For months, powerful companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have been working to shrink online video sizes. But their work just got more important, because Apple has now joined the partnership too. The Alliance for Open Media is working on technology called AV1 that compresses video before it’s stored or sent over the network. …
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For all sorts of products we’ve irremediably blurred the lines between renting vs. owning, local vs. cloud — but are we ready to do the same for the PC? Blade thinks so, and over the past few years has been slowly rolling out its Shadow desktop-as-a-service subscription. It has about 5,000 subscribers in France, and at CES 2018 it announced …
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Here’s a New Year’s resolution for tech companies: Stop ruining things by releasing them early. Yes, I know it’s tempting to test the waters and beat the competition to the punch, but what if things go bad? What if your shiny new phone ruins your company’s reputation? What if your world-changing gadget isn’t so world-changing because you forgot a key …
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Messaging platform WhatsApp has ended support for older phone operating systems including Windows Phone 8, BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10. “These platforms don’t offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future,” the company said in a support note. “If you use one of these affected mobile devices, we recommend upgrading to a newer …
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I’ve seen VR, AR, iPhones, smartwatches, laptops and robots. But the gadget that impressed me the most, by a longshot, was the Nintendo Switch. It was a familiar story. Nintendo has a weird, wild idea. Detachable controls on a tablet. A dock that turns a handheld into a console. Even the name of the little wireless, button-studded mini-remotes was weird: …
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Editor’s note: An updated version of this roundup is here, in our collection of the laptops with the best battery life. 25 best battery life laptops +24 more See all photos Anyone considering a new laptop purchase for themselves or as a gift should keep in mind that while speed and design very important, a lot of people care about …
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The Brave browser has a new way to protect your privacy online: an option to use the DuckDuckGo search engine by default in private tabs. Private browsing, also known as incognito in Google’s Chrome browser, is a special browser mode that doesn’t leave traces of your browsing history on your computer. But Brave Software says searches with DuckDuckGo will help …
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If you ask Google “Is Hamilton a good musical?” it will send back a link to Quora, the question-and-answer service, where people ask that same question. The next link, a story published in Slate last year, is an interview with a critic who argues why the Pulitzer-, Grammy- and Tony-winning musical isn’t revolutionary (their pun, not ours). Microsoft thinks it can …
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If you are buying a Windows laptop for your child as a holiday present or because it’s required for school, then you need to know how to set it up with Microsoft’s parental controls to cordon off certain corners of the Internet. You can even set up time limits and sign up to get a weekly report on your kid’s …
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Brave Software has embarked on the next phase of its plan to get you to use its browser — and to build a privacy-first alternative to today’s online ad industry. The Brave browser blocks ads and ad trackers by default, a move that makes pages load faster and eliminates some prying into our lives online. But the startup doesn’t want …
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