Facebook is working on a new feature to hook in the one market that they’ve struggled to dominate: teenagers. ‘High School Networks for Messenger’ appears to be its latest attempt to drag post-millennials to its platform, according to sources who shared screenshots with TNW. High School Networks appears to be a way for students to connect with their peers at the same school and/or taking the same classes. The details for the feature are limited at the moment, as the feature appears to be hidden and is yet to go live in the latest version of Messenger in the App Store.
Another day, another bit of OnePlus 6 news. A day after we learned the phone would likely be water-resistant, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau took it upon himself to share the first images we’ve seen taken using the new camera. Lau shared the photos on Chinese platform Weibo. The photos are a set of simple daytime images taken in Standford, California. Have a gander:
It’s a good time to get into VR gaming. We’re finally starting to see some premium titles launching on PC platforms, such as Skyrim VR and L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files. In order to play them you’ll need a fairly powerful gaming rig, and if you’re in the market and on a budget, Dell’s Inspiron 5680 is definitely worth a look. This new addition to Dell’s lineup is intended reach gamers who aren’t ready (or can’t afford) to dive in to its Alienware brand yet. But make no mistake, the 5680 is here to game. It’s got bright LED lights that shine out of its huge tower, and it’s upgradeable like its more expensive cousins.
The Ancient Greeks were one of the first peoples to examine the nature of reality. Parmenides, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, talks about reality as a phenomenon in which change is impossible and existence is timeless, necessary and uniform. Our conception of reality has most definitely come a long way since then. One of the big questions we find ourselves asking in the modern era is, ‘is reality a singular phenomenon or are there multiple realities?’ Moreover, ‘can we create our own?’ Virtual Reality (VR) is perhaps the closest we have come to create an artificial world that we can interact with in a similar way to reality.
From the permissioned blockchain networks of IBM to the newly introduced Hashgraph technology, some of the largest technology and financial conglomerates have been testing the applicability and potential of blockchain with the Internet of Things (IoT) market since the beginning of 2016. Yet, with nearly $4 billion invested in blockchain research and development, not a single company has been able to demonstrate the successful integration of blockchain technology with IoT. In order to integrate with IoT, blockchain developers must treat each device as a unique user of the blockchain; as such, every piece of data transmitted from the IoT device is processed by the blockchain network as a transaction.
The Lightning Network might still be in its infancy stages, but it already has more active nodes running than Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Statistics show that the Lightning Network has taken a slight lead over BCH when it comes to the total number of nodes running on their networks. The data shows there are currently 1,347 Lightning nodes compared to Bitcoin Cash’s 1,286.
In July last year, Chinese phone company Doogee released the Mix — an intriguing, if not flawed, stab at a bezelless smartphone. Not long after, it released its successor, the Mix 2. This handset feels vastly more premium than its predecessor, and it does this while improving on many of the flaws of the original. I got the opportunity to spend a few weeks playing around with it, and quickly became a fan. Design Over the past year, every phone manufacturer (and their aunt) has jumped onto the bezelless bandwagon, and Doogee is no exception. As mentioned, early in 2017 it released the original Doogee Mix, which offered an almost borderless experience by making some pretty drastic compromises (namely placing the front-facing camera at the bottom of the screen, thereby forcing you to rotate your phone every time you take a selfie).
The blockchain space is truly full of surprises. It appears that Roberto Escobar, the biological brother of notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, has launched his own cryptocurrency: Diet Bitcoin (DDX). A hard fork of the Bitcoin network, the new currency promises to offer a faster and lighter alternative to Bitcoin. Roberto’s eponymous venture investment firm, Escobar Inc, is currently running an initial coin offering (ICO), where users can buy the token at a 96-percent discount: down to $2 from $50. A spokesperson for Escobar Inc has since exclusively confirmed Roberto’s involvement in the project in an email to TNW.
You might have missed a one-off opportunity to become a cryptocurrency multi-billionaire. It appears popular exchange desk Coinbase suffered from a flaw in its Ethereum smart contract setup, which made it possible to reward yourself with a virtually infinite sum of ETH, according to newly surfaced vulnerability report. The jarring vulnerability was discovered by Dutch fintech firm VI Company, which reported the issue to Coinbase back in late December last year. The exchange desk fixed the issue a month later in January and has since rewarded the Dutch company with a $10,000 bounty. “By using a smart contract to distribute [ETH] over a set of wallets you can manipulate the account balance of your Coinbase account,” the researchers wrote in a HackerOnereport submitted to the exchange desk.
