Author: Brett Venter

Okay, ignore the fact that we’ve used a Japanese video game to illustrate this story about Chinese app WeChat and its parent company Tencent being sued. It’s not some socio-political statement, it’s just ye olde internet meme (circa 2008). But the legal action being taken by Beijing prosecutors against Tencent is a little more serious. The tech-maker is already in the Chinese government’s crosshairs, despite rolling out facial recognition technology that’s supposed to limit the time kids spend playing video games. Can’t WeChat about this? Tencent, according to reporters at Reuters, is being sued over the ‘youth mode’ in WeChat…

Social media has had more than a decade to prove that your face is someone else’s fortune, but the Moscow Metro is really hammering the point home. The Russian transportation agency is trialling something called FacePay on its Filevskaya metro line. FacePay, as the name suggests, is a facial recognition system that lets users pay for things using biometric data — specifically those chiselled (or possibly crafted-from-pudding — hey, people are all different) features you’re carting around all day. Moscow Metro 2033? How it works in this particular instance is that eligible users will download the Moscow Metro app, upload…

Facebook is only called a social media company because they want you to keep using their services. In reality, Facebook is a data-harvesting company. Social media is just the threshing machine the company uses to separate out all of the useful bits of your life that keep Mark Zuckerberg in business. And, according to a new report from The Information, the company is investigating the potential of a whole new crop of user information — your encrypted messaging information sent over WhatsApp. See, users send masses of information over WhatsApp, but right now there’s just no way of using that…

In an excellent example of why pre-order pricing sometimes works, Virgin Galactic has set official ticket prices for a trip to the edge of space on board one of Richard Branson’s hybrid airplane rocket things. If you’d taken advantage of initial pricing, before anyone was wholly certain it was possible, you’d have paid R2.9 million (at today’s exchange rates), or $200,000. But now you’re stuck paying a little over R6.5 million to ride the rich man’s rocket — which is a certainly almost reasonable (if you’re a wealthy American) $450,000 a pop. Paying the price for Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic…

Last week, two noteworthy events occurred in and around space travel. First, Jeff Bezos offered to give NASA $2 billion if they’d let Blue Origin construct the Artemis lunar lander, a contract originally awarded to SpaceX. Second, the International Space Station (ISS) was tipped out of orientation by a misfiring thruster from its new Russian module. We’ve got updates on both of those events: The follow-up to Bezos’ offer and the reason why the ISS was knocked a little off course for a bit. Blue Origin must be feeling blue Jeff Bezos’ appeal to NASA to be awarded SpaceX’s Artemis…

In another stunning example of cancel culture, Google is cancelling Android Gingerbread, otherwise known as Android 2.3.7. As well as every other Android device running an earlier version of the operating system. This isn’t isn’t going to render your ‘it-belongs-in-a-museum’ device inoperable, but it is going to have a considerable affect on the (probably already limited) functionality of whatever piece of history you’re using. It’s the Android Gingerbread, man According to a Google support document (first located by Liliputing), “As part of our ongoing efforts to keep our users safe, Google will no longer allow sign-in on Android devices that…

When you hear that there’s an object in space that shouldn’t be there, the immediate reaction might be panic. But the objects found in the asteroid belt of our solar system by a team of scientists are no cause for concern. Rather, they might give us very important clues as to how our solar system formed. Asteroid addiction Using a combination of visual and near-infrared spectroscopic observation, the scientists, in a paper led by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronomer Sunao Hasegawa, have identified 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, two asteroids drifting around between Mars and Jupiter (with Elon Musk’s…

It took quite a road to get here but the August-September 2021 issue of Stuff Magazine has finally arrived. Whether you’re picking the magazine up in print or digital format, you’re in for a packed issue. We’ve got a closer look at the first Honor smartphone with Google Mobile Services installed, a set of sneakers made out of Lego (assuming you buy two sets), a new Game and Watch from Nintendo and a new set of Beats — and that’s just in the first few pages of this brand new issue.  Also contained within the pages of the August-September 2021…

Earbuds are a relatively new audio segment and, like all new territory, it’s being wildly contested. Sony’s WF-1000XM4 in-ear ‘buds are perhaps the best entry to come out of the Japanese company’s extremely well-stocked audio engineering labs. By extension, that means that these are perhaps the best wireless earbuds on the planet right now. But don’t go getting all indignant. There’s a very small chance that you could secure better audio quality from your earbuds, but then there’s a sacrifice made elsewhere. The battery life may not be up to par or the companion app is weak or perhaps the…

The MLM thruster at the centre of the very recent scare at the International Space Station (ISS) has nothing to do with multi-level marketing. Last night, a newly-docked Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) — called Nauka — pushed the ISS out of orientation when its thrusters fired without warning. NASA says that the crew on board the space station “…was never and is not in any danger”, and for once we believe this particular sort of announcement. The folks on the ground are constantly monitoring the status of the ISS, because it’s space and there are many, many things that…