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Google’s new experiment called Floom creates vortexes in your room that’ll let you see what’s on the other side of the globe, literally. Here’s how it works. Head to the Floom site in Chromeon your Android device. After approving necessary permissions, point your camera to an empty space on the floor. You might need to walk around a bit for it to work. You can tilt your phone to change the direction of the tunnel, and the app will build a new portal that takes you to a different destination on the globe....

Google this week unveiled a new challenger to OpenAI’s vaunted DALLE-2 text-to-image generator — and took shots at its rival’s efforts. Both models convert text prompts into pictures. But Google’s researchers claim their system provides “unprecedented photorealism and deep language understanding.” Human raters preferred Imagen over DALLE-2 for both sample quality and image-text alignment. Credit: Saharia et al.The cringingly-named Imagen system uses a large pre-trained language model as a text encoder....

The only problem is, if it seems too good to be true, it’s generally because it is. If it wasn’t, nine out of ten startups wouldn’t fail in their first year. Essentially, ‘growth hacking’ promises that with a few simple techniques, businesses will quickly see viral growth. Sounds great. It’s actually an even better branding strategy by the guy who coined it, GrowthHackers CEO Sean Ellis. Unfortunately, the term soon became hijacked by others who just wanted a sexier way of selling conversion rate optimization (CRO), but without the business model and long-term vision....

While personally identifiable information — full names, social security numbers, home addresses, dates of birth, credit card numbers — can be exploited by criminals to commit identity fraud, the theft of medical information can have equally serious impact on victims. Thanks to a new report published by Carbon Black, we now know exactly how hackers use stolen healthcare data to their benefit. “Valuable data from the healthcare industry exceeds protected health information (PHI) and the hottest offerings today are provider data, forgeries, and hacked health insurance company login information,” the cybersecurity firm noted....

Kraken Security Labs’ latest blog details a “voltage glitching” attack that extracts the encrypted seed used to access cryptocurrency stored on the device. An attacker can then brute force the encrypted seed, as it is simply protected by a 1-9 digit PIN, which the firm described as “trivial.” Worse still, researchers warn that fixing this flaw is no easy feat — the KeepKey team reportedly can’t do anything about it without redesigning the hardware....

The hackers are requesting the city pays over $30,000 (4 BTC) by October 28 at 5PM, reports Business Day. — eNCA (@eNCA) October 25, 2019 The city tweeted that it had “detected a network breach which resulted in unauthorized access to our information systems.” “The incident is currently being investigated by City of Joburg [sic] cybersecurity experts, who have taken immediate and appropriate action to reinforce security measures to mitigate any potential impacts....

And so, one Twitter account is hilariously posing a very poignant question: has Jeff Bezos decided to end world hunger? @HasBezosDecided’s bio cites a report from the Institute of Food Policy Research Institute that found solving world hunger by 2030 would cost $11 billion in extra spending each year. Every day, the account confirms whether Bezos has bothered to contribute what represents a small fraction of his fortune to that goal....

With so much instability in the global job market, it’s no surprise that everyone is thinking about their career plans. No matter whether you feel fulfilled and secure in your current position or think you’re expecting new challenges soon, expanding your skillset is never a bad career move — and might actually make all the difference in landing a new opportunity or new employer. As part of your Memorial Day plan to jumpstart your professional life, pick up training in one of these 10 new skills now and you’ll have it mastered by the time fall rolls around....

As such, the implementation of two-factor authentication (2FA) has become a necessity. Generally, 2FA aims to provide an additional layer of security to the relatively vulnerable username/password system. It works too. Figures suggest users who enabled 2FA ended up blocking about 99.9% of automated attacks. But as with any good cybersecurity solution, attackers can quickly come up with ways to circumvent it. They can bypass 2FA through the one-time codes sent as an SMS to a user’s smartphone....

WhatsApp doesn’t take a large space on your phone compared to some games and apps. However, over time, files sent on the chat app can fill your storage pretty quickly. When you take the backup of your WhatsApp account, all these files are backed up too. Sadly, there’s no way to exclude media files from backup as of now. So, the best way to manage your local and cloud storage is to get rid of frequently forwarded and large files from WhatsApp....

Instagram today revealed its rolling out new updates to Reels, it’s thinly-veiled TikTok rip-off, that will essentially make it more like the controversial competition. In short, it’ll allow you to do things like save and share whole audio clips from other Reels. Here’s how to do that. ?Save Audio → save sounds to create with whenever you want ?‍♀️ Share Audio Pages → share all the Reels that use a specific piece of audio over DM ?...

It seems that saying ‘I’m busy’ has become a badge of honor these days. If someone asks you whether you’re busy the expectation is that you’ll say ‘Yes, very!’ If you were to reply ‘No, not at all’ that would be cause for concern. You’re not busy? Are you okay? Are you sure? What’s wrong? So what exactly defines ‘busy?’ If you ask me to do something that takes only 30 seconds, and I say I can’t do it because I’m busy, surely you’ll argue that I’m just making excuses, and nobody can be so busy they don’t even have time to do a 30-second task....

To be fair, the steel ball Tesla was throwing at the window didn’t actually go through the window as it presumably would have on a normal car door. Tesla also demonstrated a naked sheet of the material emerging unscathed during the presentation, which made the eventual cracks particularly disappointing/hilariously awkward. People have been providing theories on why the glass cracked ever since – aside from the fact that glass is, you know, glass – but now Musk is stepping in:...

My work focuses on how people use technology, and I’ve been following the rise of emoji for a decade. With 3,353 characters available and 5 billion sent each day, emojis are now a significant language system. When the emoji database is updated, it usually reflects the needs of the time. This latest update, for instance, features a new vaccine syringe and more same-sex couples. But if my undergraduates are anything to go by, emojis are also a generational battleground....

Death Stranding, the long-awaited first game from Hideo Kojima after his split from Konami, is on its way. And with each new trailer, we see that Stranding will include the same crazy bullshit we’ve come to expect from a Kojima production: a script heavy with exposition, on-the-nose names and titles ripped straight from a twelve-year-old’s first sci-fi story, and a heavy dose of the supernatural. If nothing else, it looks to be a typical Hideo Kojima game....

“During this incident, an unauthorized third party has gained access to our internal system API, one of which had access to hashed passwords and other non-financial data about our customers,” the Lithuania-based company said. Hostinger — founded in 2004 — has over 29 million users across 178 countries. The security incident is said to have come to light on August 23, when it was alerted to a breach of one its servers....

Hardly any means has been available to organizations for credibly communicating to their customers—and maybe even their own employees—the trustworthiness of their operations and use of A/IS. In the absence of such a method, often uninformed fear, uncertainty, and doubt of A/IS has festered. Moving forward, concerns about the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence and A/IS and lack of trust could hold back the advancement of revolutionary technologies with tremendous, far-reaching potential for benefiting humanity—across application areas such as improving disease prevention and diagnosis, boosting agriculture and manufacturing efficiency, addressing climate change, enhancing security… even helping resolve the global COVID-19 crisis....

Face is particularly important in East Asian societies such as China, and found in two related forms. The first and more popular conception, mianzi (面子), primarily concerns wealth, social status, position, power and prestige; the second, lian (臉), concerns moral character and behavior. A person can have mianzi – eg, status, position, etc – but lack a corresponding level of lian – eg, be regarded as morally bad. A complete lack of lian erodes and eventually undermines one’s mianzi, while someone with great lian will have considerable mianzi....

As we’re moving towards a more sustainable transportation model, electricity will gradually replace petrol and diesel in our cars. Personally, I can’t wait for the EV domination, but I caught myself wondering: do I really know how an electric engine works? Turns out, there were indeed some gaps in my knowledge. So I did some research and will now share my newly acquired wisdom with you. What is an electric motor?...

Five Dutch cities – Amsterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven, Rotterdam and The Hague – are collaborating to establish a new standard for the exchange of data between cities and shared mobility operators. In partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water, the five cities, known as the G-5, will develop the City Data Standard – Mobility (CDS-M). The platform will allow information on mobility patterns, including the use of shared vehicles, traffic flows and parking, to be shared in compliance with Europe’s strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)....