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Samsung has been  struggling to collect  all shipped units from its recently  discontinued  Galaxy Note 7 lineup, but it turns out the phone-maker might’ve been recalling the wrong devices all along. Yesterday, Redditor  Dominicedcel  shared a screenshot of a safety warning he received from Samsung, kindly prompting him to turn off his Note 7 and “surrender” the device to one of the designated stores or carriers. While that’s hardly surprising given the South Korean giant has been running  special exchange   programs  for some time now, there’s one problem – Dominicedcel owns a three-year-old Note 4. The confusion is only partially Samsung’s fault though. Unlike your ordinary  Android  user, Dominicedcel has opted to flash the Note 7 ROM onto his older Note 4 device – a tweak that only a tiny fraction of smartphone enthusiasts is capable of performing. To give you the gist of it, ‘flashing’ refers to the process of swapping out the factory-set version of Android on your phone with

Messaging platform Telegram has launched Telegraph, a new tool for publishing stories on the Web without having to register for an account. It’s like the most lightweight blogging platform ever. Just visit  telegra.ph , add a title and your name, and you’re off. You can add text and format it with  Markdown , and even embed images from your computer, as well as tweets and videos from  YouTube  and Vimeo. Sharing your post is as simple as hitting ‘Publish’ and then posting the URL to social networks or sending it to your contacts via mail and messaging platforms. You can edit your post as long as your current browser session is active. Because there’s no registration, you can’t create a profile and collate your posts. There isn’t even a comments section for each article. That may make Telegraph a good choice for quickly publishing content, but it also opens up the possibility of people impersonating others just by using their names in the byline. Telegraph plays nice with  Instant V

Social network’s plan to bring 1 billion people online suffers blow as American National Transportation Safety Board examines ‘structural failure’ of Aquila drone. Facebook  has hit a hitch in its plans to use a solar-powered unmanned drone to provide internet access to developing nations, after it was revealed the American National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has opened an investigation into an accident on the drone’s first test flight in June. At the time,  Facebook described the flight as “successful” : the drone, called Aquila, stayed aloft for 96 minutes, three times the planned duration. “We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Jay Parikh, Facebook’s head of engineering and infrastructure,  wrote when Facebook revealed the test flight, in late July . “In our next tests, we will fly Aquila faster, higher and longer, eventually taking it above 60,000 feet.” In a second, more technical, blogpost published that same day, Facebook’s Martin Luis Gomez and Andrew Cox acknowledged

The Big G is brushing up its flagship Google Pixel smartphone with some much-wanted features from its  Nexus predecessor  that will aid you in quickly and easily checking your notifications. Google has rolled out an update in Canada that brings double-tap and raise-to-wake functionalities to the Pixel – including the larger XL model. This means you’ll now be able to conveniently wake your device to see alerts and notifications by simply raising your phone or double-tapping its screen. While the features were already available in previous Google devices like the  Nexus  6P, loyal customers were disappointed to see these two functionalities missing from the Pixel. Apple  recently unveiled its own  raise-to-wake functionality  for  iPhone  and  iPad  with the announcement of  iOS 10 .  Android competitors like LG and  HTC  have also added similar features to some of their latest smartphone lineups. It remains unclear when Google will release the update for US and international Pixel o

Social network’s founder and chief executive was suspended from the site due to ‘internal mistake’, losing 700,000 followers in the process In the wake of the US elections, with the rise of the “alt-right” blamed for the easy ride the far right have had on social media,  Twitter  is eager to prove that it can police its own borders. Perhaps too eager. Overnight, the social network suspended its own chief executive and co-founder,  Jack Dorsey . A couple of hours later, Dorsey was back, blaming an “internal mistake” for his account suspension, and attempting to make light of it with a call back to his, and the service’s very first tweet. 🚶🏽jack(@jack) just setting up my twttr…again (account suspension was an internal mistake) November 23, 2016 Hours later, there remain some odd effects around the suspension. Dorsey has lost almost 700,000 followers, if the public counts before and after his suspension are accurate. Dorsey’s self-imposed ban follows a more deliberate crackdo

Amidst the backlash that Facebook is facing for  providing a platform to circulate hoax news , it’s come to light that the company has quietly built a tool to suppress posts from appearing in users’ news feeds in specific geographic areas,  reports The New York Times . The tool is said to have been created with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blessings to help the social network gain entry into China, where Facebook has been  blocked since 2009 . To distance itself from the responsibility of blocking content, Facebook geared the tool for use by third parties, such as local companies in China. Those partner firms would have full control over which posts will appear in users’ feeds in the first place. The NYT notes that work on this feature gained steam last year as engineers within the company were assembled from various teams to work under Vaughan Smith, Facebook’s vice president for mobile, corporate and business development. Internally, the tool isn’t exactly a well-kept secret. Employees

For the longest time,  Google Sites  felt like the forgotten app in Google’s productivity suite. Earlier this year, though, the company  announced  that it would finally give Sites a full overhaul. Today, after a short beta, this new version of Sites is  going live  for all users. Google Sites is essentially a drag-and-drop website builder for creating both public facing web pages and intranet sites that’s deeply integrated with the rest of Google’s tools. You can easily insert documents from Google Docs, Slides, Sheets and the rest of the (unfortunately named) G Suite tools into any site, for example. It also directly integrates with Google Analytics. The new sites now also allows multiple users to collaboratively edit a site (using the same tech the company also uses in Google Docs). Admins can choose whether users are able to publish to the web or only able to make their pages available to users on their own domain. For the longest time,  Google Sites  felt like the forgotten ap

Facebook appears to be testing a new feature that lets you find nearby wireless hotspots. Not long ago, Facebook started asking Pages to list Wi-Fi locations at their physical addresses. It seems this is the backbone that the information is built on, but it might also lend itself to some inaccurate results The inclusion seems an obvious fit for a network that’s pushing Facebook live harder than ever. Without a strong internet connection, people have pretty shoddy results when trying to film live video. The more nearby locations Facebook can point you to, the better the quality of real-time information sharing, news, and viral-esque video content becomes. It’s everything Facebook wants from its Live feature. What’s not clear is if  Android  users have the feature. Those we polled didn’t, but that’s not to say there aren’t some lucky Facebook users that have it. As for  iOS , it hasn’t rolled out to everyone just yet. I don’t have it, but some of our team does. It’s really a mixed bag

Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation released their long-awaited  guidelines  for automated vehicles. On the same day of release, Obama published an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , declaring his support for self-driving car technology and stating a focus on automated vehicle safety. He also promised the public that the government would have the authority to pull unsafe self-driving cars off the streets.   See also:   Consumers’ group wants Uber to publicize self-driving tests Despite the declaration, there is still a long road ahead to gain public support for autonomous car technology. Current research indicates that not all Americans are in favor of self-driving vehicles. The public’s hesitation stems from three reasons: cost, safety and fun. The cost of automation How much will driverless vehicles cost to purchase? While a definitive amount won’t likely be released until they’re officially on the market, there are estimated prices. IHS predicts they will cost

Disney’s Moana is going to be the biggest children’s film of the year, and now the company is using it to get more young people to learn about code. The company just released  Moana : Wayfinding With Code . This free tutorial gives young people a gamified introduction to the fundamentals of software development, all through a simple drag-and-drop interface. The tutorial has you guide Moana and Maui — the two protagonists in the film — through the ocean, accomplishing tasks and battling pirates as you make your way. These are done by building small programs. To make it easier for younger users, this is done by dragging the correct block into a window, rather than typing them out. Moana: Wayfinding with Code will be available in more than 180 countries and 23 languages, including Samoan Polynesian. The tutorial is part of  Code.org’s Hour of Code initiative . This isn’t the first time Disney has created a coding tutorial. Over the past two years, Disney has launched two Hour of Code

It’s easy to hop online and find information on just about anything, but it’s also easy to find unreliable, downright wrong information, too. Google Images can help detect a  fake news story written around an image . As CNET points out, there are some fairly obvious guidelines for weeding out a lot of fake news stories, but Google Images makes it easy to see where an image originates. Just take a screenshot, drag it into  Google Images , then search for the original source. Chances are, you’ll see sources that have already found the image to be miscaptioned or just fake. For example, CNET’s Laura Hautala says she used this on a photo of Susan B. Anthony that recently went viral. Turns out, it wasn’t Susan B. Anthony. (If you search the image, you can find the  original source here , the front page of the Daily Mirror newspaper in 1910.) Of course, Google Images will simply show you other places the photo is found online, so it’s up to you to read those sources and search for the orig

Samsung really doesn’t need another line of its top-selling phones to start catching fire. After a horrendous autumn dealing with the fallout of combusting batteries in the Galaxy Note 7, Samsung is now reassuring customers that its smaller-sized, S7 range is not affected by the same issue. “Samsung stands behind the quality and safety of the Galaxy S7 family” the company said  in an official statement  released late on Friday. “There have been no confirmed cases of internal battery failures with these devices among the more than 10 million devices being used by consumers in the United States.”  Samsung’s third quarter profits dropped by 30% in part because of the effects of Samsung’s massive recall and eventual shelving of the Galaxy S7 Note.  There had been numerous reports from around the world of the Note 7 catching fire, and in mid-October the FAA, America’s civil aviation regulator, even banned the Note 7 from all U.S. airline flights. By Sept. 1st 2016, the company had alrea