Facebook Brings Messenger app for children

Facebook has just released a new Facebook Messenger app, designed for parents to keep tabs on their kids.

In addition to our research with thousands of parents, we’ve engaged with over a dozen expert advisors in the areas of child development, online safety and children’s media and technology who’ve helped inform our approach to building our first app for kids, 

Facebook’s Loren Cheng writes, We’ve also had thought-provoking conversations around topics of responsible online communication, parental controls and much more with organizations like National PTA and Blue Star Families, where we heard firsthand how parents and caregivers approach raising children in today’s digitally connected world.

Facebook Messenger for Kids is much like the regular app, with limitations. Children are managed entirely by their parents, this means that parents have control over whom their children communicate with.

Gifs (filtered), stickers (filtered) and emoji are all present. and you get the usual text chat and video chat as well.

There aren’t any ads in this app, and Facebook is promising that it won’t be selling your children’s app data anytime soon, which is good news for privacy hawks.

As social media use is expanding, children are more likely to start using Facebook and other messaging apps before the age of 13. While parents could always try to wholesale restrict their children from social media, this often backfires and simply leads to hidden, unrestricted, social media use instead.

Facebook’s new app strikes a balance between total censorship, and total freedom, and allows parents to keep their children on a leash.

The firm has rolled this app out already to the US on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, but will be rolling it out to the rest of the world as well as the Google Play and Amazon Stores shortly.

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Nokia is the only smartphones brand with superfast Android updates

As soon as the HMD Global has started manufacturing Nokia’ smartphones, the brand name seems to be getting public interest all over the globe. Nokia has proved the availability of the latest version of Android devices even for its budget phone like Nokia 3.

Remember when the new Nokia promised that all of its Android devices will be upgraded to Android Oreo? Well, it sure looks like the company is ready to deliver rather a fast Android 8.0 updates even for the budget phones, putting all the other device makers to shame.

Also Read:Windows Phone Most Secure Smartphone OS

I am not saying that Nokia phones are very much competitive as compared to other budget-friendly devices which are also offering a handful of features but to me, Nokia phones’ legendary design is pure love. Nokia’s Android smartphones with sleek and stylish design, especially Nokia 5 and Nokia 6 could be the ultimate competition in emerging markets.

According to Forbes, the long-term commitment to support will have been noted by industry watchers, and while it may not directly translate to many sales, it increases the confidence in HMD Global’s plans. The Android-powered Nokia handsets are all running as close to a ‘pure’ version of Android as possible.

If your phones carry a more updated version of Android then your device is more secure for vulnerabilities. The more updated version of Android protects your device from malware and security threats. Nokia is also eager about the new updates of Android as they have declared in a report that iOS and Windows are more secure than Android.

Recently, Nokia has also announced that it will test Android Oreo beta update on Nokia 6. Other smartphones manufacturer are slow in this field especially Samsung, who wait out for a stable version of Android updates even for their flagships.

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Nokia Intelligence report says Android the least secure OS

Google’s Android, the most generally used working framework in cell phones today, isn’t as secure as you think. As indicated by Nokia’s 2017 Threat Intelligence Report, Android gadgets are substantially more liable to end up noticeably infected contrasted with those on other operating systems. As the discussion with the new update in of Apple’s iOS 11 causing inconvenience for some users, perhaps because of a bizarre bug in iOS 11.1 which is making individuals insane. Presently another report by Nokia has uncovered that Android has even crossed Apple in giving a minimum secure platform.

As indicated by the report, around 68.50% gadgets of Nokia running on the Android stage got infected by malware and security dangers in the previous year. Windows operating system secures the second position, representing 27.96% of infections while around 3.54% were running iOS.

The figures accumulate information gathered from Nokia’s security product, NetGuard which was conveyed for mobile network administrators and used to screen network traffic from more than 100 million gadgets crosswise over North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, barring India and China.

Nokia is taking more precaution now that it took up Android

Nokia says the general cell phone infection rate was 0.68 percent, while the figure was around 0.2 percent for Windows gadgets associated with mobile systems. With the advent of Nokia on Android platform, it has been ceaselessly updating its gadgets to stay secure from any conceivable threats.

As assessed by Nokia in the report, Android malware has developed by 53% over the past year. The report likewise advised users to know, as their own data could be spilled to non-allowed applications. It isn’t normal from a tech monster like Google that its forums are very helpless against malware.

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Microsoft Announced Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

You’re standing in line at a coffee shop. Your right thumb is stre-t-ch-ing to drag out words on your phone’s keyboard while you squint to read the text on the web form you’re filling out.

It’s amazing what’s possible today—but don’t you wish your phone could magically send that task to your Windows 10 PC where you could luxuriate in a big screen and hardware keyboard?

With the new preview apps we’re launching for iOS and Android – you can. Introducing Microsoft Edge for iOS/Android and Microsoft Launcher for Android, two apps designed to make it easy to move what you’re working on between your phone and PC.

Microsoft is excited to continue the work we announced at Build to make Windows 10 PCs work great with your phone. Microsoft Edge for iOS is available starting today in preview, with Microsoft Edge for Android available soon in preview. And, Microsoft Launcher is available starting today in preview as well. Continue on PC functionality in both apps comes with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android

One of the most common requests we hear from people who use Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 PCs is “we want our browser experience to move to our phones”. You spoke, we listened.

Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android brings familiar features like your Favorites, Reading List, New Tab Page and Reading View across your PC and phone, so, no matter the device, your browsing goes with you. But what makes Microsoft Edge really stand out is the ability to continue on your PC, which enables you to immediately open the page you’re looking at right on your PC—or save it to work on later.

Beginning today, iOS users can test the preview app via Apple TestFlight, and Android users can sign up to be one of the first to test the preview app which will be available soon. Go here to sign up to test the Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android preview apps.

A few more details about the preview: Initially Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android will launch only in US-English, but we’ll ramp to other countries/languages as we expand the preview. And some features—like roaming passwords and support for iPads/Android tablets—aren’t available at preview launch but will come in the future.

Microsoft Launcher for Android

Android phones have a feature that iPhones don’t – they allow customization of the “launcher” that’s displayed when you push the phone’s home button. How nice! Today, we are also launching a preview release of our new Microsoft Launcher for Android. We think it’s the most beautiful (based on Fluent design), customizable, powerful launcher available. With Microsoft Launcher, your recent photos, documents and more can all Continue on PC as well.

And – just like on Windows 10 – with Microsoft Launcher you can put icons of your favorite people right on the home screen so they’re quickly and easily available.

The Feed: Info at your Fingertips. With just a quick swipe-to-the-right, Microsoft Launcher offers a tailored feed of your important events, top news, recent activities, favorite people and most frequently used apps.

Beautiful and customizable. Launcher has wide-ranging ways to let you personalize your phone, it’s easy to set colors of backgrounds—and our new ‘gesture’ support will let even hard-core customizers create the environment that makes them most productive.

Continue on PC. And of course, Microsoft Launcher has been designed to make it easy for you to seamlessly continue what you’re working on – whether it’s photos, documents and more—on your PC.

Microsoft Launcher represents the “graduation” of the 4.6-star rated “Arrow Launcher” project that was developed in our Garage – we’re making a big update to Arrow and changing its name. Everyone on the Arrow Launcher beta will automatically get the Microsoft Launcher today, and any other Android users can join the preview of Microsoft Launcher beginning today as well.

Go here to access the Microsoft Launcher preview. 

Microsoft hopes Windows Insiders will try these preview apps alongside their Windows 10 PCs and provide feedback and ways to make them even better. As has been our approach with Windows 10, we’ll continue to try new things, learn and build the best experiences possible. They look forward to bringing these experiences more broadly to you later this year.

Source: Microsoft Blog

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Firefox Quantum to Be Released in November, Beta & Developer Edition Available Now

The folks over at Mozilla have been busy lately with a number of different projects under the Firefox umbrella. Earlier today we talked about how an upcoming update to Firefox will be dropping support for Flash and now we have information about the browser engine they’ve been working on. What was previously known as Project Quantum is now slated for release in version 57 of Firefox and should make its way to the stable branch in the middle of November.

Project Quantum is something Mozilla has been working on for a while and it’s something we touched on last month as well. A lot of the work done by web browsers today is thanks to the rendering engine they use and that’s what Mozilla has been attempting to improve. With Project Quantum, the goal is to replace some of the components of their Gecko engine with code that has been pulled from the Servo engine. The Servo engine is far from complete, but Mozilla has been working to bring some of its best features to Gecko.

Mozilla feels the transition to Firefox Quantum is such a big leap that you’ll instantly feel the difference when loading up your favorite websites. A popular way of measuring the speed of a website is with the Speedometer 2.0 benchmark (that is currently still in development). Using this as a base for comparison, the company says Firefox Quantum is about twice as fast as Firefox was a year ago. They’ve even released a video of the beta so you can see how it compares to Chrome.

We recommend you check out their blog for the technical details of the changes that went into this new update. If you’re not interested in that though, you should be aware that this update is scheduled to be released via the stable branch of Firefox on November 14th. However, you can try it in Beta on desktop, Android, and iOS if you’d like, while web developers are encouraged to check out the Developer Edition version here.

Credits: Morzilla Blog

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