Twitter now supports third-party apps for two-factor authentication

Authenticate your tweets with Google Authenticator, 1Password, etc.

Twitter added two-factor authentication to all the way back in 2013, and while it works fine, it’s continued to lack support for third-party apps year after year. Thankfully, now at the end of 2017, this is finally changing.

Up until now, Twitter’s login verification process has only been able to send authentication codes via SMS. This is still more secure than not having two-factor authentication enabled at all, but the SMS messages are prone to being intercepted by people other than you.

Using two-factor authentication with a third-party app adds an even greater layer of security and codes that are sent to you automatically disappear after 30 seconds to ensure that you and only you can gain access to your account.

Supported apps include the likes of Google Authenticator, Authy, and 1Password, and turning on this feature is pretty simple.

Tap your profile icon, go to Account, and then Security
Text Message will be enabled as your default authentication method – tap review your login verification methods
Enter and confirm your password
Tap Set up -> Mobile security app -> Start
Verify your password once more if asked
Scan the QR code that pops up, follow the instructions, and then enter the 6-digit security code

Talon reimagines how Twitter’s timeline should look

Let the $39 Anker SoundCore Pro fill your room with your favorite tunes

The perfect device to blast Thrifter’s Holiday 2017 Jams playlist on.

Amazon has the Anker SoundCore Pro on sale for just $39 when you clip the on-page coupon to save $60 off its regular price.

This compact Bluetooth speaker features two full-range drivers and two tweeters to deliver 25W of sound. It comes equipped with patented Anker BassUp technology and a professional quality DSP to produce clear highs and deep, full-bodied lows. It has a USB port which can charge phones, tablets and other devices, and a battery that can last for up to 18 hours on a single charge. It’s also water resistant.

Anker provides a worry-free 18-month warranty with purchase of this speaker.

For a smaller version of this Bluetooth speaker, the SoundCore nano is down to just $15.99. There’s also the standard SoundCore on sale for $24.

See at Amazon

Netflix’s big-budget film ‘Bright’ already has a sequel planned

If you’re as thrilled as we are for Netflix’s Will Smith vehicle, Bright, then get ready for even more excitement. The film, which reportedly cost Neftlix $90 million to make, already has a sequel lined up, according to a report at Bloomberg. Whether this is the start of a Marvel-esque movie universe exclusively on Netflix (as TechCrunch notes) or not, it’s hard not to see this as competition for actual movies in theaters.

Starring Smith and Joel Edgerton and directed by Suicide Squad‘s David Ayer, Bright sets its buddy-cop story in a world where fantasy creatures like orcs interact with ordinary humans. Smith and Edgerton play human and orcish cops, respectively, who must stop the forces of darkness from destroying the world with a magic wand/superweapon. With overtones of Shadowrun with other urban fantasy tropes, Bright could be the set up for a full franchise of followup films if it does well enough when it releases December 22nd.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Bloomberg

Charizard will look life-size with the ‘Pokémon Go’ AR+ update

The latest update for Pokémon Go doesn’t add new monsters. Instead, it takes advantage of iOS 11’s advanced augmented reality tech to give you a better look at them. “The new AR+ feature builds on the core AR gameplay in Pokémon Go and leverages Apple’s ARKit framework to enhance the visuals and dynamics of catching Pokémon in the real world,” a blog post says. Meaning, Pikachu and pals will now be the proper size based on where you find them. Getting closer or backing up will cause them to change in size and perspective from here on out assuming you have an iPhone 6s or newer.

This isn’t just a superficial update, either. Developer Niantic says that if you’re sneaky enough you’ll be able to earn a new capture bonus with each creature. Given AR’s impact on battery life, though, the question is if anyone’s going to use this for more than posting shots of the pocket monsters to Instagram.

Source: Niantic

Magic Leap One: All the things we still don’t know

It’s that time of year again: the special season where everybody’s favorite mythical creature makes its annual appearance. That’s right, it’s Magic Leap hardware teaser season! Seemingly once a year, the secretive startup reveals what it’s been up to and, on Wednesday, revealed renderings of its latest AR headset prototype. The company even deigned to allow a Rolling Stone reporter to take the system for a spin. But for everything that Magic Leap showed off, the demonstrations and teaser materials still raise as many questions than they answer. There’s a whole lot about the Magic Leap system that we don’t know, so maybe let’s hold off on losing our minds about the perceived imminent AR revolution until we do.

But before we get into all the things we don’t know, let’s take a quick look at the things we do. Magic Leap the company was founded in 2011 by Rony Abovitz, the bioengineer who created the Mako surgical assistance robot. He sold the Mako company for $1.65 billion and used that cash to start Magic Leap and fund it through its first four years. Today, the company is almost valued at $6 billion and has raised $1.9 billion in funding to date, despite having shown little more than high level animations and a few hardware renderings.

The company has spent the last seven years developing the Magic Leap Augmented Reality system. Currently in its ninth iteration, the setup has three components. The “Lightpack” is a pocket computer Abovitz claims is “something close to like a MacBook Pro or an Alienware PC,” which would be incredible given its relative size in the renderings. Users can reportedly input commands through either hand gestures or the “Control” module. The Lightpack is wired up to the third component, the goggles themselves.

The “Lightware” goggles reportedly utilize translucent cells the company calls “Photonic wafers” which, according to Abovitz, shift photons around a 3D nanostructure to generate a specific digital light field signal. Basically, a light field is all the light that is bouncing off the objects around us, “like this gigantic ocean; it’s everywhere. It’s an infinite signal and it contains a massive amount of information,” Abovitz told Rolling Stone.

Abovitz theorizes that the brain’s visual cortex doesn’t need all that much information in order to actually generate our perception of the world. Therefore instead of trying to recreate the entirety of the light field, “it just needed to grab the right bits of that light field and feed it to the visual cortex through the eye… We could make a small wafer that could emit the digital light field signal back through the front again,” he said.

These are some pretty amazing claims, to be sure. The theories Abovitz is basing the device on are ones that he and a CalTech professor came up with. Theories so radical, as he told Rolling Stone, “we were way off the grid.” That’s not to say that his theories are unsound, or that the system doesn’t work the way he says it does. It’s just that there isn’t yet any way to independently verify any of these claims.

And some of the claims beg to be investigated. Ones like there’s a powerful secondary computer integrated into the Lightware, “which is a real-time computer that’s sensing the world and does computer vision processing and has machine learning capability so it can constantly be aware of the world outside of you.” That’s a whole lot of buzzwords and big promises to pack into a single pair of googles.

And beyond those supposed capabilities, we have practically zero information on how the system actually works. What are the hardware specs, CPU/GPU speeds, or operating system? Will the internal components be upgradable or, like the MacBook Pro, be sealed, requiring more costly upgrades? What’s more, how is the unit powered? What are its energy requirements? Is it fully mobile? What’s the battery life? We need more than Abovitz’s explanation that, “It’s got a drive, WiFi, all kinds of electronics, so it’s like a computer folded up onto itself.”

Information on the Magic Leap’s availability is just as nebulous. The Magic Leap website states that the SDK will be available in “early 2018” but there has been no word on even an estimated hardware release date. And don’t even bother asking about the price. The company was silent on an MSRP during Wednesday’s announcement, though Business Insider spoke with sources close to the company in August who claimed the system would retail in the $1,000-to-$1,500 range. But again, those are guesstimates at best.

There are also questions surrounding Magic Leap’s demo choices. Of all the major players in technology news, why present this huge piece to Rolling Stone and Pitchfork rather than, say, Wired or Cnet? It may well be because the former choices command an older, more affluent readership, which is who are most likely going to be buying these things first, given their price. Or perhaps, more worrisome, the company hopes to avoid the harsh scrutiny of the entire tech press corps until the product is practically in the hands of consumers. Apple pulled similar shenanigans earlier this year when it provided a single-day review embargo for the experimental iPhone X.

What’s more, we have haven’t so much as scratched the surface of the societal implications should this technology take hold. Lord, can you imagine somebody driving with these things on? So, again, there’s no reason to think that Magic Leap isn’t on the up and up regarding the capabilities of its headset or the proprietary technology it’s built upon. But the company is making some pretty extreme claims and, if they expect the rest of us to pony up $1,500 for a pair of the Snapchat Spectacles’ dorkier cousins, they’re going to need to provide a more transparent answer than “trust us, it totally works.”

Watch the trailer for Hulu’s apocalyptic cop drama ‘Hard Sun’

Hulu and the BBC have been cooking up a TV show this year, and they’re now ready to show their creation to the world. The two have released the first trailer for Hard Sun, a “pre-apocalyptic” cop drama. The six-episode series stars Agyness Deyn (Clash of the Titans) and Jim Sturgess (Cloud Atlas) as officers who come across secret info revealing that a disastrous “extinction level event” could wipe everyone out within 5 years. Needless to say, it’s not exactly the feel-good hit of the year: there’s conspiracy, interpersonal tension and an overall sense that the world is about to collapse.

To no one’s surprise, UK viewers get first crack at Hard Sun. It premieres January 6th on BBC One, while Americans watching on Hulu will have to wait until March 7th. It might be worth your patience, however. At first glance, this is a fresh take on cop dramas while avoiding the tropes that come with post-apocalyptic shows. It also underscores the advantage of what happens when streaming services and conventional broadcasters get together: you see programming that reaches a much wider audience than it might if it stuck to one format.

Via: Deadline

Source: BBC (YouTube)

Amazon’s Fire TV devices add web browsers to access YouTube

Browsing the web on the big screen in your living room isn’t something many of us are clamoring for. Still, Amazon already added its own Silk browser to select Fire TV devices last month, but is expanding its availability to all Fire TV gadgets today. It’s adding Firefox as a second web browsing option, too. Both browsers are available on every Fire TV device in all countries they are sold in starting today — just in time too, since the browsers help owners get around Google’s YouTube block.

Amazon says that its Silk browser has been optimized for Fire TV with an interface you can use to search, browse and launch curated bookmarks for the web with the Fire TV remote. “With full web browsers on Fire TV, our customers’ entertainment and information options are greatly expanded,” said Amazon’s Marc Whitten in a statement. “We want to make it easy for customers to access the Web from the comfort of their couch.”

Mark Mayo, a senior vice president at Firefox, says that his company’s browser will let viewers “surface a multitude of web content — including videos.” If using your phone or tablet to surf the web while watching content on Fire TV isn’t enough, this should make some folks happy — but probably not the ones at Google’s HQ,.

Source: Amazon

Honor View 10 (Honor V10) hands-on

Honor recently announced the 7X, its new hope for breaking into the U.S. market, but it’s got another device hitting the market that may pique people’s interest too.

This is the Honor View 10, also known as Honor V10 in China.

The Honor V10 could be thought of as the sibling to the Huawei Mate 10. It’s got a similarly sized low-bezel display, front facing fingerprint reader, the same Kirin 970 SoC, which comes with the cutting edge Mali-G72 GPU. Many of the internals of this device are the same, but it has some trade offs which make it unique, and much more affordable, than the Mate 10.

Unlike the Mate 10, this phone’s got a 1080p screen, akin to the Mate 10 Pro. Is this a bad thing?  Not at all. 1080p screens are still perfectly fine, and this particular 5.99″ FHD+ display looks big, bright, and beautiful. If you want a big display, this has one, and it maintains a form factor that fits comfortably in the hand.

Powering that enormous display is a 3,750 mAh battery, which is quite respectable for a phone this size. Sure, it’s not the 4,000 mAh cell powering the Mate 10, but it’s close. Honor didn’t give us any estimates as to how long this battery should last you. We think it will do quite well, though we’ll have to see how it fares in our full review.

The View 10’s Kirin 970 SoC puts it on par with phones running the Snapdragon 835. If anyone said this wasn’t a flagship, they’d be mistaken. This is the best processor Huawei currently makes.

The Mali-G72 is equally flagship-grade, with 12 cores to help it bust through graphically intensive tasks. We think you’ll see similar performance to Huawei’s Mate 10 series of phones, but time will tell once we get more hands-on time with this device. The specs are quite impressive, especially for a likely much cheaper device.

The Honor View 10 comes with 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage standard— quite a lot for any device, especially as a baseline. You can expand that storage to 384 GB with a 128 GB microSD card too, so you should be able to fit (most of) your music collection on here locally. This configuration is usually only seen in the highest-end devices, and we’re really glad to see Honor playing hardball.

The phone’s got dual cameras on the rear, with 16 and 20 MP resolutions. These come with a wide aperture range as well, ranging from f/.95 to f/16. That’s pretty crazy wide open, and we’re excited to see just how much depth of field we’re able to pull out of such a small sensor. Smartphone cameras are not usually very good at that, but we’re hoping to see some interesting results.

These aren’t Leica cameras like you’d find in the Mate 10 or Mate 10 Pro, so you’re not going to able to brag about that. They do, however, have a lot of the same camera features as the Mate series. There’s a nice “pro” mode, moving picture, portrait mode, and yes, even monochrome. We were able to take a couple sample shots at the event. Take a look and let us know what you think.

The camera software I tested is probably not final. The images watermarked themselves “Huawei P9 Leica Dual Camera”, so take them with a grain of salt for now.

For you sound guys out there, the View 10 sports Bluetooth 4.2 as well as aptX and aptX HD support. You’re not getting the latest and greatest Bluetooth 5.0, but 4.2 does very well with power and with these codecs you’ll get you some great sound (assuming you’ve got headphones that support it).

EMUI 8.0 is the fork of Android powering this phone, and it’s based on Android 8.0 Oreo. This is nice to see, and you won’t have to wait months to get all the newest features Android has to offer. Whether this phone will be updated down the road is another question, but we have a long way to go until we see the next version of Android.

The device will come in Navy Blue and Midnight Black once it hits the US, but China will get additional Red and Gold color variants.

Specs:

Gallery:

Are you excited for the Honor View 10? It look sure to make a splash once it lands, so stay tuned for all the latest on this phone as it hits.

Amazon won’t let you upload your own MP3s anymore

Streaming services from Spotify, Apple, Google and Amazon have all but made personal MP3s extinct in most circles. It’s not a huge surprise, then, that Amazon has decided to end a program that allowed customers to upload and listen to their own MP3 tracks. Originally noted by Slashgear and reported by TechCrunch, members of the free plan cannot upload music with the Amazon Music app as of on December 18th. New subscriptions will be accepted until January 15th, 2018, however, which means you can still pay to upload up to 250,000 songs before then.

Music that free subscribers uploaded will still be available for streaming and downloading until January 2019. Paid subscribers will retain access to their music (until then) as long as they don’t let their membership lapse. If they do, there won’t be any way to re-start, and only 250 of the uploads will remain stored for free for a year. Basically, you’re out of luck if you have more than 250 songs uploaded to Amazon. You can still upload 50,000 songs to Google Play Music for free, (or twice as many songs if you use a Samsung Galaxy S8), though honestly who does that anymore?

Via: TechCrunch, Slashgear

Source: Amazon

ESPN will put ‘Monday Night Football’ in your pocket beginning in 2018

Hot on the heels of NBC’s announcement that football fans will now be able to watch their favorite sport on Sunday nights on their mobile devices, ESPN is saying, “Me too.” The sports network has newly reached an agreement with the National Football League to expand its own live-streaming of Monday Night Football for ESPN subscribers to smartphones, which means that soon, you’ll be able to watch athletes on the gridiron just about every day of the week from just about any device. The new agreement also includes NFL highlights on mobile devices, and will run through the end of ESPN’s current NFL agreement, which concludes with the 2021 season.

Beginning January 6 and 7 with the upcoming NFL Wild Card Weekend, ESPN will be able to show football fans NFL highlights as well as Monday Night Football games across all devices and platforms. While ESPN could previously stream various NFL-branded studio shows like Sunday NFL Countdown, Monday Night Countdown, and NFL Live to mobile devices,  Monday Night Football served as an unfortunate exception. But now, nearly all of ESPN’s most popular programming can be accessed using computers, tablets, connected TVs, and smartphones, too.

“Every day, tens of millions of fans turn to ESPN to stream events, view highlights and connect with the latest sports news and stories, so we’re thrilled that they will now be able to enjoy Monday Night Football and the latest NFL highlights as part of their experience on mobile phones as well,” said Burke Magnus, ESPN executive vice president for programming and scheduling.

The new NFL agreement should help boost ESPN’s already gargantuan numbers when it comes to its digital platform — the network reports that around 117 million users tune in to ESPN Digital each month, which is said to be more than the second, third, and fourth largest sports properties combined. Further, the ESPN app claims to be the most popular sports app on the market, and given that nearly 75 percent of total visits to ESPN Digital come from mobile devices, it comes as no wonder that the network and fans alike are celebrating the arrival of Monday Night Football. 

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