News

YouTube has paid out more than $30 billion to content creators over the past three years

YouTube has paid out more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media organizations over the last three years, according to a new letter published by CEO Susan Wojcicki. In 2019 alone, YouTube contributed an estimated $16 billion to the US gross domestic product (GDP). According to Oxford Economics, that’s roughly equivalent to 345,000 full-time […]

News

Twitter is making it easier for researchers to study its platform

Twitter on Tuesday announced a significant shift in the type of data it makes available for free to third-party academic researchers interested in studying user behaviors and trends related to online discourse. Now, Twitter says it will no longer require researchers pay for premium or enterprise developer access and will instead make the “full history […]

News

iOS 14.4 rolls out

Apple has started rolling out iOS 14.4 to iPhone and iPad users. While not as a meaty of an update as iOS 14.3, it comes with a handful of small enhancements. There’s a lot to play with in the latest iOS 14.4 build. For HomePod users, there’s new audio, video, and haptic effects related to […]

News

Spotify dabbles in audiobooks by offering nine public-domain works

Spotify isn’t limiting its audio ambitions to podcasts and music. Today the company announced it’s furthering its audiobook experiments with the release of nine new audiobooks available exclusively in the app. The nine new books are public-domain titles like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Naturally, Spotify has again recruited […]

News

Italian watchdog tells TikTok to block users whose ages can’t be verified

Italy’s data privacy authority has ordered video sharing app TikTok to temporarily block the accounts of any users whose ages can’t be confirmed, Reuters reported. The order comes after the death of a 10-year-old girl in Palermo, whose parents told authorities their daughter was participating in a “blackout challenge” she saw on the app. The […]

Space

SpaceX launches a record 143 satellites into orbit

SpaceX has smashed a record for sending spacecraft into orbit. The company successfully launched its Transporter-1 mission carrying an unprecedented 143 satellites, including 133 commercial and government customer vehicles and 10 Starlink machines. The Falcon 9 rocket, which supported Crew Dragon Demo-2, landed aboard a drone ship in the Atlantic. This was SpaceX’s first dedicated […]

News

Apple’s next MacBook Air said to be thinner and lighter with MagSafe charging

According to Bloomberg’s well-connected Mark Gurman, the new MacBook Air will be thinner and lighter than its predecessor. One possible technique being discussed to make the system smaller is to shrink the bezels around the display. Gurman said Apple was even considering making a 15-inch MacBook Air, but decided against it for the next generation. […]