The Apple-branded cloth, made of unspecified nonabrasive materials, will be available to purchase separately. Other than having an Apple logo stamped on it, it’s unclear how the cloth is any different from a typical microfiber cloth that you can get for a fraction of the price.
Source: A piece of cloth to clean your Apple devices will cost you $19
A failure to ensure women have equal access to the internet has cost low-income countries $1tn (£730bn) over the past decade and could mean an additional loss of $500bn by 2025 if governments don’t take action, according to new research .
Source: Digital gender gap: men 50% more likely to be online in some countries – report
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the business model of food-delivery apps went largely unconsidered by the diners who relied on them for midday kale salads and late-night taco feasts. Platforms such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub often charged restaurants commissions of up to thirty per cent per order, and they were evasive about how (and how much) their couriers were compensated. But for most restaurants delivery comprised only a fraction of total sales. Then the covid-19 pandemic turned virtually all restaurants into takeout-and-delivery-only businesses, and the brutal economics of the delivery apps became a matter of life-or-death urgency, for both the restaurants selling food and the couriers delivering it.
Live sports and gambling have a long co-dependent relationship, which is expanding beyond casinos to over-the-top video. The new field of dreams for incremental billions in revenue began in 2018 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal anti-sports-gambling law.
Source: Streaming Video Betting Big on Legalized Sports Gambling
Many of those pills are being traded openly via social media, particularly on Snapchat, the most popular app among U.S. teens. Snapchat has been linked to the sale of fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills that have caused the deaths of teens and young adults in at least 15 states, according to The Partnership for Safe Medicines, a nonprofit public health group. NBC News independently confirmed deaths in 14 of the 15 states and identified five additional states not included in the research.
Source: When one pill kills
TikTok is having a very good week, it seems. It started with a Reuters story saying the social video platform has passed the 1 billion user mark in a shockingly short time. Next came the Bytedance property’s hosting its own event, TikTok World, at which it announced several new innovations to attract advertisers , creators and influencers.
The platform work model is reshaping entire economies, sectors, lifestyles, and livelihoods.
Source: Gig workers are uncertain, scared, and barely scraping by
For more than a year, an active member of a community that traded in illicitly obtained internal Apple documents and devices was also acting as an informant for the company.
Source: Apple’s Double Agent
Every photo and every data point is a link to the old way of life in Afghanistan – and a reason for Taliban retribution
The general consensus among the terminally online would seem to be that the internet is a miserable place just barely made tolerable by the idiots and well-meaning naifs whose screw-ups at least provide something to ridicule. But is there a scientific basis for this generalized feeling? How has social media actually impacted mental health, per the research? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.
Depending on who you ask, smartphones with folding screens—like the two models Samsung just released—are either a gimmick or the next frontier.
Source: Folding Phones Are the New 3D TV
The Apple TV+ comedy series Ted Lasso now has its own iMessage Sticker Pack to easily share the Lasso spirit with friends. Animated stickers are also now available to download inside of the Clips app.
Source: Apple releases Ted Lasso sticker pack for iMessage and Clips
With a new capability to search for illegal material not just in the cloud but on user devices, the company may have opened up a new front in the encryption wars.
Source: Apple Walks a Privacy Tightrope to Spot Child Abuse in iCloud
IBM Digital Health Pass uses blockchain encryption technology, eliminating the need to collect and store personal data. This allows user to manage what information they want to share through their smartphones. All border agents see is a prompt for whether a traveler is cleared for travel or not.
Source: More than 450 airlines can now use IBM’s blockchain-based vaccine passport
To master the roads, autonomous vehicles need lots of data. Workers everywhere from Kenya to Venezuela are providing it.
The digital media companies that once seemed to have a lock on the future are making plans to get bigger and pay back their investors.
Source: BuzzFeed Is Going Public. Now What for Vox Media, Group Nine and Vice?
We need to think of the Metaverse as a sort of successor state to the mobile internet. And while consumers will have core devices and platforms through which they interact with the Metaverse, the Metaverse depends on so much more. There’s a reason we don’t say Facebook or Google is an internet. They are destinations and ecosystems on or in the internet, each accessible via a browser or smartphone that can also access the vast rest of the internet. Similarly, Fortnite and Roblox feel like the Metaverse because they embody so many technologies and trends into a single experience that, like the iPhone, is tangible and feels different from everything that came before. But they do not constitute the Metaverse.
Unlike auto racing, in drone racing the pilots aren’t subjected to debilitating G-forces, which means the races can take place at impossibly fast speeds . So fast, in fact, that autonomous drones have always lagged behind those piloted by humans who benefit from split-second reflexes.
Source: An Autonomous Drone Just Beat a Professional Racing Pilot for the First Time
NYC Mesh, a band of a few dozen tech volunteers, takes on Verizon and the big “incumbent providers,” with the promise of inexpensive community internet.
Source: ‘Welcome to the Mesh, Brother’: Guerrilla Wi-Fi Comes to New York
If you’ve ever hesitated to add a smiley face or a thumbs-up to an email, a new survey from Adobe may put you at ease. The software company, which conducts regular surveys on emoji use, found that the whimsical icons can make people feel more connected and more receptive to new tasks. They allow people to quickly share ideas. They make group decisions more efficient and can even reduce the need for meetings and calls.
