chief Federico Viticci, who shared a screenshot on Twitter.
Apple recently made a change (seems iOS 12.1.4 and 12.2 beta) to make it easier to manage subscriptions for iOS apps.
Now you just need to open the App Store, tap your profile, and choose 'Manage Subscriptions'. pic.twitter.com/4PtxvAQjTm
Subscriptions are now one of the main driving forces behind the increase in consumer spending on iPhone.
A recent Sensor Tower report said that iPhone users in the U.S. spent $79 on apps in 2018, up 36% from last year. Much of that is due to mobile gaming, as always, but subscription-based apps are now playing a large role.
But making the rules and enforcing them are two different matters. In the meantime, being able to figure out what subscriptions you have and turning off those you don’t want needed to be simpler.
Also related to this is the fact that Apple is preparing to launch some new subscriptions of its own – presumably, its long-awaited streaming video service and perhaps the news subscription service as well – at a press event in March.
The update to subscriptions to appears to be rolled out worldwide for those on the latest version of iOS.
Following the pre-Christmas drone debacle in the UK — which plunged thousands of people into travel misery after repeated drone sightings closed the runway at Gatwick, and later also briefly suspended departures at Heathrow — consumer drone maker DJI has announced it’s upgrading its geofencing system across Europe.
It says its Geospatial Environment Online (GEO) 2.0 system will be rolled out to the 19 European countries that did not already have the GEO system in phases — “starting later this month”.
“GEO 2.0 creates detailed three-dimensional “bow tie” safety zones surrounding runway flight paths and uses complex polygon shapes around other sensitive facilities, rather than just simple circles used in earlier geofencing versions,” it writes.
We’ve asked how long it will take for the update to be fully rolled out across the region.
A further 13 local markets that had the GEO system already will also now get the 2.0 update.
In all, 32 European countries will be covered by GEO 2.0 — which DJI bills as offering “enhance protection of European airports and facilities”.
Here’s how it explains the new geofencing approach in Europe:
GEO 2.0 applies the strictest geofencing restrictions to a 1.2 kilometer (3/4 mile) wide rectangle around each runway and the three-dimensional flight paths at either end, where airplanes ascend and descend. More flexible geofencing restrictions apply to an oval area within 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) of each runway. This bow tie shape opens more areas on the sides of runways to beneficial drone uses, as well as low-altitude areas more than 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) from the end of a runway, while increasing protection in the locations where traditional aircraft actually fly.
DJI’s new boundary areas around airport runways are based on the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Annex 14 standard for airspace safety near runways. DJI also consulted with aviation organizations on ways to enhance geofencing features near airport facilities. DJI’s categorisation of airports is based on airport types, numbers of passengers, operations and other factors, influencing the sensitivity of the airspace around a given location.
The countries getting GEO for the first time are: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden.
While those countries set for an upgrade to GEO 2.0 are: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.
Update: A spokesman confirmed it will be live in all 32 countries later this month. He also confirmed that DJI drones operating in the nineteen European countries that are getting GEO for the first time had no geoblocks at all prior to this roll out.
It’s not clear what took DJI so long to implement stricter and more detailed geofencing — and, well, any geofencing at all in most regional markets — around critical infrastructure sites like airports. We asked and it didn’t respond to the question.
But it has also announced a change of data provider — from California-based AirMap to Altitude Angel — in Europe. So appears to have needed to source better European mapping data. (Although the latter company launched its unmanned traffic management platform back in 2016.)
Altitude Angel, a UK-based startup which was founded in 2014, says its GuardianUTM platform is being used by DJI to extend the functionality of GEO 2.0 so it “more accurately reflects the highest safety risks around particular facilities”.
DJI claims the upgrade not only better reflects actual safety risks around airports but describes it as “more flexible in lower-risk areas” — saying, for example, that it would permit “authorized users to conduct drone activities in locations parallel to runways”. (Albeit UK airports might not be in a huge rush to permit any kind of nearby drone flights given the recent chaos… )
Another difference for the platform flagged by Altitude Angel itself is the claim it better maps other “sensitive facilities” too, such as prisons and nuclear power stations — which it says are represented by “more accurate ‘polygon’ shapes, rather than large, static cylinders”.
“By more accurately mapping the highest risk zones, DJI can improve safety while opening up more of the airspace to drone pilots,” is its claim.
Another change coming via the GEO update is that DJI’s geofencing system will also include Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) imposed during major events or natural disasters.
“The TFRs will be based on authoritative data from Eurocontrol,” it says.
When the drone maker announced the launch of its GEO geofencing system in Europe and North America, back in 2015, its VP of policy and legal affairs wrote: “Our years of actual user experience have shown that in most instances, strict geofencing is the wrong approach for this technology, and instead we are helping operators make informed, accountable decisions.”
As it turned out there’s rather more work to be done to ensure human nature combined with affordable, powerful drone tech doesn’t turn a consumer gadget into a weapon of mass disruption.
Another wrinkle, vis-a-vis geofencing as a mechanism for regulating drone use, is that individual (DJI) drone owners must update their DJIGO 4 flight control app and aircraft firmware for the new geoblocks to apply. So a push button fix for drone misuse this most definitely is not.
Add to that, modded/hacked drones can and do circumvent baked in geoblocks. And of course other drone brands, with different geofencing systems, are available.
Regulators have been caught on the hop around drone safety but aren’t likely to stand still for too much longer.
Last month the UK government announced new powers for police to tackle illegal use of drone technology — including powers to land, seize and search drones.
It also said it would beef up stop-gap flight restriction rules on drones by expanding a 1km flight exclusion zone around airports to circa 5km.
A full drone bill is still pending but the Gatwick drone chaos will have concentrated ministerial minds on the expeditious need to better regulate the tech.
Pon Radhakrishnan, India’s minister of state for finance and shipping, published a series of puzzling tweets today after Pratik Sinha, a co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, accessed a Google document of prepared statements and tinkered with the content.
Among the statements tweeted out, Radhakrishnan said Prime Minister Modi’s government had failed the middle classes and not made development on improving the country’s general welfare. Sinha’s edits also led to the official BJP Assam Pradesh account proclaiming that the Prime Minister had destroyed all villages and made women slaves to cooking.
And then you can get a Union Minister to tweet that "working for the middle class is low on the agenda of Modi Govt"
These are the opposite of the partisan messages that the accounts intended to send.
The messages were held in an unlocked Google document that contained a range of tweets compiled for the Twitter accounts. Sinha managed to access the document and doctor the messages into improbable statements — which he has done before — in order to show the shocking lack of security and processes behind the social media content.
How do you get a Union Minister to tweet what you want? Well, you go and edit the trending document made by BJP IT cell, and then you control what they tweet. Thread.
Here's the video of this morning when their trending document got automagically updated :-)
Sinha said he made the edits “to demonstrate how dangerous this is from the security standpoint for this country.”
“I had fun but it could have disastrous consequences,” he told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “This is a massive security issue from the point of view of a democracy.”
Sinha said he was able to access the document — which was not restricted or locked to prevent changes — through a WhatsApp group that is run by members of the party. Declining to give specifics, he said he had managed to infiltrate the group and thus gain access to a flow of party and government information and, even more surprisingly, get right into the documents and edit them.
What’s equally as stunning is that, even with the message twisted 180 degrees, their content didn’t raise an alarm. The tweets were still loaded and published without any realization. It was only after Sinha went public with the results that Radhakrishnan and BJP Assam Pradesh account begin to delete them.
The Indian government is rightly grilling Facebook and Google to prevent its platform being abused around the election, as evidence suggested happened in the U.S. Presidential election and the U.K’s Brexit vote, but members of the government themselves should reflect on the security of their own systems, too. It would be too easy for these poor systems to be exploited.
Another autonomous vehicle unicorn has joined the herd.
TuSimple, a self-driving truck startup running daily routes for customers in Arizona, has raised $95 million in a Series D funding round led by Sina Corp. as the company prepares to scale up its commercial autonomous fleet to more than 50 trucks by June.
The startup, which launched in 2015 and has operations in San Diego and Tucson, Arizona, has a post-money of $1.095 billion (aka unicorn status). TuSimple has raised $178 million to date in rounds that have included backers such as Nvidia and ZP Capital. Sina, operator of China’s biggest microblogging site Weibo, is one of TuSimple’s earliest investors. Composite Capital, a Hong Kong-based investment firm and previous investor, also participated in this latest round.
TuSimple launched when the burgeoning AV ecosystem of investors, academics turned entrepreneurs, and early self-driving tech pioneers, were focused more on the development of autonomous passenger vehicles, namely robotaxis.
Autonomous trucking existed in relative obscurity until high-profile engineers from Google launched Otto, a self-driving truck startup that was quickly acquired by Uber in August 2016. Then came the reveal of the Tesla Semi and the founding of several autonomous trucking startups including Starsky Robotics and Embark.
Suddenly, it seemed people had woken up to the economic opportunity that could be achieved — just maybe — with trucks.
Meanwhile, TuSimple quietly scaled. In late 2017, TuSimple raised $55 million with plans to use those funds to scale up testing to two full truck fleets in China and the U.S. By 2018, TuSimple started testing on public roads, beginning with a 120-mile highway stretch between Tucson and Phoenix in Arizona and another segment in Shanghai.
“Autonomous driving is one of the most complex AI systems humans have ever built. After three years of intense focus to reach our technical goals, we have moved beyond research into the serious work of building a commercial solution,” TuSimple founder, president and CTO Xiaodi Hou said.
Today, TuSimple is taking three to five fully autonomous trips per day for customers on three different routes in Arizona. All of these trips have two safety engineers, one who is behind the wheel, and another monitoring the data pouring in during each trip. TuSimple says these daily trips allow it to earn revenue while it validates its Level 4 autonomous system, a designation by SAE that means the vehicle takes over all of the driving in certain conditions. TuSimple has 12 contracted customers.
Now, it’s ready to ramp up further, in terms of its fleet size and partnerships. TuSimple plans to expand its daily “fully-autonomous” commercial deliveries to Texas. The company also plans to use this influx of capital to fund what it describes as “critical joint production programs” with OEM, Tier 1 suppliers and sensors partners. Truck manufacturing suppliers are working with TuSimple on the integration of autonomous software with powertrain, braking and steering systems. The company says this is “an essential step for the commercial production and operation of self-driving trucks.”
TuSimple isn’t disclosing its customers or even suppliers yet. Although, TuSimple did reveal last month at CES that it’s working with Tier 1 supplier Cummins Inc. to enable powertrain integration with its autonomous technologies.
TuSimple’s focus on cameras
Other AV companies, namely low-speed autonomous passenger vehicles have focused on LiDAR (light detection and ranging lasers) to improve the perception of the vehicle, arguably one of the most difficult tasks of automated driving. But for TuSimple, “laser isn’t the sauce.”
Instead, TuSimple has developed a camera-centric perception solution. The company does use LiDAR for its mapping and some data collection. However, LiDAR has its limitations in the high-speed world of trucking, Hou explained to TechCrunch in a previous interview.
Even its name, which is an interlingual pun that essentially means “simple image” or simple image analysis, affirms TuSimple’s approach.
It appears that has paid off. LiDAR can detect objects like cars to about 250 meters, although the optimal quality falters past 150 meters. TuSimple says its camera-based system has a vision range of 1,000 meters.
As a reluctant participant in AV demos, this TechCrunch reporter headed to TuSimple’s Tucson operations recently armed with lots of curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism.
The TuSimple truck, two safety engineers in the front, and Hou and myself in the back of the cab, entered into autonomous mode in the company parking lot as it approached a surface road. From here, the truck drove the route in autonomous mode for the entire 65-mile or so trip. This route began with a left turn onto a surface road, then onto an unprotected left at a traffic light, a railroad crossing, and finally an entrance onto the highway. The truck continued for 30 miles before exiting the interstate, then maneuvering back onto the highway from the trip back.
A display in the cab allowed us to see what the truck was seeing, or more specifically what the camera-based system sees. TuSimple’s camera combined with software algorithms allows the system to track distance, relative speed and vehicle type of the various objects spotted while on the road and has an intention prediction feature that allows the vehicle to understand what those objects might do.
The end result, at least for this demo, was a ride along in an autonomous truck that was able to accomplish a number of complicated tasks, including anticipating congestion ahead and making a lane change in a smooth, uninterrupted movement — no disc braking necessary.
When you want to access the dark web, you need to use a browser that knows how to access the content. Browsers like Chrome and Safari are not suitable.
If you’re not sure which one to choose, keep reading. We are going to introduce you to several dark web browsers that you should consider.
Warning: Always Use a VPN on the Dark Web
We spend a lot of time espousing the virtues of a reliable paid VPN provider. A high-quality VPN is one of the best tools at your disposal if you want to keep yourself safe and secure online.
In the context of using the dark web, using a VPN is even more critical. Because of the content that’s available on the dark web, law enforcement agencies around the world are particularly keen to know who is using it and what they are looking at.
Sadly, the myth that the dark web somehow makes you impossible to track is completely untrue—just ask the founder of the Silk Road site, Ross Ulbricht. He is currently serving life in prison.
If you want to ensure your anonymity, you should sign up to a reputable provider like ExpressVPN or CyberGhost. Both VPNs have special deals for MakeUseOf readers! Get three months of ExpressVPN for free using this link, or six months of CyberGhost for free using this link!
1. Tor Browser
Available on: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android
The Tor Browser has been the de facto leader for many years. It is the flagship product of the Tor Project (the company responsible for maintaining the Tor network).
The browser itself is based on Firefox. In addition to the Tor proxy, it also comes with modified versions of NoScript and HTTPS Everywhere built in.
When you use the Tor Browser, all your traffic will automatically travel through the Tor network. And when you end your dark web session, the browser will instantly delete cookies, browsing history, and other data.
You’ll also find yourself using the Tor Browser if you use the TAILS operating system to connect to the dark web. If you would like to learn more about TAILS, check out our article on how to access the dark web safely.
Finally, a word of warning. In 2013, experts realized that Tor was vulnerable from a JavaScript attack due to issues with the implementation of NoScript. Users IP addresses and MAC addresses were leaked (again, use a VPN!).
The Invisible Internet Project (often shortened to I2P) lets you access both the regular web and the dark web. Specifically, you can access I2P’s own darknet, though you can access Tor using the built-in Orchid Outproxy Tor plugin.
When you use the software to log on to the dark web, your data is run through a layered stream; it muddies the information about the user and makes tracking almost impossible.
The app encrypts all the connections (including both public and private keys) that run through it.
Perhaps the most unique aspect of the Invisible Internet Project is its support for decentralized file storage thanks to the Tahoe-LAFS plugin.
(Note: We advise beginners to use Tor instead. I2P is notorious for being difficult to set up, especially if you are new to the dark web world.)
The Whonix browser uses the same source code as Tor, so you know you’re going get a reasonably similar experience in terms of both usability and features.
Despite the similarities, however, there are some crucial differences under-the-hood. Most significantly, the browser prevents user applications from discovering a machine’s IP address thanks to a workstation virtual machine which connects to the internal virtual LAN and which can only communicate with the gateway.
The developers claim that their technology is so robust that even malware with root privileges would not be able to discover the machine’s true IP address.
It’s also important to realize that Whonix is not a standalone browser. It is part of the wider Whonix operating system; the entire OS runs inside a virtual machine. It comes with all the major productivity apps like a word processor and an email client.
As the name suggests, Subgraph OS is another complete operating system—just like Whonix and TAILS. The browser and wider operating system were both praised by the famous whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, for their privacy features.
Once again, the browser users the Tor Browser’s code for its foundation. The app uses multiple layers to protect your security. The layers include kernel hardening, meta-proxy encryption, filesystem encryption, package Security, and binary integrity.
Subgraph OS also deploys container isolation. It includes customized messenger and email apps.
All these features have seen Subgraph OS grow in popularity over the last couple of years. Though there is no official data, it is anecdotally the second most popular dark web browser behind Tor.
The Tor bundle is the most popular browser for the darknet. It opened the gates to this mysterious inner world and is still going strong. But don’t forget the peace of mind a VPN service will give you.
The dark web is still a confusing and mysterious place. Aside from needing to use an unfamiliar browser, you’ll also quickly discover that search engines like Google don’t work.
Can Experian’s Dark Web Scan service really help you discover if your personal data has been stolen? And is it worth $10 a month when free alternatives offer a similar result?
In this week’s Really Useful Podcast we look at the Dark Web Scan, Skype’s blurred background feature, how to tidy Twitter the Marie Kondo way, and where to find free college courses online.
Meanwhile for gamers we have a look at the best portable game console. For PC gaming fans, there’s also details on how to choose a PC game that will run on your computer.
Really Useful Podcast Season 2 Episode 2 Shownotes
The second show of the Really Useful Podcast Season 2 is hosted by MakeUseOf deputy editors Christian Cawley and Ben Stegner. You can follow them on Twitter:
This is a list of essential tools and services from my coding workflow that I think should be part of every web programmer’s toolkit. Whether you a building a simple “Hello World” app or a complex web application, these tools should make your coding easier and increase productivity.
The Web Developer’s Toolkit
1. devdocs.io — API documentation for all popular programming languages and frameworks. Includes instant search and works offline too.
2. glitch.com — create your own web apps in the browser, import GitHub repos, use any NPM package or build on any popular frameworks and directly deploy to Firebase.
3. bundlephobia.com — quickly find the import cost (download size) of any package in the NPM registry. Or upload your package.json file to scan all dependencies in your project.
4. babeljs.io/repl — Write your code in modern JavaScript and let Babel transform your code into JavaScript that is compatible with even older browsers.
5. codeply.com — quickly build frontend responsive layouts with frameworks like Bootstrap, Materialize CSS and SemanticUI.
6. httpie.org — a command-line tool that is useful for making HTTP requests to web servers and RESTful APIs. Almost as powerful as CURL and Wget but simpler.
10. explainshell.com — Type any Unix command and get a visual explanation of each flag and argument in the command.
11. tldr.ostera.io — Unix man pages are long and complex. This site offers practical examples for all popular Unix command without you having to dive into the man pages.
12. mockaroo.com — quickly generate dummy test data in the browser in CSV, JSON, SQL and other export formats.
13. jsdelivr.com — Serve any GitHub file or WordPress plugin through a CDN. Combine multiple files in a single URL, add “.min” to any JS/CSS file to get a minified version automatically. Also see unpkg.com.
14. carbon.now.sh — create beautiful screenshots of your source code. Offers syntax highlighting for all popular languages.
15. wakatime.com — know exactly how long you spend coding with detailed metrics per file and even language. Integrates with VS Code, Sublime text, and all popular code editors.
16. astexplorer.net — paste your JavaScript code into the editor and generate the Abstract Syntax Tree that will help you understand how the JavaScript parser works.
17. hyper.is — A better alternative to the command line terminal and also iTerm. Use with the Oh My Zsh shell and add superpowers to your terminal.
18. curlbuilder.com — make your own CURL requests in the browser.
20. trackjs.com — monitor errors in your JavaScript based web projects and get instant email notifications when a new error is detected.
21. ngrok.com — Start a local web server, fire up ngrok, point to the port where the localhost is running and get a public URL of your tunnel.
22. codeshare.io — An online code editor for pair programming, live interviews with video conferences or for teaching code to students remotely.
23. webhooks.site — Easily inspect the payloads and debug HTTP webhooks in the browser. All HTTP requests are logged in real-time. Another good alternative is RequestBin.
24. surge.sh — the easiest way to deploy web pages and other static content from the command line. Supports custom domains and SSL. Also see Zeit Now.
25. visbug — A must-have add-on for web developers that brings useful web design tools right in your browser. Available for Google Chrome and Firefox.
26. puppeteersandbox.com — Puppeteer is a Node.js framework for automating Google Chrome. Use the sandbox to quickly test your scripts in the browser. Also see try-puppeteer.com.
27. prettier.io/playground — Beautify your JavaScript and TypeScript code using Prettier, the favorite code formatter of programmers.
28. json.parser.online.fr — The only JSON parser you’ll ever need to analyze and beautify your complex JSON strings.
29. scrimba.com — Create your own programming screencasts in the browser or watch other developers code.code.
30. katacoda.com — A training platform for software developers where anyone can create their own dedicated and interactive training environments.
31. codesandbox.io — A full-featured online IDE where you can create web applications in all popular languages including vanilla JavaScript, React, TypeScript, Vue and Angular. Also see StackBlitz.com and Repl.it.
32. apify.com — Write your own web scrapers using JavaScript and schedule your scrapers to run at specific intervals automatically.
33. vim-adventures.com — The Vim text editor is hugely popular among programmers. The site will help you master the various key commands through a game.
34. insomnia.rest — A desktop based REST client that lets you create HTTP requests and view response details all in a easy-to-use interface. Advanced users may consider Postman.
LinkedIn is launching its own live streaming video service. Called LinkedIn Live, the service will be aimed at delivering the kind of content that aligns with LinkedIn’s userbase. Which means a focus on business, technology, and people who want to network.
LinkedIn Live Will Let You Broadcast to the World
According to TechCrunch, LinkedIn Live will offer both individuals and organizations the chance to broadcast live to the world. LinkedIn is eyeing up tech conferences, product announcements, and earnings calls as the kind of content suitable for LinkedIn Live.
LinkedIn isn’t doing this alone. Microsoft, which acquired LinkedIn in 2016, is providing the encoding through Azure Media Services. LinkedIn has also partnered with established broadcasting services including Wirecast, Switcher Studio, Socialive, and Brandlive.
Pete Davies, the director of product management at LinkedIn, said, “Video is the fastest growing format on our platform right now, and the one most likely to get people talking.” He also revealed that “millions” of users have watched videos on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is initially launching LinkedIn Live in beta exclusively in the U.S. It will be available on an invite-only basis, with LinkedIn adding a contact form for users to express their interest in accessing LinkedIn Live in the coming weeks.
LinkedIn Needs to Focus on its Own Special Niche
LinkedIn is a little late to the live streaming party, and it faces tough competition from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others. However, by focusing on its niche, and delivering content its target audience is likely to enjoy, it may well succeed.
Google is finally making Gmail’s right-click menu more useful. This means that the number of things you can do when you right-click on an email in Gmail is about to increase sharply. Which could be a real boon to people who always have full inboxes.
Saving You Seconds Dealing With Emails
With the rise in social media platforms and messaging apps, some people predicted the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of email. That simply hasn’t happened, and most of us still endure a daily battle to achieve Inbox Zero.
This daily battle to plow through emails means even the smallest changes can have a positive impact. One simple UI change can save you seconds dealing with each email, which, over the course of a busy year, can add up to hours.
Gmail Gets a New Right-Click Context Menu
Google’s latest change to the way Gmail works is exactly that. A small UI change that could save you small chunks of time. In a nutshell, Google has vastly expanded the number of options available when you right-click on an individual email.
Previously, your options were very limited. You could Archive an email, Delete an email, or Mark it as unread. And that was about it. Now, you can Reply, Reply All, Forward, Move to, Label as, Snooze, Mute, and search for emails, all from the right-click menu.
It isn’t a groundbreaking change, and we have to wonder what took Google so long, but it’s certainly welcome. As detailed on the G Suite Updates Blog, the new right-click menu is rolling out to G Suite customers now, and is expected to roll out to everyone else shortly.
Don’t Take the Right-Click Menu for Granted
Once the new right-click context menu goes live for you, you’ll be able to access it by right-clicking on an email or email conversation in Gmail. Windows users can also press the Menu button on their keyboard, and Mac users can use Ctrl+Click.
Google for Startups has expanded a partnership with startup training program Founder Gym to better serve underrepresented founders through a new scholarship program.
The program typically charges $396 to participate but thanks to this partnership with Google for Startups, Google will cover the costs for select scholarship recipients to participate in the six-week program. This partnership an extension of a pilot program that started last March.
“Google for Startups took an early bet on FounderGym when we were less than six months old, and as any founder knows, you never forget the first people to say ‘yes’ to your dream,” Schumacher-Hodge Dixon said in a statement.
“Our team at FounderGym has used that early vote of confidence to help fuel our efforts to train a groundbreaking number of founders around the world in our inaugural year.”
“We are deeply committed to supporting the growth and success of underrepresented founders,” Google for Startups VP Lisa Gevelber said in a statement. “At Google we know that innovation can come from anywhere, but the resources needed to succeed are not evenly distributed. Founder Gym is truly moving the needle in this space – their unique program delivers the tangible resources necessary to level the playing field for founders and help them grow their businesses.”
Instead of describing it as a school, bootcamp or incubator, Founder Gym describes itself as a topical, six-week training program that covers topics like fundraising, pitching, user growth and problem validation. In Founder Gym’s first 12 months of operations, its cohort has collectively raised $35 million in funding.
“As we enter year two of this journey, we couldn’t be more excited to expand our partnership with Google for Startups, an organization that has a long history of supporting the entrepreneur’s journey,” Schumacher-Hodge Dixon said. “There is no doubt in my mind, this partnership will help us achieve our mission of developing the next generation of great innovators and leaders.”
When it comes to the cloud market, there are few known knows. For instance, we know that AWS is the market leader with around 32 percent of market share. We know Microsoft is far back in second place with around 14 percent, the only other company in double digits. We also know that IBM and Google are wallowing in third or fourth place, depending on whose numbers you look at, stuck in single digits. The market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get a much bigger piece of the pie.
Neither company is satisfied with that, of course. Google so much so that it moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums. Meanwhile, IBM made an even bigger splash, plucking Red Hat from the market for $34 billion in October.
This week, the two companies made some more noise, letting the cloud market know that they are not ceding the market to anyone. For IBM, which is holding its big IBM Think conference this week in Las Vegas, it involved opening up Watson to competitor clouds. For a company like IBM, this was a huge move, akin to when Microsoft started building apps for iOS. It was an acknowledgement that working across platforms matters, and that if you want to gain market share, you had better start thinking outside the box.
While becoming cross-platform compatible isn’t exactly a radical notion in general, it most certainly is for a company like IBM, which if it had its druthers and a bit more market share, would probably have been content to maintain the status quo. But if the majority of your customers are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, it might be a good idea for you to jump on the bandwagon — and that’s precisely what IBM has done by opening up access to Watson across clouds in this fashion.
Clearly buying Red Hat was about a hybrid cloud play, and if IBM is serious about that approach, and for $34 billion, it had better be — it would have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. As IBM Watson CTO and chief architect Ruchir Puri told my colleague Frederic Lardinois about the move, “It’s in these hybrid environments, they’ve got multiple cloud implementations, they have data in their private cloud as well. They have been struggling because the providers of AI have been trying to lock them into a particular implementation that is not suitable to this hybrid cloud environment.” This plays right into the Red Hat strategy, and I’m betting you’ll see more of this approach in other parts of the product line from IBM this year. (Google also acknowledged this when it announced a hybrid strategy of its own last year.)
Meanwhile, Thomas Kurian had his coming-out party at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco earlier today. Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.
He suggested that his company would be more aggressive in pursuing traditional enterprise customers, although I’m sure his predecessor, Diane Greene, wasn’t exactly sitting around counting on inbound marketing interest to grow sales. In fact, rumor had it that she wanted to pursue government contracts much more aggressively than the company was willing to do. Now it’s up to Kurian to grow sales. Of course, given that Google doesn’t report cloud revenue it’s hard to know what growth would look like, but perhaps if it has more success it will be more forthcoming.
As Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide tweeted today, it’s one thing to turn to the tried and true enterprise playbook, but that doesn’t mean that executing on that approach is going to be simple, or that Google will be successful in the end.
To be honest, all of these suggestions for broadening Google Cloud are from the obvious enterprise sales playbook, but it doesn't mean they are easy.
These two companies obviously desperately want to alter their cloud fortunes, which have been fairly dismal to this point. The moves announced today are clearly part of a broader strategy to move the market share needle, but whether they can or the market positions have long ago hardened remains to be seen.
Insta-chat addicts, rejoice. You could soon be trading memes and emojis from your computer. Instagram is internally testing a web version of Instagram Direct messaging that lets people chat without the app. If, or more likely, when this rolls out publicly, users on a desktop or laptop PC or Mac, a non-Android or iPhone, or that access Instagram via a mobile web browser will be able to privately message other Instagrammers.
Instagram web DMs was one of the features I called for in a product wishlist I published in December alongside a See More Like This button for the feed and an upload quality indicator so your Stories don’t look crappy if you’re on a slow connection.
A web version could make Instagram Direct a more full-fledged SMS alternative rather than just a tacked-on feature for discussing the photo and video app’s content. Messages are a massive driver of engagement that frequently draws people back to an app, and knowing friends can receive them anywhere could get users sending more. While Facebook doesn’t monetize Instagram Direct itself, it could get users browsing through more ads while they wait for replies.
Given Facebook’s own chat feature started on the web before going mobile and getting its own Messenger app, and WhatsApp launched a web portal in 2015 followed by desktop clients in 2016, it’s sensible for Instagram Direct to embrace the web too. It could also pave the way for Facebook’s upcoming unification of the backend infrastructure for Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct that should expand encryption and allow cross-app chat, as reported by the New York Times’ Mike Isaac.
Mobile reverse-engineering specialist and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong alerted us to Instagram’s test. It’s not available to users yet, as it’s still being internally “dogfooded” — used heavily by employees to identify bugs or necessary product changes. But she was able to dig past security and access the feature from both a desktop computer and mobile web browser.
In the current design, Direct on the web is available from a Direct arrow icon in the top right of the screen. The feature looks like it will use an Instagram.com/direct/…. URL structure. If the feature becomes popular, perhaps Facebook will break it out with its own Direct destination website similar to http://bit.ly/1yREj4f which launched in 2015. Instagram began testing a standalone Direct app last year, but it’s yet to be officially launched and doesn’t seem exceedingly popular.
Instagram did not respond to requests for comment before press time. The company rarely provides a statement on internal features in development until they’re being externally tested on the public, at which point it typically tells us “We’re always testing ways to improve the Instagram experience.”
After cloning Snapchat Stories to create Instagram Stories, the Facebook-owned app decimated Snap’s growth rate. That left Snapchat to focus on premium video and messaging. Last year Instagram built IGTV to compete with Snapchat Discover. And now with it testing a web version of Direct, it seems poised to challenge Snap for chat too.
Insta-chat addicts, rejoice. You could soon be trading memes and emojis from your computer. Instagram is internally testing a web version of Instagram Direct messaging that lets people chat without the app. If, or more likely, when this rolls out publicly, users on a desktop or laptop PC or Mac, a non-Android or iPhone, or that access Instagram via a mobile web browser will be able to privately message other Instagrammers.
Instagram web DMs was one of the features I called for in a product wishlist I published in December alongside a See More Like This button for the feed and an upload quality indicator so your Stories don’t look crappy if you’re on a slow connection.
A web version could make Instagram Direct a more full-fledged SMS alternative rather than just a tacked-on feature for discussing the photo and video app’s content. Messages are a massive driver of engagement that frequently draws people back to an app, and knowing friends can receive them anywhere could get users sending more. While Facebook doesn’t monetize Instagram Direct itself, it could get users browsing through more ads while they wait for replies.
Given Facebook’s own chat feature started on the web before going mobile and getting its own Messenger app, and WhatsApp launched a web portal in 2015 followed by desktop clients in 2016, it’s sensible for Instagram Direct to embrace the web too. It could also pave the way for Facebook’s upcoming unification of the backend infrastructure for Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct that should expand encryption and allow cross-app chat, as reported by the New York Times’ Mike Isaac.
Mobile reverse-engineering specialist and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong alerted us to Instagram’s test. It’s not available to users yet, as it’s still being internally “dogfooded” — used heavily by employees to identify bugs or necessary product changes. But she was able to dig past security and access the feature from both a desktop computer and mobile web browser.
In the current design, Direct on the web is available from a Direct arrow icon in the top right of the screen. The feature looks like it will use an Instagram.com/direct/…. URL structure. If the feature becomes popular, perhaps Facebook will break it out with its own Direct destination website similar to http://bit.ly/1yREj4f which launched in 2015. Instagram began testing a standalone Direct app last year, but it’s yet to be officially launched and doesn’t seem exceedingly popular.
Instagram did not respond to requests for comment before press time. The company rarely provides a statement on internal features in development until they’re being externally tested on the public, at which point it typically tells us “We’re always testing ways to improve the Instagram experience.”
After cloning Snapchat Stories to create Instagram Stories, the Facebook-owned app decimated Snap’s growth rate. That left Snapchat to focus on premium video and messaging. Last year Instagram built IGTV to compete with Snapchat Discover. And now with it testing a web version of Direct, it seems poised to challenge Snap for chat too.
(@yashar) 
In the current design, Direct on the web is available from a Direct arrow icon in the top right of the screen. The feature looks like it will use an Instagram.com/direct/…. URL structure. If the feature becomes popular, perhaps Facebook will break it out with its own Direct destination website similar to http://bit.ly/1yREj4f which 
