Tech Boys

Some TikTok users in the U.S. have reported ‘zero views’ glitches, restrictions, and even account bans they say are related to content about Palestine, criticism of Donald Trump and ICE, and even mentions of Jeffrey Epstein’s name in private messages. Notably, it happened days after the social media platform closed on a deal to separate its U.S. operations from its global business. In the States, the app is now owned by TikTok USDS Joint Ventures LLC – a private majority company established to oversee TikTok in the country. Immediately following the handover, TikTok suffered outages , and many U.S. users reported difficulties signing in to the platform. Once users could sign in, they were asked to agree to new Terms of Service , which raised privacy concerns among some users. from Mashable https://ift.tt/4SWcoC1 via IFTTT

There may be plenty of gaming handhelds out there, but there aren't many horizontal options that let you play childhood favorites in the original 4:3 aspect ratio. To address that gap, Ayaneo launched a premium option with the Pocket S Mini . As a "true 4:3 retro handheld," the Pocket S Mini won't have those pesky vertical black bars whenever you're emulating video games from the CRT television era. Handhelds like the Anbernic RG405M and even Ayaneo's own Pocket Air Mini already offer a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the Pocket S Mini presents a more high-end build with a full metal frame and a glass front panel. The 4.2-inch LCD screen has a resolution of 1,280 x 960 and is flanked by Hall effect joysticks with RGB lighting, Hall effect triggers and "crystal-textured" buttons. Inside, the Pocket S Mini runs on a Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 chip and is powered by a 6,000mAh battery. Ayaneo Unlike most of Ayaneo's other devices , the Pocket S Mini isn...

GET $5 OFF: Amazon is offering $5 off a Grubhub order of $15 or more when you link your Prime and Grubhub accounts. Opens in a new window Credit: Grubhub/Amazon Get FREE Grubhub+! Get $5 off a Grubhub order of $15 or more when you link your Prime and Grubhub accounts. Get Deal Amazon Prime comes with a ton of perks: Free same-day delivery, streaming deals (including access to Amazon Music Unlimited ), fuel savings, prescription savings, and so much more. If you're not a member yet, you should definitely do a little math to see if the benefits could work for you. SEE ALSO: DoorDash unveils new delivery robots that yawn, wink, and travel 20 mph Did you know that Amazon Prime members also get free access to Grubhub+ for the duration of their account? So, if you have a Prime account, you also have a Grubhub+ account, which gets you $0 delivery fees, lower service fees, and exclusive savings. According to Amazon, this little perk can save you around $336 pe...

Since 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover has achieved a number of historic milestones, including sending back the first audio recordings from Mars . Now, nearly five years after landing on the Red Planet , it just achieved another feat. This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot , marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot.     Between December 8 and 10, Perseverance drove approximately 400 meters (about 437 yards) through a field of rocks on the Martian surface mapped out by Claude. As you might imagine, using an AI model to plot a course for Perseverance wasn't as simple as inputting a single prompt.  As NASA explains, routing Perseverance is no easy task, even for a human. "Every rover drive needs to be carefully planned, lest the machine slide, tip, spin its wheels, or get beached," NASA said. "So ever since the...

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said it received more than 1 million reports of AI-related child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025. The "vast majority" of that content was reported by Amazon, which found the material in its training data, according to an investigation by Bloomberg . In addition, Amazon said only that it obtained the inappropriate content from external sources used to train its AI services and claimed it could not provide any further details about where the CSAM came from.  "This is really an outlier," Fallon McNulty, executive director of NCMEC’s CyberTipline, told Bloomberg . The CyberTipline is where many types of US-based companies are legally required to report suspected CSAM. “Having such a high volume come in throughout the year begs a lot of questions about where the data is coming from, and what safeguards have been put in place.” She added that aside from Amazon, the AI-related reports the organization received fr...

Google has launched a new AI experiment called Project Genie, a tool that lets users build their own interactive virtual worlds. Project Genie comes from the Google DeepMind research lab and is now available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the United States (users must be over the age of 18). If you're an AI Ultra subscriber — the AI subscription plan is priced at $249.99 — you can start building worlds right away by visiting Google Labs and navigating to Project Genie . What does Project Genie do? A video released along with Project Genie shows exactly how users can create custom virtual worlds. Crucially, Project Genie doesn't just create a virtual environment; it also allows the user to create a character to explore and interact with the world. Users can even use prompts to create their own mini-games, using their keyboard's arrow keys to control the character. (One reporter at The Verge quickly realized he could use Project Genie to make Zelda and Super Mari...

The Internet Archive has often been a valuable resource for journalists, from it's finding records of deleted tweets or providing academic texts for background research. However, the advent of AI has created a new tension between the parties. A few major publications have begun blocking the nonprofit digital library's access to their content based on concerns that AI companies' bots are using the Internet Archive's collections to indirectly scrape their articles. "A lot of these AI businesses are looking for readily available, structured databases of content," Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing for The Guardian , told Nieman Lab . "The Internet Archive’s API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP." The New York Times took a similar step. "We are blocking the Internet Archive's bot from accessing the Times because the Wayback Machine provides unfettered access to Times conten...

Patreon creators will need to make some changes soon, thanks to Apple. On Wednesday, Patreon said Apple has renewed its requirement that all Patreon creators must move to subscription billing. The deadline to do so is November 1, 2026. Patreon's blog post announcing the change made it clear that it had no other choice. "We strongly disagree with this decision," the company wrote. "Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy billing will now have to endure the whiplash of another policy reversal — the third such change from Apple in the past 18 months." Up to this point, Patreon’s billing model has operated in a gray area, allowing its creators to charge fans outside the App Store without paying Apple’s fees. This was because some of the content people were paying for could be consumed in-app, while others couldn’t. But now Apple has reimposed its subscription mandate, eliminating the g...

Apple has released the latest update to its iPhone operating system, and users with compatible devices can update to iOS 26.2.1 immediately. Compared to the previous iOS 26 updates , the new upgrade is extremely light. The official description is a single short sentence: "This update provides support for AirTag (2nd generation) along with bug fixes." Apple recently announced the launch of the AirTag 2 , after months of rumors and speculation. The new AirTags have a louder speaker and an expanded range. In addition, Apple is offering improved precision-tracking features that point you to the exact location of your missing item, down to the foot. If you plan to pick up the new AirTag, you'll want to upgrade to iOS 26.2.1. (The new AirTag is the same price as the original version released in 2021, but the original is currently on sale at Amazon .) Opens in a new window Credit: AirTag 1 (4-pack) AirTag (1st Generation, 4-pack) $69.99 at Amazon $99 Save $2...

Pornhub 's parent company, Aylo, announced today that it is restricting the porn site in the UK come Feb. 2. Any adult who has already verified their age will still be able to use that site after that date, but no one else will. The decision comes around six months after the enaction of the Online Safety Act, the UK's age-verification law. When the law went into effect, Pornhub announced it would comply with the law due to working with a regulator (Ofcom, UK's Office of Communication) and less intrusive methods of age assurance. SEE ALSO: How to unblock Pornhub for free Over time, however, Aylo identified failures with the Online Safety Act, namely non-compliant porn sites. There's also the ability to circumvent the law by the use of VPNs. Meanwhile, Pornhub's traffic has taken a nosedive in the territory, announcing in October it has dropped by 77 percent. Now, Aylo announced that it'll restrict Pornhub and its other free sites (like RedTube and You...

Here's a use of AI that appears to do more good than harm. A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) developed a neural network that searches through space images for anomalies. The results were far beyond what human experts could have done. In two and a half days, it sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts, discovering 1,400 anomalous objects. The creators of the AI model, David O'Ryan and Pablo Gómez, call it AnomalyMatch. The pair trained it on (and applied it to) the Hubble Legacy Archive , which houses tens of thousands of datasets from Hubble's 35-year history. "While trained scientists excel at spotting cosmic anomalies, there's simply too much Hubble data for experts to sort through at the necessary level of fine detail by hand," the ESA wrote in its press release. After less than three days of scanning, AnomalyMatch returned a list of likely anomalies. It still requires human eyes at the end: Gómez and O'Ryan reviewed the...

It sucks to have your favorite NFL team get bounced before the Super Bowl — but it's an unfortunate fact of life for 30 fanbases. (Editor's note: Go Bills.) But in the vacuum that inevitably follows defeat, certain sects of NFL fans love to gin up a conspiracy theory that proves, actually, their favorite team was wronged rather than fairly beaten. Such fans this week have latched onto a new version of the "script" meme — the idea that the NFL is rigged and, for some reason, doling out clues about its conspiracy — via an illustration that was posted by the league before the season began. If you zoom in on the image, you can see QBs Sam Darnold and Drake Maye at the very front of a group of players staring down the NFL's Lombardi Trophy, given to the winner of the Super Bowl. Darnold and Maye play for the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots, respectively, which are — you guessed it — the teams who'll face off in Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8. The odds of c...

TikTok's newly formed US entity is off to a very bumpy start. As the app continues to face technical issues affecting the recommendation algorithm, view counts and other features, TikTok is also seeing a wave of frustrated users uninstalling it, according to new data. Analytics firm Sensor Tower, which tracks downloads and other app store-related metrics, told CNBC that there has been a 150 percent rise in uninstalls of the TikTok app in the United States compared with the last three months. An analyst at Sensor Tower told Engadget that TikTok's US daily active users (DAUs) have increased about 2 percent in the same time period, and are flat week-over-week. TikTok has blamed a power outage at a data center for causing issues, but hasn't said when users can expect a fix or explained how a power outage could be responsible for nuking users' video views or drastically changing their recommendation algorithm.  At the same time, an independent app called UpScrolled has ...

Google has agreed to a $68 million settlement regarding claims that its voice assistant inappropriately spied on smartphone users. Plaintiffs claimed that the company’s Google Assistant platform began listening to them after it misheard conversations that sounded like its wake words. The suit argued that private information that Google Assistant shouldn't have heard was then used to deliver those individuals targeted ads.  Reuters reported that Google denied wrongdoing in the suit, but according to court papers, the company agreed to a settlement in order to avoid the risk and costs of litigating the issue. The preliminary class action settlement was filed on Friday and now awaits approval from U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman. Google has been transitioning away from the Google Assistant platform in the past year, replacing it with its Gemini tool. Not that AI chatbots should be trusted as paragons of privacy either. Apple faced a very similar allegations around its Si...

Google is rolling out a Gemini feature that could turn out to be pretty useful for many folks. It's a Google Calendar tool that can help figure out the best time to schedule a meeting, taking into account attendees' schedules. When creating a meeting, you can click the "Suggested times" option and Gemini will look at the availability that people have marked on their calendar and potential conflicts. You'll then be able to choose from a list of suggested time slots. But the time you pick may not work for everyone. So if multiple people decline the meeting invite, you can reschedule by going to the event. You'll see a time when everyone is available and you can quickly update the invite. There are a few catches here. Naturally, this will only work properly when meeting organizers have access to attendees' calendars. It's also limited to paid users who are on Google Workspace Business (Standard and Plus) and Enterprise (Standard and Plus) plans, as we...

It’s almost a new lunar phase, with the Moon one night away from the First Quarter. This means that just under half of the Moon is illuminated tonight. What is today’s Moon phase? As of Monday, Jan. 26, the Moon phase is First Quarter. According to NASA's Daily Moon Guide , 54% of the Moon will be lit up tonight. Half of the Moon is illuminated tonight, so there's plenty surface area to look for features. With just your naked, you should be able to spot the Crisum, Serenitatis and Vaporum mares. If you have binoculars you'll also be able to catch a glimpse of the Apennine Mountains, Alphonsus Crater, and the Mare Nectaris. There's even more to see with a telescope, including the Apollo 11 and 15 landing spots and the Rupes Altai. When is the next Full Moon? The next Full Moon will be on Feb. 1. The last full moon was on Jan. 3 . What are Moon phases? NASA tells us the lunar cycle lasts about 29.5 days, which is how long the Moon takes to travel once around Ear...

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It’s almost a new lunar phase, with the Moon one night away from the First Quarter. This means that just under half of the Moon is illuminated tonight. What is today’s Moon phase? As of Sunday, Jan. 25, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. According to NASA's Daily Moon Guide , 43% of the Moon will be lit up tonight. There's plenty to see tonight, even with just your naked eye, including the Crisum, Serenitatis and Fecunditatis mares. If you have binoculars you'll also be able to catch a glimpse of the Endymion Crater and the Posidonius Crater. And finally, if you have a telescope, you can also see the Apollo 16 and 17 landing spots and the Rupes Altai. When is the next Full Moon? The next Full Moon will be on Feb. 1. The last full moon was on Jan. 3 . What are Moon phases? NASA tells us the lunar cycle lasts about 29.5 days, which is how long the Moon takes to travel once around Earth. Over that period, it passes through eight recognised phases. While the same side...

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