Android emoji reactions now show up properly on iPhones
The change may have been made by Apple or Google
While messaging between Android phones and iPhones still isn’t perfect, it’s a lot better than it used to be – and users have now noticed that emoji reactions from Android devices are now showing up correctly in the iPhone Messages app.
As spotted by The Verge, Android Central, and others, if RCS (Rich Communication Services) is enabled on both Android and iOS, then emoji reactions sent from Android will now actually be stuck to the message they’re responding to – rather than appearing on a separate line, which was rather confusing.
It’s not clear what has changed on Apple‘s end or Google‘s end to make this happen, but the iOS 18.1 update seems to have something to do with it. Make sure you’re running the latest iPhone software, and check RCS is enabled, and it should work.
The RCS option on the iPhone can be found in Settings: tap Apps, Messages, and then RCS Messaging. Your carrier needs to support RCS for the option to be visible though – you can check this from Settings by tapping General, About, then Carrier.
An improving situation
You may remember Apple announcing that it would support RCS messages back in November 2023, though we had to wait for the iOS 18 software to roll out in September before the functionality actually became available.
Advertisement
RCS is the successor to plain old SMS, adding modern features such as read receipts, group chats, and higher resolutions for photo and video sharing. It’s used by default in the Google Messages app on Android.
While this doesn’t solve the green bubble problem, and has a few security issues that need to be ironed out, it brings iPhone-and-Android chats closer to the level of iPhone-to-iPhone chats using Apple’s own iMessage.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
Of course, for a lot of users outside the US, WhatsApp is the primary messaging tool – it offers end-to-end encryption, a whole pile of messaging features, and works more or less the same on both Android and iOS.
For her first film since 2014, Cameron Diaz is teaming with Jamie Foxx to play spies in Back Action, an upcoming action comedy from Netflix.
After working for the CIA as spies, Emily (Diaz) and Matt (Foxx) leave espionage behind to start a family. Years later, the couple returns to the field after their cover is blown. “For the first time in a really long time, I felt alive again,” Emily tells Matt in the teaser trailer. Rediscovering their elite combat skills is easy. Explaining their previous life to their two kids (McKenna Roberts and Rylan Jackson) is challenging.
When his son asks if he’s Jason Bourne, Matt says, “Yeah, but we remember stuff.”
Back in Action‘s ensemble features Kyle Chandler, Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, and Jamie Demetriou.
Advertisement
Seth Gordon, who directed Foxx in Horrible Bosses, helms Back in Action from a script he wrote with Neighbors scribe Brendan O’Brien. Gordon produces alongside Beau Bauman, Jeno Topping, Peter Chernin, and Sharla Sumpter Bridgett.
Like her character in the movie, Diaz is ending her acting retirement after 10 years. In 2014, Diaz appeared in The Other Woman, Sex Tape, and Annie. After Annie, Diaz took an extended break from acting, with the actress confirming her retirement in 2017.
Back in Action will not be a one-off, as Diaz has several acting projects lined up. The Mask actress will appear in Jonah Hill’s Outcome, an Apple TV+ comedy with Keanu Reeves. Diaz will also reprise her role as Princess Fiona in Shrek 5, which opens in theaters on July 1, 2026.
Back in Action streams on Netflix on January 17, 2025.
Samsung may be making a radical change regarding the manufacturing of Exynos chips. The company produces its own SoCs at Samsung Foundry factories. However, it has not been up to the task of efficiently manufacturing 3nm chips. According to reports, it has been working to try to resolve the situation. Now, a reliable tipster claims that Samsung is considering outsourcing Exynos chip manufacturing to TSMC.
TSMC is currently the largest contract chip manufacturer in the world. Big Samsung customers have moved to TSMC in recent years due to problems at the South Korean giant’s factories. However, Samsung’s potential decision to switch to TSMC for Exynos chip production is still striking.
Samsung reportedly considering turning to TSMC to manufacture Exynos chips
Tipster Jukanlosreve posted on X the news about Samsung considering turning to TSMC factories. The source doesn’t offer any further details on this, but the recent background regarding Samsung Foundry explains the potential move. Industry insiders claim that the Galaxy S25 series will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip worldwide. Apparently, solving the low yield issues of the company’s 3nm GAA wafers will take longer than it has available.
Samsung considering using external factories to produce its Exynos chips is quite normal. This doesn’t mean that it will happen with total certainty, however. Big brands always need contingency plans in place for any incidents or problems that may arise during a project. What’s surprising is the company turning to its main rival in the chip production segment.
Advertisement
In recent weeks, tipsters revealed that Samsung even explored the possibility of using the Dimensity 9400 chip in the vanilla and Plus models. The company also tested the Exynos 2500 until the last minute, hoping to resolve Foundry’s issues. However, it seems that Samsung will have to turn to Qualcomm for the hardware that will power its next flagship mobile devices. Therefore, switching to TSMC could serve as a backup plan in the event that problems persist with Samsung Foundry wafers.
Samsung’s move to a 3nm process has been problematic
In the recent past, chips manufactured by Samsung have presented issues related to temperature management, throttling, and modem performance. The company seemed to have solved these problems with the 4nm Exynos 2400 chip, which performs admirably. However, the difficulties returned when Samsung tried to migrate to the more advanced 3nm process.
Black Friday is set to soak the world in glorious deals, but why wait until later in the month? Some of these deals are already live. For instance, the M2 MacBook Air . The regular price is $1,000, so this is a discount of 25 percent. It even boasts 16GB of RAM.
This model easily made , even with the presence of the . Here are the takeaways. This laptop, obviously, includes Apple’s proprietary M2 8-core CPU, which is more than fast enough for basic tasks and fine for even many advanced tasks, like music-making. We called it “Apple’s near-perfect Mac” in our official review.
Apple
This is not the bare-bones standard model, as it comes with 16GB of RAM. Most versions ship with 8GB of RAM. The multitasking bona-fides are strong with this one. The M2 MacBook Air also ships with a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display with 500 nits of brightness and support for the P3 wide color gamut.
Advertisement
It’s thin and light. It’s a MacBook Air. This thing weighs around 2.7 pounds. The battery life is solid, at around 18 hours of use per charge. The four-speaker sound system can get surprisingly loud, so headphones are not a requirement when watching random YouTube videos or listening to music.
To view this content, you’ll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the “Content and social-media partners” setting to do so.
So what’s the downside? There isn’t one. Not really. This isn’t the M3 MacBook Air, so those looking for the latest and greatest model may be let down. The model does only ship with a 256GB solid state drive, but it’s easy enough to plug in an external.
When you board a plane, the pilot already knows the weather on the flight path and can steer clear, or at least warn you it’s coming. The same can’t be said of “space weather” from solar events, which can seriously affect satellites and even passenger planes.
Mission Space is about to launch a constellation provide near-real-time monitoring of this increasingly important phenomenon.
Space weather is a general term for the radiation in the near-Earth environment; outside the planet’s protective aura, satellites and spacecraft feel the full brunt of the sun’s rays, and a solar storm can interfere with or disable them. The type and intensity of this radiation shifts and flows just like atmospheric weather, but being invisible and moving at the speed of light, it’s considerably more difficult to observe and predict.
There are numerous satellites and deep-space missions that monitor solar radiation, but they are necessarily limited; imagine trying to predict the path of a storm using only a handful of wind and rain sensors scattered across the ocean. And while historically this has been sufficient, the growth of the new space economy has transformed space weather from an occasional inconvenience to a constant and quantifiable threat.
Advertisement
“More and more companies are putting space weather on their agenda,” said Alex Po, CEO and founder of Mission Space. “We have 7,000 satellites in space, but in ten years it’ll be 50,000; that means space weather events will be the same as now, but they will have ten times the impact.”
A serious solar storm is not dangerous not only to electronics, but also to unprepared astronauts. If someone happens to be doing a spacewalk, they could get a face full of radiation — and if we want to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, where there’s similarly little protection, we’ll want to know exactly when it’s safe to go outside.
Nearer the surface, airlines are concerned about passengers getting large doses of radiation during a long flight over the poles, and some have even canceled flights because of it. And there are numerous secondary effects on services that rely on satellites, including precision agriculture.
Po’s startup, originally founded in Europe but now based in Israel and the U.S., is about to launch the first two of a planned 24-satellite constellation that will monitor space weather and provide reports and predictions in near real time.
It’s not intended to replace the scientific instruments currently in space, but augment their data (much of which is public) with a voluminous, proprietary stream that enables more precise, timely monitoring.
Advertisement
Po explained that while many companies and governments are increasingly aware of the need for better space weather prediction, the satellites are aging and the data is difficult to share.
“The infrastructure for space weather monitoring was developed in the late 90s, and many of the scientific models were developed 50 years ago,” Po said. Information sharing agreements between organizations like NASA, NOAA, and ESA are complex, and the data itself is not trivial to integrate and harmonize.
“There are no people in the companies who need this data who can understand it. What’s needed is, say, alerts for different alert levels for launch, or for airlines. Everyone uses weather data but no one thinks about how it is generated: you just want to know if it’s going to rain or not. It’s the same here,” he continued.
Mission Space currently uses public sources, doing the work of normalizing it to create something of a unified data stream. But they are launching the first two of their own satellites in the first quarter of 2025, with more planned for later that year. Po said they could probably launch faster, but that it’s more beneficial to learn from the first set and improve as they go. “Engineers…” he said, “There are always more changes.”
Advertisement
The satellites themselves (named Zohar) are specialized but not exotic, he noted, leading to a lower cost for a constellation of 24 than you might expect. The important part is that they still collect 15 parameters a thousand times a second.
“Space weather is a data monopoly game: the first to launch the constellation and build the infrastructure will win,” he predicted. “Even with half a constellation, in two years we will generate a thousand times more space weather data than humans have generated in the last 60. And the real-time data will let us develop machine learning models based on it.”
They are not in competition with governments and scientific organizations, he claimed, or really even startups looking to serve those customers — collaboration is a necessity for a number of reasons.
Their customers are “aerospace in general; satellite operators and space tourism companies; anyone doing private space stations. They’re all very aware of the problem,” said Po. “It was common knowledge in the aviation industry but now the companies are actually paying attention to solutions. And of course for defense, they’ve been developing the domain, and you must be sure you will not have issues in critical space operations. With the current level of precision, that’s hard for them.”
While the real-time readings and predictions will have to wait for the full constellation, the pair going up in a few months should offer a marked improvement over the existing offerings. No exact date is set for launch.
In the weeks leading up to the US presidential election, Kacey Smith was feeling hopeful. Smith, who supported Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, says she knew it would be a close race between the Democratic nominee and Republican Donald Trump. But as she scrolled TikTok, she believed Harris would be victorious.
But Election Day approached, and she started to sense red flags in that positivity. She recalls TikTok serving her enthusiasm for reproductive choice with videos encouraging “women’s rights over gas prices” — implying, falsely, she thought, the choice was “either/or.” The rhetoric fit well inside her feed filled with strangers, but as a campaign strategy, it felt limiting and risky. “When I started seeing that messaging play out,” Smith says, “I started getting a little uneasy.” Her fears were borne out: Harris lost the popular vote and Electoral College and conceded the election to President-elect Trump.
Filter bubbles like TikTok’s recommendation algorithm are a common point of concern among tech critics. The feeds can create the impression of a bespoke reality, letting users avoid things they find unpleasant — like the real people in Smith’s life who supported Trump. But while there are frequent complaints that algorithmic feeds could serve users misinformation or lull them into complacency, that’s not exactly what happened here. Voters like Smith understood the facts and the odds. They just underestimated how convincingly something like TikTok’s feed could build a world that didn’t quite exist — and in the wake of Harris’ defeat, they’re mourning its loss, too.
TikTok’s algorithm is hyperpersonalized, like a TV station calibrated exactly to a user’s brain. Its For You page serves content based on what you’ve previously watched or scrolled away from, and breaking out of these recommendations into other circles of the app isn’t easy. It’s a phenomenon political activists must figure out how to adapt to, says Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of progressive youth voter organization NextGen America.
Advertisement
“It not only makes it harder for us to do our job, I think it makes it harder for candidates to do their jobs. It makes it harder for news media to do their job, because now you’re talking about having to inform a public that has so many different sources of information,” she says.
From the onset, the Harris campaign seemed to understand the power of these silos. On TikTok, where the Kamala HQ account has 5.7 million followers, an all-Gen Z team of staffers produced video after video that are, at times, indecipherable to the average person. If you saw a video stringing together clips of Harris saying things like “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people” and “I have a Glock” with a gentle Aphex Twin song as the soundtrack, would you understand it as “hopecore”? The campaign bet that it didn’t really matter because the TikTok algorithm would carry it to people who did understand it. And at least to some extent, they were right.
Smith, like other TikTok users, knows that the platform recommends her content based on what she watches, saves, comments on, or likes. When pro-Trump content came across her For You page, Smith would purposely not engage and simply scroll away.
“I don’t want my algorithm to think that I’m a Trump supporter, so I just want to scroll up and ignore it,” she says.
Advertisement
In hindsight, Smith wonders if that was the right thing to do or if a mix of different types of political content may have given her more insight into what the other side was saying, doing, and thinking. She likens it to being a liberal or progressive who consumes news from right-wing outlets like Breitbart or Fox News — not because you agree with the material, but because it’s helpful to know what messages are resonating with other types of voters.
The echo chamber effect isn’t limited to politics: we don’t even really know what is popular on TikTok generally. Some of what we see may not be guided by our preferences at all. A report by The Washington Post found that male users — even liberal men — were more likely to be served Trump content on TikTok than women. According to data from Pew Research Center, about 4 in 10 young people regularly get news from TikTok.
TikTok obviously isn’t the only filter bubble out there. Two years into Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now called X, the platform has morphed into a right-wing echo chamber, with content boosted by Musk himself. While TikTok is simply (as far as we know) serving people things they like to sell ads, the slant on X was a deliberate electoral strategy that paid off handsomely for Musk.
“I don’t think we know the full implications of X’s algorithm being rigged to feed us right wing propaganda,” Tzintzún Ramirez of NextGen America says. A recent Washington Post analysis found that right-wing accounts have come to dominate visibility and engagement on X. That includes an algorithmic boost to Musk’s own posts, as the billionaire angles for influence with the incoming administration.
Advertisement
Unlike somebody drinking from Musk’s algorithmic fire hose, a young person deep in a pro-Harris TikTok bubble likely wasn’t being fed racist “great replacement” theory stories or false claims about election fraud. Instead, they were probably seeing videos from some of the hundreds of content creators the Democratic Party worked with. Though the direct impact of influencers on electoral politics is difficult to measure, NextGen America’s own research suggests that influencer content may turn out more first-time voters.
“I should know better than to be fooled”
Alexis Williams is the type of influencer that Democrats were hoping could carry their message to followers. For the last several years, Williams has made content about politics and social issues and attended the Democratic National Convention this year as a content creator, sharing her reflections with 400,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. Though Harris wasn’t a perfect candidate in Williams’ eyes, she felt Harris would win the presidency in the days leading up to the election.
“As someone with a literal engineering degree, I should know better than to be fooled,” Williams says. She was fed TikToks about a bombshell poll showing Harris ahead in Iowa; young women in Pennsylvania going to the polls in support of Harris; analysis about why it was actually going to be a landslide. Professional polls consistently showed a dead heat between Trump and Harris — but watching TikTok after TikTok, it’s easy to shake off any uncertainty. It was a world full of what’s frequently dubbed “hopium”: media meant to fuel what would, in retrospect, look like unreasonable optimism.
Advertisement
TikTok and the Harris campaign didn’t respond to The Verge’s requests for comment.
For many voters on TikTok, the Kamala HQ content fit in seamlessly with other videos. The campaign used the same trending sound clips and music and a casual way of talking to viewers that seemed, at times, borderline unserious. (The Trump campaign also used popular songs and post formats but didn’t seem as native to the platform — more like a politician’s attempt at TikTok.) But Smith says that even as a Harris supporter, there was a limit to how much of that she could stomach. At a certain point, the trends get old, the songs get overplayed, and the line between a political campaign and everything else on TikTok starts to get blurry. Kamala HQ, Smith says, started to feel like just another brand.
Williams’ confidence began to break down on Election Day, as she walked to a watch party. “I know what I’m seeing on the internet and everything, but I still had [something] in my heart that was like, I don’t see us having another Donald Trump presidency, but I also don’t see a world where a Black woman gets elected for president right now,” she says. She started to wonder whether that much had changed in the eight years since the last female presidential candidate. “You’re seeing all this stuff, and people are getting so excited, but this could be just a mirage.”
Filter bubbles are not a new phenomenon, and voters have a wide range of places to get hyperpartisan news apart from TikTok: blogs, talk radio, podcasts, TV. Whether on the right or the left, there’s a tendency to look around at what you see and assume it’s representative. But the false sense of certainty that TikTok brings is perhaps even more powerful. What we see on the platform is both uncomfortably personal and incredibly global: a video talking about something that happened on our neighborhood block might be followed up by someone across the country voting for the same candidate for the same reasons. It gives an illusion that you are receiving a diverse assortment of content and voices.
Advertisement
As social media algorithms have gotten more precise, our window into their inner workings has gotten even smaller. This summer, Meta shut down CrowdTangle, a research tool used to track viral content on Facebook. A public TikTok feature called Creative Center — which allowed advertisers to measure trending hashtags — was abruptly restricted by the company after reporters used it to report on the Israel-Hamas war. It is harder than ever to understand what’s happening on social media, especially outside of our bubbles.
“As technology gets more advanced and more convincing, our idea of a communal reality might genuinely become archaic,” Williams says. “This election has really taught me that we are very much sucked into these worlds that we create on our phone, when the real world is right in front us.”
Earlier this week, researchers discover a 9.2 flaw affecting multiple NAS models
D-Link says it won’t patch them since they reached end-of-life status
Crooks are now targeting them with available exploit code
Cybercriminals have begun targeting D-Link NAS devices, recently found to have a critical vulnerability, but which will not be patched due to being at their end of life.
Threat monitoring service Shadowserver recently sounded the alarm in a brief thread posted on X.
It was recently reported multiple versions of D-Link NAS devices were vulnerable to a 9.2-severity flaw that could allow hackers to interfere with the endpoints. However, as the devices had reached their end-of-life, the company said it would not be addressing the flaw, and would not be issuing a patch – instead, advising users to replace the devices with newer models.
Thousand(s) of victims
While the researchers said the exploitation was somewhat difficult since the complexity of an attack was relatively high, they did stress that there is a publicly available exploit out there.
“We have observed D-Link NAS CVE-2024-10914 /cgi-bin/account_mgr.cgi command injection exploitation attempts starting Nov 12th,” the researchers said. “This vuln affects EOL/EOS devices, which should be removed from the Internet.”
Advertisement
They added that in total, there were more than 60,000 endpoints out there that could be compromised, including different models such as DNS-320 Version 1.00,
DNS-320LW Version 1.01.0914.2012, DNS-325 Version 1.01, Version 1.02, and DNS-340L Version 1.08.
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Shadowserver also said that it observed roughly 1,100 potential victims, significantly fewer than the 60,000 that were originally claimed.
Advertisement
A NAS device is a dedicated data storage unit connected to a network, allowing multiple users and devices to access and store data centrally. It provides secure file sharing, data backup, and storage, making it ideal for both home and business use. NAS devices are typically easy to set up and scale, offering RAID support and other protections against data loss.
Cybercriminals frequently target NAS devices because they often hold sensitive data, including personal documents, financial information, and business files. By compromising NAS systems, attackers can steal, encrypt, or delete valuable data, with ransomware being a common threat.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login