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This smart ring lets you remote-control Zoom and PowerPoint

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In the age of remote work, a smart ring for productivity such as the Genki Wave seems like a clever idea. Instead of making you search for the right keyboard shortcuts to unmute yourself on Zoom or turn your laptop’s volume down, the Genki Wave for Work  ($149, with a launch price of $99) lets you wear those same shortcut buttons and more right on your index finger. And since you’re not working in an actual office, no one’s going to judge you for wearing an unashamedly dorky accessory. [Photo: courtesy of Genki] But the more I used the Genki Wave myself, the more disappointed I became by all the things it wouldn’t let me do. While the idea of wearable computer shortcut buttons has some promise, Genki’s approach doesn’t live up to its potential yet. Not your typical ring The Genki Wave is technically not a new product. It debuted last year as a wearable MIDI controller for musicians, the kind you’d use to quickly trigger a drum fill or dial down the volume. But during the pandemic, Genki Instruments saw a chance to pivot to a broader audience by using the Wave to help people deal with an onslaught of Zoom calls and remote PowerPoint presentations. To that end, the ring is decidedly utilitarian, with one half containing its eight-hour battery and electronics, and the other half comprised of a Velcro loop. You wear the ring on your index finger, and the chunkier half is supposed to stick out to the side, letting you easily press its three rubberized buttons with your thumb. The Wave uses Bluetooth to connect with your computer, and it has a companion app to control what its buttons do. Despite its bulk, I found the Wave to be fairly comfortable. I wore it loosely enough to pull on or off without undoing the Velcro strap, and at one point I forgot that I was still wearing it after getting up from my computer. [Photo: courtesy of Genki] Out of the box, the ring is most helpful for video calls in apps such as Zoom or Google Meet. Read More …

PayPal now lets you spend cryptocurrency at millions of U.S. merchants

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PayPal now allows payment for goods and services with cryptocurrency, with a twist: Merchants receive cold, hard, American cash, less PayPal’s standard merchant fee. Starting with U.S. customers and merchants, the global payment-processing firm’s new “Checkout with Crypto” provides the most mainstream conduit to convert value in bitcoins and three other digital currencies into government-backed dollars to complete purchases. “What I love about this for the consumer is that their crypto holdings are just like any other funding instrument inside the PayPal wallet, whether it be your credit card, your debit card, your balance that you may have. . . . You just select whatever funding source you want,” says PayPal CEO Dan Schulman Read More …

Hackers put a back door in a code library that powers 79% of websites

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On Sunday some malicious actors tried to install a back door into the PHP code library, a server-side programming language that powers 79% of sites on the internet, including Facebook and Wikipedia. The attack recalled one of the worst government hacks in history , on SolarWinds, the IT management software used by many government agencies and large U.S. companies. The SolarWinds attackers—widely thought to be employed by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service—planted malware in the SolarWinds system that sends out updates to end users. As in the SolarWinds attack, the PHP hackers targeted the code base of a widely used library so that the changes they made would impact instances of the software run by end users. The hackers attempted to install a back door that would have allowed them to remotely execute changes to the PHP code after it was put into use by websites. Since they might have activated malware, the hackers may have been able to take control of websites, freeze them, or take them offline. The PHP exploit was first reported by the BleepingComputer blog. The hackers made two additions to the PHP Git repository on Sunday. The attackers signed the first addition using the name of the PHP library’s creator, Rasmus Lerdorf, and the second was made using the name of well-known PHP maintainer Nikita Popov, likely to avoid suspicion. They also tried to disguise the major change to the code base they proposed as something trivial by labeling the additions “Fix Typo.” The work of the hackers was discovered and reversed during a standard review process on Sunday. Still, this was no trivial event. Popov said in an email to the PHP developer community that Sunday’s incident was likely the result of the git.php.net server being compromised, rather than just a single Git account. The PHP maintainers have now decided to migrate the official PHP source code library over to GitHub. “We have decided that maintaining our own git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk, and that we will discontinue the git.php.net server,” Popov explains in the email. Read More …

Microsoft acquiring Discord for $10B would be a huge bet on gaming—and a smart one

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While Zoom has become the be-all and end-all of staying connected over the past year, for gamers the first point of call has been Discord. This free voice, video, and text communication service may not have stolen headlines like Zoom, but the platform has seen user growth surge over the last year. Now, it has around 150 million users relying on the service to chat, meet, share, and play games. This growth appears to have caught the eye of Microsoft, with recent reports suggesting that it is interested in acquiring Discord for the colossal price of nearly $10 billion. Assessing the interest The driving force behind Microsoft’s interest in Discord may be that it would increase the company’s exposure to the global gaming market. Although Discord is not a developer or a platform where people directly play games, the service has become a central social hub for millions of gamers. If the acquisition occurs, Microsoft will likely seek to embed Discord and its millions of active users into an ecosystem of Microsoft products. The most comparable move would be Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch for just under $1 billion in 2014 . It was mutually beneficial: Amazon was able to incentivize Twitch’s users to sign up for Prime while encouraging Prime subscribers to watch and follow users on Twitch. Twitch now hosts 91% of all video game streaming , dwarfing competition from YouTube and Facebook, and attracts more than 2 million viewers at any given time of any given day. Microsoft will likely look to create a similar symbiotic relationship between Microsoft Game Pass—a monthly subscription that gives users access to a vast library of games—and Discord’s premium service Nitro, which provides an enhanced experience through upgraded video and upload functions and access to a global bank of emojis and avatars. The tech giant is also building an online gaming service, Project xCloud, that will let users stream Xbox games to any device with a screen and an internet connection. This could one day make expensive hardware, such as consoles, unnecessary. Microsoft could potentially integrate this service within Discord, since the platform already offers popular streaming options for users, paving the way for the post-console era of gaming. But if it is to succeed, Microsoft will need to learn from the mistakes of the past. Understanding the challenges Microsoft acquired Mixer, an upstart competitor to Twitch, in 2017 and spent as much as $30 million on deals with high-profile streamers such as Ninja to lure users to the platform. But the service failed to attract viewers and streamers in equal measure. Compounded by a lackluster user experience, it quickly ran out of steam and was shut down permanently last year . Read More …

Robinhood makes Wall Street feel like a game to win—not a place where you can lose your savings

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Wall Street has long been likened to a casino . Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering , makes the comparison more apt than ever . That’s because the power of the casino is the way it makes people feel like gambling their money away is a game. Casinos are full of mood lighting , fun noises, and other sensory details that reward gamblers when they place coins in slots. Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool. The color palette of red and green is associated with mood, with green having a calming effect and red increasing arousal, anger, and negative emotions . Picking stocks can seem like a fun lottery of scratching off the winning ticket; celebratory confetti drops from the top of the screen for the new users’ first three investments. But just as people can lose a lot of money gambling at the casino, the same thing can happen when you trade stocks and bonds—sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost $750,000. I study how people behave inside game worlds and design classroom games . Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions. Games explained Generally speaking, games—whether played on a board, among children or with a computer— are voluntary activities that are structured by rules and involve players competing to overcome challenges that carry no risk outside of their virtual world. Read More …