But games crept into “third place” territory even before COVID-19 left people tethered to digital devices for connection. Last year, Fast Company declared Fortnite the internet’s “best new social network,” showing how the free-to-play, multiplatform game has become entrenched in the social fabric of a generation. Fortnite today is Facebook ten years ago. So, it stands to reason that brands must recognize the importance of meaningful in-game interactions. For brands to succeed in a new era of gaming, they’ll have to shift gears and put purpose before products, focusing on opportunities to enhance the human connection and fuel creativity through indelible experiences....

While REST isn’t going away, much of the internal development interest will be focused on GraphQL, and the company is placing a great emphasis on ensuring its most popular external endpoints are available via GraphQL. This isn’t the most perfect metaphor, but it’s a bit like going to work, and your manager announcing that instead of English, the lingua franca of the office was now Afrikaans or French. Sure, they’re still human-comprehendible languages....

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, announced the move in a blog post published Monday: The mooted platform would have allowed children aged 10-12 to access a modified version of Instagram. At present, people under the age of 13 are barred from the app, but younger users can lie about their date of birth when they sign up for an account. Instagram said that a site designed for children would make younger users safer, but the proposals were widely slated....

Despite the fact the chips are still based on a 10nm process, the company is promising noticeable performance improvements over the current 10th gen chips. Specifically, the company is focusing on improving performance in AI-based tasks. In all, Intel says the 11th-gen chips should be up to 20% faster for office productivity tasks, 2x faster for gaming while streaming, and 2.7x faster in content creation “in real-world workflows over competitive products....

Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion. There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.” In Austin, Texas, there are billboards with slogans like “Crypto Is Real” that weirdly mirror the ubiquitous billboards about Jesus found on Texas highways....

Many people think that growing their Instagram account is an important and necessary part of life on social media, but very few of us have stopped to ask ourselves, “Is my Instagram account actually worth growing?” At its core, growing an Instagram does one thing: it increases the number of people who visit your Instagram account or, in other words, it generates additional traffic to your Instagram account. Additional traffic can be potentially valuable (depending on what you do with it) but it also comes at a price....

As borders closed and remote work boomed, the rules of the game changed overnight. For digital nomads, this brought unexpected challenges – and new opportunities. Closed borders, national lockdowns, travel restrictions, fewer and more expensive flights. It sure seems like a bad time to be a digital nomad. Yet in the post-pandemic landscape that’s emerging, more people work remotely than ever before and mainstream interest in nomadic lifestyles is soaring....

Sex, and specifically female sexual pleasure, is a long-held taboo in our society. In recent years, the sex tech industry has had to deal with a range of challenges. It’s not an easy task to break the taboos around sexual pleasure and design sex toys to suit a wide variety of anatomically different bodies, all with different needs and preferences. When sex toys became popular in the ‘70s, the industry was entirely dominated by men....

One of the latest that might join the ever-growing list of countries taking this authoritarian (yet humanitarian) action is Japan. Over the past 24 hours, reports have surfaced that suggest the Asian nation will ban the sale of new gasoline vehicles by the mid-2030s, Reuters reports. According to reports, public broadcaster NHK broke the news yesterday, which follow as part of prime minister Yoshidie Suga’s plans for Japan to reach net zero emissions by 2050....

But since Covid-19, we’ve started to see a shift. Staff members are no longer looking for onsite laundry facilities or weekly massages. As remote working takes over the tech world, it’s getting harder for companies to placate their staff with, let’s face it, what can often be shallow perks. After surviving a global pandemic, we’re not as impressed by things like nap pods or free exercise classes. In 2022, we want real, meaningful work benefits that improve our day-to-day lives rather than novelties that generate a bit of publicity....

Kenya’s Huduma Namba initiative, which the government has stated is to unify all Kenyans personal data into one database, has been both lauded and criticized as some have pointed out that it is unnecessary given how the country already allocates a unique ID number for citizens. — Dr. Roselyn Akombe (@DrRoselynAkombe) May 18, 2019 What is Huduma Namba? According to the brochure issued by Kenya’s government, some of the main reasons for intruding Huduma Namba, National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS), is to centralize the collection and storage of citizens personally identifying data and biometric data into one database....

And that’s exactly what a team of researchers at the University of Michigan has tried to accomplish with the development of a 1,000-cycle battery that could quintuple EV range. What’s the potential of lithium-sulfur batteries? Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries have a series of advantages over their lithium-ion (Li-ion) counterparts: So what’s the hold-up? Well, the main problem is that Li-S batteries can’t be recharged enough times before they fail to make them commercially viable....

Chief among them is a $129 dock that is able to charge three devices at once. Unlike the AirPower, however, the 3-in-1 dock doesn’t just let you drop any wireless charging device onto a mat willy-nilly. Instead, it is specifically designed to charge an Apple Watch alongside two other devices. While Logitech is marketing the device specifically towards Apple users, the two large wireless charging pads are compatible with a wealth of Android devices too....

If an adversary gives you a machine learning model and secretly plants a malicious backdoor in it, what are the chances that you can discover it? Very little, according to a new paper by researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study. The security of machine learning is becoming increasingly critical as ML models find their way into a growing number of applications. The new study focuses on the security threats of delegating the training and development of machine learning models to third parties and service providers....

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab said they found an app with 100 million downloads that housed a malicious module that then pushed ads or downloaded apps surreptitiously onto compromised Android devices. The malicious component was found by the researchers after they were alerted to ‘suspicious behavior’ in the free version of the popular document scanning app CamScanner following a rash of negative reviews left by users to avoid using the app....

— Mario Kart Tour (@mariokarttourEN) August 27, 2019 The company originally released a beta for the Android version of the game earlier this year. The company is making a big bet on the title, with some analysts thinking it could be the gaming giant’s first “billion dollar app.” The company’s previous title’s such as Super Mario Run, haven’t been popular, but they don’t have the same replayability and multi-player prowess that Mario Kart has been known to deliver for generations....

Hanwang Technology used a sample database of around 6 million unmasked faces and a much smaller database of masked faces to create the system. The Beijing-based firm, which also goes by the English name Hanvon, began to develop the tech in January, as people in China began donning face masks in their droves. The system was rolled out just one month later. Hanwang Vice President Huang Lei says the system’s recognition rate reached about 95% when people wore a mask — still some way below its regular success rate of 99....

Anybody can plunk some numbers into a rudimentary spreadsheet. That doesn’t mean you’re somehow now a Microsoft Excel expert. Not quite. That heritage business software has been around for decades because it’s incredibly versatile, but if you don’t understand some of the basics, then the true subtle power of Excel is lost. Which brings us to pivot tables. If you don’t fully grasp pivot tables, the way that Excel users extract important data and aggregate it for display from much larger data sets, then you don’t really get Excel....

The Redmond tech giant posted $35 billion revenue and $10.8 billion net income in Q1, up 15% and 22% respectively when compared with the corresponding period last year. [Read: Microsoft reportedly plans to invest in India’s payments giant Paytm] Microsoft’s commercial cloud arm grew fast, up 39% year-on-year to hit $13.3 billion. In fact, Microsoft’s flagship cloud platform Azure posted 59% more revenue than in the same quarter in 2019....

Specifically, he told Stevivor,” Our goal for our first-party games is that your entitlements will be cross-generation and your Achievements will move effectively with your save game because that’s where they stand.” The idea behind Play Anywhere is that when you buy a game you’d be able to play it on any of your Microsoft platforms. Saves and achievements transfer across those platforms. So any game you play on PC or One that’s also available on the Scarlett will be able to transfer over to the new console....