AI chatbots have garnered a great deal of buzz ever since Facebook brought them to its Messenger platform earlier this year. Some analysts are already claiming that these bots are going to be the next big thing in the industry, but other than a select few diamonds in the rough, we haven’t seen many that have impressed us.
DoNotPay is one of those diamonds.
Google saw a 100 percent surge in U.K. searches for “getting an Irish passport” after Britain voted to leave the European Union.
The searches, which were mostly from Northern Ireland, spiked as news broke of the surprise result in Thursday’s referendum on E.U. membership. The Republic of Ireland is a member of the European Union.
For as detestable as they are, scammers are undeniably clever and resourceful. In the most recent example which highlights the lengths to which scammers will go to swindle people out of the hard-earned money, Torrent Freak directs us to a new phishing scheme where ISPs are the primary target.
Tens of millions of people are going to wake up in a panic this morning when they go to check Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other social networks only to find out that all of the video links they click on are dead. Why? Because YouTube is down. AHHH! Google’s insanely popular video site went offline just before 7:30AM EDT, and all clicks to videos return the dreaded 500 Internal Server Error, which looks like this: More →
A number of simultaneous reports today, all from reputable sources, appear to have confirmed that this year’s iPhone will not have a headphone jack. As you’d imagine, the news spawned a series of internet Hot Takes, including one particularly withering listicle from Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel.
“Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid” does, in all honesty, raise some excellent points about why ditching the headphone jack is…well, user-hostile and stupid. I would personally like for my next phone to have a headphone jack. But an otherwise-worthwhile piece ends with this one observation:
6. No one is asking for this
Raise your hand if the thing you wanted most from your next phone was either fewer ports or more dongles.
I didn’t think so. You wanted better battery life, didn’t you? Everyone just wants better battery life.
This is stupid, and hostile to common sense.
What’s the very first thing you do when you feel an unfamiliar symptom coming on? Unless there’s a doctor in the other room, chances are that you head straight to Google in hopes that you can figure out what’s ailing you with the help of the internet. This often leads you down a seemingly endless rabbit hole of potential sicknesses and diseases, culminating in needless stress and worrying.
Google wants to simplify this process once and for all.
Yesterday, the internet went slightly crazy for the story of Promobot, a Russian-made “runaway robot” that escaped its handlers and caused a traffic jam on a suburban Russian street. It’s a story perfectly set up for viral success: out-of-control machinery, Russian dashcam footage, and a cute little robot is a YouTube traffic-maker from the heavens.
The only little niggle? I’m personally pretty sure that the entire thing was fabricated to generate publicity.
Of all the surprises from Apple at WWDC 2016 this week, few were more welcome than the complete visual overhaul of Apple Music. A year after the service’s launch, it has attracted an impressive 15 million subscribers, but Apple knew that if it was going to compete with the likes of Spotify, it was going to need a better app.
To mark the reveal of the Apple Music revamp, some of Apple’s top executives sat down with Billboard to discuss the future of the service.
Google’s search function is once again in the spotlight for connecting Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.
Typing “When was Hitler born” into the search engine Friday generated some of the expected information on the Nazi dictator, but also a Donald Trump image and link. Trump’s image appears alongside that of Hitler’s wife, Eva Braun, and Charlie Chaplin, who famously satirized the Nazi leader in his 1940 movie “The Great Dictator.”
The unusual search result caught the attention and sparked debate on the online forum Reddit, and has spread across the internet. Google told FoxNews.com that it is looking into why Trump’s image would appear alongside Hitler’s. More →
Google’s cheap, high-speed Fiber network is the internet we all need, but very few actually get. A lot of that has to do with the cost of running fiber-optic under streets and to houses, which involves a lot of messy manual labor.
One solution Google is looking at, according to Alphabet chairperson Eric Schmidt, is millimeter-wave wireless signals to cover the “last mile” to customers’ houses.
Facebook is pushing hard on the whole virtual reality thing, as its purchase of Oculus and 360-degree video implementation makes clear. The latest move is putting support for 360-degree photos into the News Feed, so you can now make your friends doubly jealous of whatever vacation you’re on.
The company announced that 360-degree photos would be coming last month, but the change was only just rolled out.
What do you get when you combine the functionality of Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags, the e-commerce options of a site like PayPal and the communities like those at Goodreads and allrecipies.com, to name a few?
The answer is Imzy, a Salt Lake City-based startup as well as a new whimsically named platform for communities built by a team that includes a band of Reddit veterans. Its CEO, in fact, is Dan McComas, who previously led product at Reddit and who says he was dismissed not long after the user revolt that plagued the site last year. More →
