Internet & Websites - Page 8

TikTok has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons for months, leading into the Trump administration talking about banning TikTok from operating in the US.

But over the weekend, news popped up that Microsoft would buy the US portion of TikTok with US Fox Business Network's Charles Gasparino tweeting that he confirmed that his sources told him Microsoft were in talks to buy TikTok.

Gasparino added that Microsoft is "probably the only big US tech co that can do the deal since the others are probably prohibited from getting bigger by regulators" he said, according to "bankers with knowledge of the matter".

With hundreds of millions of people across the world stuck inside thanks to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, social networking giant Facebook couldn't be happier.

Facebook reported their Q2 2020 earnings, smashing analyst expectations and seeing FB shares spiking 7% in extended trading. We now know that Facebook revenue for Q2 2020 was a bold $18.69 billion for the three-month period, up 98% year-on-year.

As for the amount of people using Facebook, that has also been boosted in a big way -- with 1.79 billion daily active users (DAUs) while the monthly active users has reached a gigantic 2.7 billion monthly active users MAUs.

McDonalds has just announced that all of its restaurants across the United States will require all of its customers to wear a face mask before entering one of their restaurants.

The new changes come into effect starting August 1, where the company also announced it would still be still halting in-store dining from re-opening for another 30 days. McDonald's USA said in a press statement that "From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we've based decisions on our top priority: protecting the health and well-being of our and our franchisees' employees and customers".

Joe Erlinger, President, McDonald's USA and Mark Salebra, National Franchise Leadership Alliance Chair continued, adding:

The future of detecting COVID-19 coronavirus in the wild might just be a... sniffer dog.

New research is being conducted by scientists over at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover, who have been training sniffer dogs to detect COVID-19 on human samples.

Their recent tests have been quite accurate, where the scientists taught 8 separate sniffer dogs from the German Bundeswehr for just a few weeks to be able to tell the difference between the saliva and mucus of people that had coronavirus, and didn't have coronavirus.

We all do it: send a message, email, or tweet and instantly regret it. Especially Twitter, where you can't edit your tweets once they hit Dorsey's servers.

President Trump has said he "often" regrets some of his tweets and retweets, where in a recent interview at the White House with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, he compared using Twitter today to the old days where you'd write a letter.

President Trump explained: "It used to be in the old days before this, you'd write a letter and you'd say, 'this letter is really bad,' you put it on your desk and you go back tomorrow and you say, 'oh, I'm glad I didn't send it'".

Qanon poses no harm to anyone, doesn't advocate violence (unlike many other groups on social media that don't get banned) but that hasn't stopped Big Tech from banning as much as Q as they can. Facebook was first, then Twitter just recently.

Now we have TikTok blocking multiple Qanon-related hashtags, but the Chinese video sharing giant won't be removing videos using the hashtag. TikTok will however be banning the terms "Qanon", "Fall Cabal" and "QAnonTruth" but then The Verge reporter Kim Lyons gets this very pivotal bit wrong. She adds that they're banning "Out of Shadows" which is a "related phase" used by "QAnon believers".

I'll call her out now -- no it's not: Out of Shadows is not some "related phrase". Go and search "Out of Shadows" and see what it is, and how it has been all but removed from the internet, it's near impossible to find on YouTube yet has millions of views and should've been trending on YouTube but it wasn't for obvious reasons (once you've watched it, you'll understand).

Cloudflare had some major issues across multiple regions in the last 12 hours or so, with the company announcing the news on its status page, and Twitter -- which, uh, recently was also attacked.

The internet hosting giant explained: "We are aware that some regions may be experiencing issues with some Cloudflare services. We are currently investigating. This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network".

Cloudflare continued: "It was not as a result of an attack. It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available".

President Trump is notorious for his tweets, and whether you agree with them or not, anyone can see that sometimes they get a little out of hand, or perhaps are even interpreted incorrectly.

Every social media platform has rules and regulations, and Twitter is no exception to this rule. Above is an example of a tweet violating what Twitter calls "public interest". Here's what President Trump said, "There will never be an 'Autonomous Zone' in Washington, D.C., as long as I'm your President. If they try they will be met with serious force!" According to Twitter, the context of this tweet and the wording used violates the platform's guidelines, and has warranted a "public interest" notice to be slapped on the front of the tweet.

The public interest notice doesn't remove the tweet entirely but instead places a warning over the top of the tweet so it can't be immediately viewed. Here's what the warning says, "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about abusive behavior. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible." This isn't the first time Twitter has issued a public interest notice on one of Trump's tweets. Last month the platform regulated this tweet from the President, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts".

The world of streaming is change quite rapidly, and just yesterday Microsoft announced the closure of its streaming platform Mixer.

Microsoft announced that it was partnering with Facebook Gaming to transit its community over to Facebook's streaming service. This has left big name streamers such as Shroud and Ninja as free agents that have complete rain of choice for what streaming platform they want to start streaming on. The closure of Mixer may not affect the already established badly (as most already have monetary contracts signed), but it certainly will impact the streamers that have been slowly climbing the ranks of the streaming world.

So what do these streamers do? A moderately large Mixer streamer might have a hard time transitioning their audience over to a new platform. The transition could come at a cost of many streamers audience members leaving, essentially, throughout the transition period viewers are lost. Mixer streamers will have to make a decision of what platform they are going to begin streaming on soon, as Mixer will be officially killed off on July 22nd.

The internet is a strange and wonderful place. Sometimes it can be very brutal as well, but other times it can be a representation of large amounts of the population coming together for one cause.

All social medias using a 'liking' system one way or another, which begs the question 'what is the most-liked image on the internet?', and perhaps, 'why is it the most-liked image?'. Well, start to take your guesses for what the most-liked image is because you might be shocked when you find out what image has taken first place. Guesses taken? Ok, well, the most-liked image online is a picture of an egg, yes, that's right, a simple stock image of an egg is the most-liked image on the internet.

So how did this happen? According to 'Instagram Egg' Wikipedia page, the 'Instagram Egg' became a global phenomenon within just days of its creation. The @world_record_egg account was created was on January 4th, 2019, and posted the simple photo above with the caption "Let's set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this." Within just 10 days, the Instagram Egg smashed 18.4 million likes, taking first place as the most-liked image on Instagram.

The co-founder of Reddit has just announced that he is resigning, where he will now push all-in with his time and money to "serve the black community, chiefly to curb racial hate".

In a series of tweets, Alexis Ohanian Sr. the co-founder of Reddit, said that he has "resigned as a member of the reddit board, I have urged them to fill my seat with a black candidate, + I will use future gains on my Reddit stock to serve the black community, chiefly to curb racial hate".

He has started his new life by pledging $1 million to former NFL player and now civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp. He's not the only internet giant to have donated to Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp either, with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledging $3 million just a few days ago.

Intel has announced that it is discontinuing its eighth-generation Coffee Lake CPU lineup. That includes the discontinuation of the flagship Core i7-8700K processor. In all, Intel has dropped the ax on 31 desktop parts and a trio of mobile CPUs.

Intel's eighth-generation parts launched in 2017 and are falling by the wayside as the 10th generation Comet Lake processor family has debuted. When Intel launched its eighth-generation line, the processors were its response to the AMD Ryzen processors.

Intel hadn't been particularly innovative with its processor line until AMD launched the Ryzen parts. The Core i7-8700K processor had six cores and 12 threads marking the first major core increase in nearly a decade. The discontinuation program for the eighth generation line started on June 1.

YouTube is celebrating reaching the halfway mark of 2020 by doing something they hsould've had many years ago: built-in timestamps which the company calls "Chapters". Check out the tweet, with the video, below:

Content creators won't need to do anything special to get Chapters on their videos, they just need to write up the timestamps in the description of their video. The first chapter has to begin at 0:00 for YouTube's new Chapters feature to work, while videos need to have at least 3 chapters with over 10 seconds or longer, too.

It's kinda funny that it took YouTube this damn long to get its Chapters feature into its video service, but at least it's finally here.

The host of the JRE Podcast, Joe Rogan has just announced that YouTube's biggest podcast will be jumping ship and heading over to Spotify exclusively.

The move will not be immediate, and if you are thinking that viewers will be losing the video side of the podcast then don't worry, Rogan states in his announcement video that the video format will also be coming over to Spotify. Rogan announced the news via his personal Instagram account, where he stated that he signed a "multi-year licensing agreement with Spotify that will start on September 1st."

Rogan also says that the entire JRE Experience (Joe Rogan Experience) podcast library will be uploaded to Spotify on September 1st. Rogan reminds everyone that the other platforms that are hosting his content won't have to remove his content until "somewhere around the end of the year" when the exclusivity side of the new agreement with Spotify kicks in. Rogan emphasizes that the show will remain the same, and will also be free.

Facebook has just announced the first 20 members of its new Oversight Board, which acts as an independent body that approves Facebook policies, helps out with content moderation, and discusses appeals on existing decisions.

The new Oversight Board even has the power to overrule Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but I think we'll have to wait and see how much they "overrule" Zuckerberg going forward. The Next Web reports that the new Oversight Board can "overrule Facebook's upper management in policy decisions and content moderation".

There are over 40 members in the Oversight Board, that come from all sorts of different backgrounds -- and none of them have any direct connection to Facebook. There will be a independently funded trust with $130 million in its kitty, where the board will take in 5-person panels to make final rulings, explaining that "Facebook must implement our decisions, unless implementation could violate the law".

If you're into conspiracy theories or anything in the realm of Qanon then you will have already noticed that Q and Qanon content across the internet has been slowly clamped down on. The latest is Facebook.

The largest social networking site in the world has removed accounted associated with Qanon, with Facebook explaining: "Our investigation linked this activity to individuals associated with the QAnon network known to spread fringe conspiracy theories. We found this activity as part of our internal investigations into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior ahead of the 2020 election in the US".

Facebook has said that it has removed "5 Pages, 20 Facebook accounts, and 6 Groups that originated in the US and focused domestically".

Google is looking to keep all of its customers on its apps, and with so many people working from home right now and using Zoom, why not release another app that will entice them back onto Google?

Google will soon be rolling out a new free service called Google Meet. Google Meet will be free for anyone who has a Gmail account, and will have a slew of features that will no doubt steal some of Zoom's users back over to Google for the sheer convenience. Meet users will be able to create and host meetings with up to 100 participants by using Meet's website, or iOS and Android apps.

Google users will also be able to schedule meetings on their Google Calendar and go straight to meetings from the Google Calendar app or website. Meet will also be able to use real-time captions and have an expanded tile view layout. At the moment, Google Meet sessions are unlimited, but after September 30th sessions will be limited to 60 minutes each. Google is uncapping the session time to allow for everyone who is required to work from home due to the coronavirus. If you are interested in Google Meet, check out more here.

We all are stuck at home right now practicing social distancing and being quarantined over COVID-19 coronavirus, and now Facebook has finally (seriously, why haven't they done it until now) announced Messenger Rooms.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new Messenger Rooms feature in a livestream today, and in an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg explained that Facebook's new video features were planned as a larger part of creating more private messaging tools.

Zuckerberg explained: "Video presence isn't a new area for us. But it's an area that we want to go deeper in, and it fits the overall theme, which is that we're shifting more resources in the company to focus on private communication and private social platforms, rather than just the traditional broader ones. So this is a good mix: we're building tools into Facebook and Instagram that are helping people find smaller groups of people to then go have more intimate connections with, and be able to have private sessions with".

Twitter is getting serious with 5G conspiracy theories, with the social networking giant announcing new rules. YouTube recently made a similar move, removing any videos that connect COVID-19 and 5G.

These new rules will see Twitter remove tweets that have "unverified claims that incite people to engage in harmful activity, could lead to the destruction or damage of critical 5G infrastructure".

Twitter won't be removing every single 5G conspiracy theory tweet, and instead will be prioritizing claims that are inciting people to action. You know, like encouraging people across the world to burn down their local 5G towers. With over 50 fires that have targeted "cell towers and other equipment" in the UK in recent weeks, this is a strong move by Twitter.

With the coronavirus currently keeping people around the world stuck inside their homes, many are turning to Netflix and other streaming services to stay entertained. Netflix has silently launched a new update for its Android app that adds a Screen Lock button in the bottom left-hand corner of your content. The control lock is great for those who tend to watch on a small screen, such as a smartphone or tablet held in hand.

Anyone who's done this knows that as you shift your hand position, often you touch the screen resulting in the controls popping up opening the door for an accidental press on a button to skip forward or backward. That's an annoying problem that everyone has to deal with when using the Netflix app when holding advice in hand. Netflix's new update is currently only available on the Android app.

With the screen lock button pressed, a tap of the screen no longer opens the user interface allowing for accidental presses on playback controls. Instead, users of the Android app will see an icon that says Screen Locked along with a button that can be pressed to unlock the controls. Parents should also find this update useful as it could keep kids from constantly pausing the content that is keeping them quiet while you work.