Tech Hangover: This is Facebook’s America now

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We get it, you have a life. There’s no way you can read all of the day’s news in one single shot, let alone visit every web page, which is why we’re here to help. Well, sort of.

There’s a ton of tech news we weren’t able to cover throughout the day (hey, give us a break, we’re a small independent outfit), so to help you stay up to speed with everything we didn’t get to, we rounded up some of the biggest stories, which should help you keep up to date. Hence the tech hangover. 

Here’s some tech news you probably missed out on today (and when we say you, we mean us, but also…you).

New Facebook features fight election lies everywhere but ads

This is Facebook’s America now, we’re just living in it.

Heaven forbid a political candidate’s Facebook account gets hacked. They might spread disinformation…like they’re already allowed to do in Facebook ads… – TechCrunch

Facebook’s business falls under the microscope of 47 attorneys general 

Image: CIO

The U.S. government is fed up with Facebook’s shit and now they’re out for blood. Facebook is an evil company and I for one hope something comes out of all this.

Forty-seven state attorneys general have now joined a sweeping investigation into Facebook’s business practices aimed at determining whether the company has engaged in anti-competitive behavior, ignored privacy laws, or violated any other laws, according to the New York Attorney General’s office. – Gizmodo

A face-scanning algorithm increasingly decides whether you deserve the job

Image: Google I/O

Imagine having every facial expression you made throughout the workday analyzed by artificial intelligence? This company uses its software to who’s best for the job. Um, yea, this isn’t creepy at all.

The system uses candidates’ computer or cellphone cameras to analyze their facial movements, word choice and speaking voice before ranking them against other applicants based on an automatically generated “employability” score. – Washington Post

Gmail hooked us on free storage. Now Google is making us pay

Image: Google

This is a pretty interesting story because I can see where this hits close to home. Imagine using Gmail for so long that you hit you a data cap preventing you from getting new emails. Well, this is happening to people, forcing them to pay up.

Google lured billions of consumers to its digital services by offering copious free cloud storage. That’s beginning to change. The Alphabet Inc. unit has whittled down some free storage offers in recent months, while prodding more users toward a new paid cloud subscription called Google One. That’s happening as the amount of data people stash online continues to soar.

A source in this story tells Bloomberg:

“I was merrily using the account and one day I noticed I hadn’t received any email since the day before,” said Rod Adams, a nuclear energy analyst and retired naval officer. After using Gmail since 2006, he’d finally hit his 15 GB cap and Google had cut him off. Switching away from Gmail wasn’t an easy option because many of his social and business contacts reach him that way. “I just said ‘OK, been free for a long time, now I’m paying,’” Adams said.

Tom Delonge’s UFO research group signs contract with U.S. Army to develop far-future tech

Image: Getty Images

Truly, what a time to be alive.

With each passing week, former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge’s UFO research organization keeps giving us reasons to take it more seriously. The group, called To the Stars Academy, just signed an agreement with the U.S. Army in which it will help the military study and develop advanced materials for the purposes of developing “active camouflage, beamed energy propulsion, and quantum communication” for use on military vehicles. – Motherboard

Amazon joins Facebook and Microsoft to fight deepfakes 

Image: Imgflip

Look who doesn’t want to be left out of the party…..

Deepfakes have come across as serious problems this year and big companies are now paying attention. Amazon announced today it’s joining the DeepFake Detection challenge (DFDC) driven by major corporations such as Facebook and Microsoft to boost efforts to identify manipulated content. – The Next Web

Comcast’s “free” streaming box actually requires an additional $13 / month fee 

I’m not going to sugar coat it, Casey Newton of The Verge sums it up best: “This might be the most Comcast story I have ever read.” Lol, Comcast is the absolute worst.

Comcast made headlines last month when it announced plans to give a free streaming box to all of its internet-only subscribers — except, there’s an extra fee that Comcast didn’t clearly disclose at the time. It’ll only give the box to internet-only subscribers who also rent a modem and router from the company for an additional $13 per month. – The Verge

Pizza Hut is the latest fast food joint to flirt with plant-based ‘meat’

I think Josiah is generally excited about this actually. He tweeted this earlier: “Incogmeato, ya’ll.” So, I dunno.

According to a press release, Pizza Hut is following competitors like Burger King and Dunkin Donuts by testing a pizza that features MorningStar Farm’s “Incogmeato” Italian sausage. MorningStar Farms is owned by Kellogg’s which you probably know for their breakfast foods, like Pop-Tarts, Eggo, and a lot of cereals. – Mashable

And in just case you missed some of our stuff earlier, here’s what you may have missed:

• Spotify Premium and Spotify Family plan owners can now claim a free Google Home Mini
• 10 of the best-selling PC gaming monitors Amazon buyers can’t get enough of
• Review roundup: Google Pixel 4 and 4 XL
• How to delete your PlayStation 4 account
• Verizon customers will get Disney+ free for a year
• Amazon has the Resident Evil 2 remake down to just right now
• PSA: Gradient, the viral celebrity look-alike app, is kind of a scam
• Bloom is a creepy new iPhone app that uses AI to let you make edits on your face
• Amazon has a huge one day sale on PC accessories, digital storage, and more
• Human skin could be the next great smartphone innovation
• Borderlands 3’s first major event, Bloody Harvest, launches this week

Notable Mentions

Netflix may crack down on password sharing, but in a ‘consumer-friendly way’

UK Man Invents Aluminum-Air Battery In His Garage

Medium says it will compensate writers based on reading time, not claps

Traffic lights around the world are set to undergo a major change thanks to one man

Firefox to get page translation feature, like Chrome

Hulu’s Downloads feature for offline viewing arrives on Android

Amazon is rolling out a news aggregation app for Fire TV and tablets

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Previous hangovers:

• Mark Zuckerberg can’t stop, won’t stop
• Zuckerberg and Musk are wild, and not in a good way
• I think I need to fix my MacBook
• Oh right, Google sort of announced a new phone today

Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com or find him on Mastodon or Post.