Apps

The block comes just one week after Russia ordered Discord to take down nearly 1,000 posts containing “illegal” content. Russia’s communications regulator says it issued a ban on the messaging platform for violating the country’s laws, according to Reuters.

If you signed up for Google’s waitlisted feature that lets you ask Gemini questions to surface photos and videos, you might be getting it soon, as 9to5Google reports that the feature seems to be going live for some who’ve joined the list.

If you’re not already on the waitlist, you can jump in the queue by signing up on Google’s site.

State Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that TikTok has violated the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act by not giving parents control of their kids’ privacy and account settings, writes Reuters. TikTok denied the allegations in a statement to The Texas Tribune.

TikTok A federal judge blocked part of the act requiring large social networks to stop harmful content from reaching minors just prior to the law taking effect on September 1st.

In its first transparency report, Telegram says it fulfilled more than a dozen requests for IP addresses or phone numbers that affected 108 users, as spotted by 404 Media.

Following the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in August, the messaging platform announced it would comply with legal requests for user data and also changed its tone on moderation.

I had no idea you could do this! Joseph Basquin points out that you can manage bookmarks by treating them like files. The drag-and-drop strategy doesn’t work everywhere, but is solid in Chrome and Safari.

If you’re a Spotlight / Alfred / Raycast user on the Mac or the Start menu search on Windows, this might be the fastest possible way to get to a website.

A Threads post that I recently saw opened my eyes to a fun trick with Apple’s iOS 18 iMessage effects: You can make little emoji / ASCII-style animations with them.

I lost the original post (if that was you, let me know!), but I immediately used the idea. If you’ve done this, feel free to share your best ones. Below is a gallery of mine.

Would your driving experience be improved if a former Orc Warchief handled the navigation? Probably not, but World of Warcraft developer Blizzard has teamed up with Waze to make that happen anyway.

The “Thrall” voice option can be activated in the latest version of Waze, alongside some nerdy extras — like new Horde and Alliance moods, and turning your mount (erm, vehicle) avatar into a Red Drake.

Here’s an idea for a Sunday afternoon project: A Reddit user managed to generate a podcast using NotebookLM — Google’s generative AI notes software — in which the fake hosts’ cheerful “banter” is about learning they’re not real and are being shut off, apparently using a prompt like the one from this thread.

You can hear more about NotebookLM in a recent Vergecast interview with one of the Google folks building it.

The New York Times reports that documents shown to potential investors in just another tech company have an interesting detail:

Roughly 10 million ChatGPT users pay the company a $20 monthly fee, according to the documents. OpenAI expects to raise that price by two dollars by the end of the year, and will aggressively raise it to $44 over the next five years, the documents said.

The proposed investment could value the company at $150 billion and give it two years to convert to a for-profit business before the funding becomes debt.

Rich Whitehouse, whose also the Head of Digital Conservation for the Video Game History Foundation, shared a screenshot on X of an Atari Jaguar emulator they’re developing for iOS, as spotted by Time Extension.

Whitehouse is hoping to have the emulator ready for release in October 2024, bringing classic titles like Tempest 2000 and Cannon Fodder to the iPhone.

After 12 years, today EA announced that its free-to-play city building mobile game is shutting down. D’oh!

We have made the difficult decision to sunset Tapped Out. In-app purchases have been disabled, and the game will be removed from the app stores October 31, 2024. You may continue playing until January 24th, 2025, at which point servers will be turned off and TSTO will not be accessible.

The feature, which gives ChatGPT a more conversational tone, is rolling out now to Plus and Team users. My colleague Kylie got a chance to check out the feature ahead of its release and said it left her feeling “equal parts amazed and uncomfortable.”