Alan Martin

Facebook owns the four most popular apps of the 2010s

STOP THE PRESS! It looks like Facebook has gotten rather powerful over the last decade. App Annie has revealed the most downloaded apps of the 2010s and the entire top four is filled with Zuckerberg's omnipotent offspring. Unsurprisingly, Facebook -…

Pie is Pornhub's most popular Android OS

@alan_p_martin WHEN WE FIND OURSELVES in times of trouble, we turn to our creature comforts. In our case, that's the 2019 Pornhub insights page. Hey, don't yuck our yum. We thought we'd successfully drilled out every last nugget of tech-related gold…

The Nintendo Play Station prototype is going up for auction

IT MAY SOUND like we're deliberately winding you up when we use the phrase "Nintendo Play Station" - like lamenting the lack of Spock in the new Star Wars film - but this actually was almost a product. In the late 80s and early 90s, Nintendo and Sony…

Apple has gone and made some repairable hardware

IT'S A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE. Usually, Apple products are designed with repairability not so much as an afterthought, but as something other companies need to do. Why repair your iPhone 11? The iPhone 12 will be along in 10 months and it'll probably be a…

Wearables in 2019: Hitting the limits of watches

@alan_p_martin BACK IN 2015, people with too much time on their hands forecasted that 245 million wearables would be sold in 2019. Given only 84 million of them were sold at the time of the prediction, that felt like a stretch, and yet here we are…

Twitter bug notifies users when added to 'Private' Lists

A TWITTER BUG has come to light in the most embarrassing way imaginable. Twitter claims that 'Private Lists' are "only accessible to you", but it appears it's not averse to telling people when they've been added. So if you make a passive-aggressive…

The Pirate Bay launches its own streaming service called 'BayStream'

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE about The Pirate Bay - it's persistent. Having survived many attempts to shut it down, the whack-a-mole-like project picks itself up time and time again, and now it's moving into the world of streaming. As TorrentFreak explains,…

Unencrypted Facebook data was stolen from a parked car

REPORTING ON DATA BREACHES can feel a bit samey after a while, so it's thoroughly decent of Facebook to give us the opportunity to mix it up a bit. The company has been forced to apologise after the latest theft came not from an unprotected server,…

Google pulls Chrome update after bug hides data in other apps

GOOGLE HAS BEEN FORCED to slam the brakes on the release of Chrome 79 after app developers found an unfortunate side effect: their users' own local data was seemingly wiped. If your favourite app suddenly seemed to forget all your data, you might be…

Google is revamping how it shares news

ALTHOUGH GOOGLE NEWS' FUTURE in Europe is far from guaranteed, the search giant is continuing to work on it, and if you're in the United States, you're now being treated to a whole load of new content. On this side of the Atlantic, it's the old…

Twitter wants to fund an open source social media standard

TWITTER HAS A new madcap scheme to try and deal with its growing population of propagandists, bots and common-or-garden jerks. The company is set to fund researchers looking to decentralise social media standards for a shared open-source alternative.…

WhatsApp is giving up on some ageing phones

HORRIBLY NAMED MESSAGING APP WhatsApp is giving notice to owners of ‘vintage' smartphones that support is going to end soon. Well, we say "giving notice" - if you're a regular reader of the WhatsApp FAQ you'll have spotted it immediately,…

iPhone users are officially more horny than Android fans

@alan_p_martin LIKE PEOPLE WHO buy PlayBoy for the articles, we've been reading the alarmingly in-depth PornHub 2019 Insights page. There are some surprisingly interesting findings in there so strap on in. For starters, iPhone users appear to be more…

An ex-Apple executive claims the company spied on his phone after he left

GIVEN APPLE GOES to great lengths to boast about its privacy chops, a current ongoing court case could well end up causing the company a whole heap of reputational trouble. The case revolves around Gerard Williams III - the third in the long-running…

iOS 13.3 is here with support for security keys

ANOTHER VERSION OF iOS 13 is here, but this time around it's not just fixing bugs. For anyone who has been following as closely as we sadly have had to, iOS 13 managed to work its way through eight software updates in two months - a process that was…

Facebook tells the US, UK and Australia that it won't be breaking chat encryption

BACK IN OCTOBER, the US, UK and Australian governments sent a strongly-worded letter to Facebook. It essentially was a retreading the tired old arguments about end-to-end encryption: that it lets baddies discuss diabolical schemes in private, in a…

A fully souped-up Mac Pro will set you back over £48,000

@alan_p_martin DOES YOUR BUSINESS NEED to spend all its 2019 budget in a hurry? Apple has its own version of Brewster's Millions where you can burn through said budget in seconds by upgrading the brand new cheese grater-inspired Mac Pro with a whole…

The Open Rights Group wants answers on General Election data use

EVERY TIME YOU THINK this General Election campaign can't go any lower, you find a whole new depth for politics to sink towards. Today, it's the Open Rights Group's (ORG) turn to make a scene, and because they attack Labour, the Conservatives and the…

It's the end of the road for Google Glass Explorer Edition

THERE'S AN ELEMENT OF RISK in being an explorer, as Wikipedia grimly documents. Perhaps with hindsight, the words "Explorer Edition" that featured prominently on the first generation of Google Glass should have warned of a similarly disappointing…

FTC confirms Cambridge Analytica were wrong'uns

YOU MAY WANT to sit down before you read this. It turns out Cambridge Analytica - the company that turned mundane Facebook data into electoral gold (or at least bronze) before exploding in a fire of righteous outrage from privacy activists - weren't…