Tingle Tech

For all its viral coverage, celebrity fans and massive, 125 million person-strong playerbase, Fortnite is not without its issues.

Despite being rated 12, the super popular Battle Royale game has recently been shadowed by reports of addiction among young children.

Early in June, various sites published a story about a nine-year-old girl who was apparently receiving treatment for being addicted to the game. This led to a slew of similar articles advising parents what to do if they feared their child could be suffering from something similar. A large number of them called out Fortnite specifically. Read more...

Are Google and Facebook misleading European users into sharing more of their personal data than they think?

According to a new consumer advocacy report from the Norwegian Consumer Council, they most certainly are.

The NCC dropped a 44-page report on Wednesday detailing how three of the world’s biggest tech companies are “nudging” their users through “dark patterns” of user interface designs and carefully crafted wording to agree to privacy settings that share their personal data that the GDPR was setup to protect.

“Dark patterns” are designs and user interfaces that are specifically crafted to trick users into buying, signing up, or taking some other action they did not intend to. The NCC report, titled "Deceived By Design," explains just how these dark patterns are being implemented by internet companies. Read more...

Every now and then, Twitter artists try to get more followers by asking people to retweet their work in exchange for a portrait. It's a win-win situation, because artists get to flex their skills and followers get fun new picturesMost of the artists who do this are immensely talented, and sketch some beautiful avatars. But one fake Twitter artist did it to hilariously mess with people. 

@lovingkiaraa — who claimed to be a talented artist who could draw in a variety of popular cartoon styles — catfished everyone when she offered to draw their Twitter avatars if they retweeted her.  Read more...

Apple, Jabra, Sony and Bose are just four of the big brand names with major products in the wireless headphone market, so what can a relatively new Californian headphone maker bring to the party? The answer: The Epic Air True Wireless Earbuds, which JLab Audio has thrown into the increasingly crowded and competitive headphone marketplace.  Read more...

Showtime is officially bringing the long awaited Halo TV series out of cryo-sleep with a 10 episode order. Network president David Nevins is describing plans for the show as Showtime's "most ambitious series ever" and promises "personal stories with action, adventure and a richly imagined vision of the future."

Even if you haven't played the Halo games, you've almost certainly heard of them. Xbox's multibillion-dollar first person shooter franchise garnered hundreds of thousands of monthly active users in its prime and is still going strong with its latest installment, Halo Infinite, announced earlier this month at E3. Read more...

Grace Aheron has never met the four transgender women from Honduras and El Salvador currently detained in a federal immigration facility in New Mexico, but she's waiting to welcome them into her home.

These women arrived in the United States in April after traveling thousands of miles with a migrant caravan from Central America to seek refuge from discrimination and persecution in their native countries. They made their way toward the U.S. without someone to sponsor them — until Aheron, a 27-year-old activist who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, volunteered to be their host.  

Instagram Stories has blown through another big milestone. The nearly two-year-old feature now boasts 400 million daily users, the company announced on Thursday. 

To celebrate, the app is adding a feature that's likely to generate a lot of excitement among its Stories-loving users: the ability to add musical soundtracks to your posts.

The feature, which is rolling out to iOS and Android today, lets users add music to Stories via a new music sticker, which will appear next to GIF, location, and other sticker add-ons. Instagram says its library has thousands of songs available, and you can listen to previews before you decide to add them to your post. Read more...