If you've been waiting to purchase Microsoft 365 Family, now might be the right time. Amazon is offering a 12-month subscription for $100, down from $150 — plus a $50 Amazon gift card. Basically, you save $50 and get another $50 in spending money, not so bad.
Your purchase includes all the usual Microsoft programs — Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook etc. — and 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage for easy sharing of photos and files across your devices.
Microsoft 365 is available to download immediately for up to six family members on PCs or Macs. The Amazon gift card, on the other hand, will arrive in the mail. It has no expiration date so as long as you don't lose the little card somewhere, you can hold onto it for a while (or spend it right away, no judgement here).
If you choose to buy the family package, do yourself a favor and set a calendar reminder for just under a year from now. The subscription will auto-renew annually and there's nothing worse than finding out through a credit card statement. If you love it, great. If not, you'll have the option to cancel.
This deal isn't completely new as Amazon offered the same one-day discount at the end of January. If you regretted skipping it then, here's your chance. But, you have to think fast, this deal is literally here today, gone tomorrow.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-will-give-you-a-50-gift-card-when-you-buy-a-year-of-microsoft-365-family-091100773.html?src=rss
The following article discusses Star Trek: Picard, Season Three, Episode Six, “The Bounty.”
When the Original Series cast made their swansong, they left Star Trek in the rudest health it had ever been in. The Next Generation had reached its creative peak, Deep Space Nine was a year away from starting, and the movie series was making good money. The Undiscovered Country gave fans one last adventure with Kirk and co. that gently highlighted why it was time to move on. By comparison, Nemesis’ soft box office meant there would be no grand finale for the TNG crew. DS9 and Voyager were done, and it wouldn’t be long before pre-Kirk prequel-series Enterprise would leave our screens. There was quite literally nobody to pick up from where Picard and co. left off as “current day” Trek went into enforced stasis. Now, it feels like 2002 all over again, with the only “current” Trek series, Discovery, canceled and the only other live-action Trek show yet again being a pre-Kirk era prequel. They say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
This sense of unease about the future permeates “The Bounty,” as Star Trek: Picard hints that the next (next) generation aren’t up to scratch. Picard, Riker and LaForge are all fathers struggling to deal with the gifts and curses they handed down to their children. The show keeps implying that there’s less hope in these kids because they’ve spent so long in their parents’ shadow. Sidney LaForge isn’t speaking to her father, who grouses to Picard how hard it was to raise her. The show has already hamfistedly tried to cover Riker’s grief over Thaddeus, while Picard has given his son a terminal case of Irumodic Syndrome. When Jack gets the idea of stealing the Bounty’s cloaking device, he and Sydney can’t get it working without Geordie’s resentful help. Come on kids, get out of the way while dad, once again, picks up your mess and fixes the things you can’t cope with. The subtext is one of disappointment, of darn kids with their avocado lattes and oat milk toast who can’t do anything as well as their baby boomer forebears.
It’s an interesting perspective from a franchise that has always worried about its own coolness, fretting that it’s too thoughtful, too middle-aged. Chekov joined The Original Series cast because producers wanted to woo a younger crowd with a Davy Jones-type mop-topped pretty boy. This anxiety is most visible in the Next Generation movies, which are constantly battling each other in attitudes around age, aging and relevance. Generations leaves Picard at peace with his own age, but everything that follows repudiates that position, mostly as Patrick Stewart’s behind the scenes power grew, so did his desire to remake the character in his own image. The vest-clad man of action in First Contact, the romantic lead of Insurrection and the off-roading petrolhead in Nemesis all stem from this desire. Rather than a desire to become the wise, elder statesman of the Star Trek universe, Picard raged against the dying of his own light. And rather than lay the table for his successors, he judged them all and found them unworthy.
This mistrust of youth goes hand-in-hand with a fetishization of the past that goes beyond nostalgia and into paraphilia. “The Bounty” has not one, but two trips to space museums so that the fans can gawk at objects of desire, stripped of their context, there for nothing but fan service. Riker, Worf and Raffi beam onto Daystrom Station, home of Starfleet’s “most off the books tech, experimental weapons, alien contraband,” which when you think about it is really daft. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the US Navy stores secret chemical weapons at MIT, which is, or was, the best point of comparison for a civilian robotics research institute. Along the corridor, there’s the Genesis Device! (Why? It was blown up when the Reliant combusted and turned into the Genesis Planet, its existence makes no sense) A Tribble! And James Kirk’s Corpse!... Wait, that seems weird, why do that? That seems weirdly perverse, why would you store a decorated officer’s dead body in a site for military weapons when there’s nothing special about his physiology in this timeline? Oh, that’s why, because our heroes don’t get to gracefully die in Star Trek any more, they just become objects of fetishization.
We get a brief cameo from Daniel Davis’ Moriarty as part of Daystrom’s not-quite security system before we hit the big reveal of the episode: Data!. Or, something else, a Soong-type android with the brains of Soong, Lore, B-4 and Data all mashed up in one body. (Why B-4 and Lore? Why would you put the unworkable prototype and the psychotic brains in there with the two functional ones? Because we’ll need an inevitable betrayal two or three episodes down the line, not because it makes sense.) And then we’re off to the fleet museum for a brief interlude of spaceship porn and, wouldn’t you know, the ships deemed worthy of preserving are almost all hero vessels from the Star Trek franchise. I mean, look, I’m a starship porn type of guy, and any loving shot of Andrew Probert and Richard Taylor’s Enterprise model will always have my heart soaring. But it just feels all so soulless, like the characters in Star Trek are now behaving like Star Trek fans.
The conclusion of the episode reveals the changelings stole Picard’s corpse from Daystrom Station for reasons as-yet unknown. Meanwhile, Riker has been captured by Vadic and taken to the Shrike, where he’s shown that the baddies have also captured Deanna. But not before the 70-year-old Riker is given a dose of good old 24-style face punching, to match the rest of the series’ Bush-era politics.
The biggest problem with this sort of all-the-characters-grew-up-watching-Star Trek nostalgia, of course, is that it collapses the size of your narrative universe. Star Trek is big and broad enough to sustain a massive trans-media ecosystem covering every corner of its fictional universe. But Star Trek: Picard makes out that Starfleet is made up of five ships not called Enterprise, none of which are worth remarking upon. The notion that the Enterprise is just one of hundreds, or thousands, of starships having wild and crazy adventures on the frontiers of space is beyond comprehension. In a way, I’m glad nobody in TV-land is familiar with Star Trek: New Frontier, lest it turned out that someone at Daystrom has collected Mackenzie Calhoun’s eyeballs on a shelf for the lolz.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/star-trek-picard-3-6-the-bounty-review-130030243.html?src=rss
Amazon's Echo Show 8 is our pick for the best smart display for Alexa users, and it's now on sale for $75 at various retailers. While we've seen this deal before, it's still about $20 below the 8-inch display's typical street price and $55 off Amazon's list price. For reference, the device's all-time low is $70.
We gave the Echo Show 8 a review score of 87 when it launched a couple of years ago, and we currently recommend it in our guides to the best smart displays and best smart home devices. It generally offers the best blend of price and performance within Amazon's smart display lineup; the Echo Show 5 is a bit too small for general-purpose use, while the Echo Show 10 and its rotating display are much pricier and bulkier. The 8-inch, 1,280 x 800 resolution display here, on the other hand, is sizable enough to make video calls and photo viewing comfortable but not so large that it'll look out of place in a kitchen or bedroom. Its built-in speakers are capable of filling a room, and the whole thing is powerful enough to pull up the weather, control your smart home gear, stream video and do other Alexa tasks without much sluggishness. And while no smart speaker or display is really ideal for those protective of their privacy, the Echo Show 8 has a physical camera shutter and mic mute button for when it's not in use.
Like all Echo devices, the Echo Show 8 will work best if you've already invested in other gadgets that work with Alexa. If you're not in that ecosystem but still want a smart display, the 7-inch Google Nest Hub might be a better buy in this price range, as it integrates better with common Google services like Gmail, Google Calendar and YouTube. (The latter only works through a web browser on the Echo Show.) It lacks a camera for video calls, though that might be a good thing for the more privacy-conscious. Nevertheless, if you'd prefer an Alexa-based smart display, this is a decent deal.
We’ve all been there. Maybe you were neck-deep in a work project, or you hopped too far down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, but at a certain point you looked up and realized you were drowning in a mess of browser tabs, with no clear way to put them all in order.
Thankfully, there’s a variety of features you can use to tidy up your browsing space. We’ve broken down the most helpful tab management tips and tricks for the four most popular browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox), from lesser-known built-in tools to some useful add-ons from third parties.
How to organize tabs in Chrome
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
Google Chrome is by far the most popular web browser in the world, but some of its built-in tab management tools may not be immediately apparent to some users. One trick is to use “tab groups,” which lets you cluster multiple tabs into groups that you can label and color-code. This makes it easier to distinguish between different topics, or simply separate work-related pages from the rest. Clicking a group’s label will collapse or expand all tabs within.
You can create a group or add tabs to an existing group by right-clicking on the one you want to move, selecting “Add tab to group,” then choosing where you want the tab to go. Alternatively, you can just click and drag a tab in or out of a group to add or remove it. All of this still works if you’ve selected multiple tabs simultaneously (which you can do by holding Ctrl on Windows, or Cmd on macOS, as you click).
If you right-click on a group’s label, you can change the name and color, ungroup all the tabs contained within it, close the group entirely or move it into a new window. You can also do the last of those by simply dragging the group label out of its current window. If you close a tab group accidentally, note that you can restore it from Chrome’s three-dot menu, hovering over History, finding the group’s name and clicking “Restore group”.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
Regardless of whether you use tab groups, you can quickly search through all of your open tabs by using the “Search tabs” button. This is the downward-facing arrow in the top right corner of your window. You can also pull this up by hitting Ctrl + Shift + A on Windows, or Cmd + Shift + A on macOS. This will show you a tidy vertical list of all your open tabs, plus a handful that you’ve recently closed. You can close tabs directly from here as well, and the menu will break out any open tabs that are currently playing audio or video. You can also search through your open tabs directly from Chrome’s address bar. Just type “@tabs”, then hit the space bar or Tab to initiate it.
If you like to order your tabs by putting them in distinct windows, you can give each a custom name for better organization. If you have a bunch of work-related tabs in one window, for instance, you could call that one “Work”. To do this, pull up the window you want to name, right-click the empty space next to the new tab (or “+”) icon and select “Name window.”
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
From that same menu, you can also select “Bookmark all tabs” to bookmark all of your open tabs and put them in a particular folder. Hitting Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + D will bring you to this same function.
Tab management isn’t as big of a hindrance on smartphones, where you might only look at one tab at a time. Still, we’ll note that Chrome lets you create tab groups on Android by tapping the square “Switch tabs” button, then holding and dragging a particular tab over to whatever other tab you want to group it with.
That feature isn’t available on iPhones and iPads, but you can still search through open tabs by hitting the same Switch tabs button, then selecting the Search icon in the top left corner. You can also bookmark one or more open tabs from the Switch tabs menu, after pressing and holding an open tab. For multiple tabs, press Edit, then Select Tabs, check off the tabs you want to bookmark, then hit Add To… > Add to Bookmarks.
How to organize tabs in Edge
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
Microsoft Edge is built on the same codebase as Chrome, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that its tab management features are similar to those found in Google’s browser. It, too, has a tab grouping feature, which works in effectively the same way: Just right-click on one or more tabs and select “Add tab(s) to group.” As with Chrome, you can give each group a custom name and color, and you can quickly collapse or expand the tabs within each group by clicking its label.
Also like Chrome, hitting Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + A will pull up a tab search menu, which vertically lists your current and recently closed tabs and distinguishes any media-playing tabs. The “@tabs” address bar shortcut mentioned above won’t work here, but you can still assign custom names to windows.
Another way to access some of Edge’s tab-related tools is through the dedicated “tab actions” icon in the top left corner. To make this visible, click on Edge’s three-dot menu button, then go to Settings > Appearance > Customize toolbar, then activate the “Show tab actions menu” toggle. Here, you can pull up the tab search menu, a list of recently closed tabs, and a list of Edge tabs you have open on other devices.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
The tab actions menu also lets you turn on Edge’s “vertical tabs” mode. This moves your tabs from their usual spot above the address bar to the left side of the window. This view won’t be everyone’s favorite, but the wider space can make it easier to identify which tabs you have open. If you prefer to keep the tab actions button hidden, you can swap between the standard and vertical tabs views on Windows by pressing Ctrl + Shift + , (Comma).
Like other browsers, Edge also lets you save tabs as bookmarks (or “favorites”). But we’ll also give a quick mention to the browser’s “Collections” tool, which you can access by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Y or hitting the icon in the top right corner that looks like two squares and a plus sign. This is more of a native web clipper than a full tab manager, but if you want to stash web pages alongside images, text notes and the like, you can hit “+ Add current page” within a given Collection to add your current tab to it. On macOS, you can also right click a tab to add all open tabs to a Collection at once.
How to organize tabs in Safari
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
Like Chrome and Edge, Apple’s Safari browser allows you to organize tabs into distinct groups. There are a few ways to set this up. For one, you can click the downward-facing arrow in the top left of the Toolbar. From here, click New Empty Tab Group, or select New Tab Group with # Tabs to put all the open tabs in your window into their own group. (The “#” is just whatever number of tabs you have open.) You’ll be prompted to give each group a custom name. You can find these same options under the File menu or by two-finger clicking any open tab.
Click the Show Sidebar button in the top right corner to view, rename, delete and rearrange your tab groups as needed. If you two-finger click a tab group’s name in the Sidebar and select Copy Links, you’ll make a neatly formatted list of all the links within that group, which you can paste into a doc or chat. The icon at the top of the Sidebar that looks like two overlapping squares with a plus symbol gives you another way to create a new tab group. You can also open the Sidebar by going to File > Show Sidebar or pressing Cmd + Shift + L on your keyboard.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
To add a new tab to a group, two-finger click the tab, select Move to Tab Group, then choose where you want it to go. If the Sidebar is open, you can also drag a tab into a group directly. To quickly swap between groups, click on your current group’s name in the top left corner, then select the group you want from the resulting dropdown menu. These tab collections will sync across multiple Apple devices if they’re connected to the same iCloud account.
The Sidebar can work somewhat like the vertical tabs view that’s available in Edge. If you hover over “# Tabs” at the top of the Sidebar or the name of any tab group, you’ll see a rightward-facing arrow. Click that, and you’ll see a vertical list of all the tabs nested within. You can access similar views for your bookmarks or Reading List at the bottom of the Sidebar. Safari doesn’t let you hide the horizontal tab bar like Edge, however.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
Annoyingly, Safari doesn’t allow you to select and drag multiple tabs at once from the tab bar, so separating a chunk of tabs into separate windows can feel clunky. You can easily sort your tabs, however, by two-finger clicking one (or opening the Window menu), then choosing Arrange Tabs By. From here, you can reorganize all your current tabs by their page title or website.
To more comfortably see what tabs you have open, click the Tab Overview icon, which looks like two overlapping squares in the top right corner. This presents all your tabs in a grid as large thumbnails, which can make it easier to find a particular page. You can also get to this page by selecting View > Show Tab Overview, pressing Cmd + Shift + \ on your keyboard, or two-finger clicking on a tab group in the Sidebar.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
In the top right corner of this Tab Overview screen is a search bar. This function is also available on iPhones and iPads. The downside is this search will be limited to just the tabs in your current group, not those in separate tab groups or windows. Simply typing a keyword in the address bar will usually suggest a few relevant tabs you have open, too, but this isn’t comprehensive.
For sites you plan to revisit regularly, you can bookmark a tab by hitting Cmd + D, or going to Bookmarks > Add Bookmark. To bookmark multiple open tabs, select Bookmarks > Add Bookmarks for These # Tabs.
Many of these tricks are also available on Safari for iPhone and iPad. To create a tab group on an iPhone, hit the Tab Overview button, touch and hold a tab, then choose Move to Tab Group. Alternatively, just long-press the address bar while viewing a web page. To look through your tab groups or add all your open tabs to a group by tapping the downward-facing arrow at the bottom of the Tab Overview screen (or top right on an iPad).
How to organize tabs in Firefox
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
Mozilla’s Firefox isn’t as popular as it used to be, but it remains worthwhile if you care strongly about data privacy, customization and independence from the usual tech giants. That said, its native tab management tools aren’t as robust as those in Chrome, Edge or Safari. There are many extensions you can add to close the gap – we’ve noted a few below – but by default, there’s no tab grouping feature, custom window names or vertical tabs mode.
You can still see a tidy list of each window’s tabs, however, by clicking the “List all tabs” button, which is the downward-facing arrow in the top right corner. Above that list you can also access a tab search function. If that’s too cumbersome, typing a relevant keyword in the address bar will display any corresponding open tabs at the bottom of the dropdown list that pops up. Alternatively, you can put a % symbol before or after a keyword search in the address bar to limit your search to just your currently active tabs.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
As with most browsers, Firefox lets you pin tabs, create bookmarks, close several tabs at once and drag multiple tabs into new windows simultaneously. To put all your current tabs into a bookmark folder, right-click on any tab, choose “Select All Tabs,” right-click again and choose “Bookmark Tabs.”
To open all bookmarked tabs in a folder, go to your bookmarks menu or bookmarks toolbar (depending on where it’s saved), right-click, then select “Open All Bookmarks.” If you want to search for a specific bookmark, put a * symbol before or after a keyword query in the address bar to limit a search to solely your bookmarks.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
For a little extra organization, note that Firefox also lets you assign custom tags to your bookmarks. You can add these in the menu that pops up whenever you click the star icon for a specific web page, or by clicking Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + O to bring up your full bookmarks library then adding tags as needed. You can also get to the latter by hitting the three-line menu button on the right side, then selecting Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks.
After setting this up, you can look for a bookmark just by typing out the tag(s) in the address bar. You can also make it so a search in the address bar only pulls from bookmarks you’ve tagged by adding a + symbol.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
You can see a clean-looking list of several recently closed tabs on the Firefox View page. To access this, just click the little Firefox logo pinned in the top left corner. It’s still possible to reopen your last closed tab with the usual Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + T shortcut as well.
Finally, we’ll also make note of Firefox’s “Containers” feature. This is aimed more at privacy than reducing tab clutter: The idea is to separate your browser cookies between distinct clusters of tabs, so you can log into multiple accounts for one website in the same window, or make it so a site can’t see any information about tabs outside of its specific container. Using containers distinguishes your tabs by different color codes, though, which gives it a modicum of organizational value.
You’ll need to install this as an extension on macOS, but once it’s set, you can add one or more tabs to a container by right-clicking it, selecting “Open in New Container Tab,” then choosing the container you want. There are four presets by default; to create a new container, click the three-line menu button and select Settings. Then, look for the Tabs submenu, click the “Settings…” button next to “Enable Container Tabs,” click “Add New Container,” then choose the name, color and icon you want.
Third-party tab extensions
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
All of these built-in browser tools should make navigating tab hell a little more manageable, but if you’re still not quite getting what you need, there are tons of third-party extensions and add-ons that can help. Perhaps the most popular is OneTab, which is available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari. This adds a little icon by your address bar that, when pressed, quickly collapses all open, non-pinned tabs in your window into an orderly list of links on a separate page. From there, you can then open and delete tabs individually or all at once, drag them into different groups of links you’ve previously OneTab’d, or turn a list of links into one shareable URL. There are other add-ons along these lines, but OneTab is clean, fast and dead simple to use. Plus, it can help make your browser a bit less of a memory hog.
Tab Session Manager for Firefox, Chrome and Edge works similarly. It saves all of your open tabs at once, regardless of whether they’re in different windows. It doesn’t close your tabs; instead they’re displayed as a vertical list in a dropdown menu. You can add tags to specific clusters of tabs, sync “sessions” between devices, and search for tabs right from its menu. You can also access tabs from windows you’ve closed.
Firefox users can particularly benefit from tab managing add-ons. Tree Style Tab, for instance, adds a detailed vertical tabs view, while Window Titler lets you add custom tags to windows. And Simple Tab Groups may not be quite as intuitive as the built-in tab grouping tools built into Chrome, Edge or Safari, but it still provides that sort of functionality in Firefox.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-to-organize-browser-tabs-150011935.html?src=rss
In 30 minutes or less, TikToker and Chicago-based server Kristen Sotakoun can probably find your birth date. She’s not a cybersecurity expert, despite what some of her followers suspect, but has found a hobby in what she calls “consensual doxxing.”
“My first thing is to be entertaining. My second thing is to show you cracks in your social media, which was the totally accidental thing that I became on TikTok,” Sotakoun, who goes by @notkahnjunior, told me.
It’s not quite doxxing, which usually refers to making private information publicly available with malicious intent. Instead, it’s known in the cybersecurity field as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. People unknowingly spell out private details about their lives as a bread crumb trail across social media platforms that, when gathered together, paint a picture of their age, families, embarrassing childhood memories and more. In malicious cases, hackers gather information based on what you or your loved ones have published on the web to get into your accounts, commit fraud, or even socially engineer a user to fall for a scam.
Sotakoun mostly just tracks down an anonymous volunteer's birth date. She doesn’t have malicious intent or interest in a security career, she said she just likes to solve logic puzzles. Before TikTok, that was spending a ride home from a friend’s birthday dinner at Medieval Times discovering the day job of their “knight.” Sotakoun just happened to eventually go viral for her skills.
So, to show me her process, I let Sotakoun “consensually doxx” me. She found my Twitter pretty quickly, but because I keep it pretty locked down, it wasn’t super helpful. Information in author bios from my past jobs, however, helped her figure out where I went to college.
My name plus where I studied led her to my Facebook account, another profile that didn’t reveal much. It did, however, lead her to my sister, who had commented on my cover photo nine years ago. She figured out it was my sister because we shared a last name, and we’re listed as sisters on her Facebook. That’s important to note because I don’t actually share a last name with most of my other siblings, which could’ve been an additional roadblock.
My sister and I have pretty common names though, so Sotakoun also found my stepmom on my sister’s profile. By searching my stepmom’s much more unique name on Instagram, it helped lead Sotakoun to mine and my sister’s Instagram accounts, as opposed to one of the many other Malones online.
Still, my Instagram account is private. So, it was my sister’s Instagram account – that she took off “private” for a Wawa giveaway that ultimately won her a t-shirt – featuring years-old birthday posts that led Sotakoun to the day I was born. That took a ton of scrolling and, to correct for the fact that a birthday post could come a day late or early, Sotakoun relied on the fact that my sister once shared that my birthday coincided with World Penguin Day, April 25.
Then, to find the year, she cross-referenced the year I started college, which was 2016 according to my public LinkedIn, with information in my high school newspaper. My senior year of high school, I won a scholarship only available to seniors, Sotakoun discovered, revealing that I graduated high school in 2016. From there, she counted back 18 years, and told me that I was born on April 25, 1998. She was right.
“My goal is always to find context clues, or find people who care less about their online presence than you do,” Sotakoun said.
Many people will push back on the idea that having personal information online is harmful, according to Matt Edmondson, an OSINT instructor at cybersecurity training organization SANS Institute. While there are obvious repercussions to having your social security number blasted online, people may wonder what the harm is in seemingly trivial information like having your pet’s name easily available on social media. But if that also happens to be the answer to a security question, an attacker may be able to use that to get into your Twitter account or email.
In my case, I’ve always carefully tailored my digital footprint to keep my information hidden. My accounts are private and I don’t share a lot of personal information. Still, Sotakoun’s OSINT methods found plenty to work with.
Facebook and Instagram are Sotakoun’s biggest help for finding information, but she said she has also used Twitter, and even Venmo to confirm relationships. She specifically avoids resources like records databases that could easily give away information.
That means that there’s still a lot of data out there on each of us that Sotakoun isn’t looking for. Especially if you’re in the US, data like your date of birth, home address and more are likely already out there in some form, according to Steven Harris, an OSINT specialist that teaches at SANS.
“Once the data is out there, it’s very hard to take back,” Harris said. “What protects people is not that the information is securely locked away, it’s that most people don’t have the knowledge or inclination to go and find out.”
There are simple things you can do to keep attackers from using these details against you. Complex passwords and multi-factor authentication make it harder for unauthorized users to get into your account, even if they know the answers to your security questions.
That gets a bit more complicated, though, when we think about how much our friends and family post for us. In fact, Sotakoun said she noticed that even if a person takes many measures to hide themselves online, the lack of control over their social circle can help her discover their birth date.
“You have basically no control on your immediate social circle, or even your slightly extended social circle and how they present themselves online,” she said.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/it-took-a-tiktoker-barely-30-minutes-to-doxx-me-120022880.html?src=rss
It's perhaps not a huge surprise that Sonos has more speakers on the way, but a new report reveals what the company's next models probably look like, as well as some of the specs and approximate pricing. The Sonos Era 300 and 100 are slated to arrive in late March, according to The Verge. The latter is said to effectively be a replacement for the Sonos One, which has been around since 2017.
The Era 100 looks similar to the One, though it has a more spherical design. The physical controls, meanwhile, appear to be on an indented bar. The Era 100 could be a little more expensive than the $219 One (Sonos is said to have bandied around a price of $250), but it reportedly has extra features, such as Bluetooth audio and USB-C line-in support. It's believed that the Era 100 won't have upward-firing drivers, though it should build on the Sonos One's performance by including a second tweeter (to help deliver stereo audio) and larger mid-woofer for stronger bass.
Sonos
The drum-style Era 300, meanwhile, appears to have similarly indented controls and seems to be designed with spatial audio in mind. It reportedly has six drivers. The Verge indicated that, when a pair of the Era 300 speakers are combined with the Arc or Beam (Gen 2) soundbar — used as rear surround speakers in this case — they'll deliver Atmos surround sound with upward-firing audio. Like the Era 100, the 300 is said to support Bluetooth audio and USB-C line-in. It's anticipated that the Era 300 will cost around $450, which is less than the Sonos Five.
While the speaker reportedly supports spatial audio from Amazon Music Unlimited, it's believed that Sonos has not reached an agreement to stream Apple Music’s Dolby Atmos tracks directly on an Era 300. There are workarounds involving an Apple TV 4K and Sonos' soundbars, though for the time being, it seems that standalone Apple Music Dolby Atmos playback will remain an exclusive HomePod feature.
Both Era speakers are said to have WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0 and AirPlay 2 support. The report suggests they'll work with Trueplay calibration on Android phones. They'd be the first Sonos devices to do so.
Meanwhile, it's expected that Sonos will separately sell a line-in adaptor for USB-C audio. It's also understood that you'll need to buy a so-called combo adapter if you want to plug in an Ethernet cable as neither speaker has a built-in port. In any case, we should find out more details about both speakers in the coming weeks.
YouTube Kids is finally available on more than a handful of devices in your living room, if not quite in the way you'd expect. As 9to5Googlereports, Google is rolling out the YouTube Kids experience on game consoles, Roku devices and more smart TVs through an update to the main YouTube app. If you switch to a YouTube Kids profile, you'll get the child-friendly experience without having to jump to a different app. This also makes it easier to return to the full app once your kid has finished watching.
You'll see the new approach sometime in the "next few weeks," Google says. You can delete kids' profiles through families.youtube.com when they're ready for grown-up access, although the company warns this will scrub profiles on all platforms.
The dedicated YouTube Kids app is available for Android TV, Apple TV and Fire TV devices as well as LG and Samsung smart TVs. This move makes the walled-off experience available to considerably more people — important if you're concerned your young one might view mature content or thinly-veiled sales pitches. You'll still want to keep an eye on your child's viewing habits, but you might not have to steer them toward a computer or tablet.
You might not have to pay much to bolster your smart home's security. Amazon is selling Blink devices for up to 43 percent off, including a Video Doorbell plus Sync Module for $60 (normally $85) — that's near an all-time low, You can also get the doorbell by itself for just $40 if you already have sync hardware. Most camera kits are also on sale, starting at $70 (normally $100) for the weather-ready Blink Outdoor.
Blink is effectively the budget counterpart to Amazon's Ring brand, but that's not necessarily a bad thing — you're getting a lot of functionality at a lower price. The Video Doorbell supports both wired and wireless connections, offers two-way audio, captures infrared footage at night and gives you the choice of either storing clips locally (on a USB drive) or in the cloud with a subscription plan. It ties into Alexa devices, too, so it may be your ideal doorbell you have an Echo Show.
The Blink Indoor and Outdoor models, meanwhile, remain our top picks for wireless security cameras. You get much of the same flexibility as with the doorbell, including a peak two years of battery life. Again, you'll have to invest in the Alexa ecosystem to make the most of these products. If you can live with that, though, you might not have many complaints.
The original HomePod was notoriously difficult to repair, to the point where cutting tools were sometimes necessary. Apple isn't giving nearly as much grief with the second-gen model, however. iFixit has torn down the new smart speaker and discovered that it's far easier to pry open. The large amounts of glue are gone — you can get inside using little more than a screwdriver, and the internal components are similarly accessible. Combine this with the detachable power cord and it should be feasible to fix at least some parts yourself.
iFixit cautions that it hasn't tested for possible software restrictions on repairs. It's not clear that you can replace circuit boards and still expect a functioning HomePod. Even so, it's evident Apple considers repairability to be a priority this time around, much as it does with the standard iPhone 14 and other recent products.
Not that Apple has much choice but to make the HomePod more fix-friendly. Both federal and state governments are pushing for right-to-repair mandates. If Apple didn't make the speaker easier to maintain, it risked a political pushback. And while we wouldn't count on Apple adding the HomePod to its Self Service Repair program, the second-gen's design makes that prospect more realistic.
As promised, Meta has restored former president Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts, two years after it suspended him from both platforms. The company previously said it would apply extra "guardrails" to his accounts to "deter repeat offenses."
Meta, like Twitter and other services, kicked Trump off of its platforms in January 2021 after he praised those participating in the Capitol Hill insurrection. The company initially locked the accounts for 24 hours over two policy violations before it suspended him indefinitely. Meta's Oversight Board was among those who criticized the handling of the ban.
By 2:30PM ET, Trump, who is running for the White House for a third time, had not posted anything on either platform. He has an agreement with his "free speech" app Truth Social, whereby he has to share social media posts there first and can't plop them anywhere else for at least six hours. Twitter restored Trump's account on its service late last year, but he hasn't returned to what was once his favored social media platform either. Maybe he's still too butthurt about that one thing Chrissy Teigen wrote about him.
