I’m a big fan of the Roku box if only because the apps you know and love work really well on it (e.g. YouTube, Amazon Prime video, Pandora, Netflix) and now with Apple making a smart move it will be even better.

I suppose this pretty much spells the end of the Apple TV “puck” hardware in favor of opening up the platform.

Source: Apple’s revamped TV app is coming to Roku and Fire TV, plus Samsung, LG, Vizio, and Sony TVs – The Verge

Another great example of how you can’t stop people from doing what they want and in this case it’s chatting.

In this latest twist, kids are using Google docs (which is a commonly used school application for legitimate purposes) as the basis for chatting. There are some hilarious examples, such as copying a teacher’s document and then opening chat windows on it so that if a teacher looks at their screen, they will see what looks like their document and not suspect that it’s really a cover for God-only-knows chat conversations.

This article also highlights what happens when a younger generation is given tools that are utterly foreign to the older generation.  In many cases teachers think that kids are busy doing schoolwork when it’s anything but that.

It’s a good insight on what’s going on with today’s teens.

Source: The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is Google Docs – The Atlantic

This is pretty damning: FB wants us to submit our mobile ph# for security purposes; you know, the one where you log in and then they text you another code you have to enter – AKA “2 factor authentication”).

The problem is that once you give your ph#, people can then look you up on Facebook if they know your phone number. And you can’t turn off this “feature”.

You might think this is not big deal, but if you think about all the databases where your phone number may exist, you can imagine all kinds of strangers now able to look you up on Facebook.

Nothing wrong with having a feature to enter your ph# if you specifically want people to be able to look you up, but to make a “security” case to get you to give your ph# and then turn around and use it for lookup purposes it pretty bad, in my opinion.

Users are complaining that the phone number Facebook hassled them to use to secure their account with two-factor authentication has also been associated with their user profile — which anyone can use to “look up” their profile. Worse, Facebook doesn’t give you an option to opt-out. Last year, Facebook was forced to admit that after […]

Source: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting | TechCrunch