Finally, someone to beat tiktok..? Also from China tho TikTok has a new competitor: Zynn, a nearly button-for-button clone of TikTok that differentiates itself with one key twist — it pays users to sign up, watch videos, and convince others to follow suit. The app launched at the beginning of May, and it’s now the number one free app in Apple’s App Store and in the top 10 on Google’s Play Store theverge.com/2020/5/29/21274994/zynn-tiktok-clone-pay-watch-videos-kuaishou-bytedance-rival

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Just stop using FB's WhatsApp, if you care about privacy Signal announces new face-blurring tool for Android and iOS Encrypted messaging app Signal has announced a new face-blurring tool that will be incorporated into the latest Android and iOS versions of the software. Users sharing pictures through the app will be able to quickly blur faces, adding another layer of privacy to pictures, though not necessarily hiding the subject’s identity completely. In a blog post announcing the update, Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike linked the update to the worldwide protests against racism and police violence sparked by the killing of George Floyd by law enforcement. These protests have led to record downloads for Signal, which uses end-to-end encryption to make messages harder to intercept. “We’ve also been working to figure out additional ways we can support everyone in the street right now,” writes Marlinspike. “One immediate thing seems clear: 2020 is a pretty good year to cover your face.” When you take a picture through Signal and select the Blur option in the toolbar, the app will automatically detect any faces it spots in your image. If it misses any, users can simply blur out faces by hand, or blur any other features they want to hide. All processing is done on-device, meaning uncensored images never leave the user’s phone. Although blurring faces in photographs certainly makes pictures more private, it’s by no means a foolproof way of anonymizing images and hiding someone’s identity. Some blurring and pixellation methods can be reversed with the right tools, for example. And anyone seeking to identify someone in a picture can work from other information, such as clothing and tattoos, which can be compared with other, un-blurred images. Even if attendees at a protest, for example, hide the identity of fellow protestors, that doesn’t mean other groups and individuals will do the same. Surveillance cameras, police body cameras, and press photographers are all capturing images. Ultimately, the best way to obscure your identity is to take matters into your own hands and wear a mask.

New macOS update time! macOS 10.15.5 is out now with a new battery health feature Apple released macOS Catalina 10.15.5 today, adding a new battery health feature and new FaceTime options. That battery health feature could extend the life of your MacBook’s battery. Lithium-ion batteries, like the ones in a MacBook, slowly age over time, which means they typically begin to hold less of a charge as the computer gets older. Apple’s new battery health feature in macOS is designed to slow that aging process so that your battery will hold more charge over a longer period of time. Here’s how the feature works behind the scenes, as described by my colleagues Dieter Bohn and Jacob Kastrenakes last month: ...in certain cases, seeing 100 percent battery life in your menu bar may not necessarily mean it’s the maximum your battery could charge to. Instead of meaning that it’s charged to 100 percent of what the battery could take, it will now mean it’s charged to 100 percent of what the battery should take to maximize its lifespan. The new battery health feature will be turned on by default for new MacBooks that ship with macOS 10.15.5 or after you upgrade to macOS 10.15.5 if you’re using a MacBook that supports Thunderbolt 3 (which is any MacBook Pro released in 2016 or later or any MacBook Air released in 2018 or later). macOS 10.15.5 will also let you turn off the feature in group FaceTime calls that changes the size of the portrait of the current speaker, adds controls to let you better calibrate the Pro Display XDR, and has other bug fixes and improvements.

Android 11 is looking to be a huge design overhaul power button menu leaks, showing new smart home Quick Controls Images from leaked developer documentation have just given us our best look yet at Android 11’s new power button menu. The menu can include a series of new smart home shortcuts called “Quick Controls,” which can control everything from smart lights to locks and thermostats, alongside payment options and the standard “Power off” and “Restart” buttons. The images were tweeted out by Mishaal Rahman from XDA-Developers, who credits Twitter user @deletescape as the source of the leaked documents containing the images. We’ve known about these shortcuts since at least March when XDA-Developers reported on their existence, but these latest screenshots give us a better idea of how the overall menu will look. The existing “Power off,” “Restart,” “Screenshot,” and “Emergency” buttons have been relocated to the top of the screen above a shortcut to Google Pay, similar to the one that was added to the Google Pixel back in March. The bulk of the screen, however, is taken up with these smart home controls. Android Police reports that tapping each of them will reportedly toggle the corresponding smart home gadget on or off, and long presses will either give you more options or take you directly to the relevant smart home app. As Rahman notes, one of the images shows that a smart home camera feed could even be embedded directly into this menu. Google was due to officially unveil Android 11 on June 3rd, but it decided to delay the announcement over the weekend. It’s currently unclear when the event will be rescheduled.