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Kids in U.S. UK, and Spain Spending Nearly as Much Time on TikTok as YouTube

Charlotte Henry ·

Children in the U.S., UK, and Spain are now spending nearly as much time watching TikTok videos as they are watching clips on YouTube. That’s according to new data from Qustodio, reported on by Techcrunch.

Kids ages 4 to 15 now spend an average of 85 minutes per day watching YouTube videos, compared with 80 minutes per day spent on TikTok. The latter app also drove growth in kids’ social app use by 100% in 2019 and 200% in 2020, the report found. The data in the annual report by digital safety app maker Qustodio was provided by 60,000 families with children ages 4 to 14 in the U.S., U.K., and Spain, so it’s data isn’t representative of global trends. The research encompasses children’s online habits from February 2019 to April 2020, takes into account the COVID-19 crisis, and specifically focused on four main categories of mobile applications: online video, social media, video games, and education.

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Elon Musk: 'Time to Break up Amazon'

Charlotte Henry ·

Elon Musk doesn’t like monopolies. He also appears to not like Amazon, if his latest tweets, reported on by Bloomberg News, are anything to go by. They included his declaration that it’s “time to break up Amazon.”

“Monopolies are wrong,” Musk tweeted while tagging Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man. Musk’s post came in response to a tweet from a writer who said his book titled “Unreported Truths About COVID-19 and The Lockdown” was being removed from Amazon’s Kindle publishing division for violating unspecified guidelines. With more than 35 million followers, Musk is a prolific tweeter. He has been criticized in the past for his posts on various subjects ranging from the coronavirus outbreak to Tesla stock. Amazon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

TMO Deals

Coconut Portable Waterproof Light: $36.99

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on the Coconut Light, a portable, waterproof light made of silicone. It’s a perfect sphere with an LED, whose light diffuses through the silicone shell. it has small feet on the “bottom” to keep it from rolling around, but it’s also waterproof, so you can toss it in the pool. The Coconut Light is $36.99 through our deal.

‘Mirage’ Helps You Detect Edited Photos Using Machine Learning
Cool Stuff Found

‘Mirage’ Helps You Detect Edited Photos Using Machine Learning

Andrew Orr ·

Mirage is a cool app I discovered today that uses machine learning to detect edited photos. Not only that, it can also undo the editing. However, it requires a face to be present in the photo, so it won’t work on any image. It’s based on this research paper [PDF]:

We present a method for detecting one very popular Photoshop manipulation – image warping applied to human faces – using a model trained entirely using fake images that were automatically generated by scripting Photoshop itself. We show that our model outperforms humans at the task of recognizing manipulated images, can pre- dict the specific location of edits, and in some cases can be used to “undo” a manipulation to reconstruct the original, unedited image.

App Store: Mirage – US$2.99

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Private Messenger ‘Signal’ Now Automatically Blurs Faces

Andrew Orr ·

Private messenger app Signal added a feature that lets it automatically blur faces in your images.

Thousands of people are protesting against police brutality and to support the Black Lives Matters cause. If you are a part of the protests, you might post photos of the demonstration around you on social media or send them to your friends — and that’s not entirely safe, because it could help identify people there and put them in danger.

A great feature. I’ve been trying to create a shortcut that can obfuscate faces.