Author: Max Milella

At the beginning of this month, it came to light that Kaseya, a company that provides IT management software to companies and businesses all over the world faced a massive ransomware attack at the hands of affiliates of the Russian hacker group REvil.  Due to the nature of Kaseya’s software, the hacker group was able to infect hundreds of different company networks, and many individuals found their data encrypted. Now Kaseya has announced that it has obtained a universal decryptor to help customers who still find themselves suffering after the attack.  Kaseya has you covered, finally You may remember that…

Roll out the red carpet, social media sensation Clubhouse is finally launching! That tagline might be a little confusing so allow us to explain.  While Clubhouse has been truly phenomenal over the past few months, and has existed for over a year, up until now it’s only been available in beta form. This meant that it existed with several caveats and restrictions, including the infamous waitlist and invite system, the only way for prospective users to actually get in on the action. With the full release, everybody’s free to use the platform without limits. Welcome to the Clubhouse Clubhouse shared…

On Tuesday, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed a lawsuit against video game goliath Activision Blizzard for cultivating a ‘frat boy’ culture in its workspace wherein female employees experience constant sexist treatment. This includes sexual harassment, verbal harassment and unequal pay and work opportunities. Since the filing of the suit, many women have come forward to share their stories. As a disclaimer, this article will cover sensitive topics. Some details may be particularly disturbing to some readers. Please bear this in mind as you read on. California vs Activision Blizzard The official lawsuit covers, in detail,…

As much as Facebook and its siblings are nobody’s best friends right now, Instagram’s been doing its best recently to make itself a safer space for users. Back in April it rolled out a feature letting users prevent abusive DMs from ever reaching their inboxes, and a month later it gave users the option to remove the ‘Like’ button and ‘Like counter’ from posts. Now it’s adding in a tool that lets users filter sensitive content out of their explore feeds.  Instagram gets a little sensitive “We believe people should be able to shape Instagram into the experience that they…

In case you haven’t poked your head around the internet, billionaire Jeff Bezos recently (sourly) followed in Richard Branson’s footsteps and took a quick trip to the stars on Tuesday this week. The 57-year-old founder of Amazon (and a few lucky civilians) road a Blue Origin rocket 65 miles (105 kilometres) into the air, enjoying a few minutes of suborbital anti-gravity before making their successful descent again.  In a press conference following the flight, Bezos thanked his numerous employees for making the trip possible. Bezos’ brazen boasting “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you…

We know that many sci-fi minded folks are worried about the inevitable android-fueled apocalypse. But if they’re just keen to kick back and play some retro video games, like this robot hand made by a team of scientists at the University of Maryland, then we’re cool with that.  The hand was created as part of the team’s experimentation in the field of ‘soft robotics’. ‘Soft robotics’ focuses on creating inflatable and flexible robots powered by fluid or air rather than electricity. These have myriad safety and adaptability benefits, and researchers are currently looking at ways they can use them in…

With the third wave of the pandemic still raging outside many South African’s doors, meetings (whether for work or play) remain mostly online. With WhatsApp still being enormously popular and widely used as a messaging app, its group call feature has become a staple for many peoples’ online interactions with friends, coworkers, and loved ones. Now it’s getting an upgrade that lets you join calls that started without you midway through. Walk-in walk-out Whatsapp Calls The big green social media app is loosely calling the feature ‘Joinable calls’ which tells you just about everything you need to know about it.…

WhatsApp’s been on a bit of a role with beta updates recently. Just over a week ago, it added in the option to adjust the compression settings on images you want to share, and more recently it finally began beta testing the long-pined-for multi-device feature. Now, on a more technical front, the messaging app is testing out end-to-end encryption for your chat backups. WhatsApp chat backups, now with 2 times the encryption So, what does that mean in laymen’s terms? Well, you may already know that your messages, as well as WhatsApp calls, are end-to-end encrypted. From the moment you…

There’s nothing better than a good singing competition TV show. It’s got everything you need: cringe-worthy auditions juxtaposed with symphonic masterpieces, judges with the power to lift someone to fame or grind their dreams into dust, heartbreaking back stories… Alter Ego is the newest singing competition show to hit your screen, courtesy of Fox, and it’s got a rather unusual twist: competitors perform through virtual avatars.  Singing from the computer-generated heart Singers will take to the stage via motion-capture dolled-up as funky virtual avatars when they perform. These avatars are more Fortnite than Sims too. In the teaser we see…

Twitter released a voice-tweet feature around a year ago, which does exactly what it says it does: it’s an audio-format tweet. However, since then they’ve been sorely lacking accessibility features, making them rather pointless for anyone hearing-impaired. Now, finally, voice tweets are getting closed captions. About time, Twitter https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1310989207062675457 It’s quite simple. Here’s how it works. As you record your voice tweet, captions will automatically be generated and added to the tweet. When one of your followers listens to the tweet and has closed captions on it, they’ll see the transcription pop up as they listen. The captions look a…