On 4 October 2021, Facebook disappeared from the Internet for most of the day. Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare explains how it happened, even if we don’t know exactly why.
Apple recently unveiled an iPad camera feature called Center Stage that keeps one or more people within the frame during video chats even when they move around. Julio Ojeda-Zapata gave Center Stage a try and compared it to smart displays from Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
As of 24 October 2021, seven-digit dialing for local calls won’t work in parts of the US due to the need to use 988 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Here’s how to find and update your stored seven-digit numbers.
After his LastPass Chrome extension disappeared in Brave, Adam Engst discovered that it had been corrupted and was easily repaired.
We have many choices now for boosting coverage and throughput on our home Wi-Fi networks. The main determinants on the path you might pick? Cost, complexity, and installation hassle.
If you’re putting up with slow or unreliable Internet connectivity and are willing to pay for better service, the Speedify VPN promises to combine multiple Internet sources into a single connection that’s faster and more reliable.
Anyone using FTP or SFTP to connect to their Web site or other servers should consider a tweaky but significant security upgrade that swaps passwords for encryption keys.
Consumer Reports and The Verge are conducting a survey of Internet access in the United States, and they’re asking users to perform speed tests and upload PDFs of their bills.
Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 365 service promises to let you stream Windows from the cloud to a Mac or iPad. It could be a win for those looking for an x86 Windows solution on an M1-based Mac.
Fed up with Verizon’s high prices and poor service, Josh Centers decided to try the AT&T network through Consumer Cellular. After a successful test, he ended up switching.
If you’re perturbed by Google’s tracking and profiling based on your searches, there’s a new alternative in town that doesn’t, like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, rely on Microsoft Bing. The new Brave Search provides fully anonymous searches using an independent search index, though it also currently checks its results for quality against Google using anonymous queries.
T-Mobile is offering free “test drives” of its 5G cellular-data service by leveraging the eSIM built into recent-model iPhones. After a quick app install, you get 30 days or 30 GB of data (whichever comes first) to try out T-Mobile. The beauty of the eSIM approach is that it doesn’t mess with your existing service.
If you’re a Mac user who wants to turn Google Docs into a standalone app using a site-specific browser, you have at least seven choices. However, as Adam Engst discovered, there’s a great deal of variability in the site-specific browser world, and a number of the options work poorly with Google Docs in particular.
Faced with the inability to find an official solution to Google blocking embedded browsers from its login page, the developers of the Gmail-specific email client Mailplane have stopped selling licenses and are offering refunds to those who purchased in the last 60 days.
Amazon will soon turn on Amazon Sidewalk, which will enable many Amazon devices to share your bandwidth with other Internet of Things devices. Here’s how to turn it off if you want to opt-out.