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"Stress is the common factor in many behaviours widely understood to be bad for our health - drinking too much booze, smoking cigarettes, even eating unhealthy food. (There is some evidence to suggest that cortisol - the hormone released when we feel stress - makes us crave high fat and sugary foods.) And, these days, many of life's stressors are communicated via the mobile phone. I cannot stop these stressors, but by turning off notifications, I can at least stop them ambushing me. It's an action that helps me regain some sense of control. For example, when I open up a news app, I am ready to find out what is happening in the world. It is different from being in the supermarket cheese aisle and getting an alert, where - as part of a whole barrage of communications - I may feel blindsided."

"The verification codes required for logging into a 2-step enabled account can be generated either using a mobile app - like Authy or Google Authenticator - or you can have them sent to your mobile phone via a text message or a voice call. The latter option however will not work if the mobile phone associated with your account is outside the coverage area"

Wow here is an interesting and real use of augmented reality beyond all those silly games and iPhone apps...

"Just ahead of the first anniversary of its release, Indian law enforcers are accusing the popular game of inciting violence and distracting kids from their studies, even pushing for a large-scale prohibition of the "battle-royal" style shooter. Following numerous complaints by parents, a temporary ban on the mobile app was first announced by police in metropolitan Rajkot, with some other cities multiplayer-game soon following suit. While the current ban only extends until March 30, the police and children's rights watchdog are petitioning New Delhi to ban the game altogether"

"The chatbots - BabyQ and the Microsoft-created XiaoBing - were yanked from Chinese messaging app QQ, according to the Financial Times, after they started providing answers that weren't satisfactory to the glorious party.  According to FT, BabyQ would answer the question, "Do you love the Communist Party?" with "No." XiaoBing's transgressions were a bit more direct, declaring for some users "My China dream is to go to America" and answering other patriotic questions with "I'm having my period, wanna take a rest.""

"But its "surprising accuracy" was "very concerning". Questioned about this, he said that a database using facial recognition technology was unlikely to be a service that the company would create, but went on to say that "some company … is going to cross that line"."

"We are talking about vast fields of aggregate data, the scale of which is difficult to comprehend; this data can be parsed by the artificial intelligence recommendation algorithms that Google has pioneered, and that now steer everything from employment application processes to dating apps."

"Egyptian police on Tuesday arrested a Tiktok star who has been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for her posts on social media. Haneen Hossam, a 20-year-old Cairo University student who became an influencer on video sharing app Tiktok, was sentenced in absentia on Sunday alongside four others."

"Some ideas include building mechanisms into devices or platforms that cause them to shut down automatically after two hours, or nudges that make it more difficult to keep spending money in an app. The problem is that tech companies are ruled by a profit model built on capturing more of our attention to sell to advertisers. Designing platforms so they limit the amount of time we spend on social media runs counter to this model."

"Saudi Arabia appears to be exploiting the US messaging app Snapchat to promote the image of its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, while also imposing draconian sentences on influencers who use the platform to post even mild criticism of the future king."

"Social media giant TikTok has announced it will actively ban videos that encourage tanning and add educational content to its platform after alarm from Australian medical experts over the platform's sharing of pro-tanning material. In September, Melanoma Institute Australia co-medical directors Prof Georgina Long and Prof Richard Scolyer, speaking at the National Press Club, took issue with the video-sharing app for its popular #sunburnchallenge hashtag."

"The role of social media platforms and messaging apps in Sunday's political violence in Brasília is under the spotlight after experts highlighted their use by Jair Bolsonaro supporters to question the presidential election result and organise the protests. Facebook and Instagram's owner, Meta, has said it will take down content that praises the storming of government buildings in Brazil's capital, amid claims that tech firms had not done enough to head off the attacks or quell disinformation."

"The rapid online spread of deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift has renewed calls, including from US politicians, to criminalise the practice, in which artificial intelligence is used to synthesise fake but convincing explicit imagery. The images of the US popstar have been distributed across social media and seen by millions this week. Previously distributed on the app Telegram, one of the images of Swift hosted on X was seen 47m times before it was removed."

"Disappearing messages is a feature offered by apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving users the option to have conversations that self-destruct. They're not the only platforms that have tapped into the allure of digital ephemerality. The very premise of Snapchat is that content is only viewable for a short window; Instagram stories similarly vanish after 24 hours. Those who are chronically online may remember the last day of X's own foray into expiring content called "fleets", when countless users threw whatever remaining posting-caution they had to the wind to share revealing, horny or outright unhinged posts for one final hurrah before the feature itself vanished. I can't tell you what people posted or link you to evidence of this because, well, it's gone."

"But an analysis of the app's code found that it does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk; it also shares information with the police, setting "a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides"."

"THE DIGITAL DIVIDE The fear of losing control aside, many hawkers also have to deal with another major challenge: Digital technology, which entails some basic competence in logic and literacy - much to the horror of those who only received some primary school education, typical of the older generation of hawkers."

"But whether we trust Apple might be beside the point, if we don't yet know whether we can trust ourselves. It took eight years from the launch of the iPhone for screen time controls to follow. What will human interaction look like eight years after smartglasses become ubiquitous? Our cyborg present sneaked up on us as our phones became glued to our hands. Are we going to sleepwalk into our cyborg future in the same way?"

"However, once technology is released it's like herding cats. Deepfakes are a moving feast and as soon as moderators find a way of detecting them, people will find a workaround."

"Twitter sent a letter this week to the small start-up company, Clearview AI, demanding that it stop taking photos and any other data from the social media website "for any reason" and delete any data that it previously collected, a Twitter spokeswoman said. "