Author: Tapiwa Matthew Mutisi

A man blackmailed the makers of the upcoming movie The Boss Baby after he obtained a leaked copy. He demanded 20th Century Fox & Dreamworks to pay a bitcoin ransom to avoid the file leaking online before its official premiere. After 20th Century Fox paid ransom, a man was arrested…

But wait. There’s one more thing you need to choose, and it’s a big one: panel technology. Essentially, you’ve got three main choices today: LED TVs, OLED TV, and quantum dot TVs (now referred to as QLED TV by Samsung) They sound the same, so it can be confusing. And…

If Samsung has its way, we’ll all be bellowing voice commands to “Bixby,” the company’s new voice assistant. Yet Bixby could be hard for some users to call upon because of the placement of one letter: the “x.” The “x” in Bixby sounds essentially like a “k” and an “s”…

Toyota owes Microsoft a big ol’ “thank you” when it comes to the future of the automaker’s connected cars. Microsoft will license a good deal of its connected car patents to Toyota. Toyota will have access to a number of intellectual properties covering operating systems, voice recognition, artificial intelligence and…

Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] suspended its pilot program for driverless cars on Saturday after a vehicle equipped with the nascent technology crashed. The accident, the latest involving a self-driving vehicle operated by one of several companies experimenting with autonomous vehicles, caused no serious injuries, Uber said. Even so, the company…

Google is probably the most qualified entity to speak about the number of websites being and compromised on the World Wide Web, and a recent report from them not only indicates that the number of hacking attacks is rising, but also that this trend is currently showing no signs of slowing…

Facebook has added streaming to user profiles from desktop and laptop computers, allowing users to go live right from their timeline. Users have had the ability to stream from their phones and tablets for the past year, however, this feature had not yet been brought to computers. Facebook’s addition of…

“Power Rangers” is baloney through and through, but as baloney goes, it’s better than you might expect. It packs enough zing to make you forgive the origin-story clichés. And the predictable save-the-world stuff. And the insanely ubiquitous product placement. (Seriously, whatever Krispy Kreme paid to be an actual plot point…

The days of Google Talk are quickly coming to an end. As the company  announced, the messaging service that allowed Gmail users to talk to each other since it launched in 2005, will now be completely retired. Even while Google pushed Hangouts as its consumer messaging service (before Allo, Duo, Hangouts Chat and…

Google recently announced the new version of Hangouts, which is focussed on catering enterprises. Now that Google is more keen on developing Android Messages as a unified messaging platform for Android, the company is reportedly stripping Hangouts of SMS feature. As Android Messages is Google’s RCS (Rich Communication Service) product, the…

After years of stubborn caution, Facebook is finally embracing the animated GIF. Next week Facebook will begin testing a GIF button that lets users post GIFs from services like Giphy and Tenor as comments. Facebook confirmed the GIF test is coming with this statement: “Everyone loves a good GIF and…

Instagram is adding two new features for security and community guidelines on its social network. Instagram just made your account much harder to hack. Today instagram added two-factor authentication to the social network, increasing security measures for their 600 million active users. You can activate two-factor in authentication by going…

If you use Google’s G Suite apps and Mozilla’s Firefox browser, good news: The two are going to get along much better. The G Suite tools for word processing, spreadsheets, Gmail and other chores have worked better on Google’s Chrome than on rival browsers in one important way: You can open…

50 million Spotify users who now listen music for free will be unable to access new tracks from some top artists. The service has announced a major change, which would see making some music available only to paying customers. Before, all music on Spotify has been available to both free…

“Make an appointment for 3pm tomorrow with Francis,” I say to my assistant. Remembering that there was a time when you had to be high up in an organisation to have an assistant. My assistant is an artificially intelligent piece of software that lives in my smart phone. It makes…

Entry of the mobile technology ride-sharing service, Uber, into passenger transport markets across the world has brought disruptive competition with substantial benefits to consumers. Africa is no exception. Uber is currently the dominant ride-sharing app used in Africa. It has rapidly grown its African footprint and now has operations in eight countries; Egypt,…

Companies are bombarded with phishing scams every day. In a recent survey of more than 500 cyber security professionals across the world, 76% reported that their organisation fell victim to a phishing attack in 2016. These scams take the form of emails that try to persuade staff to download malicious attachments,…

Twitter made it clear that Periscope was more than just a live selfie platform when it added support for professional cameras and GoPros last year. Now, the social network is ready to extend that same platform beyond its own native apps. In a post on the company blog today, Twitter…

Reddit knows its old-school message board style can be a little intimidating for new users, and its individual user pages have never really expanded beyond a list of submitted comments and some badges — which can make it intimidating for casual redditors to keep up with real people on the…

Amazon has quietly rolled out the “Send to Kindle” feature to its Kindle for iOS application that allows you to save articles and documents found on the web to the app. That means your Kindle device or app can replace your preferred “read it later” application – like Pocket or…