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Incogni is one great way to keep your personal info and address private. It’s now 55% off.

The refurbished Apple AirPods Pro 2 are on sale from Best Buy with a $100 discount. Here’s your chance to get the wireless earbuds for an affordable price.

Is $20,000 too much to pay for a soundbar? Possibly. But wait till you hear the Dynaudio Symphony Opus One.

Leaks suggest Nvidia is collaborating with Lenovo on a powerful new chip that will be featured in its Yoga line of laptops.

Google and Mercedes are teaming up to integrate the former’s Gemini AI with the latter’s in-car navigation system and assistant.

Have you received a mail delivery alert on your iPhone asking you to respond with a Y to activate a link? It’s a phishing scam. Here’s you can handle it easily.

With TikTok likely just days away from being banned in the US, the app’s users are pushing some previously little-known apps to the top of Apple and Google’s stores. The app that has so far seemed to benefit the most is a Chinese social media app called “RedNote” or Xiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book.” 

The TikTok-like app for shortform video is currently the number one app in Apple’s App Store and is in the 34th spot in Google’s Play Store. RedNote has been gaining popularity as many TikTok creators have begun posting about their experiences trying out the Chinese app. Meanwhile, over on RedNote, a number of creators have shared videos about welcoming “TikTok refugees” to the service.

The app is set up very much like TikTok, with the ability to vertically scroll through feeds of shortform videos based on your interests. Much of the app’s interface is in Chinese, so it can be a bit confusing to navigate, though there are some helpful videos on TikTok that explain how to change the app’s language to English.

While RedNote seems to have come out of nowhere, the app has been popular in China for years. CNBC reports that the more than decade-old app is seen as a challenger to ByteDance’s Douyin and e-commerce giant Alibaba, with about 300 million users.

RedNote isn’t the only app that’s been boosted by anxious TikTok users. Another ByteDance app, Lemon8, is also trending in both Apple and Google’s stores, where it’s in the second and first spot, respectively. But while TikTok itself has at times boosted the app, Lemon8 will likely face the same fate as TikTok should the Supreme Court side with the Biden Administration, which seems likely.

Another video app called Flip, which describes itself as “where social meets shopping,” is also trending in both app stores. The app, from Los Angeles-based Humans, Inc., features shortform videos and an in-app storefront. It’s currently ranked number 14 in Google’s store and number four in Apple’s. The company was valued at more than $1 billion last year, according to Crunchbase.

Another app that has seemingly benefited from the impending TikTok ban is something called “ReelShort.” While the app’s name sounds like a play on Instagram’s reels and YouTube Shorts — both of which are well established TikTok clones — the app seems to be less of a TikTok clone and more of a wannabe streaming platform. The app features bite-sized clips of longer “movies” with bizarre titles like “The Heiress Blacklisted her Husband” and “In Love with the Alpha.” ReelShort is number seven in the App Store number two in Google Play.

While it’s unlikely any of these apps will remain popular for long, the fact that so many relatively unknown apps have risen to the top of the app stores so quickly is yet another sign of how influential TikTok’s users and creators can be. It also highlights how banning TikTok alone won’t curb the influence of Chinese tech companies in the US.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/chinese-social-media-app-rednote-is-the-number-one-app-as-tiktok-ban-looms-235929802.html?src=rss

Last week, Meta decided it would replace its professional fact-checking program with X-style “Community Notes” and it looks like a version of the feature is already being tested on Threads. Alessandro Paluzzi, a developer who frequently posts leaked details on Meta’s apps, shared three screenshots that show an early look of what the Community Notes will look like in Threads.

Paluzzi’s images show a new “Write Community Note” option in the menu you can access in the corner of a Threads post. If you select it, it looks like you’ll be able to anonymously submit your note, and if it’s rated as helpful, it will appear under the post. The whole setup is not dissimilar from how X uses Community Notes, which started as a feature called “Birdwatch” on Twitter before Elon Musk acquired and renamed the company.

Alessandro Paluzzi

Engadget has reached out to Meta for information on the new Threads feature and will update this post if we learn more.

Community Notes are just one of the ways Threads is changing under Meta’s new approach to moderation. The app, which was against the sharing and promoting of “political” content, will now also suggest political posts. Instagram and Threads head Adam Mosseri demonstrated how you can adjust the amount of political content you see in your feed in a short video shared to Threads today. Meta is giving users three options to choose from: “See less,” which attempts to weed out political content, “Standard,” which suggests some political content and “See more,” which treats political content like everything else on the app.

It’s not clear that Community Notes or toggles for political content address the actual issues users have with Threads, or if they’ll make anyone happier. They do fit with the “free speech warrior” image Meta is trying to project, though.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-is-starting-to-test-community-notes-232150151.html?src=rss

Alarmo, the most important hardware announcement Nintendo’s made in the last year, will soon be available to a lot more people. Nintendo says the motion-tracking alarm clock will be able to be purchased “in stores at participating retailers” in March, without the need for a Nintendo Switch Online subscription or a visit to a physical Nintendo store.

Nintendo’s alarm clock originally launched in October 2024. It combines beloved sound effects from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and Pikmin 4 with motion sensors that can track your tossing and turning. This gives the Alarmo some rudimentary sleep tracking features, and morning alarms that can get louder the more you flop around, only stopping when you actually sit up.

As Engadget’s review found, Alarmo is pricey at $100, and not particularly great as a sleep tracker. The alarm clock can only track one person at a time, which keeps anyone who shares a bed from accessing its most charming feature. But if you’re weak to Nintendo nostalgia or have a child who’s already a fan, the clock is a cute way to start your morning routine.

In March, retailers will only have Alarmo “while supplies last,” but hopefully by then, die-hard Nintendo fans will already be saving up for their next big purchase.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/nintendos-goofy-alarm-clock-will-be-available-to-everyone-in-march-222912137.html?src=rss

Meta appeared to be blocking links to Pixelfed, a decentralized photo-sharing platform, on Facebook, according to both users on Bluesky and 404 Media. A small group of posts that linked to “pixelfed.social” was deleted, with Facebook’s “Community Standards on spam” used as a justification.

When asked to comment, a Meta spokesperson said removing the posts was a mistake and that they’d be reinstated.

Pixelfed runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is part of the wider “fediverse” of decentralized posting platforms. It functions a lot like Instagram in its ability to let you share, like, and comment on images, but because its on ActivityPub, your posts could show up in other apps or be ported to entirely different takes on photo sharing if you want. Meta is slowly adopting parts of ActivityPub into Threads, which makes it possible to post to Threads and Mastodon at the same time, for example.

The timing of these deletions is enough to make anyone suspicious. Meta just announced pretty dramatic changes to how it plans to moderate speech on its platforms. The company decided to end both its third-party fact checking program and change its Hateful Conduct policy last week. The company’s loosening standards now allow for speech that would be defined as hateful under any normal circumstance, based on what Wired was able to dig up. 

It’s not unreasonable to imagine users might consider jumping ship to an alternative like Pixelfed in response, and the platform did share on Saturday that it was “seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social.” It’s also not unreasonable to imagine the new right-leaning Meta might preemptively block its competitors, just like X did with links to Mastodon and Substack. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-admits-it-deleted-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed-194624098.html?src=rss