There are quite a few options available for Xbox consoles, but Microsoft's own Xbox Wireless Headset is enjoying a great sale right now. A 51 percent discount brings the Xbox Wireless Headset from $100 to $49, low enough to let you pick one up for yourself and a friend, or use the extra money to nab a new game.
The Xbox Wireless Headset keeps you engaged and aware of your game's happenings with spatial audio formats like Dolby Atmos, Windows Sonic and DTS Headphone: X. You can rotate the earbuds to change chat levels and volume, as well as use auto-mute and voice isolation to have a clearer chat without having every breath heard. The wireless headset can hold up to 15 hours of battery life, but if you're running low, it can also connect to your Xbox with a USB-C cable.
These Xbox headphones also ensure you won't miss a call while deep in gameplay. You can connect your phone right to them and take the call without even pausing your game (though you might want to if it's your mom or someone else important). Arguably one of the most comfortable features, though, is the lightweight, adjustable headband, so you can play as long as you want without feeling much pressure.
Amazon is running another sale on its Fire TV Stick media streamers, with the Fire TV Stick 4K Max available for $27. We've seen the 4K streaming stick fall as low as $25 in recent weeks, but this deal is still roughly $20 below the device's average street price. The standard Fire TV Stick is also on sale for $25, but since the Max brings a performance boost for only a couple dollars more, we recommend getting the higher-end model instead.
Though it's a couple years old, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max is still relatively fast to load menus and switch between apps. Its remote has Alexa support baked in, so it can tie neatly into other Alexa-compatible smart home devices. It supports just about all the major streaming services and HDR standards, as well as Dolby Atmos audio. Unlike the base Fire TV Stick 4K, it also includes a WiFi 6 radio, though you'll need a compatible router and a particularly fast internet connection to see any advantage from that.
The main caveat, as with most Fire TV devices, is software. Compared to similarly-priced streamers from Roku and Google, Amazon's Fire OS is generally more aggressive about displaying ads on the home screen and nudging you toward the company's own services throughout the UI. You'll get the most out of it if you already use services like Prime Video on a regular basis. There's also no support for Google Cast (unlike Google's Chromecast) or Apple AirPlay (unlike various Roku streamers).
We broadly recommend the Roku Streaming Stick 4K and Google Chromecast to most people in the market for an affordable streaming stick for those reasons. Right now, though, both of those devices cost about $20 more. If all you need is a cheap and quick way to get more streaming apps on your TV, the Fire TV Stick 4K is still a fine value at this price.
America didn't get around to really addressing child labor until the late '30s when Roosevelts New Deal took hold and the Public Contracts Act raised the minimum age to 16. Before then, kids could often look forward to spending the majorities of their days doing some of the most dangerous and delicate work required on the factory floor. It's something today's kids can look forward to as well.
InHands of Time: A Watchmaker's History, venerated watchmaker Rebecca Struthers explores how the practice and technology of timekeeping has shaped and molded the modern world through her examination of history's most acclaimed timepieces. In the excerpt below, however, we take a look at 18th- and 19th-century Britain where timekeeping was used as a means of social coercion in keeping both adult and child workers pliant and productive.
Although Puritanism had disappeared from the mainstream in Europe by the time of the Industrial Revolution, industrialists, too, preached redemption through hard work — lest the Devil find work for idle hands to do. Now, though, the goal was productivity as much as redemption, although the two were often conveniently conflated. To those used to working by the clock, the provincial workers’ way of time appeared lazy and disorganized and became increasingly associated with unchristian, slovenly ways. Instead ‘time thrift’ was promoted as a virtue, and even as a source of health. In 1757, the Irish statesman Edmund Burke argued that it was ‘excessive rest and relaxation [that] can be fatal producing melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder’ while hard work was ‘necessary to health of body and mind’.
Historian E.P. Thompson, in his famous essay ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, poetically described the role of the watch in eighteenth-century Britain as ‘the small instrument which now regulated the rhythms of industrial life’. It’s a description that, as a watchmaker, I particularly enjoy, as I’m often ‘regulating’ the watches I work on — adjusting the active hairspring length to get the watch running at the right rate — so they can regulate us in our daily lives. For the managerial classes, however, their watches dictated not just their own lives but also those of their employees.
In 1850 James Myles, a factory worker from Dundee, wrote a detailed account of his life working in a spinning mill. James had lived in the countryside before relocating to Dundee with his mother and siblings after his father was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to the colonies for murder. James was just seven years old when he managed to get a factory job, a great relief to his mother as the family were already starving. He describes stepping into ‘the dust, the din, the work, the hissing and roaring of one person to another’. At a nearby mill the working day ran for seventeen to nineteen hours and mealtimes were almost dispensed with in order to eke the very most out of their workers’ productivity, ‘Women were employed to boil potatoes and carry them in baskets to the different flats; and the children had to swallow a potato hastily … On dinners cooked and eaten as I have described, they had to subsist till half past nine, and frequently ten at night.’ In order to get workers to the factory on time, foremen sent men round to wake them up. Myles describes how ‘balmy sleep had scarcely closed their urchin eyelids, and steeped their infant souls in blessed forgetfulness, when the thumping of the watchmen’s staff on the door would rouse them from repose, and the words “Get up; it’s four o’clock,” reminded them they were factory children, the unprotected victims of monotonous slavery.’
Human alarm clocks, or ‘knocker-uppers’, became a common sight in industrial cities.* If you weren’t in possession of a clock with an alarm (an expensive complication at the time), you could pay your neighborhood knocker-upper a small fee to tap on your bedroom windows with a long stick, or even a pea shooter, at the agreed time. Knocker-uppers tried to concentrate as many clients within a short walking distance as they could, but were also careful not to knock too hard in case they woke up their customer’s neighbors for free. Their services became more in demand as factories increasingly relied on shift work, expecting people to work irregular hours.
Once in the workplace, access to time was often deliberately restricted and could be manipulated by the employer. By removing all visible clocks other than those controlled by the factory, the only person who knew what time the workers had started and how long they’d been going was the factory master. Shaving time off lunch and designated breaks and extending the working day for a few minutes here and there was easily done. As watches started to become more affordable, those who were able to buy them posed an unwelcome challenge to the factory master’s authority.
An account from a mill worker in the mid-nineteenth century describes how: ‘We worked as long as we could see in the summer time, and I could not say what hour it was when we stopped. There was nobody but the master and the master’s son who had a watch, and we did not know the time. There was one man who had a watch … It was taken from him and given into the master’s custody because he had told the men the time of day …’
James Myles tells a similar story: ‘In reality there were no regular hours: masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression. Though it is known among the hands, all were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss anyone who presumed to know too much about the science of Horology.’
Time was a form of social control. Making people start work at the crack of dawn, or even earlier, was seen as an effective way to prevent working-class misbehavior and help them to become productive members of society. As one industrialist explained, ‘The necessity of early rising would reduce the poor to a necessity of going to Bed bedtime; and thereby prevent the Danger of Midnight revels.’ And getting the poor used to temporal control couldn’t start soon enough. Even children’s anarchic sense of the present should be tamed and fitted to schedule. In 1770 English cleric William Temple had advocated that all poor children should be sent from the age of four to workhouses, where they would also receive two hours of schooling a day. He believed that there was:
considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed for at least twelve hours a day, whether [these four-year-olds] earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them ...
Because we all know how entertaining most four-year-olds would find ten hours of hard labor followed by another two of schooling. In 1772, in an essay distributed as a pamphlet entitled A View of Real Grievances, an anonymous author added that this training in the ‘habit of industry’ would ensure that, by the time a child was just six or seven, they would be ‘habituated, not to say naturalized to Labour and Fatigue.’ For those readers with young children looking for further tips, the author offered examples of the work most suited to children of ‘their age and strength’, chief being agriculture or service at sea. Appropriate tasks to occupy them include digging, plowing, hedging, chopping wood and carrying heavy things. What could go wrong with giving a six-year-old an ax or sending them off to join the navy?
The watch industry had its own branch of exploitative child labour in the form of what is known as the Christchurch Fusee Chain Gang. When the Napoleonic Wars caused problems with the supply of fusee chains, most of which came from Switzerland, an entrepreneurial clockmaker from the south coast of England, called Robert Harvey Cox, saw an opportunity. Making fusee chains isn’t complicated, but it is exceedingly fiddly. The chains, similar in design to a bicycle chain, are not much thicker than a horse’s hair, and are made up of links that are each stamped by hand and then riveted together. To make a section of chain the length of a fingertip requires seventy-fi ve or more individual links and rivets; a complete fusee chain can be the length of your hand. One book on watchmaking calls it ‘the worst job in the world’. Cox, however, saw it as perfect labor for the little hands of children and, when the Christchurch and Bournemouth Union Workhouse opened in 1764 down the road from him to provide accommodation for the town’s poor, he knew where to go looking. At its peak, Cox’s factory employed around forty to fifty children, some as young as nine, under the pretext of preventing them from being a financial burden. Their wages, sometimes less than a shilling a week (around £3 today), were paid directly to their workhouse. Days were long and, although they appear to have had some kind of magnification to use, the work could cause headaches and permanent damage to their eyesight. Cox’s factory was followed by others, and Christchurch, this otherwise obscure market town on the south coast, would go on to become Britain’s leading manufacturer of fusee chains right up until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
The damage industrial working attitudes to time caused to poor working communities was very real. The combination of long hours of hard labor, in often dangerous and heavily polluted environments, with disease and malnutrition caused by abject poverty, was toxic. Life expectancy in some of the most intensive manufacturing areas of Britain was incredibly low. An 1841 census of the Black Country parish of Dudley in the West Midlands found that the average was just sixteen years and seven months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-hands-of-time-rebecca-struthers-harper-143034889.html?src=rss
It's about to get easier to stream your favorite console games: Discord has announced it's rolling out Stream to Discord for Xbox, allowing you to stream directly from your Xbox Series X|S or Xbox One. This news marks the first implementation of a console streaming directly to Discord, which has only been available for PC and mobile gamers. Xbox has typically received new Discord features before its competitor Playstation, such as last year's update allowing gamers to connect directly to Discord Voice channels.
If you haven't already, you'll need to connect your Xbox to Discord in the Connections menu on your desktop or mobile app — just click on the Xbox logo and sign into your Microsoft account. You can stream right from a Voice channel by opening the Parties & Chats tab on your Xbox, choosing Discord, and then picking the channel you want to join. From there, all you need to do is click "Stream your game" whenever you want to start broadcasting your game. Stream to Discord for Xbox is also available in one-on-one or group DMs by clicking "transfer to Xbox" while on the call. Then, just like in a channel, you can choose to stream your game to your friends. Nitro subscribers will notice their streams appear in HD and up to 1080p.
Stream to Discord is now available for Xbox Insiders and will be rolling out "soon" to all Xbox players. The Xbox Insider Hub app is available for anyone to download through the Xbox store. Discord also claims they "are far from finished" with their Xbox integration and will have more announcements later in the year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/xbox-gamers-can-now-stream-directly-to-discord-150045129.html?src=rss
Novelty accessory maker 8BitDo today announced a new mechanical keyboard inspired by Nintendo’s NES and Famicom consoles from the 1980s. The $100 Retro Mechanical Keyboard works in wired / wireless modes, supports custom key mapping and includes two giant red buttons begging to be mashed.
The 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard ships in two colorways: the “N Edition” is inspired by the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and the “Fami Edition” draws influence from the Nintendo Famicom. Although the accessory-maker likely toed the line enough to avoid unwelcome attention from Nintendo’s lawyers, the color schemes match the classic consoles nearly perfectly: The NES-inspired variant ships in a familiar white / dark gray / black color scheme, while the Famicom-influenced one uses white / crimson.
The Fami Edition includes Japanese characters below the English markings for each standard alphanumerical key. The keyboard’s built-in dials and power indicator also have a charmingly old-school appearance. And if you want to customize the keyboard’s hardware, you can replace each button on its hot-swappable printed circuit board (PCB). 8BitDo tells Engadget it uses Kailh Box White Switches V2 for the keyboard and Gatreon Green Switches for the Super Buttons.
8BitDo
As for what those bundled Super Buttons do, that’s up to you: The entire layout, including the two ginormous buttons, is customizable using 8BitDo’s Ultimate Software. The company tells Engadget they connect directly to the keyboard via a 3.5mm jack. And if the two in the box aren’t enough, you can buy extras for $20 per set.
The 87-key accessory works with Bluetooth, 2.4 GHz wireless and USB wired modes. Although the keyboard is only officially listed as compatible with Windows and Android, 8BitDo confirmed to Engadget that it will also work with macOS. It has a 2,000mAh battery for an estimated 200 hours of use from four hours of charging.
Pre-orders for the 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard are available starting today on Amazon. The accessory costs $100 and is estimated to begin shipping on August 10th.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/8bitdos-nintendo-inspired-mechanical-keyboard-has-super-buttons-just-begging-to-be-mashed-150024778.html?src=rss
Our phones can replace a lot of things we used to need on the regular — our wallets, our car keys and now even scanners. Thanks to your handset’s camera, the power to scan things is built into your iPhone. You can use it to scan documents, QR codes and more, allowing you to save IRL files in a pinch, pull up menus at restaurants and even check grocery prices on the fly. Here’s how to scan almost anything with your iPhone.
How to scan documents with an iPhone
The default way to scan a document with an iPhone lives within iOS’ native Notes app. Open it and open a new note. Tap the camera icon on the bottom menu bar, tap Scan Documents and then hold your phone to frame the document you want to scan.
Photo by Julia Mercado / Engadget
The camera will scan the document automatically. But, just like taking a photo, you also have the option to do it manually by tapping the white button at the bottom of the screen or pressing the volume button.
If your document is more than one page, repeat the process for each page and hit the Save button at the bottom right corner when you’re done. If you need to redo or edit a scan, tap the stack icon at the bottom left corner. Once saved, all of the pages will be attached to the same note in your library.
Photo by Julia Mercado / Engadget
Your iPhone also has the ability to scan the text in your document and make a note from it as well. Just tap and hold on text in your scanned document and highlight the portion you want to extract. You can then make a new note from that, or copy and paste the text into an existing note.
How to scan a QR code with an iPhone
Open the Camera and hold it up to the QR code. Tap the link that generates beneath the code and it will take you straight to your browser. You will automatically be sent to the site or PDF that the QR code links to.
Another way to scan a QR code is by using iOS’ built in Code Scanner. First, go to settings and tap Control Center. Then, tap the green plus icon next to Code Scanner to add it to your Control Center. Swipe down from the top right corner of your home screen and tap the Code Scanner. The icon is represented with a small QR code inside four corners framing it.
Photo by Julia Mercado / Engadget
That option will take you to another form of your camera. This time, there’s no need to click a link: just frame the code in the four white corners and wait. Code Scanner will automatically show you what's linked in your browser.
How to scan a barcode with an iPhone
Unfortunately, iPhones can’t handle barcodes on their own just yet, but there are third-party apps that can. Depending on the barcode, each app can help you do something different. If you are looking to keep track of books in your library, you can rely on Goodreads. If you just want to shop smart, ShopSavvy can help you find coupons on items you’re thinking of buying. And if you need a basic scanner, Barcode Scanner can look up anything and add it to your history, plus it even lets you make your own QR codes.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-to-scan-with-iphone-120030667.html?src=rss
Amazon has the company’s Kindle Kids e-reader on sale for 33 percent off right now. Its $80 price (usually $120) is nearly as low as it was on Prime Day, making it an ideal time to surprise your little one(s) with the gift of distraction-free reading. The device is an Engadget recommendation in our Best Educational Toys guide.
The discounted Kindle Kids model is the latest (2022) version. It includes a cover, bundled with your purchase, available in three designs resembling children’s book art: space whale, ocean explorer and unicorn valley.
The e-reader’s internal tech is identical to the standard 2022 Kindle, one of our picks for the best e-reader. Its specs include a high-res (300 ppi) display, 16GB storage, six weeks of battery life, USB-C charging and an adjustable front light. Each purchase comes with a year’s subscription to Amazon Kids+, including a library of thousands of kid-appropriate books and hundreds of audiobooks. (The membership will renew at $5 a month after that, so be sure to cancel before then if you only want the free year.)
Although the standard Kindle Kids is our top recommendation, you can also save on the Kindle Paperwhite Kids if you don’t mind spending more on an upgraded model. Compared to the cheaper Kindle Kids model, the child-focused Paperwhite has a larger screen (6.8 inches vs. 6 inches), more LEDs for better front-lit reading and an adjustable warm light that’s easier on the eyes. Amazon’s sale has the Kindle Paperwhite Kids for $114 (typically $170), only $10 higher than its Prime Day discount.
Ever since Strange New Worlds’ second season was announced, the big draw has been the crossover episode with animated sitcom Lower Decks. It would see Tawny Newsome (Mariner) and Jack Quaid (Boimler) taking their until-now animated characters into live action. Following an early screening at Comic-Con, the episode is now available to watch on Paramount Plus.
The following article contains spoilers for “Those Old Scientists.”
There’s an SNL sketch where William Shatner, as himself, exhorts a room full of Star Trek fans to “Get a Life!” It’s clearly intended in jest, given Shatner’s barely-suppressed smile and a twist where Phil Hartman’s manager forces him to instantly recant his rant. Depending on who you ask, the sketch was either taken in the spirit it was intended, or with outrage amongst fans who felt mischaracterized, and misunderstood. But it’s this dichotomy, between the legend and the truth that’s mined for laughs in “Those Old Scientists,” the crossover episode between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks. Well, that and an affectionate elbow in the ribs suggesting that we could all do with being a bit less obsessive.
The (animated) beta shift is making a routine survey of a long-dormant time-travel portal, while Boimler and Tendi argue about who discovered it. Boimler brags it was found by Starfleet, but Tendi says it was Orion scientists, once again trying to dispel myths that all Orions are pirates. While messing around Boimler is standing on the portal when Rutherford accidentally sets it running, throwing him back in time. When he arrives on the other side, he’s now in the live action world of Strange New Worlds, and is greeted by Spock, Una and La’an. And with that, we’re into an animated version of the title sequence, complete with nacelle-sucking alien.
On the Enterprise, Boimler can’t help but express his shock, surprise and generally fanboy out in front of his heroes. He gets lectured by La’an about not polluting the timeline and, thanks to her adventure in “Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” not getting attached. But, since this is the Boimler we know and love, he can’t help but throw spoilers out left, right and center. Not to mention his insistence on pointing out the difference between the history as he knows it, and the storylines as they’re presently unfolding on Strange New Worlds. For instance, he’s mightily disturbed by the fact that Spock – happy in a relationship with Chapel – is laughing, smiling and generally acting like he’s in love. After all, the Spock he knows – his Spock – isn’t this outwardly emotional, because that’s what the legend tells us. It’s almost as if he’s a stand-in for the sort of obsessive fan who tries to police the borders of what Star Trek is, instead of enjoying the journey.
At the same time, the Enterprise has to deal with an Orion vessel with undetermined intentions which then steals the time portal. Boimler urges Pike to be diplomatic, but winds up forcing him to trade a supply of much-needed triticale grain to get it back. Pike sees this – and the forced relocation of a planet-full of starving colonists – as preferable to having this guy on his ship any longer. When the portal is active and back in position, the Enterprise crew ready to get rid of this purple-haired irritation, Mariner leaps through, bravely declaring that she’s coming to the rescue. Except, the hardware had power enough for just one trip, and there’s not a fuel source available anywhere else in the quadrant. Leaving an eye-rolling Pike with the unwelcome possibility that they’re stuck with the Cerritos’ pair for good.
Boimler and Mariner wind up spending some time with their heroes, until they eventually realize that the Enterprise itself has a supply of fuel. Thanks to the naval tradition of using a component from the previous vessel in the construction of the next one, they can refine a chunk of NX-01 into fuel which can be used to send the pair home. (But not before the Strange New Worlds crew can reveal that they, too, are secretly as nerdy as a bunch of fans of their predecessors from Enterprise as Boimler is for this era.) They meet with the Orions again, and Pike pledges to claim that the Orions discovered the portal, giving their burgeoning science ship a small chunk of credit. And when Boimler and Mariner leap back to the future, the Enterprise crew drink an Orion cocktail that, in the closer, renders them all as animated characters.
“Those Old Scientists” is as pure a dose of fan service as Star Trek has ever produced, and I mean that as both a compliment and a criticism. Plenty of the elements, including the animated title sequence, reached straight into the lizard part of my brain and left me grinning like a loon. The screenplay, credited to Lower Decks’ executive story editor Kathryn Lyn and Bill Wolkloff, is crammed full of great gags. It helps, too, that Strange New Worlds has enough comic talent in its ranks to play an episode like this, and Carol Kane steals the show with the best gag in the episode.
But, and there is a but, the episode is a bit like cotton candy in that once the initial hit of sugar leaves your tongue, there’s little else here. We get a lot of scenes of Boimler and then Mariner telling the Enterprise crew how great they are, or are seen as such, by their successors. Most of these scenes take place sitting around desks, bars or lounges – telling rather than showing. I know that this is Strange New Worlds, and so the narrative will always belong with this crew rather than its guest stars. But the lower deckers are rendered passive observers in a narrative that could, or should, really have enabled them to demonstrate the dynamism they have in their own show. In the moment where Boimler and Mariner try to solve things on their own, they’re instantly shut down by La’an and Uhura and told to sit back on the bench. The worst served by this is Tawny Newsome, who is absent a major chunk of the episode and has little to do when Mariner does finally arrive in the past.
That cotton candy metaphor is probably the best way to sum up “Those Old Scientists,” a goofy snack between meatier meals, or episodes, either side. The fact it exists at all is a joy, even if it’s not as wonderful as it could have been, and I’d love nothing more than to see more forays into the real world by the Lower Decks crew. At the very least, with Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks in production at the same time, it’s a great time to be a Star Trek fan.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-drops-its-lower-decks-crossover-early-230033262.html?src=rss
Discord has updated its policy meant to protect children and teens on its platform after reports came out that predators have been using the app to create and spread child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), as well as to groom young teens. The platform now explicitly prohibits AI-generated photorealistic CSAM. As The Washington Post recently reported, the rise in generative AI has also led to the explosion of lifelike images with sexual depictions of children. The publication had seen conversations about the use of Midjourney — a text-to-image generative AI on Discord — to create inappropriate images of children.
In addition to banning AI-generated CSAM, Discord now also explicitly prohibits any other kind of text or media content that sexualizes children. The platform has banned teen dating servers, as well, and has vowed to take action against users engaging in this behavior. A previous NBC News investigation found Discord servers advertised as teen dating servers with participants that solicited nude images from minors.
Adult users had previously been prosecuted for grooming children on Discord, and there are even crime rings extorting underage users to send sexual images of themselves. Banning teen dating servers completely could help mitigate the issue. Discord has also included a line in its policy, which states that older teens found to be grooming younger teens will be "reviewed and actioned under [its] Inappropriate Sexual Conduct with Children and Grooming Policy."
Aside from updating its rules, Discord recently launched a Family Center tool that parents can use to keep an eye on their kids' activity on the chat service. While parents won't be able to see the actual contents of their kids' message, the opt-in tool allows them to see who their children are friends with and who they talk to on the platform. Discord is hoping that these new measures and tools can help keep its underage users safe along with its old measures, which include proactively scanning images uploaded to its platform using PhotoDNA.
Discord's Family Center is a new opt-in tool that makes it easy for teens to keep their parents and guardians informed about their Discord activity while respecting their own autonomy. pic.twitter.com/UFY0ybo0LR
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/discord-bans-teen-dating-servers-and-the-sharing-of-ai-generated-csam-071626058.html?src=rss
Discord is announcing Family Center, a new tool that will help keep parents and guardians in the loop on what their teens are doing on the platform. The company says the main goal of the tool is to help both teens and parents build better internet habits.
The new Family Center utility comes in two parts: an activity dashboard and a weekly email summary. The dashboard will give parents an insight into how many people their kids have messaged or called, along with data on how many friends they’ve added and how many servers they’re connected to at any time. The weekly summary is all of that, but in an email sent every week.
Family Center will join all of the existing parental control tools already found on Discord, giving both teens and guardians more options to customize their experience on the platform. Tools such as direct message and explicit image filtering, friend request settings and user blocking have helped teens stay safe on Discord.
While Discord’s new Family Center tool is a step in the right direction, the company has a lot of work to do to make its platform a safe space not only for teenagers but adults as well. Last month, it was reported that Discord was in hot water over an astonishing amount of cases regarding child safety on the platform. Hopefully, Family Center can help reduce these incidents on Discord.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/new-family-center-tool-gives-parents-better-insight-into-their-teens-discord-usage-150014579.html?src=rss
