Tech Soha

A new dating app is trying to change the face of online dating, literally. S’More (something more) touts an experience like no other for online daters. “It’s the first anti-superficial relationship app with thousands of locals already on it. Dallas is S’More’s sixth active city in the U.S.,” Adam Cohen Aslatei, CEO of S’More said. Think of it as a blind date, but on an app. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. S’More allows you to connect with a person and the more you chat with them and the more you and get to know about them the more their photo unblurs and more visual content about them unlocks,” Aslatei said. Lilly Talavera is a user in Dallas and said she is just looking for something that doesn’t require her to put her best face forward before someone gets to know her. “It’s like your photo is your first impression and you don’t know how to pose. what do I do? So it’s all about the profile photo and with S’...

What to Know A hyperloop system has transported humans for the first time ever Virgin Hyperloop announced Sunday that it transported two staff members in a hyperloop pod along a 500 meter test track Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group, said it “will change the way people everywhere live, work, and travel in the years to come” Virgin Hyperloop announced Sunday that humans have traveled in its superfast vacuum tube for the first time, albeit at limited speeds. The futuristic mode of transport, which involves firing a pod through a low-pressure tunnel, was tested by the company’s Chief Technology Officer Josh Giegel and Sara Luchian, who is director of passenger experience. On Sunday afternoon, they travelled 500 meters in 15 seconds on a test site outside Las Vegas, where the company has already completed over 400 unoccupied tests. They reached around 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour), which is some way off the 1,000-kmh-plus speeds the company hopes to a...

A police officer from Coral Springs is facing two weeks’ suspension without pay after a citizen complained about two TikTok videos in which the officer appeared to be making offensive suggestions about Mexicans. The incident began when several city officials were emailed regarding two public TikTok videos that Sergeant Gilbert Monzon of the Coral Springs Police Department had posted to his account. In one of the videos, an artificial voice says “scanning for Mexicans,” until the camera stops on a Coral Springs police officer and the voice says “We’ve got a Mexican.” The second video features a voice singing, “Donald Trump, send me home, back to where I belong, back to Mexico, to see my papa.” The person who alerted city officials to the posts wrote in the email that he had been deeply offended by the videos. An internal affairs investigation concluded that Monzon had “engaged in behavior that could be construed as mean spirited, abusive, and unprofessional.” Monzon, who is Cuban,...

Ever want to feel like a celebrity with your own personal bodyguard to protect you? Now there’s an app for that. Tammy Johnson runs her errands on the Upper West Side with an unusual companion: private security. She’s not a celebrity, just an everyday New Yorker – but 2020 has her questioning her personal safety. “As much as I love my neighborhood, we know that safety is not always at the top,” Johnson says. “There has been a rise in the number of homeless folks that are basically throughout the neighborhood where that was not the situation prior and it’s a little concerning to me. I’m always out and about and sometimes I’m a little afraid.” Johnson turned to a relatively new app called Bond. The company’s creator just last month launched the bodyguard service where clients can hire protection for as little as $30 for 30 minutes. The program comes as New Yorkers in Johnson’s neighborhood say they feel increasingly unsafe as the country braces for a potentially contentious election....

The City of Dallas is on a mission to become a hub for advanced technology. Mayor Eric Johnson says a recent partnership with Microsoft will expand education and digital skill opportunities so the city is at the forefront of the next technology revolution.  The new digital alliance with the City of Dallas, part of Microsoft’s “Accelerate Initiative,” is focused on closing equity and digital skills gaps. There are communities in our area that would otherwise not have access to these digital skills, until now. There are so many in the workforce right now ready for that opportunity to “upskill,” reinvent themselves in the digital world. The program also targets students preparing to join a digital workforce. Microsoft hopes the program will be a transformative opportunity for students, teachers, workers and really the entire community. We talked to Raamel Mitchell, the Citizenship and Market Development Dir. at Microsoft in Dallas, and he says right now is the time to invest your ...

Less than a week before Election Day, the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google are set to be grilled by Republican senators making unfounded allegations that the tech giants show anti-conservative bias. Democrats want to expand the discussion to include issues such as the companies’ impact on local news. The Senate Commerce Committee has summoned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai to testify for a hearing Wednesday. The executives have agreed to appear remotely after being threatened with subpoenas. With the election looming, Republicans led by President Donald Trump have thrown a barrage of grievances at Big Tech’s social media platforms, which they accuse without evidence of deliberately suppressing conservative, religious and anti-abortion views. The chorus of protest rose this month after Facebook and Twitter acted to limit dissemination of an unverified political story from the conservative-leaning New York Post about Democratic presi...

Ever since Russian agents and other opportunists abused its platform in an attempt to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has insisted — repeatedly — that it’s learned its lesson and is no longer a conduit for misinformation, voter suppression and election disruption. But it has been a long and halting journey for the social network. Critical outsiders, as well as some of Facebook’s own employees, say the company’s efforts to revise its rules and tighten its safeguards remain wholly insufficient to the task, despite it having spent billions on the project. As for why, they point to the company’s persistent unwillingness to act decisively over much of that time. “Am I concerned about the election? I’m terrified,” said Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and an early Facebook investor turned vocal critic. “At the company’s current scale, it’s a clear and present danger to democracy and national security.” The company’s rhetoric has certainly gotten ...

A widespread Twitter outage on Thursday “was caused by a system change initiated earlier then planned, affecting most of our servers,” the company said. Shortly before 10 p.m. ET the company tweeted: “Most of you should be back to Tweeting.” There were user-generated reports of the outage on Downdetector,com just after 6 p.m. ET. Many reported receiving an error message. At 7:16 p.m. ET, Twitter issued a statement on its platform: “Twitter has been down for many of you and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack.” Around 7 p.m., the social media platform appeared to be working again, at least for some users. In July, hackers broke into the Twitter accounts of technology moguls, politicians, celebrities and major companies in an apparent Bitcoin scam . The ruse included bogus tweets from former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential front-runner Joe ...

Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon wasn’t able to have  Prime Day  in July this year, but from midnight pacific time on Tuesday, Oct. 13 through Wednesday, Oct. 14, the sale is on with exclusive discounts for Amazon Prime members.  According consumer psychology expert Kelly Haws, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, the idea with Prime Day is that Amazon “tries to throw a lot at a consumer to get them excited about this very limited time opportunity,” the Vanderbilt University marketing professor says. Given that, it can be challenging for consumers to navigate the sale without over-spending or buying things that they have no use for. So it’s important to be aware of how behave around sales and why, says Priya Raghubir, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who specializes in consumer behavior and psychology. “It’s not just the very strong cognitive economic benefit that a deal is providing us, it is also so much more,” Raghubir say...

What to Know On Tuesday, Apple is holding a launch event where it will reveal this year’s iPhone lineup.  This year’s iPhone launch is a significant one. It could be the first major case redesign since 2018 and the expectation that Apple’s new iPhones will support 5G cellular networks have investors hoping for a big upgrade cycle. “We expect this fall’s launch to be the most significant iPhone event in years,” Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty wrote this week. On Tuesday,  Apple  is holding a launch event where it will reveal this year’s iPhone lineup.  In most years, Apple announces its iPhones in September, and they go on sale shortly after that. This year is different. Apple instead  released  new  Apple Watches  last month and pushed the iPhone announcement to October. The delay is an outgrowth of the Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted electronics manufacturing and forced most Apple employees to work from home.  Still, this ...

In addition to a  wide variety of airplanes  to pilot, the new Microsoft Flight Simulator offers what is generally agreed to be the most realistic and complete digital representation of the world that has ever been made available to the public, NBC News reports . It includes 1.5 billion rendered buildings and enough data to fill 1.7 million DVDs. For digital tourists, a trip to the  Grand Canyon or Mount Fuji  is now a flight away. Like the real world, it’s dynamic. The virtual planet continuously updates, complete with weather. When Hurricane Laura hit the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, people playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020  chased the storm . Smoke from  recent wildfires  was also in the virtual world. There’s even wildlife, spurring something of a  digital safari niche on YouTube . Other people have re-created  famous flights from movies . That means flights around the globe can be a long haul.  Two streamers  even ...

If you’re familiar with video games, you know how hyper-realistic people look, making you wonder if they’re animated or taken from actual video. Now, that artificial intelligence technology has been used to create a video of a young man who died two years ago. “Yo, it’s me, it’s Guac, I’ve been gone for two years and nothing’s changed, bro,” he says in the video animation.  If it takes your breath away, imagine the impact it has on Joaquin Oliver’s parents.  “It is really hard because I, personally, to me today is hard to believe that really, Joaquin is not here,” said Patricia Oliver, Joaquin’s mother.  “It was tough, emotionally, it was a challenge in terms of technology but you know, Joaquin is able to do anything,” said Manuel Oliver, Joaquin’s father.  Joaquin will forever be 17 years old. He was among the 17 shot to death at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in 2018. His parents became advocates for what they call sensible gun control laws....

While the world wants flashy quick fixes for everything, especially massive threats like the coronavirus and global warming, next week’s Nobel Prizes remind us that in science, slow and steady pays off. It may soon do so again. Science builds upon previous work, with thinkers “standing on the shoulders of giants,” as Isaac Newton put it, and it starts with basic research aimed at understanding a problem before fixing it. It’s that type of basic science that the Nobels usually reward, often years or decades after a discovery, because it can take that long to realize the implications. Slow and steady success in science has made researchers hopeful in the fight against the pandemic. It even offers a glimmer of climate optimism. Many years of advances in basic molecular science, some of them already Nobel Prize-winning, have given the world tools for fast virus identification and speeded up the development of testing. And now they tantalize us with the prospect of COVID-19 treatments a...

Lawyers for TikTok pleaded with a U.S. federal judge on Sunday to delay the Trump Administration’s ban of the popular video sharing program from app stores set to take effect at the end of the day, arguing the move would infringe on First Amendment rights and do irreparable harm to the business. The 90-minute hearing came after President Donald Trump declared this summer that TikTok was a threat to national security and that it either sold its U.S. operations to U.S. companies or the app would be barred from the country. TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is scrambling to firm up a deal tentatively struck a week ago in which it would partner with tech company Oracle and retailer Walmart and that would get the blessing of the Chinese and American governments. In the meantime, it is fighting to keep the app available in the U.S. The ban on new downloads of TikTok, which has about 100 million users in the U.S, was delayed once by the government. A more comprehensive ban is sch...

Back in April, when New York City was in the grips of COVID-19, Yuan Mingyue relied on WeChat to keep in touch with relatives in China, to check on their health and to share how things were in New York. The social media app’s video call function, similar to FaceTime, proved especially useful as a lifeline for Yuan, who came to the United States 10 years ago and lives in Queens, once America’s center for Covid-19. While FaceTime works for Apple customers, not everyone in China owns an iPhone or another Apple device, NBC News reports. So when President Donald Trump’s  WeChat ban was to take effect Sunday  —  even as a federal judge temporarily put the brakes on his order  — Yuan began the dizzying task, like so many other Chinese Americans, of figuring out workarounds. “We can use other Chinese platforms, like Sina Weibo or QQ, or otherwise just make a phone call,” Yuan said in Mandarin. “I use WeChat just to send messages and videos,” she said. “But I do feel it ...

What to Know A U.S. judge in California halted the Trump administration’s ban on downloads of the Chinese-owned app WeChat early Sunday The move blocks the Commerce Department from forcing Apple and Alphabet’s Google to remove Tencent Holding’s WeChat for downloads by Sunday evening Commerce Department officials also said on a call with reporters on Friday that they were preparing for a long legal battle A U.S. judge in California halted the Trump administration’s ban on downloads of the Chinese-owned app WeChat early Sunday. The move blocks the Commerce Department from forcing  Apple  and  Alphabet ’s Google to remove Tencent Holding’s WeChat for downloads by Sunday evening. U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in California  said in an order  that WeChat users who filed a lawsuit “have shown serious questions going to the merits of the First Amendment claim, the balance of hardships tips in the plaintiffs favor.“ Beeler’s preliminary injunction als...

Kim Kardashian West, Katy Perry and Leonardo DiCaprio are among celebrities taking part in a 24-hour Instagram “freeze” on Wednesday to protest against what they say is parent company Facebook’s failure to tackle violent and hateful content and election misinformation. They were among the high profile names lending their backing to the “#StopHateforProfit” movement’s latest campaign. The movement asks people to put up a message highlighting what they called the damage Facebook does but otherwise refrain from posting on Instagram for a day. “I can’t sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation – created by groups to sow division and split America apart – only to take steps after people are killed,” Kardashian West posted on her Instagram account on Tuesday. Facebook declined to comment but pointed to recent announcements about what it’s doing to limit the reach on its platform of groups that support violence and i...

Facebook announced Tuesday that it is launching a science information center to provide users with facts and resources around the climate crisis, NBC News reports. The new feature is the latest in a string of resource hubs that have enabled Facebook to set clear lines of demarcation on matters of fact and fiction. But Facebook will not change its approach to combating climate misinformation outside the hub. It will continue to apply warning labels to demonstrably false information, but will not take down posts unless they pose an immediate safety risk. Facebook has also announced that its own global operations will achieve net zero carbon emissions and be 100 percent supported by renewable energy this year. It is now aiming to reach net zero carbon emissions across its supply chain within the next decade. Read the full story on NBCNews.com from Tech News – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth https://ift.tt/35ByD8V

The owner of TikTok has chosen Oracle over Microsoft as the American tech partner that could help keep the popular video-sharing app running in the U.S., according to a source familiar with the deal who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. Microsoft announced Sunday that its bid to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations was rejected, removing the tech giant from the running a week before President Donald Trump promises to follow through with a plan to ban the Chinese-owned app in the U.S. over spying concerns. TikTok and the White House declined to comment Sunday. Oracle didn’t return a request for comment but has previously declined comment. Walmart, which had planned to partner with Microsoft on the acquisition, said Sunday it “continues to have an interest in a TikTok investment” and is talking about it with ByteDance and other parties. The Trump administration has threatened to ban TikTok by Sept. 20 and ordered ByteDance to sell its U.S. business, claiming national-securit...