Technology and Body

PSA: Enable This Setting to Password Protect Facebook Payments Facebook has been quietly rolling out a feature that allows you to send money to your friends via Messenger. By default, however, there's no password or PIN protection at all for your payments. Here's how to enable it. Facebook's send payments feature is rolling out now, and it's displayed so prominently, you might have discovered it by accident. The button is directly next to the text box on the desktop, and it even turns any dollar figure you type into a clickable link to send money. That's neat if you want to share payments. However, Facebook requires no authentication of any kind by default for sending money. If you already have a payment method associated with your Facebook account (say, for spending money in apps), this could make it pretty easy for someone with access to your logged-in Facebook account to send themselves or someone else money. To prevent this, follow these steps...

 Week's Top Downloads The Best Address Book App for iPhone We've seen a ton of address book apps for the iPhone, but most have struggled because they rely on social network integration that tends to break after a few months. Because of that, we like Simpler Contacts, which keeps things simple, but has enough features to set it apart from the default app. iOS 8.4 Jailbreak Is Now Available for Mac iOS/Mac: The iOS 8.3-8.4 jailbreak as released a few weeks ago, but it was limited to Windows users. Now, there's a Mac version. WifiMapper Launches on Android with Some Exclusive New Features WifiMapper, the iOS app that helps you find free Wi-Fi hotspots around the world, launches today in the Google Play Store with some useful Android-only features. HBO Now Arrives On Android and Amazon Devices If you're a fan of HBO Now, the streaming HBO service you can watch without a cable subscription, you used to have to sign up on an iPhone or iPad. Well, HB...

Here Are Some Cool Facebook Extensions To Make It More Fun Are you done with sharing pictures, links and statuses on Facebook already? Don't rely on the developers of the social networking site to get something new for you every day. Try out these cool hacks and extensions, using which you can surely have some more fun interacting with your Facebook friends. 1. Download an entire album So you love the travel album that your friend uploaded? But isn't downloading one pic at a time cumbersome? If you want to download the entire Facebook album, try downloading the extension called Bulk Download Images. This would enable you to download the album at once, saving you the time and trouble. 2. How Dare They? Although it sounds creepy, but sometimes, you really want to know if someone has removed you from their friend list. Instead of going through your friend list and challenging your memory, try installing an extension called Unfriend Notify for Facebook, and g...

Homejoy Is Shutting Down At The End Of The Month On-demand house cleaning service Homejoy is shutting down, after talks of an acquisition by its biggest competitor and a failure to raise enough money to keep things moving. Confirmation of the shutdown comes on Homejoy’s own blog, where co-founder Adora Cheung writes that the service will “officially close its doors on July 31st.” Homejoy had raised nearly $40 million in funding to date, but had difficulties raising sufficient funds for a Series C. In an interview with Re/code, Cheung suggests that lawsuits over whether Homejoy cleaners were employees, as well as the bad timing of the California Labor Commission’s ruling on a similar issue for Uber, was making investors wary of the overall space — a point I’m sure Homejoy’s surviving competitors would want to debate. Homejoy immediately stopped accepting new appointments, offering refunds to those with credits remaining. If you’ve found a cleaning professional on Homejo...

The Future Of Podcasting   Podcasting is having a celebrity moment: Serial’s Sarah Koenig has appeared on The Colbert Report; Arnold Schwarzenegger has been on the Tim Ferriss show; and, most recently, Barack Obama visited Marc Maron’s garage to appear on his WTF podcast. The $65 Billion Question Beneath the headlines, however, we see conflicting stats that lead us to ask whether podcasting is truly taking off or just getting more popular with existing diehard users. Measured by Google searches and episode downloads, podcasting has seen 30+% annual growth in recent years. On the other hand, only 17% of the population listens to podcasts each month. In fact, the growth rate of podcast listenership has dropped by half in the past two years. We set out to develop a view on the future of podcasting. Understanding where podcasting is headed is important to us because we have been building, and recently released, a social audio discovery app called Clammr. P...