Category: Tech Made Simple

Energizer just keeps on Going… and Going… with their Smartphones

Energizer is a name everyone associates with batteries, not smartphones, so it may surprise you to learn they’ve been quietly dipping its toes into the Android smartphone waters for awhile. But now it looks like they’re ready to make a splash, because this year at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019, Energizer is set to debut […]

At Home DNA Takes a Bite Out of Crime

FamilyTreeDNA, a popular at-home DNA test, is working with the FBI to help the agency solve violent crimes, the company acknowledged in a statement. The policy appears to go beyond the privacy rules generally laid out by other major DNA testing companies.   In its statement, the company said the laboratory that performs DNA tests […]

Snopes Breaks Up with Facebook

Snopes, a fact-checking organization, announced on Friday its decision to end its partnership with Facebook, which has been ramping its efforts to curb misinformation on its services since the 2016 U.S. election.   Facebook and Snopes had been working together since December 2016 to fact check content on the social network, reportedly paying the debunking […]

Apple Puts the Smackdown on Facebook Apps

Things are getting more heated between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.   According to TechCrunch, Facebook had long been paying people $20 a month to download an app called Facebook Research that essentially gave the company full access to collect data from their phones, including which websites they visited, the messages […]

Amazon’s Rekognition Still Showing Signs of Racial Bias

As facial recognition systems become more common, Amazon has emerged as a frontrunner in the field, courting customers around the US, including police departments and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But experts say the company is not doing enough to allay fears about bias in its algorithms, particularly when it comes to performance on faces […]

T-Mobile’s Coolpad Surfs Service to Rural Areas

T-Mobile announced the launch of the Coolpad Surf, a 600MHz mobile hot spot that, aside from having a super cool name, is designed to bring greatly improved coverage service to their long ignored and underserved rural areas. It’s the first mobile hot spot to support Band 71, or 600MHz LTE, which T-Mobile recently won the […]

Netflix vs. Hulu

In light of the fact that Netflix has announced its subscription prices are going up and Hulu’s are actually going down, The Verge just published a side-by-side ratings comparison of these two mega-popular subscription streaming services to help us all decide which is really the better deal.   Least Expensive: Hulu (Sort of) Hulu’s traditional […]

Facebook’s plan to get those Teens… LOL!

Facebook’s seemingly never-ending quest to make itself appealing to younger, teenage smartphone owners has now resulted in an app called LOL, a simple piece of software featuring a feed of memes and GIFs categorized by topics like “animals” and “pranks,” and Facebook is currently testing it with 100 high school users (with the consent of […]

Verizon’s Free Spam Protection

Verizon has just announced that it will offer free spam and robocall protection to its subscribers starting this March.  The “Call Filter” service, which was previously available as a $3 add-on, will be offered for free to all Verizon customers with phones that support the features, including iPhones and Android phones. It’s about time: competing […]