How to Fix Galaxy S7 Battery Life Problems

The Galaxy S7’s battery is plenty big, but you still don’t want to waste what you have.

The eternal quest for longer battery life in smartphones continues on, as evermore efficient chips and bigger batteries are in a battle with new software, apps, features and big screens. You want your phone to do everything, but also do it for a very long time — and those things are at odds, especially if you don’t want to be chasing around a wall outlet everywhere you go.

The Galaxy S7’s 3000 mAh battery is bigger than the Galaxy S6 and offers really solid battery life. But if you consistently find your GS7 coming up short at the end of the day — particularly as it gets older — we have a handful of tips for you to get the most out of what battery you have.

Keep on the lookout for battery-hungry apps

As much as we wish that every app out there was written to be a great phone citizen and be cautious in its use of your phone’s limited resources, this unfortunately isn’t the case. If you have a bunch of apps installed and find your phone’s battery is draining faster than you’d like, you can take a look in the phone’s settings to try and diagnose what’s going on.

Head into the phone’s settings, tap Battery and then Battery usage. This isn’t a definitive list of apps that are using up your battery, and of course if you actually use an app a lot it’ll show up, but the battery usage screen can point out if something is chewing up your battery without your knowledge. If you find an app that’s consistently misbehaving, consider uninstalling it.

Check out ‘App power saving’ settings

Even if you identify and remove power-hungry apps from your phone, there are plenty of other apps you want to keep around but are still unnecessarily running in the background. The best way to handle this is in the Galaxy S7’s “App power saving” settings, which can be found inside the Battery area of your phone’s settings.

With App power saving turned on, your phone will restrict the ability of apps to run in the background if you haven’t used them in more than five days. For example, if you haven’t opened up the Foursquare app in five days, it won’t be able to run rampant in the background because you’ve expressed that you aren’t interested in having it running all the time. The app will still work when you open it up and that’ll reset the counter for it to be optimized again.

In the settings you can define on an app-by-app basis what the settings will be, if you wish — the default will have the app save power after five days of inactivity, but you can also set it to always save power or never save power. For example, you may want a travel utility like the American Airlines app to always be able to run for flight updates, even though you may not open it every five days.

Uninstall or disable unused bloatware

If you bought your Galaxy S7 from a carrier, chances are it’s been loaded up with a good number of apps — call ’em “bloatware” if you wish — that you don’t want. These apps can run and use up your battery, and even if you don’t have one egregious culprit a handful of bad actors could add up to a meaningful impact on battery life.

So instead of just ignoring these pre-installed apps or hiding them in your launcher, go through and uninstall what you can and disable the rest. Head into your phone’s settings, find Applications and then tap Application manager to get a list of apps. To find everything, tap More and then Show system apps.

Turn off unused radios like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

This is something that’s true no matter what phone you have — if you don’t plan on using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth for a long period, just turn them off. With the Galaxy S7’s quick toggles in the notification shade it’s easy to just tap and turn them off, and quickly flip them back on when you need. Now of course there’s no reason to bother shutting off these two radios if you’re going to turn them on over and over again throughout the day — convenience is important — but if you’re going to go a long stretch without either one, take the two seconds to turn them off.

If you do want to keep Wi-Fi on, you can at least turn off a few advanced features that will take up a little extra juice. In your Wi-Fi settings, tap More then Advanced and turn off Network notification, as well as any other hotspot auto-join settings your carrier may have added.

Use Power saving and Ultra power saving modes

Samsung has awesome built-in power saving modes on all of its recent phones, and they really work well. The one that most people will find useful is the standard “Power saving mode,” while “Ultra power saving mode” remains as the absolute last-ditch toggle to use.

When you turn Power saving mode on, your phone will do a handful of things to eke out a handful of extra percentage points when your battery reserves are low. The Galaxy S7 will limit its performance, turn off vibration feedback and restrict location services to offer battery savings with minimal effect on your use of the phone. If you want to go a step further, tap the settings toggle to restrict all background data, which will keep apps from using data while they aren’t open and in use. You can set Power saving mode to turn on automatically at 50, 20, 15 or 5% battery, or you can just toggle it on manually as you need.

Ultra power saving mode goes several steps further, switching your phone to the absolute bare minimum of performance and features in order to maximize limited battery resources. Your phone’s display will switch to a greyscale mode, apps usage will be restricted, mobile data will turn off with the screen and extra radios are turned off. This is really designed for last resort situations, and should really only be used when keeping your phone alive is far more important than actually using your phone.

Make a few changes to your Display settings

The Galaxy S7 has an industry-leading display, and while it’s actually really efficient it will still take up a large chunk of your battery over the course of the day. If you dive into your phone’s display settings, you’ll find a few different tweaks you can make that won’t change the way your experience your phone while also saving a few percentage points on your battery.

• Screen brightness: Consider lowering your screen brightness just a tad. You can still keep automatic brightness checked for proper visibility in a variety of conditions, but moving the slider down a bit will drop the brightness in many situations.
• Screen timeout: The lower the better. Your screen isn’t using power when it’s off!
• Smart stay: This feature keeps the screen on when you’re actively looking at it, which may help you cope with turning down your overall screen timeout setting.
• Always On Display: Depending on which AOD mode you use it use take too much battery, but if you can handle not having information on your otherwise “off” display, you can save a few percentage points by turning off AOD altogether.

Update to the latest software

It may seem obvious, but if you haven’t taken the time to update your Galaxy S7 to the latest version of the software released by your carrier, then you could be missing out on important improvements to battery life.

To check whether your phone has an update, head to Settings and About device and tap on Download updates manually to check. Usually, if an update is available, it means that Samsung has fixed an important bug or added a feature that, at least most of the time, could positively affect battery life.

Turn off automatic updates from Google Play and Galaxy Apps

If there’s one thing we’ve established at this point, it’s that apps running when you’re not expecting them to can be annoying. This also goes for the app stores that download and manage those apps, which in this case are Google Play and Galaxy Apps.

When it comes to Google Play, head into the app’s settings, tap Auto-update apps and set to Do not auto-update apps for the most battery savings. If you’d prefer to get those updates automatically but want to find a healthy middle ground, select Auto-update apps over Wi-Fi only, which will also save you on mobile data costs.

In Galaxy Apps, tap the More button and then Settings to reveal the auto-update settings. Here, Samsung makes a distinction between auto-updating its own apps and auto-updating other apps you’ve installed through the store. When it comes to Samsung’s own apps, your best option is setting Via Wi-Fi only. For other apps, you have the option to select Turn off.

Factory reset

If you’ve been using your Galaxy S7 for almost two years and are having issues, it may be time for you to start over fresh with a factory reset. These modern phones have all sorts of systems to try and keep their software running smoothly over time, but it’s an unfortunate reality that old software tends to slow down with prolonged use. As you add and remove data, swap out apps and use your phone every day, it becomes harder and harder for the software to manage — and so, factory resetting can be a great way to fix up all of that leftover cruft.

Perform backups of any of your important data — Samsung even offers a backup service built in — and then follow these steps to factory reset:

Enter your phone’s Settings and scroll down to General management.
Tap on Reset near the bottom.
Tap on Factory data reset.

• The other two options only perform light resets on specific settings — a useful troubleshooting step, but not what we want here.

Read the confirmation of everything that will be reset, and tap Reset device — you’ll be asked to confirm your lock screen if you have one.

The phone will reboot and take a few minutes, and at the end of it you’ll have a fresh phone with nothing but the stock software on it. Set your phone back up, and you should notice some improved performance and battery life. Be judicious about what software and apps you install, and you’ll do even better.

Take advantage of Fast Charge when you do have to power up

No matter what you do to extend the battery life on your Galaxy S7, the sad truth is you’ll have to actually charge it up at some point. When you do finally charge up your GS7, consider using the power brick and cable that came with the phone. With this charger, your Galaxy S7 will charge at the fastest possible rate, meaning you can get the phone back off the charger in less time — just 30 minutes on the charger will add a substantial amount to you battery.

If you want to have a secondary charger, look for chargers that are certified for Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 to get a similar experience when you don’t have the in-box charger available.

Last resort: Consider a battery case

Though all of the above tips can add up to a pretty substantial increase in battery longevity, some people just can’t do what they need on their phones and keep the battery lasting all day. When push comes to shove, we (reluctantly) recommend you check out a battery case for your phone. Our leading choices come from Samsung itself and well-known case maker Mophie, which both make really solid options for the Galaxy S7.

Samsung’s Wireless Charging Battery Pack is slick (by battery case standards), simple and will add 50% to your Galaxy S7’s battery with wirelessly charging that leaves your ports uncovered.

See at Amazon

Mophie’s Juice Pack is a bit bigger and adds 60% battery to your phone in about half the time of Samsung’s own case — and while it charges the phone over Micro-USB, the case itself can be charged wirelessly.

See at Amazon

Both will add substantial bulk to your phone, but if you just can’t make it through the day any other way, give these a look.

Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge

• Galaxy S7 review
• Galaxy S7 edge review
• U.S. unlocked Galaxy S7
• Should you upgrade to the Galaxy S7?
• Best SD cards for Galaxy S7
• Join our Galaxy S7 forums

Unlocked
AT&T
Sprint
T-Mobile
Verizon

Update January 2018: Updated with the latest information to help your aging Galaxy S7 get the best battery life possible.

Google removed over 700,000 malicious apps from the Play Store in 2017

99% of abusive apps were removed before users could install them.

There are a lot of excellent apps and games to be found on the Play Store, but to no one’s surprise, it can also be home to some bad seeds, too. There were quite a few reports of malicious Android apps all throughout last year, but new numbers from Google reveal that things could have been a lot worse.

In just 2017 alone, over 700,000 malicious apps were removed from the Play Store. That’s 70% more than what Google removed in 2016, and of that 700,000, 99% of the apps were taken down before a single user could install them. Similar to other products and services Google is involved with, a lot of this success can be attributed to the company’s machine learning systems.

There were a few nasty app trends in 2017, and Google has more evidence to back up its claims of staying on top of all these. When it comes to malicious apps that try to impersonate legitimate ones, 2017 saw Google remove a whopping 250,000 of these. Tens of thousands of applications with inappropriate content (such as pornography and extreme violence) were also removed from the Play Store last year, and the install rate of apps that are bundled with malware was reduced “by an order of magnitude compared to 2016” thanks to Google Play Protect.

Being safe with what you install on your phone has a lot to do with common sense, but for those times when app developers go the extra mile to be sneaky and deceptive, it’s nice to know that Google’s security measures are getting stronger and smarter.

Google Play had 145% more app installs than Apple App Store in Q4 2017

Anker’s $46 Roav DashCam A1 will have your back

Record your driving with ease.

If you’re worried about getting in an accident and being blamed for it, you’re going to want to pick up a dash cam. Anker’s Roav DashCam A1 is currently on sale for $46 at Amazon when you use the coupon code BESTCAMB during checkout. This is a savings of $14 from its regular price.

Don’t be caught wishing you had one. This dashcam has a super wide-angle lens that captures the entire road, and it has a ton of technology packed into its night vision as well. It’s easy to manage your video using the built-in Wi-Fi along with the Roav DashCam app. It will even record when you’re away. The built-in gravity sensor detects sudden movements, like someone bumping into your car, and will automatically turn on to record activity.

You’ll get the camera, a car charger, a suction mount, a cable, a trim removal tool, and a manual. You may want to pick up an extra microSD card if you don’t have one lying around.

See at Amazon

Spotify Free vs. Spotify Premium vs. Spotify Premium for Family

Nothing in life is free, and this is especially true of music.

Spotify’s free tier tries to cut most of these strings while you’re on a computer, allowing you to play your music in the order you want with fewer ads. That said, those strings are still dangling, and they tangle and strangle free users on mobile devices.

Spotify Premium can be worth every penny on Android, but how many pennies you shell out depends on which plan you use.

Spotify Free

• Access to over 30 million songs, curated playlists, algorithm-based radio stations and mixes, and podcasts while within the country
• Ads when you open the app and during playback
• Shuffle Play only on Android (no listening to albums in order)
• No offline music
• Basic sound quality

Spotify Free comes with some strings, but if you’re a casual listener who primarily listens through the web player — or listens on shuffle anyway — Spotify Free can be tolerable.

Bless you for your saintly patience with those ads, especially the inescapable ad offering you a 30 day trial of Spotify Premium.

Spotify Premium

• No ads
• Play your songs/albums/playlists/mixes when and how you want
• Download up to 3,333 songs for offline playback on up to 3 devices
• Access to over 30 million songs, curated playlists, algorithm-based radio stations and mixes, and podcasts even while traveling outside the country
• Control your music quality when downloading or streaming for high-quality sound or data-conscious playback
• Listen to your music on other devices through Spotify Connect

Spotify Premium cuts the strings that held back Spotify Free users, allowing you to take full advantage of Spotify’s library and masterful mixes. If you’re looking to get Premium but want to avoid the monthly charge, consider investing in some Spotify gift cards, which you can keep as a balance on your account Spotify will burn through before it charges your card again. They also make good gifts for the Spotify users in your life.

Spotify Premium ($9.99/month)

Spotify Student

If you can prove you’re a college student, you can enroll in Spotify Student, which now gives you access to both Spotify Premium and Hulu for $4.99 a month. Congrats! Here are some things to keep in mind:

• The Spotify Student subscription is ad-free, but the Hulu subscription is not, as it’s the “Limited Commercials” subscription, such as the one you’d get for $7.99 as a non-student
• You can be asked to re-verify your student status whenever Spotify asks, and if you can’t, you’ll lose the Hulu subscription and be bumped up to a regular Spotify Premium account
• Spotify Student does eventually run out, and if you’re not attentive to Spotify’s emails and notifications, you could be bumped to a Spotify Premium plan without a chance to cancel or extend your student pricing

Spotify Student is one of Spotify’s crown jewels, as many, many, many Student users are willing to be bumped to Premium accounts once they lose the discount because they get hooked on Spotify’s library and features.

Spotify Student ($4.99/month)

Spotify Premium for Family

Now people can share Netflix and HBO subscriptions all the livelong day, but you can’t do that with Spotify, even Spotify Premium. If you’re playing something on the web player and someone opens the Android app, it’s going to ask you if you want to stop listening on the web and start listening on Android. So what if you have three or four people in your house that want to listen to Spotify? That’s where Premium for Family comes in:

• See one $14.99 a month bill for up to 6 Premium accounts at the same address
• Everyone gets their own Spotify Premium account, so no one’s playlists interfere with anyone else’s algorithmic recommendations

This sounds like a sweet deal, and you can see savings even with two members, so why doesn’t everyone use a Premium for Family account? Well, here’s what you need to be wary of before you try to sign up for one:

• Everyone in your family plan has to be able to be verified as living at the same address. Per Spotify’s FAQ: “If we’re unable to verify the members of a Premium for Family plan, they are removed from the plan.”
• You cannot change the address of a Premium for Family plan, meaning if you move, the only way to quickly get a new Premium for Family plan is to delete your account, make a new account at your new address, and start your library over. Yikes.
• You cannot use any specials with a Premium for Family plan. It cannot be combined with the Spotify-Sprint deal, nor can you use gift cards to pay for them.

If you join a Premium for Family plan that falls through, you can revert to a singular Premium plan, but you won’t be able to join another Family plan for 12 months.

If all of this sounds like a bit of a pain, there’s always Google Play Music + YouTube Red or Apple Music family plans, which don’t care what addresses you’re registered at.

What made you go Premium?

What tipped the scales for you to upgrade to Spotify Premium? Was it retaking control of your playlists or unlocking high-quality streaming? Did the Student or Family discount sway you towards their particular plans? Let us know – and let us know what you’re listening to!

Artists secure 5 years of increased payment from streaming services

This is a big win for the music industry.

Streaming services such as Spotify and Google Play Music are things that I use every single day, and when you think about it, they really have changed the way people purchase and listen to music. Opening an app on your phone and having access to millions upon millions of songs is way more convenient than stocking up on physical CDs, and while consumers have benefitted greatly from this transition, the same hasn’t exactly been true for songwriters and music publishers.

Up until now, royalty rates for songs on streaming services have been set at just 10.5% to be split between both songwriters and the labels that publish their music. However, the National Music Publishers’ Association recently announced that this rate is being increased to 15.1% for the next five years. This will see a total increase of 43.81% during that time, and although specifics of how this will be dolled out are still up in the air, that’s a lot more money in the pockets of the people responsible for creating the songs we know and love.

Per NMPA President and CEO, David Israelite:

We are thrilled the [Copyright Royalty Board] raised rates for songwriters by 43.8 percent — the biggest rate increase granted in CRB history. Crucially, the decision also allows songwriters to benefit from deals done by record labels in the free market. The ratio of what labels are paid by the services versus what publishers are paid has significantly improved, resulting in the most favorable balance in the history of the industry.

Breaking down these numbers a bit more, the NMPA states the increased rate will see a split of $3.82 to $1 for labels to publishers. This means publishers will get a new rate of 26.2%, which is a nice bump up compared to the 21% they were previously receiving.

Talking about this, Israelite added:

While an effective ratio of 3.82 to 1 is still not a fair split that we might achieve in a free market, it is the best songwriters have ever had under the compulsory license.

For a casual listener like myself, I honestly never realized how little songwriters and publishers were paid as a result of their work being put on streaming services. It’s simply something that doesn’t cross my mind in the day-to-day, but now that I’m aware of what was taking place, I’m thrilled to see that steps are being taken to go in the right direction.

YouTube signs deal with two music labels ahead of new streaming service

Fake porn is the new fake news, and the internet isn’t ready

Ever since Facebook finally admitted to having a fake news problem, it’s been trying to fix it. It hired thousands of people to help block fake ads, pledged to work with third-party fact-checking organizations and is busy building algorithms to detect fake news. But even as it attempts to fight back against fraudulent ads and made-up facts, another potential fake news threat looms on the horizon: Artificially generated fake video.

Motherboard recently uncovered a disturbing new trend on Reddit, where users create AI-generated pornographic clips by swapping other people’s faces onto porn stars. The outlet first reported on the phenomenon a month ago when Reddit user “deepfakes” posted a video of Gal Gadot’s face swapped onto a porn star’s body (he’s since created more fake porn with other celebrities). According to Motherboard, the video was created with machine learning algorithms, easily accessible open-source libraries and images from Google, stock photos and YouTube videos.

But while that was just the one user faking pornographic videos, now there’s an app helping tens of thousands of others do it too, not just with celebrities, but with everyday people. Motherboard reports that the app can be used by people without a technical background or any programming experience. The app creator, who goes by the name of “deepfakeapp,” told Motherboard he eventually wants to streamline the UI so that users can “select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button.” Though the resulting fake videos aren’t perfect, some do look eerily realistic.

Jessica Alba’s face swapped with a porn actress using the “deepfakes” app

Needless to say, this has frightening consequences. Not only does this open the door for a horrifying new kind of revenge porn, where a vengeful ex could slap your face on an x-rated video, it also opens a Pandora’s box of fears where nothing on the internet can ever be trusted. After all, false news claims are already widely read and shared on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of a world where foreign nation states can use AI to create and disseminate videos of politicians or public figures saying things they’ve never said. It would be fake news taken to a dystopian extreme.

At a recent AI roundtable in San Francisco, a panel of experts from various Bay Area tech companies was asked how they could safeguard against such malicious practices. Li Fan, Pinterest’s head of engineering, said that, in the specific case of face swapping celebrities into adult movies, blocking fraudulent videos wouldn’t be too difficult. That’s because you could run a facial matching algorithm to filter out well-defined databases of celebrity faces. But that, unfortunately, probably wouldn’t be the end of it.

“Where it gets really hard is when you have a mouse and cat game,” she said. “There will always be hackers and fraudsters who will do more. It’s really a game where we have to keep catching up.” Andrew Bolwell, the head of HP Tech Ventures, suggested that the best defense for an AI hacker is an AI defender. ” [Still] As the defense gets better, the attack gets better … it’s really hard to imagine an answer to that, that would cover all of the use cases.”

Perhaps the most intriguing answer came from Joaquin Quinonero Candela, Facebook’s Director of Applied Machine Learning. “I am confident that we can build algorithms to detect counterfeit content,” he said, echoing the sentiments of the rest of the panel, and also agreed with the “AI is the best defense” comment. But he also agreed that the rising ease and efficiency of imitation algorithms presents a pretty big, ongoing problem. A problem which, right now, doesn’t seem to be going away.

Just a few months ago, a research team at the University of Washington was able to create an artificial video of president Obama mouthing the words to a recording of himself. The team used 14 hours of his weekly address to train a neural network to sync his lips to the audio. The system even adjusted for head and jaw movement to make the whole thing look more realistic. While this sort of video magic would’ve previously required hours upon hours of painstaking CGI work, the team simply let the neural network run itself for a few hours and, voila, a fake video is born.

And that’s not all. A few years ago, Stanford University developed a software called Face2Face, which can capture someone’s facial expressions on a webcam and then transfer them to the person in a video. A team at University of Alabama at Birmingham is also working on creating synthesized speech culled from audio taken from YouTube videos and radio shows.

Alexander Reben, the Bay Area artist and engineer behind “Deeply Artificial Trees,” a Bob Ross-inspired art piece powered by machine learning, said that the technology behind faking videos will only get more advanced over time. “I think not only is the technology here to fool the average person,” he said via email, “home computing hardware is now cheap enough for this sort of thing to be done by anyone.”

“One could train another system with fake and real images to try to differentiate them,” he said about using AI as a defense. “However this just might lead to an arms race of the faking systems trying to game the detecting systems.”

There are positive use cases for such technology, Reben said, such as using it in cinema or bringing a loved one “back to life” as a digital character. “But probably the bigger implication will be that we can trust our eyes and ears even less.”

On the other end of the spectrum are machine learning experts like Candela, who are busy using artificial intelligence to help weed out fake news in the first place. But things are not perfect. Dan Zigmond, Facebook’s Director of Analytics for News Feed, said in a YouTube video last November that despite all the company’s best efforts to identify and downrank fake news, it still takes three whole days for fact checkers to verify a story. Three days is more than enough time for a story to go viral, and for misinformation to spread (Zigmond did acknowledge this in the video, and said Facebook is working on improving this going forward).

A couple of weeks ago, a clickbait story from YourNewsWire claimed that the US Center for Disease Control had said that the flu shot was the culprit behind the recent spate of flu-related deaths. It turns out, however, that the story was a complete fabrication. In fact, the CDC has been strongly encouraging people to get the flu shot due to how severe the flu season is this year. Snopes debunked the story almost immediately, but it was too late. Before long, the story generated more than 176,000 engagements, despite the fact that Facebook had already unverified one of the publication’s two pages. People were still sharing the story.

“Facebook today cannot exist without AI,” said Candela in an interview with Wired Magazine last February. “Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger, you may not realize it, but your experiences are being powered by AI.” At the same time, however, he also admits that AI is still young. “The challenge is that AI is really in its infancy still,” he said in the same interview. “We’re only getting started.”

It’s true that AI is helpful in a lot of ways. Computer vision helps the visually disabled navigate the web with descriptive captions, it can assist you in sorting through your favorite vacation photos, and automated language translation helps people from different countries communicate with one another. And, yes, Facebook uses its special algorithm to surface the connections and stories it thinks are most interesting to you, which is useful for keeping up-to-date with your friends and family.

But AI can be harmful in the wrong hands, and even though AI can in turn be used to detect bad actors, it’s clearly insufficient against human fallibility. And seeing as the technology isn’t even successful in blocking misleading news stories, it seems unlikely that it’ll be able to stop fake video from propagating before it’s too late. Companies like Facebook need to be mindful that one of its core responsibilities is to act as community safeguards. And we can’t afford to be collateral damage in a cat and mouse game of AI versus AI.

Facebook bans ads promoting cryptocurrencies

Most of Facebook’s recent advertising changes have tried to curb the danger of, you know, a foreign government using the social network to influence elections. But Facebook believes other kinds of harmful ads prey on less-than-savvy users with get-rich-quick promises and trendy buzzwords. So the network is banning all advertisements that promote cryptocurrencies — yes, even bitcoin — because they are ‘frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.’

Facebook’s newest ad policy also prohibits promotions for binary options and initial coin offerings (ICOs) — the advertisements that seem like they’re shouted by an online carnival barker. “New ICO! Buy tokens at a 15 percent discount NOW!” reads one example on Facebook’s blog post.

Before you cry that some scammers are ruining the crypto game for everyone, Facebook admitted this policy is ‘intentionally broad while we work to better detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices.’ They’ll begin enforcing this policy ‘soon’ on the core platform, Instagram, and its ad-placing Audience Network, and will revisit it after their signals improve. In the meantime, if you see a shady ad that Facebook’s algorithm didn’t catch, you can always report it by clicking in the upper-right corner.

Via: Recode

Source: Facebook

Missouri wants to bring Hyperloop to the midwest

The state of Missouri has signed a deal with Virgin Hyperloop One to investigate if it’s worth building a high-speed link between three of its biggest cities. A team of interested parties will examine the feasibility of constructing a route between Kansas City, Columbia and St Louis, parallel to I-70. That will include looking at the engineering challenges, as well as the potential economic benefits of such a route.

The donkey work will be carried out by Hyperloop One, alongside infrastructure engineering firm Black and Veatch, as well as the University of Missouri. It’s thought that the route would connect five million people, and bring the journey time between the three cities down to under half an hour. Right now, it would take you just under four hours, give or take traffic, to take I-70 from Kansas at St. Louis.

Such a route would seem to be a relatively easy one to navigate, since the highway has already cut a fairly easy path between the cities. The terrain isn’t flat, but there are no major engineering challenges — like a mountain or large body of water — to overcome. Not to mention that there has been a desire to increase Missouri’s road capacity for more than a decade, at a 2006 cost of around $3.5 billion.

If Hyperloop One can demonstrate that its route can be built at a reasonable cost, it may have enough to encourage legislators to open the purse strings.

iOS 11.3 will let iPhone X users approve family purchases with Face ID

iPhone users will a get a handful of new capabilities when Apple releases iOS 11.3 this spring, one of which is sure to be welcomed by parents with an iPhone X. With the introduction of Face ID, some processes got a little easier for iPhone users, but parents who approve their children’s purchases through the Ask to Buy feature have been a little irritated with the system. That’s because while Touch ID-enabled iPhones let parents use their fingerprints to approve a child’s purchase request, the iPhone X has been forcing parents to input their password each time. However, that’s about to change because it appears iOS 11.3 will allow Face ID for purchase approvals.

While testing iOS 11.3 beta, 9to5Mac found that while the first Ask to Buy request still required a password, the system then asked if the user would like to enable Face ID for future Family Sharing approvals. Clicking “Enable” then sets that up and a password is no longer required.

Other features coming with iOS 11.3 include a battery health monitor, the ability to disable slowdowns, improvements to ARKit and Health Records.

Via: The Verge

Advocacy group urges Facebook to pull Messenger for Kids

Facebook started rolling out its messaging app for kids last December, offering a standalone app with parental controls built right in. The app is available on iOS and Android Fire tablets, and allows children under the age of 13 to chat with approved contacts. As you might imagine, however, child advocacy groups have taken issue with it. In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood express concern that “this new app will undermine children’s healthy development.”

Adults have a hard enough time managing online relationships, said the letter. Younger children, then, are “simply not ready to have social media accounts.” Kids, the letter stated, don’t really have a full understanding of privacy and what to (and not to) share online with others. It cites studies showing that media use by teens is linked to depression, decreased life satisfaction and body image issues. An app expressly for the under-13 set will likely increase the amount of time younger children spend with digital devices, said the letter, which can end up displacing face-to-face interactions “that are crucial for building healthy developmental skills, including the ability to read human emotion, delay gratification and engage with the physical world.”

While the language may seem alarmist, the concerns are likely legitimate. Companies like Apple, Google and Disney have different ways to help parents manage their children’s access to screen time already, and even Apple investors are starting to worry about too much time in the digital world. It’s not likely Facebook will kill Messenger Kids for anything but a business reason, though the company said it created the app with kid safety in mind. “”We worked to create Messenger Kids with an advisory committee of parenting and developmental experts,” said Facebook’s Antigone Davis in a statement to The Washington Post, “as well as with families themselves and in partnership with National PTA. We continue to be focused on making Messenger Kids the best experience it can be for families.”

Via: Washington Post

Source: Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood