Cool Stuff Found

Video Shows Apple's Look Around is Much Smoother than Google Maps Street View

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple revealed that there would be a new Look Around feature in Apple Maps at iOS 13. It is similar to Street View in Google Maps. However, a new video posted on Twitter by Wordpress developer Reüel van der Steege shows that Apple may have beaten its rival. Look Around seems to be much smoother.

Twitterific 6 With Full Images, GIPHY Integration, and a Subscription
Cool Stuff Found

Twitterific 6 With Full Images, GIPHY Integration, and a Subscription

Andrew Orr ·

Twitterrific 6 brings a lot of great features and improvements. You can disable video and GIF autoplaying, or choose to have them silently autoplay. With the new integration with GIPHY, you can find just the right GIF, and refine your search with filters like Reactions, Memes, and Swear Trek. Twitter’s new quoted tweets with media is supported by Twitterrific 6. Add media to a quoted tweet, and it will display both in your timeline. A new attachment preview lets you view media and add descriptions. There are three new icons: Crow, Dove, and Neon, five new themes: Dove, Akikiki, Puffin, Falcon, and Parakeet, 12 new “Olliemoji” stickers in the iMessage sticker pack, support for the San Francisco Compact Rounded Font, a High Contrast Text option, and more. App Store: Free (Offers In-App Purchases)

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Google Builds HTTPS Directly Into Top Level Domains

Andrew Orr ·

More websites have encrypted their traffic than ever, but there is a loophole. Some use a mixture of HTTPS and unsecure HTTP. Google is closing this by building HTTPS protection directly into certain top level domains.

Which means that today, when you register a site through Google that uses «.app,» «.dev,» or «.page,» that page and any others you build off it are automatically added to a list that all mainstream browsers, including Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, and Opera, check when they’re setting up encrypted web connections. It’s called the HTTPS Strict Transport Security preload list, or HSTS, and browsers use it to know which sites should only load as encrypted HTTPS automatically, rather than falling back to unencrypted HTTP in some circumstances. In short, it fully automates what can otherwise be a tricky scheme to set up.

AdGuard 3 Brings DNS Privacy, 250,000 Filter Rules, Premium Features
Cool Stuff Found

AdGuard 3 Brings DNS Privacy, 250,000 Filter Rules, Premium Features

Andrew Orr ·

AdGuard is a content blocker for iOS that lets people block trackers and ads in Safari. Its AdGuard Pro app eventually got pulled from the App Store because of new VPN rules. AdGuard 3 brings some of those Pro features to the regular app, and some of them are locked behind a premium subscription. But Pro users can get a free 6-month license key. AdGuard 3 fixes a key issue with Safari. Safari’s maximum limit for content blockers is 50,000 rules. AdGuard now works around this by combining five blocks into one, each separately enabled in Settings and each with 50,000 rules. It also supports DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS. You can read more in the blog post. App Store: Free (Offers In-App Purchases)

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Pre-order Dead Cells on iOS Now

Charlotte Henry ·

Dead Cells is now available to pre-order for iOS,  Cult of Mac reported. The popular console game costs $9.99, or $7.99 if you order now.

Dead Cells is a roguelike-metroidvania game that has been incredibly well received by fans and critics. It boats a “very positive” rating on Steam after more than 23,500 reviews, and has sold 1 million copies on the Switch alone. If you haven’t already had a chance to play it, you’ll soon have no excuse. Having Dead Cells in your pocket means you can play it anywhere, at almost any time.

 

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App Only Bank Monzo to Launch in U.S.

Charlotte Henry ·

Monzo plans to launch in the U.S. Yahoo Finance reported. It will be the first time the app-only bank has ventured outside of the UK. It could potentially be a challenger to the forthcoming Apple Card as it offers some similar facilities.

“We’ve just crossed 2m customers, our TV ad is going great, we should have a quarter of a million new customers this month, and we’re contribution margin positive here in the UK, so it feels like the UK business is on track to be really successful,” Tom Blomfield, the CEO and founder of Monzo told Yahoo Finance UK. “Now feels like the right time to start thinking about our next market.” Blomfield said sign-up events will be held in LA, San Fransisco, New York, and other major US cities before rolling out online applications.

 

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Most Privacy Policies Exceed Reading Standards With Low Readability

Andrew Orr ·

Journalists at The New York Times read 150 privacy policies, finding most of them to be incomprehensible with low readability scores.

To be successful in college, people need to understand texts with a score of 1300. People in the professions, like doctors and lawyers, should be able to understand materials with scores of 1440, while ninth graders should understand texts that score above 1050 to be on track for college or a career by the time they graduate. Many privacy policies exceed these standards.

I wish there was a standard for privacy policies so companies can’t hide their sins behind jargon. In the mean time, I use this website.

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Telegram Says China Behind Cyber Attack

Charlotte Henry ·

Telegram said China was behind a massive cyber attack on it during recent protests in Hong Kong.  The firm’s founder Pavel Durov tweeted the accusations, Bloomberg News reported.

The encrypted messaging app said it experienced a powerful distributed denial of service attack after “garbage requests” flooded its servers and disrupted legitimate communications. Most of those queries came from Chinese internet protocol addresses, founder Pavel Durov said in a subsequent Twitter post. This case was not an exception,” he tweeted without elaborating. Hong Kong is in the throes of political unrest as the Beijing-backed government attempts to force through controversial legislation that would for the first time allow extraditions to China, which protesters fear could be used to squelch government opposition.