Cast your mind back to the early 2000s. MMS messages were the only way to send photos from your (grainy) phone camera to your friends and family. Then Facebook came along. Suddenly, it became easier than ever for us to share content with other people—but the Facebook revolution was only the beginning. Less than two years after Apple launched the first iPhone, WhatsApp hit app stores around the world. At first, it was great. You could share high-quality images with several other users in seconds. But things quickly got worse. Today, most people are sick of their WhatsApp image feeds...
Read the full article: How to Stop Automatically Downloading Images on WhatsApp
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Not sure what there is to add to the headline, really. Well, I guess I should probably explain a bit. 
Autonomous cars gather up tons of data about the world around them, but even the best computer vision systems can’t see through brick and mortar. But by carefully monitoring the reflected light of a laser bouncing off a nearby surface, they might be able to see around corners — that’s the idea behind recently published research from Stanford engineers. 
Matthew Henick, formerly the head of BuzzFeed Studios, is joining Facebook’s media partnerships team, where he will serve as head of content planning and strategy. In a post on Facebook, Henick argued that the social network is “a storytelling platform at its core,” and it sounds like he wants to help Facebook take advantage of those storytelling opportunities: Good stories… 
Eager to one-up Snapchat, Instagram appears to be preparing to expand its collection of shutter modes beyond options like Boomerang and Superzoom. Buried within Instagram’s Android Application Package (APK) is an icon for a Portrait shutter for the Stories camera. This could potentially let people shoot stylized portraits with bokeh effect-blurred backgrounds or other lighting… 
Everyone knew the MoviePass deal is too good to be true — and as is so often the case these days, it turns out you’re not the customer, you’re the product. And in this case they’re not even attempting to camouflage that. Mitch Lowe, the company’s CEO, told an audience at a Hollywood event that “we know all about you.” 
Facebook’s algorithm is terrible at surfacing breaking news, often showing urgent posts hours or even days later when more facts have since emerged or the story has changed. This has made Twitter the default home for this content, but that position has weakened since Twitter implemented its own relevancy algorithm that brings up old tweets. Facebook isn’t ready to make any changes… 
Google Search is now available within iMessage. In an effort to more deeply integrate Google’s search engine on iOS devices, the company announced today that its Search app for iOS has added an iMessage extension, allowing iPhone and iPad users to search the web, then quickly add those search results to their iMessage conversations. The extension itself is clearly inspired by… 
The plot thickens. Last week, KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that Apple has been working on over-the-ear headphones in addition to new AirPods. Today, Bloomberg confirms this information and adds that these new headphones could also feature noise-canceling capabilities. KGI said that this new product should be available at some point in Q4 2018, just in time for the holiday season. But… 
Every major tech company is looking at quantum computers as the next big breakthrough in computing. Teams at Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and various startups and academic labs are racing to become the first to achieve quantum supremacy — that is, the point where a quantum computer can run certain algorithms faster than a classical computer ever could. Today, Google said that it… 
In today’s episode of ‘wtf was the tech industry thinking’, Facebook has been caught asking users if they think it’s okay for an adult man to ask a 14-year-old girl for “sexual pictures” in a private chat. 