5 Questions to Ask Before Getting a PayPal Credit Card

In Q3 2018, there were over 254 million active PayPal users in the world. It appears that people don’t realize—or simply don’t care—that there are several online payment processor alternatives to PayPal that are safer and better.

Sadly, convenience and availability tend to trump everything else.

And that’s true of the PayPal Credit Card as well. Despite its mixed reviews, a lot of people have and use a PayPal Credit Card. Should you start using one too? Here’s what you need to know to make an informed decision.

How the PayPal Credit Card Works

PayPal actually provides three different forms of credit:

• PayPal Credit (formerly called Bill Me Later)
• PayPal Extras MasterCard
• PayPal Smart Connect Card

As we learned in our overview of PayPal’s consumer services, PayPal Credit isn’t actually a credit card. It’s simply a credit line that’s part of your online account and comes with some benefits. The Smart Connect Card is similar, except you get a physical card.

When people talk about PayPal’s credit card, 99% of the time they’re referring to the PayPal Extras MasterCard, which is an actual credit card provided by Synchrony Bank. This is what we’ll be focusing on for the remainder of this article.

Here’s a quick rundown of what you get with a PayPal Extras MasterCard:

• There is no annual fee for this card.
• 3 points per $1 spent at gas stations and restaurants.
• 2 points per $1 spent at PayPal and eBay.
• 1 point per $1 spent anywhere else, online or offline.
• Redeem points for rewards. (More on that below.)
• MasterCard’s built-in protections against various inconveniences, including identity theft, fraudulent purchases, and price drops within 60 days.

How to Get a PayPal Credit Card

In order to get a PayPal credit card, you must voluntarily apply for one, be at least 18 years of age, and live within the United States. Application approval is subject to credit approval by Synchrony Bank.

Depending on your credit score and history, Synchrony Bank will determine whether you get the PayPal Extras MasterCard (21.99%, 25.99%, or 28.99% APR) or the Smart Connect Card (26.99% APR and no rewards program). Even if you apply specifically for the PayPal Extras MasterCard, there’s no guarantee you’ll get it.

However, after using the PayPal Smart Connect Card responsibly for a while, PayPal may decide to upgrade your account to an PayPal Extras MasterCard. This could take between 12 and 18 months, depending on your credit-worthiness.

Should You Get a PayPal Credit Card?

By now, the PayPal Extras MasterCard probably seems like an awesome deal. There aren’t any fees to using it, you get reward points no matter what you buy, and you get the same level of protection as you’d get from any other MasterCard credit card.

But should you apply for one? There are valid reasons to do so, of course, but there are just as many reasons why you shouldn’t. Depending on your answers to these five questions, you’ll know whether getting one is in your best interests or not.

1. Do You Already Have Consumer Debt?

If you’re already swimming in debt, grabbing another credit card is one of the last things you should do. Even if the debt you have is so-called “good debt”—such as a mortgage loan or student loans—you should be wary about taking on more debt.

It’s easy to tell yourself that you’ll be responsible with a new credit card, but the only way to know for sure is by being honest with yourself and your current credit situation. Are you responsible with your current finances? If not, you probably won’t be with any new debt.

In 2014, PayPal’s VP of Credit noted that “[consumer spending] goes up 30% after a customer adopts a PayPal credit vehicle,” citing previous studies at the company. That was true whether the credit vehicle was PayPal Credit or a PayPal credit card.

2. What Is Your Personal Credit Score?

As is true any time you apply for a new line of credit, Synchrony Bank will want to know your credit history before approving or rejecting your application. This means a hard credit inquiry, which will remain on your credit report for two years.

This means you shouldn’t apply unless you’re confident you’ll be approved. Getting a hard credit inquiry on your report and failing the approval process will leave you in a worse state than before.

Nobody knows the exact criteria, of course, but the general consensus seems to be a minimum credit score of 600 for the PayPal Extras MasterCard. Note that nothing is guaranteed and you may be rejected for other reasons unrelated to credit score.

3. Can You Get a Better Credit Card?

The rewards program for the PayPal Extras MasterCard is pretty good, but there are other credit cards with better rewards programs out there. If you qualify, you might as well shoot for them instead.

The Blue Cash Preferred Card by American Express is one of the most coveted cards for reward seekers. It has a $95 annual fee, but you get 6% cash back at supermarkets, 3% cash back at gas stations and department stores, and 1% everywhere else.

The Discover It Card by Discover is another good one, earning 5% cash back on select categories that change every three months, including gas stations, restaurants, Amazon, wholesale clubs, department stores, and others. It has no annual fee.

On the other hand, if you’re going to carry a balance from month to month (which you should NOT do if you can help it), then a low-interest option like the Barclaycard Ring MasterCard might be better, which has a 13.99% variable APR and no annual fee.

You may decide that the PayPal Extras MasterCard is still best for you. Just make sure you explore what else is out there first.

4. Are the Rewards Appealing to You?

The only reason to choose a PayPal Extras MasterCard over another credit card is if you prefer its rewards program, especially if you shop frequently with PayPal and/or eBay.

Indeed, a lot of people don’t realize that PayPal actually has its own shopping portal and directory where you can find a bunch of deals that you may not find elsewhere. On top of that, you get 2x reward points per $1 spent in the PayPal shopping portal (and on eBay).

Obviously, this only matters if you actually care about the stuff you can redeem using your PayPal reward points. Here are some of the more interesting things you can get:

• At 800 points, you can get gift cards for restaurants, gas stations, retail stores, and more.
• At 3,000 points, you can get direct merchandise of various kinds, including houseware, kitchenware, sports gear, electronics, gadgets, and more.
• At 6,000 points, you can get a direct cash back reward with money deposited straight into your PayPal balance.
• At 15,000 points, you can get travel vouchers for hotels, airfare, and car rentals.

5. Do You Support PayPal’s Business Practices?

Just because it’s popular and used by millions all over the world doesn’t mean that PayPal is doing things right—at least in terms of ethics and trust.

It’s no secret that thousands of people have been burned by PayPal in one way or another: frozen funds, lost transactions, closed accounts, and poor customer support. Maybe you’ve been okay so far, but you could be the next unsuspecting victim.

In a more abstract sense, you have to decide whether you’re willing to do business with PayPal while knowing that they aren’t treating their customers as well as they could be. Do you want your hard-earned money going to a company like that?

Maybe you don’t care, and that’s fine too. This is a personal decision and only you can make it, but for many it’s been bad enough to warrant boycotts against PayPal.

Is a PayPal Credit Card Worth It?

I have a PayPal Debit MasterCard that’s tied to my PayPal balance, but I haven’t used it in years. I’d personally never consider the PayPal Extras MasterCard—but only because I have better credit cards available to me within my credit score range.

When would I consider a PayPal credit vehicle? If the only cards available to me had annual fees (such as the Capital One QuicksilverOne Rewards) or those with weak or no rewards (such as most student-level credit cards).

And for what it’s worth, I’ve never had an issue with my PayPal accounts.

Read the full article: 5 Questions to Ask Before Getting a PayPal Credit Card

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Mac Taking Too Long to Shut Down? 7 Tips and Fixes to Try

One of the simple joys macOS offers is how quickly it starts up and shuts down. This normally takes just a few seconds, especially with the solid state flash storage in modern Mac computers.

But it’s not always perfect. Sometimes your Mac might become slow to shut down. When this happens, there are a number of tricks you can try to speed it up again.

Here are the best fixes for a Mac that takes forever to shut down.

1. Turn Off the Window Reopen Feature

macOS has a nifty feature that lets you save your current session (all your open apps, and the windows within those apps) when you shut down. It then reopens them automatically next time you log in. It’s great when you’ve finished working for the day and want to pick up where you left off tomorrow.

In order to do this, the operating system must save the session data to your hard drive. This takes time and can make your Mac shut down much slower, especially if you’re using an older Mac with a slow mechanical hard drive.

To speed up your shutdown, turn off this feature. Shut down as normal, but when the confirmation dialog box appears, make sure the option labeled Reopen windows when logging back in is not checked. If you’ve used the feature in the past, you might need a couple of restart cycles to see the full benefits.

2. Check for Stalled Print Jobs

Printers are notorious for causing computer problems. The most annoying of all is the stalled print job. You’ll try to print a document, but it won’t work for some reason. This proceeds to cause other computer tasks to grind to a halt.

If you use a printer and your Mac won’t shut down, double-check you haven’t got a stalled print job holding your system up. This can easily be the cause of the problem.

Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences > Printers & Scanners. Select your printer on the left, then click the Open Print Queue button. Delete any jobs that are left over and see if shutdown speed improves.

3. Close Down Apps More Quickly

Hanging software is another common reason why your Mac takes too long to shut down.

macOS attempts to close all open apps when it starts to shut down. But occasionally apps won’t comply, especially if you’ve been pushing your computer hard by using all the available memory.

The first fix to try for this is to close your apps manually (Cmd + Q, or right-click their Dock icon and choose Quit). If some refuse to close, you can force-quit them instead.

To do this, go to Apple Menu > Force Quit, or press Cmd + Option + Esc, and select the misbehaving app from the list. Click Force Quit to close it. Make sure you’ve saved your work before you do this.

If the problem persists, you can try to speed up the time macOS takes to close apps when it’s shutting down.

By default, the system gives apps 20 seconds to close, after which it will attempt to force-quit them. You can reduce this from 20 seconds to five seconds by copying and pasting the following commands into the Terminal app:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.coreservices.appleevents ExitTimeOut -int 5

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.securityd ExitTimeOut -int 5

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder ExitTimeOut -int 5

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd ExitTimeOut -int 5

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.coreservices.appleid.authentication ExitTimeOut -int 5

You’ll have to provide your admin password when you enter the first command. After that, you can enter the rest unhindered as long as you don’t close and re-open Terminal.

Obviously, this is a more advanced solution to try. Give it a pass if you aren’t comfortable changing system settings in the Terminal.

4. Free Up Some Disk Space

This is a simple tip, but one worth pursuing. All computers will start to run into problems when they’re very low on disk space. They need free space to store temporary data.

A lack of free space can cause shutdown problems, particularly if you have open apps trying to save their state during the process. If you have less than 15 percent of your disk capacity free, try freeing up space on your Mac and see if that helps.

5. Check Your Disk Health

Poor hard drive performance can cause a slow shutdown. Thankfully, this easy to check and fix in macOS. Just open the built-in Disk Utility app, select your drive in the left column, and click First Aid.

Next, click through the next two confirmation screens. While scanning, your computer will remain on, but it’s best to leave it alone while the job runs its course. This will detect and repair any disk problems you’ve got.

Disk repair advice for Macs once commonly recommended repairing permissions. However, while this was an option in older versions of Disk Utility, you no longer need to repair permissions on macOS. It hasn’t been necessary since the release of El Capitan in 2015.

6. Delete Your Caches

Your Mac caches a lot of data that it needs to access quickly and regularly. This helps to improve overall performance. However, caches tend to become bloated over time and can, in some cases, start to have the opposite effect.

Cache issues can even cause slow shutdowns. Clearing these macOS caches may solve the problem.

Delete the Kernel Cache

The first cache to delete is the kernel cache. macOS uses this to help it boot up quickly and safely. Purging the kernel cache from time to time can solve various problems, including making your Mac shut down more quickly.

To clear your kernel cache, you’ll need to restart your Mac in Safe Mode.

To do this, dold down the Shift key when pressing the power button to turn on your system. Keep it held until you see the Login window. This may take longer than for a normal boot.

Starting Safe Mode performs a few tasks along the way, including deleting the kernel cache. Once it loads, restart your Mac normally again and you’re done.

Delete App and System Caches

The next caches to delete are the system and app caches. You can do this quickly with an app like Disk Care from the App Store. If you prefer to save some money, you can instead do it manually.

First, open Spotlight with Cmd + Space. In the search bar, type (or paste) ~/Library/Caches. You can now delete the contents of this cache folder. As a general rule, it’s better to delete just the contents of each subfolder rather than simply selecting and deleting everything.

Next, in Spotlight type /Library/Caches (the same as before, but without the preceding tilde). Delete what’s here as well, then empty your Trash and restart.

7. Reset NVRAM, PRAM, and SMC

Macs have two special attributes called NVRAM (or PRAM on older systems) and SMC (system management controller) that handle certain core system functions, like the backlight brightness and speaker volume. Problems with PRAM or SMC can cause slow shutdowns or startups.

To reset PRAM or NVRAM, you need to turn off your Mac and then turn it back on. Immediately press and hold the Cmd, Option, P, and R keys simultaneously. Continue holding these keys until you hear a second startup sound, or see the Apple logo appear and disappear for the second time. Then release.

The process to reset the SMC differs depending on what Mac you’re using. See our guide on how to reset your Mac’s SMC for full details.

Solve Mac Startup Problems

It can be tough to isolate the exact cause of a problem like your Mac taking too long to shut down. But if you work through the steps above, you should hopefully get it back to working as fast as the day you bought it.

Some of these tips can help solve startup issues, too. But if you need more help with that, check out our guide to fixing Mac boot problems for the answers.

Read the full article: Mac Taking Too Long to Shut Down? 7 Tips and Fixes to Try

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How Russia’s online influence campaign engaged with millions for years

Russian efforts to influence U.S. politics and sway public opinion were consistent and, as far as engaging with target audiences, largely successful, according to a report from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project published today. Based on data provided to Congress by Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter, the study paints a portrait of the years-long campaign that’s less than flattering to the companies.

The report, which you can read here, was published today but given to some outlets over the weekend; it summarizes the work of the Internet Research Agency, Moscow’s online influence factory and troll farm. The data cover various periods for different companies, but 2016 and 2017 showed by far the most activity.

A clearer picture

If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple of years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts.

If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony.

Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to over 100 million on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day?

Facebook will show which Russian election troll accounts you followed

The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook actually shared Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated.

Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts.

The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted; all generated significant engagement, as this breakdown of the above stats shows:

Although the targeted communities were surprisingly diverse, the intent was highly focused: stoke partisan divisions, suppress left-leaning voters and activate right-leaning ones.

Black voters in particular were a popular target across all platforms, and a great deal of content was posted both to keep racial tensions high and to interfere with their actual voting. Memes were posted suggesting followers withhold their votes, or with deliberately incorrect instructions on how to vote. These efforts were among the most numerous and popular of the IRA’s campaign; it’s difficult to judge their effectiveness, but certainly they had reach.

Examples of posts targeting black Americans.

In a statement, Facebook said that it was cooperating with officials and that “Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency.” It also noted that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”

Instagram on the rise

Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished.

In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. Previous reports disclosed that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017).

A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram.

IRA-related Instagram posts jumped from an average of 2,611 per month in 2016 to 5,956 in 2017; note that the numbers don’t match the above table exactly because the time periods differ slightly.

Twitter posts, while extremely numerous, are quite steady at just under 60,000 per month, totaling around 73 million engagements over the period studied. To be perfectly frank, this kind of voluminous bot and sock puppet activity is so commonplace on Twitter, and the company seems to have done so little to thwart it, that it hardly bears mentioning. But it was certainly there, and often reused existing bot nets that previously had chimed in on politics elsewhere and in other languages.

In a statement, Twitter said that it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation.”

Google too is somewhat hard to find in the report, though not necessarily because it has a handle on Russian influence on its platforms. Oxford’s researchers complain that Google and YouTube have been not just stingy, but appear to have actively attempted to stymie analysis.

Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machine- readable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper.

This forced the researchers to collect their own data via citations and mentions of YouTube content. As a consequence, their conclusions are limited. Generally speaking, when a tech company does this, it means that the data they could provide would tell a story they don’t want heard.

For instance, one interesting point brought up by a second report published today, by New Knowledge, concerns the 1,108 videos uploaded by IRA-linked accounts on YouTube. These videos, a Google statement explained, “were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.”

In fact, all but a few dozen of these videos concerned police brutality and Black Lives Matter, which as you’ll recall were among the most popular topics on the other platforms. Seems reasonable to expect that this extremely narrow targeting would have been mentioned by YouTube in some way. Unfortunately it was left to be discovered by a third party and gives one an idea of just how far a statement from the company can be trusted. (Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Desperately seeking transparency

In its conclusion, the Oxford researchers — Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh and Dimitra Liotsiou — point out that although the Russian propaganda efforts were (and remain) disturbingly effective and well organized, the country is not alone in this.

“During 2016 and 2017 we saw significant efforts made by Russia to disrupt elections around the world, but also political parties in these countries spreading disinformation domestically,” they write. “In many democracies it is not even clear that spreading computational propaganda contravenes election laws.”

“It is, however, quite clear that the strategies and techniques used by government cyber troops have an impact,” the report continues, “and that their activities violate the norms of democratic practice… Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.”

Predictably, even social networks’ moderation policies became targets for propagandizing.

Waiting on politicians is, as usual, something of a long shot, and the onus is squarely on the providers of social media and internet services to create an environment in which malicious actors are less likely to thrive.

Specifically, this means that these companies need to embrace researchers and watchdogs in good faith instead of freezing them out in order to protect some internal process or embarrassing misstep.

“Twitter used to provide researchers at major universities with access to several APIs, but has withdrawn this and provides so little information on the sampling of existing APIs that researchers increasingly question its utility for even basic social science,” the researchers point out. “Facebook provides an extremely limited API for the analysis of public pages, but no API for Instagram.” (And we’ve already heard what they think of Google’s submissions.)

If the companies exposed in this report truly take these issues seriously, as they tell us time and again, perhaps they should implement some of these suggestions.

Read Full Article

How Russia’s online influence campaign engaged with millions for years

Russian efforts to influence U.S. politics and sway public opinion were consistent and, as far as engaging with target audiences, largely successful, according to a report from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project published today. Based on data provided to Congress by Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter, the study paints a portrait of the years-long campaign that’s less than flattering to the companies.

The report, which you can read here, was published today but given to some outlets over the weekend, summarizes the work of the Internet Research Agency, Moscow’s online influence factory and troll farm. The data cover various periods for different companies, but 2016 and 2017 showed by far the most activity.

A clearer picture

If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts.

If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony.

Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to over a hundred million on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day?

Facebook will show which Russian election troll accounts you followed

The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook actually shared Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated.

Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes, and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts.

The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations, and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted all generated significant engagement, as this breakdown of the above stats shows:

Although the targeted communities were surprisingly diverse, the intent was highly focused: stoke partisan divisions, suppress left-leaning voters, and activate right-leaning ones.

Black voters in particular were a popular target across all platforms, and a great deal of content was posted both to keep racial tensions high and to interfere with their actual voting. Memes were posted suggesting followers withhold their votes, or deliberately incorrect instructions on how to vote. These efforts were among the most numerous and popular of the IRA’s campaign; it’s difficult to judge their effectiveness, but certainly they had reach.

Examples of posts targeting black Americans.

In a statement, Facebook said that it was cooperating with officials and that “Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency.” It also noted that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”

Instagram on the rise

Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished.

In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. Previous reports disclosed that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017).

A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram.

IRA-related Instagram posts jumped from an average of 2,611 per month in 2016 to 5,956 in 2017; note that the numbers don’t match the above table exactly because the time periods differ slightly.

Twitter posts, while extremely numerous, are quite steady at just under 60,000 per month, totaling around 73 million engagements over the period studied. To be perfectly frank this kind of voluminous bot and sock puppet activity is so commonplace on Twitter, and the company seems to have done so little to thwart it, that it hardly bears mentioning. But it was certainly there, and often reused existing bot nets that previously had chimed in on politics elsewhere and in other languages.

In a statement, Twitter said that it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation.”

Google too is somewhat hard to find in the report, though not necessarily because it has a handle on Russian influence on its platforms. Oxford’s researchers complain that Google and YouTube have been not just stingy, but appear to have actively attempted to stymie analysis.

Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machine- readable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper.

This forced the researchers to collect their own data via citations and mentions of YouTube content. As a consequence their conclusions are limited. Generally speaking when a tech company does this, it means that the data they could provide would tell a story they don’t want heard.

For instance, one interesting point brought up by a second report published today, by New Knowledge, concerns the 1,108 videos uploaded by IRA-linked accounts on YouTube. These videos, a Google statement explained, “were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.”

In fact, all but a few dozen of these videos concerned police brutality and Black Lives Matter, which as you’ll recall were among the most popular topics on the other platforms. Seems reasonable to expect that this extremely narrow targeting would have been mentioned by YouTube in some way. Unfortunately it was left to be discovered by a third party and gives one an idea of just how far a statement from the company can be trusted.

Desperately seeking transparency

In its conclusion, the Oxford researchers — Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh, and Dimitra Liotsiou — point out that although the Russian propaganda efforts were (and remain) disturbingly effective and well organized, the country is not alone in this.

“During 2016 and 2017 we saw significant efforts made by Russia to disrupt elections around the world, but also political parties in these countries spreading disinformation domestically,” they write. “In many democracies it is not even clear that spreading computational propaganda contravenes election laws.”

“It is, however, quite clear that the strategies and techniques used by government cyber troops have an impact,” the report continues, “and that their activities violate the norms of democratic practice… Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.”

Predictably, even social networks’ moderation policies became targets for propagandizing.

Waiting on politicians is, as usual, something of a long shot, and the onus is squarely on the providers of social media and internet services to create an environment in which malicious actors are less likely to thrive.

Specifically, this means that these companies need to embrace researchers and watchdogs in good faith instead of freezing them out in order to protect some internal process or embarrassing misstep.

“Twitter used to provide researchers at major universities with access to several APIs, but has withdrawn this and provides so little information on the sampling of existing APIs that researchers increasingly question its utility for even basic social science,” the researchers point out. “Facebook provides an extremely limited API for the analysis of public pages, but no API for Instagram.” (And we’ve already heard what they think of Google’s submissions.)

If the companies exposed in this report truly take these issues seriously, as they tell us time and again, perhaps they should implement some of these suggestions.

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Lightspeed is raising its largest China fund yet

Lightspeed China Partners, the China-focused affiliate of Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, has set a $360 million target for its fourth flagship venture fund, according to a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today.

If the target is reached, the fund will be Lightspeed China’s largest yet, per PitchBook. Lightspeed China’s previous two funds each closed on $260 million. The VC raised $168 million for its debut fund in 2013.

Lightspeed China is led by David Mi (pictured). Mi, an investor in multiple billion-dollar Chinese companies, was previously the director of corporate development at Google, where he helped lead the search giant’s investment in Baidu. He joined Lightspeed in 2008 and established the firm’s China presence in 2011. Yan Han, a long-time Lightspeed investor and a founding partner of the firm’s Chinese branch, is also listed on the filing.

Lightspeed China has backed e-commerce platform Pingduoduo and loan provider Rong360, a pair of Chinese “unicorns” that both completed U.S. initial public offerings since 2017. Typically, the firm makes early-stage investments in the internet, mobile and enterprise spaces. 

Earlier this year, Lightspeed Venture Partners filed to raise a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments. This month, it tacked five new partners onto its consumer and enterprise investment teams, including Slack’s former head of growth and Twitter’s former vice president of global business development.

Lightspeed didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The incredible rise of Pinduoduo, China’s newest force in e-commerce

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Twitter’s support form leaked phone number country codes to IPs in China & Saudi

Twitter accidentally exposed the ability to pull an account’s phone number country code and whether the accounts had been locked by Twitter. The concern here is that malicious actors could have used the security flaw to figure out which countries accounts were based in, which could have ramifications for whistleblowers or political dissidents.

The issue came through one of Twitter’s support forms for contacting the company, and the company found that a large number of inquiries through the form came from IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia. Twitter writes “While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors.” We’ve requested more info on why it’s suggesting that. Attribution in these situations can be murky, and naming specific countries or suggesting state actors could be involved carry heavy implications.

Twitter began working on the issue on November 15th and fixed it on November 16th. Twitter tells TechCrunch that it has notified the European Union’s Data Protection Commissioner, as EU citizens may have been impacted. However, since country codes aren’t necessarily considered sensitive personal information, the leak may not trigger any GDPR enforcement or fines. Twitter tells us it has also updated the FTC and other regulatory organizations about the issue, though we’ve asked when it informed these different regulators.

Tech giants offer empty apologies because users can’t quit

Twitter has directly contacted users impacted by the issue, says full phone numbers were not leaked, and users don’t have to do anything in response. Users can contact Twitter here for more info. We’ve asked how many accounts were impacted, but Twitter told us that it doesn’t have more data to share as its investigation continues.

A Twitter spokesperson pointed us to a previous statement:

“It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease. These types of tactics have been around for far longer than Twitter has existed — they will adapt and change as the geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge. For our part, we are committed to understanding how bad-faith actors use our services. We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation.”

Sloppy security on the part of tech companies can make it dangerous for political dissidents or others at odds with their governments. Twitter explains that it locks accounts if it suspects they’ve been compromised by hackers or violate “Twitter’s Rules”, that includes “unlawful use” that depends greatly on what national governments deem illegal. What’s worrisome is that attackers with IP addresses in China or Saudi Arabia might have been able to use the exploit to confirm that certain accounts belonged to users in their countries and whether they’ve been locked. That information could be used to hunt down the people who own these accounts.

The company apologized, writing that “We recognize and appreciate the trust you place in us, and are committed to earning that trust every day. We are sorry this happened.” But that echoes other apologies from big tech companies that consistently ring hollow. Here in particular, it fails to acknowledge how the leak could harm people and how it will prevent this kind of thing from happening again. With these companies judged quarterly by their user growth and business, they’re incentivized to cut corners on security, privacy, and societal impact as they chase the favor of Wall Street.

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Twitter’s support form leaked phone number country codes to IPs in China & Saudi

Twitter accidentally exposed the ability to pull an account’s phone number country code and whether the accounts had been locked by Twitter. The concern here is that malicious actors could have used the security flaw to figure out which countries accounts were based in, which could have ramifications for whistleblowers or political dissidents.

The issue came through one of Twitter’s support forms for contacting the company, and the company found that a large number of inquiries through the form came from IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia. Twitter writes “While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors.” We’ve requested more info on why it’s suggesting that. Attribution in these situations can be murky, and naming specific countries or suggesting state actors could be involved carry heavy implications.

Twitter began working on the issue on November 15th and fixed it on November 16th. Twitter tells TechCrunch that it has notified the European Union’s Data Protection Commissioner, as EU citizens may have been impacted. However, since country codes aren’t necessarily considered sensitive personal information, the leak may not trigger any GDPR enforcement or fines. Twitter tells us it has also updated the FTC and other regulatory organizations about the issue, though we’ve asked when it informed these different regulators.

Tech giants offer empty apologies because users can’t quit

Twitter has directly contacted users impacted by the issue, says full phone numbers were not leaked, and users don’t have to do anything in response. Users can contact Twitter here for more info. We’ve asked how many accounts were impacted, but Twitter told us that it doesn’t have more data to share as its investigation continues.

A Twitter spokesperson pointed us to a previous statement:

“It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease. These types of tactics have been around for far longer than Twitter has existed — they will adapt and change as the geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge. For our part, we are committed to understanding how bad-faith actors use our services. We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation.”

Sloppy security on the part of tech companies can make it dangerous for political dissidents or others at odds with their governments. Twitter explains that it locks accounts if it suspects they’ve been compromised by hackers or violate “Twitter’s Rules”, that includes “unlawful use” that depends greatly on what national governments deem illegal. What’s worrisome is that attackers with IP addresses in China or Saudi Arabia might have been able to use the exploit to confirm that certain accounts belonged to users in their countries and whether they’ve been locked. That information could be used to hunt down the people who own these accounts.

The company apologized, writing that “We recognize and appreciate the trust you place in us, and are committed to earning that trust every day. We are sorry this happened.” But that echoes other apologies from big tech companies that consistently ring hollow. Here in particular, it fails to acknowledge how the leak could harm people and how it will prevent this kind of thing from happening again. With these companies judged quarterly by their user growth and business, they’re incentivized to cut corners on security, privacy, and societal impact as they chase the favor of Wall Street.

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Exploring Quantum Neural Networks

Posted by Jarrod McClean, Senior Research Scientist and Hartmut Neven, Director of Engineering, Google AI Quantum Team

Since its inception, the Google AI Quantum team has pushed to understand the role of quantum computing in machine learning. The existence of algorithms with provable advantages for global optimization suggest that quantum computers may be useful for training existing models within machine learning more quickly, and we are building experimental quantum computers to investigate how intricate quantum systems can carry out these computations. While this may prove invaluable, it does not yet touch on the tantalizing idea that quantum computers might be able to provide a way to learn more about complex patterns in physical systems that conventional computers cannot in any reasonable amount of time.

Today we talk about two recent papers from the Google AI Quantum team that make progress towards understanding the power of quantum computers for learning tasks. The first constructs a quantum model of neural networks to investigate how a popular classification task might be carried out on quantum processors. In the second paper, we show how peculiar features of quantum geometry change the strategies for training these networks in comparison to their classical counterparts, and offer guidance towards more robust training of these networks.

In “Classification with Quantum Neural Networks on Near Term Processors”, we construct a model of quantum neural networks (QNNs) that is specifically designed to work on quantum processors that are expected to be available in the near term. While the current work is primarily theoretical, their structure facilitates implementation and testing on quantum computers in the immediate future. These QNNs can be adapted through supervised learning of labeled data, and we show that it is possible to train a QNN to classify images in the famous MNIST dataset. Follow up work in this area with larger quantum devices may pit the ability of quantum networks to learn patterns against popular classical networks.

Quantum Neural Network for classification. Here we depict a sample quantum neural network, where in contrast to hidden layers in classical deep neural networks, the boxes represent entangling actions, or “quantum gates”, on qubits. In a superconducting qubit setup this could be enacted through a microwave control pulse corresponding to each box.

In “Barren Plateaus in Quantum Neural Network Training Landscapes”, we focus on the training of quantum neural networks, and probe questions related to a key difficulty in classical neural networks, which is the problem of vanishing or exploding gradients. In conventional neural networks, a good unbiased initial guess for the neuron weights often involves randomization, although there can be some difficulties as well. Our paper shows that peculiar features of quantum geometry unequivocally prevent this from being a good strategy in the quantum case, instead taking you to barren plateaus. The implications of this work may guide future strategies for initializing and training quantum neural networks.

QNN vanishing gradient: concentration of measure in high dimensional spaces. In very high dimensional spaces, such as those explored by quantum computers, the vast majority of states counterintuitively sit near the equator of the hypersphere (left). This means that any smooth function on this space will tend to take a value very close to its mean with overwhelming probability when selected at random (right).

This research sets the stage for improvements in both the construction and training of quantum neural networks. In particular, experimental realizations of quantum neural networks using hardware at Google will enable rapid exploration of quantum neural networks in the near term. We hope that the insights from the geometry of these states will lead to new algorithms to train these networks that will be essential to unlocking their full potential.

History Department

History Department

The Google Assistant can now alert you of potential flight delays

If you’re an experienced traveler, you know that plenty of your delays are due to your plane being stuck somewhere else or because the weather at your local or arrival airport isn’t ideal (I’m looking at you, fogged-in SFO in the morning). So you also know to check on your incoming flight, even when the airline tells you everything is fine, and the FAA’s airspace status pages.

But maybe you are not a frequent flier (be glad and rejoice) or don’t care to go through that process. In that case, you’ll be happy to hear that Google today announced that its Assistant will soon proactively notify you on your phone when its algorithms predict that your flight will be late. This feature is rolling out now and should be available to all users in the next few weeks.

It’s worth noting that flight delay predictions from Google aren’t new. It introduced its first iteration of this in January. At the time, it didn’t proactively alert you of those delays, though. You first had to search for your flight. So unless you knew this feature existed, you probably never saw it in action.

Google says it mostly uses machine learning algorithms trained on historic flight data to predict delays. In addition, though, the company also clearly looks at some other information, given that it knows about delays of incoming flights, too.

The airlines aren’t kidding when they tell you that you should still be at the gate at the original time, by the way. If you’re flying through a hub, they could still swap in another plane, after all. If you’re like me, though, instead of taking to the friendly skies, you will likely have to sit in Newark until well after midnight before the plane finally arrives. That’ll be right as your crew times out and with the next available reserve crew hours away. Chances are Google wouldn’t have been able to alert me of those delays, though, given that incompetence isn’t something it can predict yet, after all.

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Google is spending $1 billion to build a massive new campus in New York

Days after Apple announced a major expansion to its operations in the U.S. — including a new $1 billion campus in Austin — fellow tech giant Google has announced that it too will invest $1 billion as it sets up a new campus at Hudson Square in New York.

Google already has 7,000 staff located in New York, and this strategy is aimed at doubling that headcount over the next 10 years. Hudson Square will be a 1.7 million-square-foot campus that’ll serve as “the primary location” for Google’s Global Business Organization.

Google expects two Hudson Square buildings to be operational for staff by 2020, with a building on 550 Washington Street coming online two years later. That’s in addition to Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, which it bought for $2.4 billion in March, and additional space at Pier 57, which it is planning to take.

All this adds up to a major hiring push outside of the Bay Area.

“Our investment in New York is a huge part of our commitment to grow and invest in U.S. facilities, offices and jobs. In fact, we’re growing faster outside the Bay Area than within it, and this year opened new offices and data centers in locations like Detroit, Boulder, Los Angeles, Tennessee and Alabama,” wrote Google CFO Ruth Porat.

Google and Apple’s commitments come after Amazon announced that New York would be the location for its much-anticipated “HQ2” following a long search that pulled in authorities from cities and states across the U.S.

The great Amazon swindle

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B-Social raises £3.2M seed round to begin building a ‘social’ bank

B-Social, a London fintech that currently offers a ‘social finance’ app and beta debit Mastercard, has raised £3.2 million in Seed round funding from undisclosed high-net-worth individuals. However, the fundraise is just the first step in a journey in which B-Social want to eventually become a fully licensed bank that reimagines banking around everyday social interactions.

As it exists today, the B-Social app and accompanying card enables users to have control over everyday spending, track expenditure, and create groups between friends to split bills and record settlements. It’s currently in the hands of a limited number of beta testers, spanning employees, investors, friends and family, with plans for a wider U.K. launch in February next year.

“We recognise that almost all financial transactions are inherently social,” B-Social co-founder and CEO Nazim Valimahomed tells me. “We want to change the relationship people have with money by helping them overcome the anxiety, awkwardness and wasted time when they engage with their social finances. We are doing that by building a digital bank that truly accommodates the way people live their lives and is dedicated to connecting a person’s finances to their social world”.

The idea was born in part out of Valimahomed’s own frustrations and is informed by his belief that individuals are often a bank themselves, lending and borrowing to friends and family by making shared purchases and then getting paid back.

“A simple example might be that you pay for flights for two or more people and then get paid back individually,” he says. “For multiple transactions, this becomes complex often resulting in the trip organiser having to create a spreadsheet to work out what people owe across multiple transactions”.

To simplify this problem, B-Social wants to let you to make purchases with your card, which are flagged as an expense on behalf of a group of individuals. From here the bank to be will enable all members of a group — and where groups can be ad hoc and temporary or more long-term — to continuously see who is owed how much and to get paid back easily within the app and record settlements.

Dubbing this future proposition as the seeds of a “social bank,” the B-Social CEO cites competitors as traditional high street banks that currently dominate the U.K. consumer market (the so-called big 5 have around 87 percent market share in the U.K.).

“We are aiming at winning a part of their market share by targeting customers looking for a bank as social as they are that offers a unique digital experience in order to help change the banking ecosystem forever,” Valimahomed tells me, although he also concedes that challengers such as Monzo, N26, Starling and Revolut have also built some basic social features into their apps.

“Our entire technology and product focus is to build a bank from scratch through a social lens,” he says.

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Why Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting Is Great For Everyone

Running a WordPress site with more than a few hundred visitors is tough. Get the hosting plan wrong, and you could end up spending money for a site that doesn’t respond to your needs, and those of your readers.

Common issues with bad hosting include slow speeds, bottlenecks, and the possibility of knocking other websites on the same server offline. Managed WordPress hosting is a better idea.

This is what Kinsta offers. The company promises “premium WordPress hosting for everyone, small or large.” Let’s take a look.

What’s Different About Kinsta Hosting?

Used to a web host that offers slow shared hosting? Or a poorly configured expensive VPS?

Unless the host’s system admin knows how to correctly configure the hardware, and manage the virtual server, your WordPress site will never meet its potential.

To reach your goals, you need to move.

Kinsta hosting is one of the best destinations for your blog or store. Its managed WordPress hosting relies on the Google Cloud Platform, using Google’s premium tier global network to ensure sites load fast. Kinsta also offers 18 data centers around the globe, allowing you to situate your website on the server nearest your audience.

Every WordPress site on Kinsta is housed in its own isolated LXC container, with all resources dedicated to your site. The LXC is managed using the LXD lightweight container hypervisor. While not a precise comparison, you can think of an LXC container as a virtual server.

Each LXC container includes Linux, Nginx, PHP (versions 7 to 7.3 are available), and MySQL, as well as the WordPress software. This gives you everything you need to run your website.

To keep your website running 24/7, support is available around the clock all 365 days of the year from Kinsta’s support engineers. They’re all WordPress developers, capable of writing themes and plugins and contributing to the core code of the software.

Thus, you can be confident that they know what you need.

The independent testers at Review Signal have rated Kinsta among the top WordPress hosts. In fact, Kinsta has held the award for Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance for four years in a row.

Features You Get With Kinsta Hosting

That’s how the service works. But what features should you expect from Kinsta’s hosting?

To start off, free content delivery network (CDN) ensures your site loads media as quickly as possible, thanks to KeyCDN integration. Meanwhile, page caching delivers content rapidly. This pairs with Kinsta’s own cache plugin to improve speed and control over caching.

You can also make sure your site offers the necessary security to your readers and customers by enabling HTTPS. Kinsta offers Let’s Encrypt integration for creating SSL certificates for free, and you can also add custom certificates.

Kinsta considers your site security a priority. The company offers a daily backup service, and a free hack fix if your site becomes compromised.

For testing new features, Kinsta offers a staging environment, enabling you to try new themes and plugins before rolling them out. There’s also SSH support for sysadmin tasks, and if needed, you can use tools such as Git, npm, WP-CLI, and other package managers to add software.

You’ll manage your hosting package via a custom-designed dashboard. This not only gives you instant access to your WordPress installation, plugins, data, and backups, but also holds analytics reports for performance analysis.

Enhanced Hosting Options

Kinsta will accommodate the peculiarities of your website. In addition to some advanced options, this WordPress host offers optimizations and server-level rules for WooCommerce stores. The same is available for Easy Digital Download stores.

So whatever type of website you run on WordPress, whether it’s a blog, news site, or something else, Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting can accommodate you.

Kinsta Hosting Plans: What’s Best For You?

Reckon you’re ready to sign up with Kinsta? We recommend you try the Starter plan. This is ideal for single WordPress installs, for sites with up to 20,000 visits. With 5GB of disk space and free SSL and CDN, this package also comes with a 30-day money back guarantee.

It costs just $30 per month. Alternatively, you might pay $300 for 12 months, thereby saving $60.

For bigger sites, larger packages are available. For $60 a month, the Pro package includes two installs, 40,000 visits, and 10GB of storage. $100 per month will upgrade you to the Business 1 package for five installs, 15GB of storage, and 100,000 visits.

Check out the Kinsta Plans page to see which one is right for you.

What happens if your plan isn’t quite large enough to satisfy your site or visitor numbers? Kinsta charges overage rates; you can receive notifications when your site is at 80% and 100% capacity. Overage is charged at $1 per 1,000 visitors.

Free Migrations Make Moving Your Site Easy

Moving your website between hosts can be time-consuming, fraught with risk, and difficult.

Fortunately, Kinsta offers a migration service for new accounts. This means you can provide the company with the necessary information, and support staff will migrate your data from the existing host to your managed WordPress hosting.

If your focus is on creating and editing content rather than on the technicality of web hosting, this could be beneficial. It lets you concentrate on your strengths and site continuity, without the distraction of moving data yourself.

Setting Up Your WordPress Site With Kinsta

Once you’ve signed up with Kinsta, it takes just a few minutes to set up your hosting. If you’re using the free migration service for an existing site, you’ll receive a notification when everything is ready. Otherwise, you’ll need to set up a new WordPress blog.

Begin by opening the my.kinsta.com admin dashboard and entering your Kinsta username and password. Then head to Sites > Add site, and input your preferred server location, name of the site, domain details, and select Add a brand new WordPress install, then Add.

Make a note of your username and password, and wait as the WordPress software installs. To access your site, go to Sites > Domains and look for the Open WordPress Admin button. Click this to sign into your site’s admin account.

From here, you’re ready to select a theme, add plugins, and write content.

If you’re familiar WordPress, you’ll know how easy it is to use. Just get your site configured as required, confirm you’ve enabled the Yoast SEO plugin, and you’re all set!

What If You Need More From Kinsta Hosting?

Setting up a Kinsta account is easy, getting your hosting primed is fast, and setting up WordPress is simple. You should be up and running in minutes, but what if you want more?

Kinsta offers a selection of add-ons for sites with special requirements. You’ll find support for Nginx reverse proxy, Redis, Elasticsearch, Cloudflare Railgun, and can even opt for hourly backups.

Why You Need Kinsta Managed Hosting

By now, you should least be interested in taking advantage of Kinsta’s easy migration service. If your site needs a performance boost that you won’t get from shared virtual hosting and you can’t afford a premium VPS, then Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting is surely your best bet.

To recap, Kinsta offers:

• The full LAMP experience with WordPress pre-installed
• Easy migration to bring your site from another host
• Fast web page delivery thanks to integration with KeyCDN and Google Cloud Platform
• HTTPS and SSL from Let’s Encrypt integration
• Free hack fix service, and daily backups that you can restore for up to 30 days
• 24/7 support, 365 days a year, from WordPress developers
• A range of affordable packages, depending on your requirements
• Upgrades to customize your package, a detailed dashboard, advanced features like Cloudflare support, and even hourly backups

(Some of these features are only available with multi-site subscriptions.)

Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting is a great opportunity for you to level up and take your existing website to the next level. At just $30 a month for the basic package, it’s an opportunity you should seriously consider.

Read the full article: Why Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting Is Great For Everyone

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The 7 Best iPhone GIF Apps to Create, Collect, Save, and Share

The Best Features in elementaryOS You May Have Overlooked

I’m a long-time desktop Linux user, and elementaryOS is one of my favorite options. I love the work the team has done to make free and open source software feel vibrant and welcoming in the era of intuitive smartphone interfaces.

elementaryOS 5.0 “Juno” is the most refined version of the desktop to date. Here are some of the best parts of the experience that you may have missed. Some of these features are specific to Juno, while others also apply to elementaryOS in general.

1. Built-In Night Light

The light that radiates from electronic devices into our eyeballs isn’t great for us. It causes eyestrain, makes it harder to fall asleep, and reduces the quality of that sleep.

While it’s best to avoid screens at night time, there are times when you need to get work done to meet a deadline. In that case, it’s better to replace the blue light with red light. There are third-party apps that do this, but elementaryOS Juno now comes with the functionality out of the box.

Look for the Night Light tab under System Settings > Displays.

2. Picture-in-Picture Mode

Do you regularly watch video while working? Whether it’s clicking back and forth, or lining two apps side-by-side, managing windows is probably a regular part of your routine.

In elementaryOS Juno, you can say goodbye to this struggle with Picture-in-Picture mode. Just press Super + F and select the window you want to keep visible. (The “Super” key is either the Windows key on PCs or the Command key on Macs.) To exit, click the X that appears when you hover your mouse over the floating preview.

A few things to keep in mind about Picture-in-Picture mode:

• The floating preview provides an ongoing look at the window you selected.
• Click on the preview to drag it around.
• You can resize the preview by clicking the button that appears in its bottom-right corner.
• If you minimize the window you selected, the preview freezes, so you must leave the window open in the background.
• If you want to stream video while looking at other tabs, move the video out into a separate window.

3. Easy Image Resizing

Resizing an image isn’t particularly fun or exciting (you might even call it tedious). You often need to resize an image before sending an email or uploading a photo to a website.

This usual process involves opening an image viewer or photo editor and clicking a “resize” button. Thanks to the Resizer app, you can do this task in elementaryOS from the right-click context menu. Right-click > Resize images opens up a window that lets you designate a size and name. Boom. Done.

4. Easier App Funding

When elementary introduced AppCenter, it also rolled out a new funding model for Linux apps that lets you pay what you want for software. Some apps recommend a default price, but there’s always the option to change that number to $0.

Thing is, you often don’t know if you want to toss a developer a few bucks until you’ve first tried out their app. In the past, you could only pay money when first installing an app. This meant you had to reinstall an app if you decided to make a contribution.

With Juno, “paid” apps that you downloaded for free will prompt you to pay whenever an update is available to download (you can still change the number to $0). You can also find a Fund button at the bottom of a paid app’s AppCenter page, allowing you to make donations whenever you like.

5. Simple App Launcher Edits

The app launcher is a part of the computer interface that we may not stare at for long, but we see it often. Occasionally you will come across an app that doesn’t fit in with the others. Either the name is off or the icon is big and fuzzy.

On elementaryOS, you can address the issue using AppEditor. It will let you edit icons, change names or descriptions, alter categories, and more. This is one of the most straightforward tools for the job you can find on any system.

If you’re on the lookout for alternate icons for apps like LibreOffice and VirtualBox, I recommend downloading the elementary add or elementaryPlus icon packs.

In both cases, you can extract the icon folder without having to deal with any pesky installation instructions!

6. A Panel That Adapts to Your Wallpaper

The panel along the top of the screen provides a few essentials. You have your app launcher, the time, and system indicators. These elements change color depending on your desktop wallpaper.

How the elementaryOS panel adapts to wallpapers:

• On dark backgrounds, icons are white.
• On bright wallpapers, the icons turn black.
• On relatively clear images, the panel’s background is transparent.
• If a wallpaper is busy toward the top of the screen, the panel becomes translucent.

When it comes to translucent panels, Juno is more adaptable than previous versions. There’s now a light translucent option for bright and busy wallpapers (pictured above).

7. Keyboard Shortcut Cheatsheat

elementaryOS may be a relatively simple desktop interface, but it still comes with a fair amount of keyboard shortcuts. Discovering and memorizing them all can take time and effort.

Juno makes your job easier by including a Shortcut Overlay that appears when you tap the Super key. Many of these shortcuts use the Super key and are not the standardized ones you see on other desktops.

But don’t fret! Common shortcuts like Ctrl + B (to bold text) or Alt + F4 (to close windows) still work on elementaryOS.

8. Bold Use of Color

The elementary project began as a desktop theme, so it makes sense that color would play a role in elementaryOS. While the overwhelming majority of apps are gray, some have HeaderBars (the name for the toolbar with core app buttons) in various colors.

Consider the Vocal podcast client, which is purple. The Aesop PDF reader is brown. The Eddy DEB installer is red (what is a DEB, you ask?).

While colorful HeaderBars were around in the previous version of elementaryOS, Juno continues the trend. The elementaryOS Music app may have a gray interface, but it has adopted orange highlights. More apps may make this sort of change in the future.

9. Easy Web Integration

I love how easy it is to view and share elementaryOS software online. The team has provided a way to browse AppCenter in your browser. If you’re currently running elementaryOS, the apps compatible with your version will appear at the top, with others listed below.

Click on the app to get to a page you can share with others. If they’re using elementaryOS, the browser will attempt to open the app in AppCenter directly. To share an app with someone from the desktop version of AppCenter, just click the Share button at the bottom of an app’s page to get a link you can copy and paste.

10. Transparent and Readable Updates

Want to know what recent changes have come down the pipeline? The elementary team provides semi-monthly updates that summarize what’s new.

To get this information, check out the elementary Medium page. There you will find write ups and screenshots about major app changes and background system improvements. Transparency is hardly new to the Linux world, but it’s a treat to see this information presented in such a readable and digestible format.

Do You Use elementaryOS?

elementaryOS isn’t quite like other Linux-based operating systems. While, technically, it isn’t all that different under the hood, it feels like a polished and distinct alternative. The elementary team regularly states that most downloads come from people using Windows or macOS.

On the fence? Here are several reasons to start using elementaryOS.

Read the full article: The Best Features in elementaryOS You May Have Overlooked

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