Author: Brett Venter

Vaccine misinformation is a problem that Facebook has had to tackle for months now. It hasn’t helped that reports have turned up claiming that just twelve accounts are responsible for almost two-thirds of misinformation online at the moment. The social network disputes this view but said in its most recent update on the state of viral misinformation on its platform that it has “…removed over three dozen Pages, groups and Facebook or Instagram accounts linked to these 12 people, including at least one linked to each of the 12 people, for violating our policies.” Facebook does some vaccinating of its…

Earbuds are becoming a much more common sight, which is leading to a slight revolution in terms of hearing aids — companies are making in-ear buds that look like the headphones we all wanna wear, but are also building assistive technologies into them. Case in point, the new Jabra Enhance Plus earbuds, which are designed to give those with up to moderate hearing loss a little boost. Enhance Plus other things The name comes from the fact that they a) enhance your hearing and b) do the stuff you’d expect from a set of earbuds, like play music and connect…

You know how sometimes you can leave one career for a new one and suddenly flourish because you’re doing something you’re interested in? That seems to be what’s happening to South Korean tech-maker LG, which claims to have demonstrated 6G wireless transmission using the terahertz (THz) spectrum in Berlin. Hey LG, that doesn’t terahertz as much as we thought it would Besides opting to invest in making screens for those pocketable devices it no longer makes, LG has put some of its effort into developing 6G technology. Never mind the fact that most of us don’t really have 5G yet,…

In-person events are back. Mobile World Congress did it and the Consumer Electronics Show is going to do it too. But CES 2022 has a new requirement that we haven’t really seen anyone pushing as yet — you’ll have to provide proof of vaccination if you’re planning to attend. A stab at CES 2022 The head of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Gary Shapiro said in a statement that “We all play a part in ending the pandemic through encouraging vaccinations and implementing the right safety protocols. We are taking on our responsibility by requiring proof of vaccination to attend…

All things must come to an end, it seems. Banking firm and debt-creator Mastercard has announced that it intends to phase out the magnetic strips you’ve seen on your bank card ever since you had a bank card. This means no more swiping your card when that blasted RFID chip is malfunctioning for no particular reason this week. No more swiping your Mastercard The magnetic strip (which the company called a ‘magnetic stripe’ — tomayto, tomahto) is going away from 2024, which is when the company will roll out strip-less cards first. If you’re particularly attached to your easily damaged…

There’s a moment, right at the beginning of Boston Dynamics’ most recent demo video for Atlas, its humanoid robot, where you know that you should be freaking out about how this mechanical thing is moving. It crops up again and again, whenever you realise that this robot is jumping, flipping and balancing better, unassisted, than you’ve ever seen a robot perform before. But by the time you get to the end of the video, all that’s left is admiration. Admiration for Atlas’ performance — because it sure has come a long way — but also for the team behind its…

If at first you don’t succeed, object to the process. If that doesn’t work, offer to pay to be allowed in. If that doesn’t work, go to court about it. That seems to be the battle plan Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is following in its attempt to secure the NASA Artemis lunar lander contract (the HLS, or Human Landing System) the agency awarded to SpaceX earlier this year. Someone told Jeff Bezos ‘no’ Which, yes, does mean that Blue Origin has taken its objections to Elon Musk’s SpaceX being awarded the lunar lander contract to the courtroom. A suit was…

Earlier this year it was announced that LG was pulling out of the smartphone business, the company citing heavy competition and a desire to focus on other areas of its business. It would fulfil its final obligations and then they’d be done. So what is the company doing instead? LG does what it knows Turns out, the South Korean company isn’t heading too far away from the smartphone industry. It’s investing a substantial amount. — 3.3 trillion won, or a touch over R41 billion — in new OLED production facilities. Specifically, it’s investing in small to mid-sized OLED panels, an…

Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had their work cut out for them limiting the damage caused by Western extremists and anti-vaccination proponents of late, but now they face a new challenge — what to do about the Taliban’s online activities as the religious group takes over Afghanistan. Talibanned? In case you have somehow missed world news over the past week, the United States has pulled its troops out of Afghanistan after twenty years and, pretty much immediately, the Taliban have moved in to take over the country. Depending on who your government is, the religious extremists are…

When it comes to smartwatches in South Africa, we’re far more used to items from Samsung and Huawei than we are to seeing stuff like the TicWatch Pro 3 GPS. Learning that Mobvoi, the Chinese company behind the TicWatch series of devices, is officially in the country made for a nice change of pace so we got our hands on a R6,000 TicWatch Pro 3 to see how it measures up. Typically we love to compare what we’ve got with what has come before but that’s impossible in this case. The previous models never officially launched here, so we’re measuring…