Author: Stuff writer

If you’ve recently watched the night skies, you’ve probably spotted something that looks way too bright to be a natural star. No, it’s not the aliens, it’s a cell phone tower that’s been troubling conspiracy theorists and scientists around the world. AST SpaceMobile’s Bluewalker 3, launched on 10 September 2022, is built to connect directly to cell phones down here on earth. Its brightness has offended a group of international scientists who say it is a threat to their work and to humanity’s view of the universe. It has a 64-square-meter array of solar panels and antennas. Observations of the…

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven states in the United States are suing Google and iHeartMedia Inc for deceptive advertising. This is after the search giant allegedly paid radio personalities and influencers to promote the Pixel 4 series – by pretending to share their experiences with the devices – while they had actually never used them. “It is common sense that people put more stock in first-hand experiences. Consumers expect radio advertisements to be truthful and transparent about products, not misleading with fake endorsements,” says Massachusetts Attorney General, Maura Healey, in a statement shared by the FTC. Read More:…

“We had WhatsApp Business before WhatsApp Business was real,” says Laetitia Vambili, Love Ur Locks,  founder, and co-CEO. Social-media-turned-business platform WhatsApp became Love Ur Locks’ link to natural hair lovers across the world during its foundation and in the years that followed during the COVID-19 lockdown. Vambili was speaking at a Nedbank-sponsored Stuff event on how digital innovation is transforming small businesses. Vambili launched Love Ur Locks in 2016, four years after she asked herself why African hair only grew to a certain length. In freezing temperatures while in France on a bursary, Vambili hooked up with other African women and…

Millions of Meta-owned WhatsApp users could be affected by what could be the platform’s biggest data breach to date. This is after an ad posted on a hacking community forum by an actor allegedly selling a database of 487 million WhatsApp users’ mobile numbers, according to Cybernews. WhatsApp has more than two billion users globally. WhatsApp with your data The anonymous seller, who posted the ad on 16 November, claims to be in possession of a 2022 data set containing WhatsApp user information from 84 countries. African countries listed as part of the database with affected users include Egypt (44,823,…

Now that Black Friday is done and you’ve dusted some rands off your accounts, you can spend a few more on South Africa’s Cyber Monday deals. Though Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, is originally an American e-commerce day designed to get more things off the shelves, local consumers worldwide continue to spend like January isn’t around the corner. Most deals have a discount of around R1,000 with a few that drop prices off by around R5,000. You’ll notice there are fewer products on the slaves compared to Black Friday sales. Unlike Black Friday deals that lasted until Sunday for…

The City of Tshwane will shut down yrs ICT equipment this weekend and residents have been warned to expect internet service interruptions and a possibility of not being able to buy electricity. The City’s Internet Service Provider (SITA) plans to upgrade its Centurion Data Centre. To do so, it’ll need some electricity downtime. From 1 pm on Saturday, SITA will shut down all ICT equipment until Sunday at 2 pm. It says this is in order to safeguard the city’s network and server equipment hosted at SITA. Work around the internet outage “During the downtime period, consumers will not be…

Wearable electronics are quickly making their way into the health industry. The trouble is, you’d probably have to explain to the curious just what it is that you’re wearing. And since it’s for health reasons, you’d probably wind up explaining your ailments to the world. Even so, the idea is kinda cool. It’s also almost here. A skin-like wearable electronics project, a collaboration between the Department of Energy in the United States and the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, could soon be the answer to discrete wearables. Wearable skin? The skin-like device could soon monitor a person’s…

Amazon has made some changes to the rules on Twitch, its live-streaming gaming site, to combat grooming. The company announced on Tuesday that it will require mandatory phone verification for live streams and it will terminate accounts belonging to users younger than 13. This forms part of the company’s efforts as it continues to root out predators on the platform popular among young kids. “Grooming is particularly insidious because it can be hidden in plain sight, and there are fewer established industry practices for detecting it”, said Twitch in a blog post this week. In addition to blocking accounts belonging…

It’s Black Friday week and retailers are flooded with laptops they’d really like you to buy. Before just picking the cheapest one on the list, here’s how you can make sure it’ll actually do what you want it to do. It’s often not a case of just choosing the flashiest machine. As with most things, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Specifically, it’s all about the processor, the RAM, and the hard drive, with a side order of GPU if you’re planning on playing games. The screen could be included on this list but you can usually disregard it.…

You can no longer pretend not to understand what your international colleagues are saying during meetings on Microsoft Teams when they send you a message.  This week, the company released an Intelligent Message Translation feature in chat messages for iOS and Android mobile devices. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and translate a user’s preferred language. When participants chat in different languages, the feature gives you the option to customise your preferences so messages come through in your preferred language. Users may either automate the feature so all messages come through in their preferred language, or only activate the feature…