06 July 2020

8 Essential Email Security Tips You Should Know by Now


email-security

Online security is something you probably know is important, but might not give it the proper attention. Unfortunately, negligence in this area can result in huge problems, and your email is one of the most sensitive areas.

Having your email account compromised will allow an intruder to break into any account you’ve used it to sign into. That’s why you need to keep your email as secure as possible. Here are some simple yet important email security tips you should put in practice.

1. Use Separate Email Accounts

Most people have one central email account for all their personal activity. This means that all of your social media notifications, website registrations, newsletters, receipts, messages, password resets, and more get sent to the same email box.

Having everything in one place means that if that place fails, you’ll lose everything associated with it. If someone breaks into it, they’d be able to access all of the above kinds of media. And remember that when you reset a password on most sites, the link to reset it goes to your email. This could allow someone to lock you out of all your own accounts.

To combat this, it’s a smart idea to use separate email accounts for different purposes. This will help boost your security by limiting the damage someone could do by breaking into one account. It’s even better if you use secure email services for your most important accounts.

Plus, doing so can also boost your productivity. You could consolidate all your work emails into a single work account, friends and family communication with your personal account, have a recreational account for various websites, then a throwaway account for potential spam links.

This way, if someone hacks your work account, all of your personal emails are still safe.

2. Set a Unique, Strong Password

A login screen representing what information a cookie stores
Image Credit: mishoo/Depositphotos

No matter if you stick with one email account or use multiple as above, it’s vital to protect each one with a strong password. Reusing the same password on multiple accounts is a major vulnerability. If an attacker breaks a password, they’ll certainly try it on other accounts using your email address.

While it seems simple, many people don’t follow this basic advice. The best way to improve your security in this area is to start using a password manager. These let you create strong and unique passwords for every account that you don’t have to remember.

3. Enable Two-Factor Authentication

Gmail Two Step Authentication

Along with a strong password, you’ve probably heard the advice about using two-factor authentication (2FA) before. And while using it is a little inconvenient, it drastically increases the security of your account. In addition to your password, 2FA requires a secondary code (usually from your phone) to log in.

As mentioned above, because your email is the key to every other account, you should at least use 2FA there even if you don’t enable it anywhere else.

Follow our guide to setting up 2FA on major accounts for information on how to do it. For best results, we recommend using an authenticator app like Authy. This generates offline codes that you use to approve new account logins after entering your password.

4. Beware of Phishing Scams

Legitimate companies will not ask you for your password or other sensitive information over email. While you might be able to spot blatant attempts to steal your information, scammers have gotten better at creating convincing phishing messages.

Typically, phishing emails claim to come from a legitimate entity (like Amazon, Apple, PayPal, or similar) and tell you that something is wrong with your account. They prompt you to click a link that leads to a fake website. If you enter your credentials there to “confirm” the information, you’re actually handing the data over to thieves.

You should know how to spot a phishing email to avoid falling for these common schemes.

5. Never Click Links In Emails

The widespread nature of phishing means that it’s wise to follow a general rule: when in doubt, never click links inside emails. While you can hover your mouse over a link to preview the destination URL, this isn’t foolproof. Most email fraud relies on you clicking a link that takes you to a phony website, so clicking links is always a risk.

At best, clicking a link will let the scammer know that your email is active and that you’re willing to click on links. At worst, it could bring you to a site that tries to install malware on your computer or wants to steal your information.

If you get an email claiming to come from your bank or any other service that asks you to sign in, always visit the website manually to see what’s going on. The only exceptions are when you’re explicitly expecting a particular email, such as a forum registration link or game account activation email.

6. Don’t Open Unsolicited Attachments

Phishing Fake Ad

Most of the time, you should treat attachments in emails like links. If you’re expecting something from a friend, then you’re probably fine to open the attachment. However, if the email is unsolicited, you shouldn’t open any of its attachments.

Even if the file looks innocent, it could be a hidden danger. It’s trivial to spoof filenames and extensions to make a nasty EXE look like a JPG, for example. A lot of ransomware distributes through email attachments, so opening one could begin the encryption process on your system.

Follow our guide to spotting unsafe email attachments so you don’t make a costly mistake.

7. Scan for Infections Regularly

If you read an email, open an attachment, or visit a linked website that seems suspicious in any way, it’s not a bad idea to run a malware scan. Of course, not every spam email will infect your machine, and it’s probably overkill to run a scan every time you open a fishy message.

It’s better to be safe, though. Make sure you have a reliable antivirus suite installed (Windows Defender is fine for Windows 10) and consider installing Malwarebytes for a second opinion. If you unknowingly enabled a keylogger, you’d rather know sooner than later.

8. Be Careful on Public Networks and Computers

You probably know that public Wi-Fi isn’t as secure a connection as your home network. And while you’ll probably be OK checking your email on airport or cafe Wi-Fi, you should still take caution when using such networks.

Thanks to widespread use of HTTPS, your activity on most websites will be safe from prying eyes elsewhere on the network. However, if you don’t own the network, you can’t be certain of how it’s set up. The network could be a spoofed point, or have malicious software installed to allow for man-in-the-middle attacks.

The same goes for logging into your email on public computers, like those in libraries and hotels. Someone could install a keylogger on those machines to steal your credentials, so it’s best to stick with trusted devices like your phone when at all possible.

Safe Use of Email Is Essential

While the web has become more secure over time thanks to widespread use of HTTPS, stronger encryption protocols, and better automated detection from email providers, a lot of your personal security still lies with your decisions. Take some time to lock down your email accounts and your online safety will become a lot stronger because of it.

In short, don’t click anything from an email that you weren’t expecting, and make use of the various account security options email providers offer. Doing so will make your account much safer to use. If you’re not convinced, find out what scammers could do with access to your email account.

Read the full article: 8 Essential Email Security Tips You Should Know by Now


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MATE vs. GNOME Shell vs. Unity vs. Cinnamon Desktop Environments Explained


gnome

When GNOME 3.0 launched with a new interface, parts of the Linux community scrambled to find a new desktop environment that was right for them.

Some forked GNOME 2 into MATE or modified it into Cinnamon and Unity. Others flocked completely away from anything GNOME-related to other desktop environments entirely.

But there was more to GNOME than the interface, which left many hesitant to leave the ecosystem behind. That’s why many of the most popular alternatives are, ultimately, still based on GNOME. Here’s what sets them apart.

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment that has been around since 1998. The name originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment and is commonly pronounced with a hard G, the same as gnu (Guh-nome).

GNOME utilizes the GTK toolkit. These days the GNOME Project maintains GTK, but the coding language began as the toolkit for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, better known as GIMP. Many desktop Linux apps utilize GTK.

A desktop environment is more than an interface. GNOME also includes a suite of apps, a set of technologies, and the community of people that has grown around this software.

GNOME Shell

GNOME desktop environment on Linux

The early versions of GNOME had a traditional desktop paradigm similar to older versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS. With version 3.0, the GNOME team decided to go a different way and introduced a new design known as the GNOME Shell.

GNOME Shell contains an Activities Overview that shows your open windows, contains an app launcher, and makes virtual desktops a core part of the experience. Virtual desktops became so essential that the GNOME team did away with the minimize button, instead encouraging people to organize windows across their virtual desktops.

GNOME Shell also places a heavy emphasis on search. You can open or install apps, locate files, look up the weather, see the time, and perform many other tasks by typing directly in Activities Overview.

With this change, GNOME 3.0 introduced or adopted ways of using a computer that have since also become prominent in commercial desktop operating systems as well. But many people did not want to change the way they used their computer so drastically or simply have a preference for the traditional desktop workflow.

Despite this, GNOME remains the most widely-embraced Linux desktop environment. Ubuntu, the most popular desktop Linux distro, uses a modified version of GNOME by default. Fedora, the community-run companion to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, provides perhaps the purist GNOME experience.

Linux manufacturers such as System76 and Purism ship their own Linux distros that come with GNOME. Linux Laptops from Dell and Lenovo also run GNOME out of the box.

GNOME Classic

GNOME Classic desktop environment

If you like the classic GNOME experience but want to keep much of the modern look and feel, you don’t have to switch to a separate desktop environment. Simply log out and, at the login screen, select the gear icon to change from GNOME to GNOME Classic.

This is not an exact copy of GNOME 2, and it doesn’t have lower system requirements than GNOME Shell, but it may be just what you’re looking for.

Unity

Ubuntu Unity 20.04 desktop
Image Credit: Ubuntu Unity

With Ubuntu’s popularity, it was a big deal when Canonical chose not to throw its weight behind GNOME 3.0. Instead, the company continued to develop its own Unity interface that utilized a dock on the left-hand side of the screen and featured an even heavier emphasis on searching than GNOME. Not only could you launch apps that way, but a feature known as HUD (Heads Up Display) also allowed you to navigate menu bars by typing. If you wanted to navigate an app menu with your mouse, you would find it at the top of the screen.

While Unity was free software, the broader community shied away from Canonical’s efforts. Part of this stemmed from Ubuntu’s use of patched versions of GTK to deliver Unity, which increased the work needed to port the interface to other distros.

In 2017, Canonical discontinued Unity and made GNOME Ubuntu’s default desktop again. The community picked up from where Canonical left off. The UBPorts developers have continued work on Unity8, which never appeared in Ubuntu as anything more than a demo. As for Unity7, the software many people had grown to love, that interface made a resurgence in the new Ubuntu Unity distro that launched alongside Ubuntu 20.04.

MATE

Ubuntu MATE desktop

MATE is a continuation of the GNOME 2 series. Most MATE desktops default to a layout with two panels, one at the top and one at the bottom. You can launch apps, open the file manager, and navigate system settings via the options in the top left. System tray icons and the cloud sit in the top right.

Across the bottom you find a list of your open windows, as you would find in older versions of Windows. Your virtual desktops appear in the bottom right.

While MATE developers have been hard at work, the desktop looks largely the same as the GNOME 2 did over a decade ago. That’s because MATE is primarily a conservation project, with work going toward making sure the existing interface can continue to work with modern technologies and apps. New features appear, but they expand rather than change the established way of doing things.

MATE has lower system requirements than modern versions of GNOME, so it feels snappier on older or underpowered machines.

You can install MATE on most Linux distros. Ubuntu MATE is an Ubuntu flavor that comes with MATE as the default interface. Fedora has a MATE spin. There’s also nothing stopping you from using MATE on Debian, openSUSE, or Arch Linux.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon Linux desktop environment

When GNOME 3.0 launched, the transition wasn’t solely about a new interface. GTK 2 also gave way to GTK 3. While MATE kept GNOME 2 alive and well, that initially meant sticking with GTK 2. Cinnamon came about as a way to keep a traditional interface while still adopting GTK 3. Before becoming a separate desktop environment, Cinnamon was a set of GNOME extensions.

Cinnamon was not an effort to emulate GNOME 2. Instead, Cinnamon embraced a design language more akin to Windows. There’s an app menu in the bottom left, a system tray in the bottom right, and a window list in between.

While the design is by no means a pixel-by-pixel copy of Windows, the experience is often familiar enough for people switching to Linux for the first time.

Many consider Cinnamon as perhaps the simplest version of Linux. The Linux Mint team created Cinnamon, and they remain the primary developers. That said, you can run Cinnamon on Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch Linux, and the list goes on.

Pantheon

elementary OS comes with a suite of default apps

Pantheon is the desktop environment found in elementary OS, which first launched in 2011. The design is deliberately minimalist. There’s an app menu for opening software, a dock for managing open apps, and system icons in the top right. Like GNOME, there isn’t a minimize button, though a maximize one is still present. In elementary OS, the focus is on the apps.

Pantheon does not contain many customization options and is even less configurable than GNOME, due to its lack of extensions. But thanks to the elementary team’s commitment to design, Pantheon is one of the more polished and accessible free desktops around.

You can find Pantheon in other distros, such as Fedora or Arch Linux, but the desktop environment is designed with elementary OS in mind.

Budgie

Budgie system settings

Unlike the other GNOME-based desktops, Budgie did not come about during the GNOME 3.0 transition. Instead, the project began in 2013 as an effort to create a simple interface not unlike that of a Chromebook.

But Budgie is not a ChromeOS clone. This is a fully-featured Linux desktop environment.

While MATE and Cinnamon are both GTK-based desktops, they both exercise some distance from GNOME’s current direction. That’s less so with Budgie, which is actively dependent on core parts of GNOME and utilizes some of the same tools, like GNOME’s tool for managing system settings. The app design is also similar, doing away with traditional title bars (where app names and tool bars are separate) for many apps.

Budgie is closely affiliated with Solus, a distro formerly known as EvolveOS. Solus continues to steer Budgie’s development, but it’s not the only one invested. Ubuntu Budgie is the most well-known alternative, but as with MATE and Cinnamon, you can download Budgie on most Linux distros.

GNOME Desktop Environments, Summarized

GNOME 3.0 came with a controversial design that many people have since come to love, despite discarding some user interface elements that have become standard. Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Google’s Chrome OS all have minimize and maximize buttons. They all have a taskbar or dock. It’s no surprise that many people want to keep those things around.

But if you don’t want to swap out GNOME for another desktop environment, you can still get many of these features using GNOME extensions.

Read the full article: MATE vs. GNOME Shell vs. Unity vs. Cinnamon Desktop Environments Explained


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How to Add, Remove, and Delay Startup Items on Your Mac


mac-startup-items

Every time you turn on your Mac, various apps and services launch automatically in the background. These macOS startup apps, often referred to as login items, can be quite useful.

But having too many of them can increase your device’s boot time and decrease its performance. That’s why it’s necessary to manage the startup applications on your Mac. Let’s explore how to do that below.

How to Add Startup Apps on Your Mac

List of login items in System Preferences on macOS

If you deal with specific apps on a daily basis, setting such apps to launch automatically can help you save some time. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Open System Preferencesand click on Users & Groups.
  2. Click on the Login Items tab in the right pane.
  3. Click on the + (Plus) button below this pane, and in the Finder dialog box that shows up, select the app that you want to start automatically when you log in.
  4. Repeat the above to add more apps as necessary.

In some cases, you might want to ensure that an app’s window stays hidden when the app launches—meaning the window does not appear in the foreground right away. To make this happen, click on the Hide checkbox next to the app in the Login Items list.

Note: A quick look at the left-side pane reveals that you’re editing the startup items for the current user account by default. If you have admin privileges, you can control startup items for a different user by clicking on the relevant username in the list. If the settings are grayed out, you’ll need to enter an admin’s credentials first by clicking on the padlock icon at the bottom of the settings pane.

How to Disable Startup Apps on Your Mac Temporarily

It’s possible to prevent startup apps on your Mac from running automatically on a temporary per-login basis. This can be quite helpful when you need to login quickly—say, when you’re troubleshooting your Mac to fix startup problems.

To disable app launches when you’re logging in, after you enter your credentials on the login screen, hold down the Shift key before you click on the login (right-facing arrow) button. Release the key when the Dock appears. macOS will now start without launching any startup programs.

If you don’t see the login screen, restart your Mac and hold down the Shift key when you see the progress bar.

How to Delete Startup Apps on Your Mac

If your Mac boots up slowly, it’s a possible indicator that you need to optimize your Mac’s startup programs. This is easy to do. Here’s how:

  1. Visit System Preferences > Users & Groups.
  2. Switch to the Login Items tab to reveal the list of items that are set to launch automatically when your Mac starts. (Apps that were set to open at startup before you uninstalled them have a yellow warning icon displayed next to the Hide checkbox.)
  3. To remove an app from this list, select the app and click on the (Minus) button below the list.

When installed, certain apps set themselves up to launch at login without your explicit permission. That’s why it’s necessary to review startup apps on a regular basis to optimize the performance of your Mac.

How to Delay the Launch of Mac Startup Apps

Delay Start Mac app screen

Does your Mac have several indispensable startup items left over even after you’ve cleaned up everything? You could disable them, but then it’d be tiresome to launch each app manually. Here’s a better workaround: Delay Start.

This simple macOS utility lets you spread out the timing of your launch items in order to reduce the load on your Mac. To use Delay Start:

  1. Remove existing launch items from System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items. To do so, select all the apps in the list and click on the (Minus) button.
  2. Click on the + (Plus) button and add the Delay Start app to the list.
  3. Now launch Delay Start. In the app, click on the + (Plus) button to add the apps that you want to open automatically at login.
  4. Enter the time (in seconds) in the Time Setting box. macOS will delay the launch of that particular app by the time set above.

Repeat the last two steps to configure the delay time for as many apps as you like.

How to Detect Malicious Startup Items on Your Mac

Scan results for login items in KnockKnock Mac app

Contrary to popular belief, Macs can get infected with malware, too. To counter that threat, we recommend installing KnockKnock. It’s a free Mac app that gives you an overview of all startup items on your Mac and also scans those items for potential malware using VirusTotal.

To see KnockKnock in action, launch the app and click on the Start Scan button at the top. The scan should complete in a minute or two, after which the results appear on the screen.

The scan results are categorized into various sections. For instance, the Launch Items category displays all the apps that auto-start with your Mac. Kernel Extensions show installed modules that are possibly kernel loaded, and so on.

Once you select a category, you’ll see its information from VirusTotal on the right side. If it finds that a launch item is infected, you can click on the Show button at the far right to locate the file in Finder and delete it.

KnockKnock can also help you determine whether a particular launch item belongs to Apple or is from a third-party software vendor. A green padlock next to an item indicates an item signed by Apple, while a closed black padlock denotes an item signed by third parties. Unsigned items show up with an open orange padlock.

An open padlock doesn’t necessarily mean that the item is malicious, but you should still be wary of it.

Keep in mind that there are native methods to remove hidden launch components from your Mac. KnockKnock just makes the process easier.

Take Complete Charge of Your Mac’s Startup Programs

Use KnockKnock to detect any malicious startup items your Mac might have. Delete any infected apps immediately. Then, you can set useful apps to autorun and remove pesky programs that add themselves automatically. Better yet, you can delay the launch of apps to reduce the strain on your Mac’s resources.

With a combination of the tips we’ve outlined above, you can make your Mac start up faster. And if you want the boot process to feel snappier than ever, familiarize yourself with these macOS boot modes and startup key combinations.

Read the full article: How to Add, Remove, and Delay Startup Items on Your Mac


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7 Fixes for an iPhone Stuck in Headphone Mode


iphone-headphones-mode

If you’re lucky enough to still have a headphone port on your iPhone, you might find that problems with it cause your iPhone to get stuck in headphone mode. When this happens, no sound plays from your iPhone speakers, even though you don’t have headphones plugged in anymore.

This also happens with newer iPhones after using headphones that connect to the Lightning port or via Bluetooth. Whether you have an iPhone 6 or an iPhone 11, if it’s stuck in headphone mode, you can use the steps below to fix it.

Find Out If Your iPhone Is Stuck in Headphone Mode First

You might think your iPhone is stuck in headphone mode because it stopped playing sound from the speakers, but lots of other issues cause this problem as well. For instance, a fault with your speakers can make the sound stop working, without having anything to do with your headphones.

Make sure your iPhone is stuck in headphone mode by opening Control Center. To do so, swipe down from the top-right corner of your iPhone (or swipe up from the bottom if you have an iPhone with a Home button).

The volume slider in Control Center shows a headphone icon when your iPhone thinks your headphones are plugged in. If connected to AirPods, you should see an AirPods icon instead.

If the Control Center shows a normal volume speaker icon, your iPhone is not stuck in headphone mode. The steps below won’t fix your issue in that case; use our guide for troubleshooting iPhone speaker problems to find a solution instead.

However, if your iPhone is stuck in headphone mode, the tips below can help fix it.

1. Restart Your iPhone

Your iPhone is stuck in headphone mode because of either a hardware problem or a software problem. If it’s a software problem, your iPhone should switch back to speaker mode after you restart it.

To do this, press and hold the Side button with either Volume button (or just hold the Side button if your iPhone has a Home button). When prompted, slide to power off and wait 30 seconds for your iPhone to fully power off. Then press the Side button again to restart it.

Slide to power off prompt on iphone

After restarting, open Control Center to find out if your iPhone is still stuck in headphone mode or not. If it is, there must be a physical problem with your device. Skip the next two steps, which are software-based, to find out how to fix it.

If your iPhone switched back to speaker mode, then you’re dealing with a software problem. You can keep restarting your iPhone every time it gets stuck, or use the next two steps to eliminate the problem for good.

2. Update iOS

If your iPhone got stuck in headphone mode because of a software problem, you should make sure you’re running the latest version of iOS. Apple frequently updates iOS to introduce new features and to fix software bugs.

Go to Settings > General > Software Update to check for new updates. If any are available, download and install them as soon as possible.

Checking for iOS Software Updates in iPhone Settings

3. Erase and Reinstall iOS

Corrupt system files on your iPhone might cause it to keep getting stuck in headphone mode even after you update to the latest version of iOS. If you’ve already ruled out physical problems by restarting your device, you might be able to find a permanent solution by reinstalling iOS.

If you use a computer to do this, it erases and rewrites every line of code on your iPhone, eliminating any software bugs that crept into the system. When you do this, it also deletes all the data on your iPhone, so be sure to make a backup of your iPhone first.

Follow the instructions in our guide to factory resetting your iPhone. Make sure you choose to restore using a computer to reinstall iOS completely. Since this is such an extreme step to take, we only suggest you reset your iPhone if a software update didn’t fix your issue.

4. Reconnect and Disconnect Your Headphones

If your iPhone is still stuck in headphone mode after restarting, there must be a physical problem with the device. Usually, it’s as simple as dirt buildup in the headphone port, which tricks the sensors into thinking something is still plugged in.

Reconnect your headphones then disconnect them again. Repeat this three or four times to loosen any dirt within the port. Then gently shake your iPhone to let loose debris fall out.

remove broken headphone jack

If you have Bluetooth headphones, connect and disconnect your headphones by going to Settings > Bluetooth. When you disconnect your headphones, your iPhone should automatically switch back to using the normal speakers.

5. Clear Out the Headphone Port

It’s possible there’s more dirt packed into your headphone port causing this problem. You need to be careful when clearing it out, because it’s possible to damage your iPhone while doing this.

It’s best to turn off your iPhone before inserting anything into the headphone or Lightning port, to avoid causing a short circuit or introducing a static charge to the electronics.

Don’t insert any metal objects—like a straightened paperclip—into your ports. Instead, use the following tools to safely clear out dirt and debris safely:

  • Compressed air
  • Cotton swabs
  • Interdental brush

Compressed air, cotton bud, and intradental brush

If none of that works, you might be able to remove obstructions from the headphone port on an iPhone 6S or earlier using the inner tube of a pen. The open end of these tubes is often the same diameter as your headphone port, allowing you to carefully insert it and twist to loosen any dirt inside.

Be careful you don’t let any ink leak into your iPhone.

Inner tube of a pen

For a Lightning port, squash the end of a plastic straw to make it oblong, then insert it into the Lightning port to loosen dirt stuck at the bottom. Follow our guide to cleaning your iPhone if you need further help.

6. Check for Water Damage

If you can’t find any debris in the ports but your iPhone is still stuck in headphone mode, it might be an indication of water damage inside your device. This could happen from something as obvious as dropping your iPhone in the toilet or something as subtle as sweat dripping down your headphone cable.

Unfortunately, if your iPhone is water damaged, there’s little you can do to repair it except replace the device entirely.

You can use the liquid indicators on your iPhone to get a better idea of whether it has suffered water damage or not. Open the SIM card tray and look for a small white tab inside; this turns red, pink, or orange when it comes into contact with liquid.

On the iPhone 4S and earlier, you’ll find the liquid indicator tab inside the headphone port itself.

Liquid indicators on iPhone 4S and iPhone 6

Don’t use rice to dry your iPhone if it’s liquid damaged. This runs the risk of making matters worse by leaving harmful residue behind or further blocking the ports. Instead, take a look at our guide on how to fix a water-damaged iPhone.

7. Temporary Software Workarounds

Even if your iPhone needs a repair to fix a hardware problem with your headphone port, you can still use the workarounds below to trick it out of headphone mode whenever it gets stuck.

None of these tips offers a permanent solution, but they could be the quick fix you need if you can’t afford a repair.

Toggle Airplane Mode On and Off

Open Control Center and tap the airplane icon to turn Airplane Mode on and off. This disconnects any Bluetooth headphones or speakers your iPhone thought it was still connected to.

Change the Audio Output

When listening to music or watching videos, your iPhone lets you choose between different audio outputs. Open Control Center, then tap and hold the playback controls in the top-right corner. Select the AirPlay icon to reveal all your output options and select iPhone from the list.

Change Your Ringer Volume

Open the Settings and go to Sounds & Haptics. Tap the Ringtone option, then tap any ringtone to make it play through your iPhone speakers even if it’s stuck in headphone mode. Use the Volume buttons while the ringtone is playing to make your iPhone switch back to speaker mode.

Find Out How to Fix Your Headphone Port

When your iPhone is stuck in headphone mode because of a hardware problem, you should speak to Apple’s support team to find out if it’s fixable under warranty. Unfortunately, Apple won’t just fix your headphone port; support will replace the entire device. This makes it an expensive “repair” if you aren’t covered by warranty.

If that’s the case, look into finding a replacement headphone port and repairing the iPhone yourself. This isn’t easy to do, but it might be the best option if you can’t afford a new phone.

There are plenty of websites that show you how to fix your own gadgets, many of which sell all the tools you need to repair your iPhone’s headphone port. If you think something snapped off inside, look into removing a broken headphone plug from your phone.

Read the full article: 7 Fixes for an iPhone Stuck in Headphone Mode


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How to Send Audio in Facebook Messenger


send-audio-fb-messenger

Facebook Messenger is packed with functionality. You can send images, GIFs, files, and even money through Messenger. But did you know that you can also send audio in Messenger? Allowing you to record voice messages for your family and friends.

Sending audio in Facebook Messenger is very simple. So, in this article we’ll explain how to send audio in Messenger, allowing you to save your fingers a few extra taps on the keyboard.

How to Send Audio in Messenger

For a long time, sending an audio recording through Messenger meant recording in a separate app, copying the audio into a file, and sending the file. That was quite some time ago. It is now easier than ever to send a voice message in Messenger.

There is one thing to remember before recording an audio message. If you’re using Facebook Messenger on your desktop, you’ll need a separate microphone to record your audio. Many laptops have an integrated microphone that you can use, although the audio quality can vary via this method.

Of course, if you’re using the Facebook Messenger app on your smartphone, you can record audio directly.

Recording a Facebook Messenger Audio Message in a Web Browser

First up, you need to open Facebook Messenger and locate the person you wish to send an audio message.

Alongside the text input box at the bottom of the page, select the blue plus icon to reveal the additional options. From here, you can send pictures, files, GIFs, and audio, or launch a game in Messenger.

facebook messenger record audio in browser

Select the Microphone icon. A new box will appear with a red Record button. When you’re ready to record your message, hit the Record icon, and begin speaking. Select the same button to finish your recording, or Cancel to delete the message.

Recording a Facebook Messenger Audio Message in the App

Facebook Messenger is available for Android and iOS:

Download: Facebook Messenger for Android | iOS (Free)

The process for recording an audio message with the Facebook Messenger app is very similar to doing so on the web.

First up, open the Facebook Messenger app, then browse to the person you want to send an audio message.

Alongside the text input box at the bottom of your screen, select and hold the Microphone icon. With the Microphone icon held down, you can record your audio message. Once you let go of the Microphone icon, the audio recording will send. If you want to cancel the audio recording before sending, swipe the icon up before releasing it and sending the recording.

Sending a Pre-Recorded Audio Message in Messenger

The previous section deals with sending a live audio recording on Facebook Messenger. How about if you want to pre-record your audio message, then send the audio recording in Messenger at a different time?

Facebook Messenger makes that process easy, too.

How to Send a Pre-Recorded Audio Message via Messenger on the Web

This part of the article assumes you have an audio recording ready to use. Open Facebook Messenger and browse to the person you want to send your audio recording. Alongside the text input box at the bottom of the page, select the blue plus icon to reveal the additional options.

Select the Add Files icon, then browse to the location of your audio recording. Add a message explaining what the audio file is (if you want), then send the message. The file will upload to Facebook Messenger, where the recipient can download to listen.

How to Send a Pre-Recorded Audio Message via Messenger in the App

Open the Facebook Messenger app, then browse to the person you want to send your audio message. Alongside the text input box at the bottom of your screen, select the Add Files icon. The Files options will appear below the text input box. From here, you can scroll through your files until you find your audio recording.

The audio file will upload to Facebook Messenger, where the recipient can download the file to listen later.

The Pros and Cons of Using Facebook for Audio Messages

In August 2019, Facebook admitted that a team of contractors was transcribing audio messages. The goal was to check the working of its AI listening and transcribing system, which it uses to check the content of audio messages, and transcribe them for users if required.

However, there was never any indication that human review was part of the process and, even though Facebook took steps to anonymize the data, it was a breach of privacy.

In that, the issue is a wider representation of what can happen if you send audio messages through Facebook. A Facebook representative might not listen to your audio recording. But that recording is recorded and therefore becomes part of your Facebook identity.

There are many reasons why Facebook is a security nightmare. Including the way the social network hoovers up any data that comes its way. So, if you do use Facebook to send an audio message, stick to basic topics, and avoid discussing anything particularly sensitive.

On the plus side, Facebook Messenger offers an easy option for sending quick audio messages. You can send a short shopping list or a friendly reminder to your other half, or voice record an amazing idea and send it straight away without fiddling around with a voice recording app.

For many people, Facebook Messenger’s basic audio recording option is more than enough, especially if you share the privacy concerns outlined above.

What’s the Best Way to Send Audio Recordings?

Facebook Messenger makes it extremely easy to send an audio recording to a friend, family member, colleague, or anyone else you know. And it’s one of the easiest methods to use, period.

You can also send voice messages on Instagram and WhatsApp, two other messaging services owned and operated by Facebook.

However, Twitter is a different kettle of fish altogether, as you cannot record audio to the platform directly. However, there are various ways to upload and post audio to Twitter.

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9 Fixes for When a Movie Has No Sound


movie-nosound-fix

You sit down to watch a movie, press play, but there’s no sound. How frustrating! If you ever find that a movie has no sound, here are the steps you need to take to fix it.

Whether you’ve downloaded the movie for playback on Windows or Mac, or are streaming through a platform like Netflix or Amazon Prime, this is how you fix a movie with no sound.

1. Restart Your Device

This is the oldest trick in the book, but you’d be surprised at how often it works. Simply turn your system off and on again. For a TV, don’t just put it into standby. Turn it off at the plug, wait 10 seconds, then turn it back on.

On TVs, you can often restart specific apps like Netflix or Amazon Prime individually. Look within the app settings or help section for a button that lets you restart.

2. Update Your Device

While most systems will keep themselves updated automatically, it’s good to perform a manual check for updates when experiencing any issue.

It’s easy to update your Mac or update Windows. TVs will vary by manufacturer, but look in the settings for a firmware update. Remember that platforms like Kodi on the Amazon Fire Stick need updating too.

3. Check Your Audio Connection

HDMI cable

Try playing something else to determine whether the problem is with your playback device or the movie itself. If other things don’t have sound either, it’s probably a problem with your sound connection.

First, make sure you don’t have the device muted—who knows, perhaps you accidentally sat on the remote. Second, check your audio cables to ensure they haven’t come loose. If you’re unsure which is which, unplug all of the cables and then plug them back in firmly.

If you’re using HDMI, this transmits both video and audio. HDMI cables can be bought cheaply, and can be prone to failure, so switch yours out for a new one to see if it fixes the problem.

4. Download the Movie Again

If you downloaded the movie then you can try downloading it again. While it’s unlikely, especially if the entire movie plays fine visually, it’s possible that the file got corrupted somehow, which can happen if your connection to the server was interrupted.

If you are having internet issues, here’s how to fix a slow or unstable Wi-Fi connection.

5. Watch the Movie on Another Platform

Let’s say your Amazon Prime movie has no sound. You could try finding that movie on one of the many free movie streaming sites.

That won’t be possible if it’s a Netflix original or similar, since those are exclusive to that service, but most movies are available on multiple platforms. You might find this fixes your problem if the audio issue is with the original platform or their upload of the movie.

6. Use a Different Playback Program

vlc player

There are a million and one different media playback programs available. They don’t all work the same way. Some only support certain video files or don’t run on every platform.

The best video player is VLC. This is because it’s free, open-source, cross-platform, and most importantly supports a huge number of video formats out of the box.

The chances are if a video has no sound on another video player, it will work just fine on VLC.

If you can’t download another media player to your TV, you can stream from your computer to Chromecast.

7. Download Audio Codecs

To quote our article detailing everything you need to know about codecs, a codec “is an encoding tool that processes video [and audio] and stores it in a stream of bytes”.

Codecs help reduce the size of files and then decompress them when needed. There are many types of codecs, each using different technologies for various applications. Some examples include WMA, MP3, and XviD.

Since there are so many variables when it comes to codecs, it could be that your device or media program doesn’t have the necessary information to correctly play the movie. This can result in there being no audio.

Ideally, you should follow our advice above of using VLC because it supports lots of popular codecs out of the box.

If that still doesn’t work, download the necessary codec. If you don’t know what that is, view the movie file’s properties on a computer to find out. Still uncertain? Download a decent codec pack like K-Lite and the chances are you’ll find what you need.

8. Change the Speaker Configuration

The movie might be encoded to play on different channels that your device cannot support. For example, it’s not uncommon for downloaded movies to be in 5.1 surround sound, which is designed to play different parts of the audio from different speakers.

If you don’t have a surround sound setup, you might end up hearing only one of those tracks (like just the background noise and no dialog) or even nothing at all.

As such, you should adjust your device’s speaker configuration to be set to stereo. This will play all of the audio tracks through the same channel.

The exact method to change this will depend on your device and playback program. You might need to do it for both the device and the program.

For example, on Windows 10, press Windows key + R to open Run. Input mmsys.cpl and click OK. On the Playback tab, find your speakers, click them, then click Configure. Select Stereo and click Next until the wizard is finished.

Instructions will be different for other operating systems or TVs, so check your manufacturer’s help pages for information.

The steps will also change for each media program, but if you’re using VLC then you should use the top menu to go to Audio > Stereo Mode > Stereo.

9. Watch With Closed Captions

YouTube captions

This is a last resort, but if you can’t fix the audio and are desperate to watch the movie, then you could view it with subtitles or closed captions.

While subtitles only provide the dialog in text form, closed captions also give a description of music and sound effects. Closed captions are designed for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services offer subtitles. YouTube even has the ability to automatically generate them. If you’re watching on a platform that doesn’t already have captions, here are the best places to download free subtitles for movies and TV shows. Many of these services also offer closed captions.

Other Things to Try When Your Movie Has No Sound

Hopefully the problem of no sound is now fixed and you can enjoy the movie with glorious audio. However, if you’re still having issues, and are trying to watch the movie on your computer, here’s how to fix your computer speakers.

Read the full article: 9 Fixes for When a Movie Has No Sound


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MATE vs. GNOME Shell vs. Unity vs. Cinnamon Desktop Environments Explained


gnome

When GNOME 3.0 launched with a new interface, parts of the Linux community scrambled to find a new desktop environment that was right for them.

Some forked GNOME 2 into MATE or modified it into Cinnamon and Unity. Others flocked completely away from anything GNOME-related to other desktop environments entirely.

But there was more to GNOME than the interface, which left many hesitant to leave the ecosystem behind. That’s why many of the most popular alternatives are, ultimately, still based on GNOME. Here’s what sets them apart.

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment that has been around since 1998. The name originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment and is commonly pronounced with a hard G, the same as gnu (Guh-nome).

GNOME utilizes the GTK toolkit. These days the GNOME Project maintains GTK, but the coding language began as the toolkit for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, better known as GIMP. Many desktop Linux apps utilize GTK.

A desktop environment is more than an interface. GNOME also includes a suite of apps, a set of technologies, and the community of people that has grown around this software.

GNOME Shell

GNOME desktop environment on Linux

The early versions of GNOME had a traditional desktop paradigm similar to older versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS. With version 3.0, the GNOME team decided to go a different way and introduced a new design known as the GNOME Shell.

GNOME Shell contains an Activities Overview that shows your open windows, contains an app launcher, and makes virtual desktops a core part of the experience. Virtual desktops became so essential that the GNOME team did away with the minimize button, instead encouraging people to organize windows across their virtual desktops.

GNOME Shell also places a heavy emphasis on search. You can open or install apps, locate files, look up the weather, see the time, and perform many other tasks by typing directly in Activities Overview.

With this change, GNOME 3.0 introduced or adopted ways of using a computer that have since also become prominent in commercial desktop operating systems as well. But many people did not want to change the way they used their computer so drastically or simply have a preference for the traditional desktop workflow.

Despite this, GNOME remains the most widely-embraced Linux desktop environment. Ubuntu, the most popular desktop Linux distro, uses a modified version of GNOME by default. Fedora, the community-run companion to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, provides perhaps the purist GNOME experience.

Linux manufacturers such as System76 and Purism ship their own Linux distros that come with GNOME. Linux Laptops from Dell and Lenovo also run GNOME out of the box.

GNOME Classic

GNOME Classic desktop environment

If you like the classic GNOME experience but want to keep much of the modern look and feel, you don’t have to switch to a separate desktop environment. Simply log out and, at the login screen, select the gear icon to change from GNOME to GNOME Classic.

This is not an exact copy of GNOME 2, and it doesn’t have lower system requirements than GNOME Shell, but it may be just what you’re looking for.

Unity

Ubuntu Unity 20.04 desktop
Image Credit: Ubuntu Unity

With Ubuntu’s popularity, it was a big deal when Canonical chose not to throw its weight behind GNOME 3.0. Instead, the company continued to develop its own Unity interface that utilized a dock on the left-hand side of the screen and featured an even heavier emphasis on searching than GNOME. Not only could you launch apps that way, but a feature known as HUD (Heads Up Display) also allowed you to navigate menu bars by typing. If you wanted to navigate an app menu with your mouse, you would find it at the top of the screen.

While Unity was free software, the broader community shied away from Canonical’s efforts. Part of this stemmed from Ubuntu’s use of patched versions of GTK to deliver Unity, which increased the work needed to port the interface to other distros.

In 2017, Canonical discontinued Unity and made GNOME Ubuntu’s default desktop again. The community picked up from where Canonical left off. The UBPorts developers have continued work on Unity8, which never appeared in Ubuntu as anything more than a demo. As for Unity7, the software many people had grown to love, that interface made a resurgence in the new Ubuntu Unity distro that launched alongside Ubuntu 20.04.

MATE

Ubuntu MATE desktop

MATE is a continuation of the GNOME 2 series. Most MATE desktops default to a layout with two panels, one at the top and one at the bottom. You can launch apps, open the file manager, and navigate system settings via the options in the top left. System tray icons and the cloud sit in the top right.

Across the bottom you find a list of your open windows, as you would find in older versions of Windows. Your virtual desktops appear in the bottom right.

While MATE developers have been hard at work, the desktop looks largely the same as the GNOME 2 did over a decade ago. That’s because MATE is primarily a conservation project, with work going toward making sure the existing interface can continue to work with modern technologies and apps. New features appear, but they expand rather than change the established way of doing things.

MATE has lower system requirements than modern versions of GNOME, so it feels snappier on older or underpowered machines.

You can install MATE on most Linux distros. Ubuntu MATE is an Ubuntu flavor that comes with MATE as the default interface. Fedora has a MATE spin. There’s also nothing stopping you from using MATE on Debian, openSUSE, or Arch Linux.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon Linux desktop environment

When GNOME 3.0 launched, the transition wasn’t solely about a new interface. GTK 2 also gave way to GTK 3. While MATE kept GNOME 2 alive and well, that initially meant sticking with GTK 2. Cinnamon came about as a way to keep a traditional interface while still adopting GTK 3. Before becoming a separate desktop environment, Cinnamon was a set of GNOME extensions.

Cinnamon was not an effort to emulate GNOME 2. Instead, Cinnamon embraced a design language more akin to Windows. There’s an app menu in the bottom left, a system tray in the bottom right, and a window list in between.

While the design is by no means a pixel-by-pixel copy of Windows, the experience is often familiar enough for people switching to Linux for the first time.

Many consider Cinnamon as perhaps the simplest version of Linux. The Linux Mint team created Cinnamon, and they remain the primary developers. That said, you can run Cinnamon on Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch Linux, and the list goes on.

Pantheon

elementary OS comes with a suite of default apps

Pantheon is the desktop environment found in elementary OS, which first launched in 2011. The design is deliberately minimalist. There’s an app menu for opening software, a dock for managing open apps, and system icons in the top right. Like GNOME, there isn’t a minimize button, though a maximize one is still present. In elementary OS, the focus is on the apps.

Pantheon does not contain many customization options and is even less configurable than GNOME, due to its lack of extensions. But thanks to the elementary team’s commitment to design, Pantheon is one of the more polished and accessible free desktops around.

You can find Pantheon in other distros, such as Fedora or Arch Linux, but the desktop environment is designed with elementary OS in mind.

Budgie

Budgie system settings

Unlike the other GNOME-based desktops, Budgie did not come about during the GNOME 3.0 transition. Instead, the project began in 2013 as an effort to create a simple interface not unlike that of a Chromebook.

But Budgie is not a ChromeOS clone. This is a fully-featured Linux desktop environment.

While MATE and Cinnamon are both GTK-based desktops, they both exercise some distance from GNOME’s current direction. That’s less so with Budgie, which is actively dependent on core parts of GNOME and utilizes some of the same tools, like GNOME’s tool for managing system settings. The app design is also similar, doing away with traditional title bars (where app names and tool bars are separate) for many apps.

Budgie is closely affiliated with Solus, a distro formerly known as EvolveOS. Solus continues to steer Budgie’s development, but it’s not the only one invested. Ubuntu Budgie is the most well-known alternative, but as with MATE and Cinnamon, you can download Budgie on most Linux distros.

GNOME Desktop Environments, Summarized

GNOME 3.0 came with a controversial design that many people have since come to love, despite discarding some user interface elements that have become standard. Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Google’s Chrome OS all have minimize and maximize buttons. They all have a taskbar or dock. It’s no surprise that many people want to keep those things around.

But if you don’t want to swap out GNOME for another desktop environment, you can still get many of these features using GNOME extensions.

Read the full article: MATE vs. GNOME Shell vs. Unity vs. Cinnamon Desktop Environments Explained


Google at ACL 2020




This week, the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020), a premier conference covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language, takes place online.

As a leader in natural language processing and understanding, and a Diamond Level sponsor of ACL 2020, Google will showcase the latest research in the field with over 30 publications, and the organization of and participation in a variety of workshops and tutorials.

If you’re registered for ACL 2020, we hope that you’ll visit the Google virtual booth to learn more about the projects and opportunities at Google that go into solving interesting problems for billions of people. You can also learn more about the Google research being presented at ACL 2020 below (Google affiliations bolded).

Committees
Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chair: Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
Accessibility Chair: Sushant Kafle
Local Sponsorship Chair: Kristina Toutanova
Virtual Infrastructure Committee: Yi Luan
Area Chairs: Anders Søgaard, Ankur Parikh, Annie Louis, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Christo Kirov, Daniel Cer, Dipanjan Das, Diyi Yang, Emily Pitler, Eunsol Choi, George Foster, Idan Szpektor, Jacob Eisenstein, Jason Baldridge, Jun Suzuki, Kenton Lee, Luheng He, Marius Pasca, Ming-Wei Chang, Sebastian Gehrmann, Shashi Narayan, Slav Petrov, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Waleed Ammar, William Cohen

Long Papers
Cross-modal Language Generation using Pivot Stabilization for Web-scale Language Coverage
Ashish V. Thapliyal, Radu Soricut

Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled
Daphne Ippolito, Daniel Duckworth, Chris Callison-Burch, Douglas Eck

On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization
Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Bernd Bohnet, Ryan McDonald

MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices
Zhiqing Sun, Hongkun Yu, Xiaodan Song, Renjie Liu, Yiming Yang, Denny Zhou

BabyWalk: Going Farther in Vision-and-Language Navigation by Taking Baby Steps
Wang Zhu, Hexiang Hu, Jiacheng Chen, Zhiwei Deng, Vihan Jain, Eugene Ie, Fei Sha

Dynamic Programming Encoding for Subword Segmentation in Neural Machine Translation
Xuanli He, Gholamreza Haffari, Mohammad Norouzi

GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions
Dorottya Demszky, Dana Movshovitz-Attias, Jeongwoo Ko, Alan Cowen, Gaurav Nemade, Sujith Ravi

TaPas: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training (see blog post)
Jonathan Herzig, Pawel Krzysztof Nowak, Thomas Müller, Francesco Piccinno, Julian Eisenschlos

Toxicity Detection: Does Context Really Matter?
John Pavlopoulos, Jeffrey Sorensen, Lucas Dixon, Nithum Thain, Ion Androutsopoulos

(Re)construing Meaning in NLP
Sean Trott, Tiago Timponi Torrent, Nancy Chang, Nathan Schneider

Pretraining with Contrastive Sentence Objectives Improves Discourse Performance of Language Models
Dan Iter, Kelvin Guu, Larry Lansing, Dan Jurafsky

Probabilistic Assumptions Matter: Improved Models for Distantly-Supervised Document-Level Question Answering
Hao Cheng, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova

AdvAug: Robust Adversarial Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation
Yong Cheng, Lu Jiang, Wolfgang Macherey, Jacob Eisenstein

Named Entity Recognition as Dependency Parsing
Juntao Yu, Bernd Bohnet, Massimo Poesio

Cross-modal Coherence Modeling for Caption Generation
Malihe Alikhani, Piyush Sharma, Shengjie Li, Radu Soricut, Matthew Stone

Representation Learning for Information Extraction from Form-like Documents (see blog post)
Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Navneet Potti, Sandeep Tata, James Bradley Wendt, Qi Zhao, Marc Najork

Low-Dimensional Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Ines Chami, Adva Wolf, Da-Cheng Juan, Frederic Sala, Sujith Ravi, Christopher Ré

What Question Answering can Learn from Trivia Nerds
Jordan Boyd-Graber, Benjamin Börschinger

Learning a Multi-Domain Curriculum for Neural Machine Translation
Wei Wang, Ye Tian, Jiquan Ngiam, Yinfei Yang, Isaac Caswell, Zarana Parekh

Translationese as a Language in "Multilingual" NMT
Parker Riley, Isaac Caswell, Markus Freitag, David Grangier

Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences
Yang Li, Jiacong He, Xin Zhou, Yuan Zhang, Jason Baldridge

BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation (see blog post)
Thibault Sellam, Dipanjan Das, Ankur Parikh

Exploring Unexplored Generalization Challenges for Cross-Database Semantic Parsing
Alane Suhr, Ming-Wei Chang, Peter Shaw, Kenton Lee

Frugal Paradigm Completion
Alexander Erdmann, Tom Kenter, Markus Becker, Christian Schallhart

Short Papers
Reverse Engineering Configurations of Neural Text Generation Models
Yi Tay, Dara Bahri, Che Zheng, Clifford Brunk, Donald Metzler, Andrew Tomkins

Syntactic Data Augmentation Increases Robustness to Inference Heuristics
Junghyun Min, R. Thomas McCoy, Dipanjan Das, Emily Pitler, Tal Linzen

Leveraging Monolingual Data with Self-Supervision for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Aditya Siddhant, Ankur Bapna, Yuan Cao, Orhan Firat, Mia Chen, Sneha Kudugunta, Naveen Arivazhagan, Yonghui Wu

Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities
Ben Hutchinson, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Emily Denton, Kellie Webster, Yu Zhong, Stephen Denuyl

Toward Better Storylines with Sentence-Level Language Models
Daphne Ippolito, David Grangier, Douglas Eck, Chris Callison-Burch

TACL Papers
TYDI QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages (see blog post)
Jonathan H. Clark, Eunsol Choi, Michael Collins, Dan Garrette, Tom Kwiatkowski, Vitaly Nikolaev, Jennimaria Palomaki

Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs
Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, Ryan Cotterell

Demos
Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder for Semantic Retrieval (see blog post)
Yinfei Yang, Daniel Cer, Amin Ahmad, Mandy Guo, Jax Law, Noah Constant, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Steve Yuan, Chris Tar, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Brian Strope, Ray Kurzweil

Workshops
IWPT - The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies
Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders Søgaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty

ALVR - Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research
Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang

WNGT - The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation
Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li

NLPMC - NLP for Medical Conversations
Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, Byron Wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, Nan Du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin

AutoSimTrans - The 1st Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation
Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, James Cross, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu

Tutorials
Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP (cutting-edge)
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann, Ellie Pavlick

Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing (Introductory)
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Yejin Choi, Dan Roth

‘Hamilton’ gives Disney+ a holiday weekend bump in US, with app downloads up 72%


The much-anticipated addition of “Hamilton” seems to have paid off for Disney+. According to new data from app store analytics firm Apptopia, Disney’s streaming service saw a big jump in downloads over the July 4 holiday weekend in the U.S., following the worldwide debut of “Hamilton” on Friday, July 3rd. Between Friday and Sunday, that translated to over half a million new global downloads (513,000+) for the Disney+ mobile app, excluding India and Japan. Some 266,084 of those downloads were in the U.S, the firm estimated.

These figures represent a 46.6% increase over the average seen during the previous four weekends in June (Friday through Sunday), Apptopia noted. But the numbers don’t include India or Japan as Disney+ is streamed via Hotstar in the former; and in the latter via a partnership with NTT Docomo through an existing service that later transitioned to Disney+.

Image Credits: Apptopia

The download figures also represented a 72.4% increase over the four prior weekends in June, in the U.S, indicating that a significant amount of interest in “Hamilton,” not surprisingly — given its “founding fathers” subject matter — comes from U.S. subscribers.

Notably, these downloads represent paid subscribers, not free trial users, as Disney+ ended its free week-long trial offering back in June. 

Rival firm Sensor Tower estimates a slightly different “Hamilton”-related bump for Disney+. During the week of June 29 to July 5, downloads spiked 64% over the week prior, Yahoo reported.

Image Credits: Apptopia

Apptopia also found that “Hamilton” represented the biggest content launch of all of 2020, so far, in terms of downloads. That means it also outpaced the streaming launch of “Frozen 2,” which arrived while consumers were under coronavirus lockdowns. It was also bigger than “Onward,” “Artemis Fowl,” and others, the firm found.

Image Credits: Disney

Of course, mobile download numbers don’t provide a full picture of how many signed up just for “Hamilton.” Many of the new Disney+ subscribers likely only signed up via a TV app and have yet to download the mobile companion.

If Roku’s online channel store offered a “top charts” section with rankings, we would have another window into Disney+ popularity given its status as a top streaming device and TV maker in the U.S. But it’s worth pointing out that Roku’s user base has given the Disney+ app a 4.3-star rating across 1,55,006 total reviews. For comparison, Netflix has 3,675,383 reviews — which shows how quickly the still relatively new service Disney+ is gaining on the market leader.

In May, Disney announced its streaming service had grown from 33.5 million subscribers as of March 28 to 54.4 million Disney+ subscribers as of May 4.

The service appeals to those who follow Disney’s top brands like Star Wars and Marvel, for example, but it’s also found a lot of growth among families who now more than ever need content to keep kids entertained amid the coronavirus outbreak, which has limited families’ usual activities and kept kids indoors.  At the $6.99 per month price point (or $69.99/yr), it’s one of the more affordable streaming services available.

 

 


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