Instagram still doesn’t age-check kids. That must change.

Instagram dodges child safety laws. By not asking users their age upon signup, it can feign ignorance about how old they are. That way, it can’t be held liable for $40,000 per violation of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. The law bans online services from collecting personally identifiable information about kids under 13 without parental consent. Yet Instagram is surely stockpiling that sensitive info about underage users, shrouded by the excuse that it doesn’t know who’s who.

But here, ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s dangerous. User growth at all costs is no longer acceptable.

It’s time for Instagram to step up and assume responsibility for protecting children, even if that means excluding them. Instagram needs to ask users’ age at sign up, work to verify they volunteer their accurate birthdate by all practical means, and enforce COPPA by removing users it knows are under 13. If it wants to allow tweens on its app, it needs to build a safe, dedicated experience where the app doesn’t suck in COPPA-restricted personal info.

Minimum Viable Responsibility

Instagram is woefully behind its peers. Both Snapchat and TikTok require you to enter your age as soon as you start the sign up process. This should really be the minimum regulatory standard, and lawmakers should close the loophole allowing services to skirt compliance by not asking. If users register for an account, they should be required to enter an age of 13 or older.

Instagram’s parent company Facebook has been asking for birthdate during account registration since its earliest days. Sure, it adds one extra step to sign up, and impedes its growth numbers by discouraging kids to get hooked early on the social network. But it also benefits Facebook’s business by letting it accurately age-target ads.

Most importantly, at least Facebook is making a baseline effort to keep out underage users. Of course, as kids do when they want something, some are going to lie about their age and say they’re old enough. Ideally, Facebook would go further and try to verify the accuracy of a user’s age using other available data, and Instagram should too.

Both Facebook and Instagram currently have moderators lock the accounts of any users they stumble across that they suspect are under 13. Users must upload government-issued proof of age to regain control. That policy only went into effect last year after UK’s Channel 4 reported a Facebook moderator was told to ignore seemingly underage users unless they explicitly declared they were too young or were reported for being under 13. An extreme approach would be to require this for all signups, though that might be expensive, slow, significantly hurt signup rates, and annoy of-age users.

Instagram is currently on the other end of the spectrum. Doing nothing around age-gating seems recklessly negligent. When asked for comment about how why it doesn’t ask users’ ages, how it stops underage users from joining, and if it’s in violation of COPPA, Instagram declined to comment. The fact that Instagram claims to not know users’ ages seems to be in direct contradiction to it offering marketers custom ad targeting by age such as reaching just those that are 13.

Instagram Prototypes Age Checks

Luckily, this could all change soon.

Mobile researcher and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong has spotted Instagram code inside its Android app that shows it’s prototyping an age-gating feature that rejects users under 13. It’s also tinkering with requiring your Instagram and Facebook birthdates to match. Instagram gave me a “no comment” when I asked about if these features would officially roll out to everyone.

Code in the app explains that “Providing your birthday helps us make sure you get the right Instagram experience. Only you will be able to see your birthday.” Beyond just deciding who to let in, Instagram could use this info to make sure users under 18 aren’t messaging with adult strangers, that users under 21 aren’t seeing ads for alcohol brands, and that potentially explicit content isn’t shown to minors.

Instagram’s inability to do any of this clashes with it and Facebook’s big talk this year about its commitment to safety. Instagram has worked to improve its approach to bullying, drug sales, self-harm, and election interference, yet there’s been not a word about age gating.

Meanwhile, underage users promote themselves on pages for hashtags like #12YearOld where it’s easy to find users who declare they’re that age right in their profile bio. It took me about 5 minutes to find creepy “You’re cute” comments from older men on seemingly underage girls’ photos. Clearly Instagram hasn’t been trying very hard to stop them from playing with the app.

Illegal Growth

I brought up the same unsettling situations on Musically, now known as TikTok, to its CEO Alex Zhu on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2016. I grilled Zhu about letting 10-year-olds flaunt their bodies on his app. He tried to claim parents run all of these kids’ accounts, and got frustrated as we dug deeper into Musically’s failures here.

Thankfully, TikTok was eventually fined $5.7 million this year for violating COPPA and forced to change its ways. As part of its response, TikTok started showing an age gate to both new and existing users, removed all videos of users under 13, and restricted those users to a special TikTok Kids experience where they can’t post videos, comment, or provide any COPPA-restricted personal info.

If even a Chinese app social media app that Facebook CEO has warned threatens free speech with censorship is doing a better job protecting kids than Instagram, something’s gotta give. Instagram could follow suit, building a special section of its apps just for kids where they’re quarantined from conversing with older users that might prey on them.

FTC ruling sees Musical.ly (TikTok) fined $5.7M for violating children’s privacy law, app updated with age gate

Perhaps Facebook and Instagram’s hands-off approach stems from the fact that CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think the ban on under-13-year-olds should exist. Back in 2011, he said “That will be a fight we take on at some point . . . My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.” He’s put that into practice with Messenger Kids which lets 6 to 12-year-olds chat with their friends if parents approve.

The Facebook family of apps’ ad-driven business model and earnings depend on constant user growth that could be inhibited by stringent age gating. It surely doesn’t want to admit to parents it’s let kids slide into Instagram, that advertisers were paying to reach children too young to buy anything, and to Wall Street that it might not have 2.8 billion legal users across its apps as it claims.

But given Facebook and Instagram’s privacy scandals, addictive qualities, and impact on democracy, it seems like proper age-gating should be a priority as well as the subject of more regulatory scrutiny and public concern. Society has woken up to the harms of social media, yet Instagram erects no guards to keep kids from experiencing those ills for themselves. Until it makes an honest effort to stop kids from joining, the rest of Instagram’s safety initiatives ring hollow.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Alphabet

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin just announced that Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be replacing Page as the CEO of parent company Alphabet.

It also sounds like Brin is stepping down from his role as Alphabet’s president.

Alphabet first came into existence in 2015 as “a collection of companies” that separates Google from “other bets” that aren’t part of its core businesses, such as Waymo (self-driving cars), Verily (life sciences), Calico (biotech R&D), Sidewalk Labs (urban innovation) and Loon (rural internet access via balloon).

At the time, Page shifted from the Google CEO role to Alphabet CEO, with Pichai stepping in to lead the search giant. However, Page and Brin write today that “Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet.”

Rather than framing this as a departure, the pair suggests that they’ve “never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company” and that they remain “deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders.”

 

Updating

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Verizon and AWS announce 5G Edge computing partnership

Just as Qualcomm was starting to highlight its 5G plans for the coming years, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg hit the stage at AWS re:Invent to discuss the carrier’s team up with the cloud computing giant.

As part of Verizon’s (TechCrunch’s parent company, disclosure, disclosure, disclosure) upcoming focus on 5G edge computing, the carrier will be the first to use the newly announced AWS Wavelength. The platform is designed to let developers build super low latency apps for 5G devices.

Currently, it’s being piloted in Chicago with a handful of high profile partners, including the NFL and Bethesda, the game developer behind Fallout and Elder Scrolls. No details yet on those specific applications (though remote gaming and live streaming seem like the obvious ones), but potential future uses include things like smart cars, IoT devices, AR/VR — you know, the sorts of things people cite when discussing 5G’s life beyond the smartphone.

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 865 and 765 platforms

“AWS Wavelength provides the same AWS environment — APIs, management console, and tools — that they’re using today at the edge of the 5G network,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said on-stage. Starting with Verizon’s 5G network locations in the US, customers will be able to deploy the latency-sensitive portions of an application at the edge to provide single-digit millisecond latency to mobile and connected devices.”

As Verizon’s CEO joined Vestberg on stage, CNO Nicki Palmer joined Qualcomm in Hawaii, to discuss the carrier’s Mmwave approach to the next-gen wireless. The technology has raised some questions around its coverage area. Verizon has addressed this to some degree with partnerships with third-parties like Boingo.

The company plans to have coverage in 30 U.S. cities by end of year. That number is currently at 18.

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Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 865 and 765 platforms

This morning at its annual Snapdragon summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm offered a glimpse at two new Snapdragon chips. You know how this works: the chipmaker offers some insight into the components that will power the vast majority of Android flagships over the course of the coming year.

The two headliners for the even are the flagship-level Snapdragon 865 and the lower-end 765. No surprise, Qualcomm is focused on 5G and AI for both systems — the latter of which has become an increasingly important piece of the mobile ecosystem, while the former is expected to start driving a majority of smartphone purchases beginning next year.

Here’ Qualcomm,

The flagship Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform, which includes the Snapdragon X55 5G Modem-RF System, is the world’s most advanced 5G platform, delivering unmatched connectivity and performance for the next generation of flagship devices. The Snapdragon 765/765G brings integrated 5G connectivity, advanced AI processing, and select Snapdragon Elite Gaming experiences.

Notably, the mid-range765 features an integrated 5G option, unlike the higher-end 865, which utilizes the separate X55 5G modem. Like the latter decision is a sign of the relatively slow roll out of 5G handsets this year. They’ll surely become more of a mainstay in 2020, but many manufacturers will likely continue to offer non-5G options, particularly in countries where carriers have been slower to introduce the next-gen network.

Right now, it’s just a glimpse of what’s to come. Expect more information to be rationed out of the next few days of the summit.  We may also get a look at some of the first handsets this week in Hawaii, but likely the announcements will really begin in earnest comes CES and MWC in early-January and late-February, respectively.

Also new is Sonic Max, a new fingerprint scanning technology. The hook here is a much larger surface area for the in-screen scanner — 17x larger, according to Qualcomm’s numbers.

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This browser extension unhides Instagram Likes

Instagram is hiding Like counts to make people feel better. But what if you’re curious, competitive, or just petty? Now you can re-embrace the popularity contest by installing the Socialinsider Chrome extension that reveals Instagram Like and comment counts. “The Return Of The Likes” extension overlays the numbers of Likes and comments on the top right corner of posts on Instagram’s website. If you don’t want Instagram’s overprotective helicopter parenting, now you can download the extension here to put an end to it.

Obviously, it’s not as useful as showing Like counts right in the Instagram mobile app. You probably aren’t going to switch to browsing Insta just on the web, but if you see a post you want to know the Like count of, you can easily send yourself the permalink and open it on a computer.

Instagram is currently testing hiding Like counts with a percentage of users in every country worldwide. It started the experiment in Canada in April before adding six more countries in July and then the U.S. last month. Facebook launched a similar hidden likes experiment in Australia in September.

Instagram tests hiding Like counts globally

TechCrunch tested Return Of The Likes and verified that it works. It come from social media analytics company Socialinsider, which offers software for measuring engagement and benchmarking performance against competitors. The company insists that “No data is sent to Socialinsider servers.” We asked Instagram if the Chrome extension was in compliance with the app’s rules, and will update if we hear back.

As social media evolves, the emerging trend is for platforms to step in to protect users. In many cases, it’s warranted. Like counts can hurt people’s well-being by leading them into envy spirals comparing themselves against peers, or coercing them to self-censor to avoid an embarrassingly low Like count. Still, the question remains whether users deserve control over their own experience. Should we be able to opt back in to seeing Like counts, the way we have controls over block lists of offensive words?

After the platforms step up to ensure safety, we’ll have to decide when we want step in and demand to see what’s been covered up.

Additional reporting by Lucas Matney

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Google Photos adds a chat feature to its app

An argument could be made that Google has over-indulged in its creation of way too many messaging apps in years past. But today’s launch of a new messaging service — this time within the confines of Google Photos — is an integration that actually makes sense.

The company is rolling out a way to directly message photos and chat with another user or users within the Google Photos app. The addition will allow users to quickly and easily share those one-off photos or videos with another person, instead of taking additional steps to build a shared album.

The feature itself is simple to use. After selecting a photo and tapping share, you can now choose a new option “Send in Google Photos.” You can then tap on the icon of your most frequent contacts or search for a user by name, phone number of email.

The recipient will need a Google account to receive the photos, however, because they’ll need to sign-in to view the conversation. That may limit the feature to some extent, as not everyone is a Google user. But with now a billion some Google Photos users out there, it’s likely that more of the people you want to share will have an account, rather than not.

You can also use this feature to start a group chat by selecting “New group,” then adding recipients.

Once a chat has been started, you can return to it at any time from the “Sharing” tab in Google Photos. Here, you’ll be able to see the photos and videos you each shared, comments, text chats and likes. You can also save the photos you want to your phone or tap on the “All Photos” option to see just the photos themselves without the conversations surrounding them.

Explains Google, the idea with the new direct sharing option is not to replace users’ preferred messaging apps — a strategy that differs from Google’s investments in apps like Hangouts and Allo in previous years. Instead, the feature wants to relocate some of the photo-sharing activity that takes place in messaging apps to Google Photos.

Google had tried a similar idea with direct video sharing and messaging from the YouTube app. But the company later shut down that feature ahead of YouTube’s announcement of the $170M FTC fine for violating U.S. children’s privacy laws, COPPA. Likely, the chat feature there would have complicated YouTube’s product, now under increased regulatory scrutiny, because many kids were using direct messaging as a way to work around parental controls and other blocks on traditional messaging apps.

Google Photos makes more sense as a place to directly message friends and family, though, and the Google account requirement means users will have to be 13 or older to gain access. (Unless parents created a Google account for their child).

Direct messaging was previously announced as “coming soon” alongside Google Photos’ big fall update that also included the launch of Stories and other features.

The new feature is launching today but the rollout will take place over the next week. It will be supported across platforms, including iOS, Android and web.

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Developing Deep Learning Models for Chest X-rays with Adjudicated Image Labels

Posted by Dave Steiner, MD, Research Scientist and Shravya Shetty, Technical Lead, Google Health

With millions of diagnostic examinations performed annually, chest X-rays are an important and accessible clinical imaging tool for the detection of many diseases. However, their usefulness can be limited by challenges in interpretation, which requires rapid and thorough evaluation of a two-dimensional image depicting complex, three-dimensional organs and disease processes. Indeed, early-stage lung cancers or pneumothoraces (collapsed lungs) can be missed on chest X-rays, leading to serious adverse outcomes for patients.

Advances in machine learning (ML) present an exciting opportunity to create new tools to help experts interpret medical images. Recent efforts have shown promise in improving lung cancer detection in radiology, prostate cancer grading in pathology, and differential diagnoses in dermatology. For chest X-ray images in particular, large, de-identified public image sets are available to researchers across disciplines, and have facilitated several valuable efforts to develop deep learning models for X-ray interpretation. However, obtaining accurate clinical labels for the very large image sets needed for deep learning can be difficult. Most efforts have either applied rule-based natural language processing (NLP) to radiology reports or relied on image review by individual readers, both of which may introduce inconsistencies or errors that can be especially problematic during model evaluation. Another challenge involves assembling datasets that represent an adequately diverse spectrum of cases (i.e., ensuring inclusion of both “hard” cases and “easy” cases that represent the full spectrum of disease presentation). Finally, some chest X-ray findings are non-specific and depend on clinical information about the patient to fully understand their significance. As such, establishing labels that are clinically meaningful and have consistent definitions can be a challenging component of developing machine learning models that use only the image as input. Without standardized and clinically meaningful datasets as well as rigorous reference standard methods, successful application of ML to interpretation of chest X-rays will be hindered.

To help address these issues, we recently published “Chest Radiograph Interpretation with Deep Learning Models: Assessment with Radiologist-adjudicated Reference Standards and Population-adjusted Evaluation” in the journal Radiology. In this study we developed deep learning models to classify four clinically important findings on chest X-rays — pneumothorax, nodules and masses, fractures, and airspace opacities. These target findings were selected in consultation with radiologists and clinical colleagues, so as to focus on conditions that are both critical for patient care and for which chest X-ray images alone are an important and accessible first-line imaging study. Selection of these findings also allowed model evaluation using only de-identified images without additional clinical data.

Models were evaluated using thousands of held-out images from each dataset for which we collected high-quality labels using a panel-based adjudication process among board-certified radiologists. Four separate radiologists also independently reviewed the held-out images in order to compare radiologist accuracy to that of the deep learning models (using the panel-based image labels as the reference standard). For all four findings and across both datasets, the deep learning models demonstrated radiologist-level performance. We are sharing the adjudicated labels for the publicly available data here to facilitate additional research.

Data Overview
This work leveraged over 600,000 images sourced from two de-identified datasets. The first dataset was developed in collaboration with co-authors at the Apollo Hospitals, and consists of a diverse set of chest X-rays obtained over several years from multiple locations across the Apollo Hospitals network. The second dataset is the publicly available ChestX-ray14 image set released by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This second dataset has served as an important resource for many machine learning efforts, yet has limitations stemming from issues with the accuracy and clinical interpretation of the currently available labels.

Chest X-ray depicting an upper left lobe pneumothorax identified by the model and the adjudication panel, but missed by the individual radiologist readers. Left: The original image. Right: The same image with the most important regions for the model prediction highlighted in orange.

Training Set Labels Using Deep Learning and Visual Image Review
For very large datasets consisting of hundreds of thousands of images, such as those needed to train highly accurate deep learning models, it is impractical to manually assign image labels. As such, we developed a separate, text-based deep learning model to extract image labels using the de-identified radiology reports associated with each X-ray. This NLP model was then applied to provide labels for over 560,000 images from the Apollo Hospitals dataset used for training the computer vision models.

To reduce noise from any errors introduced by the text-based label extraction and also to provide the relevant labels for a substantial number of the ChestX-ray14 images, approximately 37,000 images across the two datasets were visually reviewed by radiologists. These were separate from the NLP-based labels and helped to ensure high quality labels across such a large, diverse set of training images.

Creating and Sharing Improved Reference Standard Labels
To generate high-quality reference standard labels for model evaluation, we utilized a panel-based adjudication process, whereby three radiologists reviewed all final tune and test set images and resolved disagreements through discussion. This often allowed difficult findings that were initially only detected by a single radiologist to be identified and documented appropriately. To reduce the risk of bias based on any individual radiologist’s personality or seniority, the discussions took place anonymously via an online discussion and adjudication system.

Because the lack of available adjudicated labels was a significant initial barrier to our work, we are sharing with the research community all of the adjudicated labels for the publicly available ChestX-ray14 dataset, including 2,412 training/validation set images and 1,962 test set images (4,374 images in total). We hope that these labels will facilitate future machine learning efforts and enable better apples-to-apples comparisons between machine learning models for chest X-ray interpretation.

Future Outlook
This work presents several contributions: (1) releasing adjudicated labels for images from a publicly available dataset; (2) a method to scale accurate labeling of training data using a text-based deep learning model; (3) evaluation using a diverse set of images with expert-adjudicated reference standard labels; and ultimately (4) radiologist-level performance of deep learning models for clinically important findings on chest X-rays.

However, in regards to model performance, achieving expert-level accuracy on average is just a part of the story. Even though overall accuracy for the deep learning models was consistently similar to that of radiologists for any given finding, performance for both varied across datasets. For example, the sensitivity for detecting pneumothorax among radiologists was approximately 79% for the ChestX-ray14 images, but was only 52% for the same radiologists on the other dataset, suggesting a more difficult collection cases in the latter. This highlights the importance of validating deep learning tools on multiple, diverse datasets and eventually across the patient populations and clinical settings in which any model is intended to be used.

The performance differences between datasets also emphasize the need for standardized evaluation image sets with accurate reference standards in order to allow comparison across studies. For example, if two different models for the same finding were evaluated using different datasets, comparing performance would be of minimal value without knowing additional details such as the case mix, model error modes, or radiologist performance on the same cases.

Finally, the model often identified findings that were consistently missed by radiologists, and vice versa. As such, strategies that combine the unique “skills” of both the deep learning systems and human experts are likely to hold the most promise for realizing the potential of AI applications in medical image interpretation.

Acknowledgements
Key contributors to this project at Google include Sid Mittal, Gavin Duggan, Anna Majkowska, Scott McKinney, Andrew Sellergren, David Steiner, Krish Eswaran, Po-Hsuan Cameron Chen, Yun Liu, Shravya Shetty, and Daniel Tse. Significant contributions and input were also made by radiologist collaborators Joshua Reicher, Alexander Ding, and Sreenivasa Raju Kalidindi. The authors would also like to acknowledge many members of the Google Health radiology team including Jonny Wong, Diego Ardila, Zvika Ben-Haim, Rory Sayres, Shahar Jamshy, Shabir Adeel, Mikhail Fomitchev, Akinori Mitani, Quang Duong, William Chen and Sahar Kazemzadeh. Sincere appreciation also goes to the many radiologists who enabled this work through their expert image interpretation efforts throughout the project.

Apple and Google reveal the best apps and games of 2019

Continuing their annual tradition, Apple and Google have released their list of the best apps and games of 2019. Apple, for the first time, held a real-world event to celebrate its winners, where it crowned A.I.-powered camera app, Spectre Camera as its best iPhone app of the year and Sky: Children of the Light as its best game. Google, meanwhile, dubbed teen messaging app Ablo as its app winner and Call of Duty: Mobile as its best game.

Apple’s event held in New York put its winning developers in front of media in order to demonstrate their apps and games. The event was less formal than the Apple Design Awards held at the company’s worldwide developer conference each year, and instead focused on private presentations to press.

Apple said its winners this year sit “at the nexus of digital and pop culture,” but its list really better highlights what Apple thinks are the key selling features for its devices. For example, with Spectre Camera by Lux Optics, it’s about the iPhone’s ability to serve as your main camera even for complicated tasks like long-exposure photos.

The iPad app of the year was Flow by Moleskine, an app that already won a 2019 Design Award. In this case, the digital notebook app shows off a top iPad use case of being a device aimed at creative professionals. Users can take advantage of its digital graphite pencils and chisel-tipped markers to draw and sketch as they could in real life.

The Mac app of the year, Affinity Publisher by Serif Labs, allows users to design and publish books, magazines, brochures, posters, and more — a task that best lends itself to a larger device with a full-sized keyboard.

Finally, the Apple TV app of the year, The Explorers by The Explorers Network, showcases something that works best on your TV’s larger, high-def screen. The app’s community of photographers and videographers are working together to create a visual inventory of the natural world, which you can enjoy on your big screen.

Apple’s iPhone Game of the Year, Sky: Children of the Light by thatgamecompany (makers of Journey, the 2013 Game of the Year), iPad Game of the Year Hyper Light Drifter by Abylight S.L., and Mac Game of the Year GRIS by Nomada Studio, are all the sort of beautiful-designed games that Apple prefers to showcase.

Today’s gaming market has become over-filled with free-to-play titles due to the sort of supported business models that work on the App Store. That’s something Apple Arcade is an attempt to correct, in fact. Apple winners show that even free games can be works of art.

Sky: Children...is a free to play social adventure with in-app purchases, but is also beautiful and creative. Similarly, adventure game Hyper Light, was already a visual arts award winner at the Independent Games Festival. And GRIS has been described as one of the most gorgeous games.

[gallery ids="1919528,1919530,1919526"]

The Apple TV Game of the Year, Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap by DotEmu was developed by LizardCube with the cooperation of series creator Ryuichi Nishizawa, to bring an 80’s cult classic back to life. That’s part of one of Apple’s larger App Store gaming trends — a year of “blockbusters reimagined.”

Apple also gave mention of other launches in this space like Mario Kart Tour, Dr. Mario World, Minecraft Eart, Pokémon Masters, Assassin’s Creed Rebellion, Gears POP!, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, Alien: Blackout, and Google’s Game of the Year, Call of Duty: Mobile.

And in what could be the start of a new tradition, Apple also anointed an Apple Arcade Game of the Year with the gorgeous, fast-paced and music-filled Sayonara Wild Hearts developed by Simogo and published by Annapurna Interactive.

Apple’s year-end list also highlighted App Store non-gaming trend of  “Storytelling,” which featured a variety of apps to tell stories, including visually, as well as through audio and text. Noted apps here were Anchor, Canva, Unfold, Steller, Spark Camera, Over, and Wattpad.

Google doesn’t go all-out as Apple does for its “Best of 2019” picks.

Instead, it simply featured best app Ablo and best game Call of Duty: Mobile as its editorial picks, then leaves the rest to a User’s Choice. Voters selected the same game, but gave the Best App award to a video editor, Glitch Video Effects.

[gallery ids="1919563,1919561,1919562"]

Google’s full list also includes Google Play’s best ebooks, audiobooks, TV shows and Movies, which you can see here.

 

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Want to change the world? Learn the art of fundraising | Kara Logan Berlin

Want to change the world? Learn the art of fundraising | Kara Logan Berlin

How do you raise money to get an idea off the ground, support a community, help change the world? Take a crash course on the secret art of successful fundraising with development strategist Kara Logan Berlin as she shares how anyone can learn to ask for money -- and get it, too.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

12 HTML5 Browser Games That Don’t Need Adobe Flash

You’re on your break at work and think it would be great to play a fun game in your browser. Unfortunately, you’re not allowed to install Adobe Flash on your computer. However, you figure there aren’t any good browser games that don’t require Flash, right? Wrong!

HTML5 games are available in any modern browser and work without plug-ins or installations. You just open and play. Plus, these are just as enjoyable as Flash games. So here’s a list of free HTML5 browser games you can play without installing Adobe Flash.

1. Smarty Bubbles

There are some great bubble shooters to play online, and Smarty Bubbles is one of them.

Your goal is to get the highest score possible by eliminating bubbles from the gameboard. Plan strategically by viewing the next bubble coming, use the handy arrow to help you aim, and ricochet off the walls to make those tough shots. What’s the best score you can achieve?

2. Fruita Crush

Another great match-three, no-Flash game is the puzzler Fruita Crush. Drag to connect three or more fruits to remove them from the board and score.

Each of the 100 levels has a different objective to meet within a certain number of moves. And, matching more than three fruits will give you special pieces like explosive bombs and handy line eliminators. These provide more points than standard pieces.

3. Jewelish

When you prefer fancy jewels over tasty fruits in your match-three game, Jewelish is the way to go. With two minutes on the clock, drag to connect three or more jewels to score.

As with Fruita Crush, connecting more than three will give you cool jewels that clear columns and rows or blow up surrounding pieces. If you want a quick way of scoring without playing through multiple levels, Jewelish is a fun option.

4. Jungle Run

If you enjoy endless running platform games, then grab some bananas and play Jungle Run. You can choose to play as Kiba or Kumba, both apes with great skills.

Run and jump, collect stars and power-ups, and see if you can make it through the 30 challenging levels. And be sure to watch out for enemies because they will take you down in a hurry.

5. Pool Billiard

When you can’t get to the pool parlor, play a quick game of Pool Billiard in your web browser. Aim and shoot to pocket all colored pool balls before sinking the black 8-ball.

You can get extra points by hitting the balls in their numbered order, but that is quite a challenge. If you are up to a test of your aiming and strategy skills on the pool table, chalk up your cue.

6. Sports Mahjong

Sports Mahjong is a take on the classic game with the twist of a sports theme. Gameplay is as normal where you match open tiles to clear the board. The game has upbeat music, a shuffle option, and hints if you get stuck.

If you enjoy Mahjong and look for variations with unusual themes, Sports Mahjong is an excellent addition to your non-Flash game collection.

7. Time Connect

For a different type of matching game, Time Connect challenges you to connect tiles with a restriction. You must match two tiles that have a clear path between them with no more than two 90-degree angles.

Your goal is to clear the board and move onto the next challenge while scoring as highly as you can. The game has helpful hints, handy shuffles, and a cute timepiece theme.

8. Maya Pyramid Solitaire

For another of the games that don’t need Flash, Maya Pyramid Solitaire is an enjoyable one that makes you think quickly.

To succeed, you must match two or more cards that equal 11 to clear the game board within the allotted time. You can combine the cards from the deck on the bottom as well as those on the board. Three jokers, which act as wildcards, can save you if you get stuck.

9. Badland

If you aren’t familiar with Badland, it’s a wonderful adventure available on mobile devices, Steam, and gaming consoles. This side-scrolling platformer takes you into a mysterious and eerie world.

Your goal is to fly through the dark forest while watching out for enemy dwellers and dangerous traps. The HTML5 version of Badland has many challenging levels and missions, spooky sound effects, and fantastic imagery.

10. Galaga Special Edition

OK, Galaga and space-shooter fans, it’s your turn for an online game without Flash. Galaga Special Edition is a fun HTML5 version of the classic shooter with great visual and audio effects. You’ll feel like you are back at the arcade with a pocket full of quarters.

Fly, blast, and maneuver through 25 unique stages. Earn bonuses, unlock achievements, score big, and, of course, prepare for the big boss battles.

11. Tentrix

It sounds like Tetris, looks like Tetris, but is completely different than Tetris. This game is called Tentrix and your goal is to use the differently-shaped pieces to eliminate rows and columns on the board.

With each round, you receive three pieces to place and must fit each one in to continue. Once you fill the board and cannot make another move, the game is over. If you like free online puzzle games, then Tentrix is the one for you.

12. King of Thieves

King of Thieves is an addictive platform adventure created by the makers of Cut the Rope. In each of the levels, you’ll need to plan and show some great clicking or tapping skills. You must maneuver around obstacles and enemies while bouncing off walls to make your way to the treasure chest.

Crazy characters, dangerous cannons, and scary spikes are everywhere… so time your moves carefully.

Who Needs Flash for Awesome Games?

With awesome browser games like these, you can stop worrying about not having Adobe Flash. Plus, be sure to browse around on the sites referenced for these games because they each have tons of other fun options available.

For more nifty games without Flash, check out our list of the best Google Doodle games.

Read the full article: 12 HTML5 Browser Games That Don’t Need Adobe Flash

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The 7 Best Sites to Prank Your Friends With Fake Email Messages

If you want to send fake emails to prank your friends and family, there are a few online services worth exploring. They each have slightly different features and use cases.

Keep reading to learn about seven of the best prank email generators and how you can use them to make an email look like it was sent from someone else.

1. Deadfake

Deadfake is one of the most well-known prank email generators on the web. The service has been responsible for sending almost two million fake email messages since it first went online.

The app lets you send fake emails to anyone you want. Better yet, you can make the email appear that it’s from any person of your choosing as well.

To aid anonymity, you don’t need to register on the site or provide your personal details to Deadfake to use the service.

When creating your fake email, you can format it using the native text editor. Make sure you use a real domain in the From field, or the email will bounce, and your attempts to make an email look like it was sent from someone else will fail.

2. Emkei’s Mailer

Emkei’s Mailer provides a similar service to Deadfake. You can choose the From Name, From Email, To, Subject, and Message.

The most significant difference between the two services is Emkei’s Mailer’s support for attachments. As per most email services, the maximum attachment size is 25MB.

Emkei’s Mailer also offers a plain text editor and an HTML editor while you’re composing your message. As such, the app is simple to use for a quick one-liner, but can also be deployed when you want to make a fake email message look a bit more convincing.

3. Send Anonymous Email

Send Anonymous Email is a web app that can make an email look like it was sent from someone else. It claims more than 60,000 anonymous emails are sent from its servers every day. That number sounds high to us, but it’s clearly a widely-used app regardless of the real figure.

The service’s options and features are the least extensive of the three sites on the list so far. You can only specify the receiver’s email, sender’s email, subject, and message. There are no attachments, and only a standard plain text editor is available.

You cannot add colors, change the font, or fiddle with other formatting options. You’ll need to enter the security code before Send Anonymous Email will let you send your fake message.

It’s worth noting that Send Anonymous Email takes a serious stance on abuse of its services. In the company’s terms, it says if you send death threats, abuse, slander, or anything illegal, the company will publish your IP address and block you from the site.

(Note: The same company provides additional services for sending anonymous or fake SMS messages.)

4. Spoof Box

Spoof Box has the most modern-looking site on the list. It is also one of the only services that let you send fake emails from either your Android or iOS device; a free app is available for both operating systems.

The service has one feature that is unique among the prank email generators we’ve looked at—you can send your fake email message to up to 10 email addresses at a time. Just separate each address with a comma in the To field.

On the downside, you can only send 30 fake emails for free. Thereafter, you need to earn credits by following Spoof Box on its various social media platforms.

Download: Spoofbox for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases)

5. ZMail

ZMail provides a unique way to send fake emails or play an email spam prank. That’s because it is the only service on our list that works via a desktop app rather than via a web app.

Don’t worry; you don’t need to fret about viruses and malware. ZMail is open source; anyone can check out the code to make sure it’s safe.

Sadly, the app is only available on Windows. Mac users will have to stick to one of the web apps we have discussed.

6. GuerrillaMail

None of the services we’ve looked at so far will allow you to receive email replies; they do not provide an inbox service.

However, some services—such as GuerrillaMail—do provide an email inbox and can be used to send a fake email. But there is a trade-off. You cannot send the fake email from someone else; GuerrillaMail does not let you add a custom From address. You can set any username you wish but are restricted to one of the app’s preselected domains.

Furthermore, emails in the inbox are only saved for 60 minutes. Thereafter, GuerrillaMail will automatically delete the messages from its servers. If you don’t regularly check for responses to your prank, you risk missing the fallout altogether.

7. Letter Generator

We’ll leave you with something a bit different. Letter Generator lets you generate fake letters using topics and keywords of your choosing.

The service is the perfect app to use when you’re not sure what to write in your fake prank email. Pair this app with one of the fake email services we’ve already discussed, and you’ve got a winning prank on your hands.

The topics available include employment, relationships, apartment rentals, and even song lyrics.

Letter Generator is entirely free to use, and there are no restrictions on the number of letters you can generate.

Use Fake Email Generators Responsibly

Services that let you send fake emails can easily be abused. The act of sending fake email from someone else raises ethical and moral concerns. And depending on the content of your message (and the actions the recipients takes in light of it), there could even be legal consequences.

Sure, fake emails can provide a bit of fun among family and friends. But don’t send prank emails that could cause alarm, sadness, or panic. And it goes without saying that you shouldn’t impersonate the police or other emergency services.

To learn more about pranking people, check out our article on the best ways to play geeky pranks on your friends.

Read the full article: The 7 Best Sites to Prank Your Friends With Fake Email Messages

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