Uber tweaks its app to improve those pesky pickups

Uber has announced two new features that are meant to improve communication between riders and drivers and make pickups less stressful. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Uber is constantly tweaking its app and rolling out new devices in its crusade to perfect those pesky pickups. The first change is a series of notifications meant…

Popcorn Time Is Back to Help You Stream Movies and TV Shows

Screenshot: Brendan HesseFor those who are healthy-yet-stuck-inside due to the oronavirus restrictions, it’s sort of like the universe gave us an excuse to binge-watch our favorite movies and TV shows (or catch up on our gaming backlogs). Most of us will probably fire up one of the many paid streaming services to get our content…

How to Enable DNS Over HTTPS in Your Web Browser

Mozilla has started rolling out DNS over HTTPS for all Firefox users, a solid security change that’s meant to address the issue of third parties spying on the websites you’re visiting. Normally, when you type a website into your browser’s address bar and hit Enter, your browser uses DNS to map the domain name to…

How Do I Switch From One 2FA Authentication App to Another?

Tech 911Tech 911Do you have a tech question keeping you up at night? We’d love to answer it! Email david.murphy@lifehacker.com with “Tech 911” in the subject line.I stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest this week when I suggested that people should switch from Google Authenticator to another two-factor authentication app on Android. I…

How did we get to 5G? The history of mobile networks

2G brought digital networks and the first data connections. Though they were a trickle by today’s standards, these speeds in the kilobits-per-second were revolutionary for the time, frequently faster than the dial-up most people in the US were still using. 3G arrived with a significant speed boost, and pushed forward the multimedia web we use…

Drones can navigate like bats using four mics and a speaker

The drone currently has to be stationary to get a feel for its environment, but the scientists hope to use the technology mid-flight. The team will also look at situations where the drone might be restricted.If this system is available worldwide, it could lead to far-reaching improvements. Drones wouldn’t be quite so reliant on cameras…

San Diego police ban Clearview AI’s facial recognition tool

Clearview AI’s platform has raised a number of ethical concerns. Police can theoretically use photos and videos from security cameras to discover your online presence, including details you might not have realized were public. There’s also evidence to suggest some (if not many) facial recognition algorithms have gender and race biases. And that’s assuming the…