Hit and hope – You’re at the mercy of your device’s maker regarding when/if you’ll actually get Android 14, and which goodies will end up on your smartphone. The tips here are for vanilla Android – your options might differ. If you have a Pixel 4a or newer, head to ‘System update’ in the settings to check if the revamped OS is waiting for you.

Lock it down – Security is a major part of Android 14. It’ll block ancient apps built for Android 5.1 or older – although anything already on your phone will still run. Passkey support is improved, and there are new PIN input options. In ‘Security and privacy’ > ‘Device unlock’ > ‘Screen lock’, you can disable animations to thwart people nosing over your shoulder as you type to unlock.

Share the love – Android has a default share sheet, but some apps override it to add custom components. Android 14 seeks to stop this by giving app creators ‘ChooserAction’ slots that surface key commands within the standard share sheet. The redesign also makes it clearer what your action will do, such as sharing a link or an image.

Check your battery – Android 14 is optimised for battery life, and tracking options are improved. In Settings > Battery > ‘Battery usage’, there’s a welcome return for ‘Screen time since last full charge’, which helps you understand phone use. For background drainage, dig into ‘View by systems’ to see what’s eating your battery.

Adjust alerts

Splash the flash – In Settings, go to Notifications > ‘Flash notifications’. Toggle and preview options to flash your camera and/or screen when a notification arrives. This feature is designed for the hard of hearing but can benefit anyone surrounded by noise.

Fine-tune volumes – In the ‘Sound and vibration’ section of Settings, you now have the means to define separate volume levels for your ringtone and notifications. So you can make alerts more subtle but still be sure to never miss a call.

Read more easily

Go (really) large – You could already scale fonts in Android (Settings > Display > ‘Display size and text’). But now you can go all the way up to a whopping 200%. Smartly, the scaling is non-linear, which stops headings from becoming too gigantic.

Access quick settings – When you only want to change your system font size temporarily, digging into Settings is annoying. Handily, then, you can use the ‘Font size’ tile in Quick Settings, which gives you the same font-resizing slider as found in Settings.

Make it your own

Rock the lock screen – In Settings, head to ‘Wallpaper and style’. Swipe between the clock options to choose a style; tap the button below to access a screen where you can define the clock’s colour and size.

Take a shortcut – Scroll down and tap Shortcuts, then select which two action buttons you’d like on your lock screen – including Home, Camera, Do Not Disturb, Mute, Torch, Video Camera, Wallet, and a QR code scanner.

Create wallpapers – Under ‘More wallpapers’, you can choose from a built-in selection – or make your own. For example, tap ‘Emoji workshop’, choose a bunch of different emojis, and then decide how they’re displayed in terms of pattern and colour scheme.

Master gestures

Drop it – Although it’s best suited to larger screens, drag-and-drop exists on Android 14 phones. For example, select and then tap-hold a block of text. With another finger, use the app switcher to change apps, and let go to drop the text in place.

Get back – Bit of a punt, this one, since it’s not fully baked at the time of writing, but with Android 14 you should get a preview of what a back gesture (slide from left) will do. This could be useful, stopping you from unexpectedly ending up on your home screen.

Just days after South Africa’s PlayStation distributor confirmed the launch of the PS5 Slim in April, we’re hearing news of Sony’s next big thing: the PS5 ‘Pro’. This isn’t coming from Sony directly, of course. It’s coming, as everything that counts as ‘news’ these days does, from an unofficial source (it was leaked) — by YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead. And later confirmed by Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson.

Oh, and it’ll be arriving sometime in the holiday shuffle — to better target those Christmas wishlists — as long as it pumps out enough first-party titles, that is. Good thing Nintendo stood aside this year, huh?

Anyone familiar with the scene knows who Tom Henderson is, and that he doesn’t mess around. He verified that the documents seen in Moore’s Law is Dead’s video are the real thing, coming from a PlayStation developer portal — with the documents hitting relevant developers a few weeks back.

We won’t bore you with all the nitty-gritty details. This is a PS5 Pro, after all. It’s a PlayStation with hardware befitting the four-year gap between itself and the original console — one that’s reportedly being kitted out to best suit any customers picking up GTA VI when it drops next year thanks to its improved GPU that’ll apparently render up to three times faster.

A more consistent frame rate is expected at 4K resolutions, and there’s talk that its ray tracing capabilities could be three (or even four) times faster than the previous iteration. PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling (PSSR) has been rumoured to use Sony’s machine learning — similar to AMD’s FSR or Nvidia’s DLSS image upscaling features to possibly boost graphics up to 8K.

Source

Let’s settle this on LinkedIn…

Anyone against the idea of starving themselves to death probably has a LinkedIn account, perhaps against their will. Microsoft’s social platform has long been a place to go in search of jobs, or employees to fill those jobs — with everyone patting themselves on the back in the process. Now, the platform is looking to branch into gaming.

That might sound like we’re pulling your leg, but it’s true. The billion-strong userbase will soon be treated to at least three of the company’s in-house games; akin to the surge of simple internet games like Wordle or something from neal.fun. They’re called Queens, Inference, and Crossclimb. It isn’t Linkle or something equally Wordle-y, so the NYT should leave them be.

The obvious implementation would be to allow employees to compete against one another, or against other companies. And, according to app researcher Nima Owji, that’s exactly what’s happening.

LinkedIn later confirmed in a message to TechCrunch that it was indeed working on a selection of games, though failed to provide any sort of release window. “We’re playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations,” the spokesperson said in a message to TechCrunch.

It’s… a strange move. A website aimed at professionals, would-be or otherwise, succumbing to the pull of time-killing games — designed to kill company time? We hope it all works out.

Source

Sony hits the pause button on VR

Virtual reality (VR) isn’t for everyone, apparently. You’d think Sony, a company where the bucks flow out of every orifice, would find a way to make it work. But if the rumours are true, the Japanese conglomerate has hit the pause button on PSVR 2 production and begun stockpiling the headsets thanks to declining sales quarter after quarter. Yikes.

We’re just spitballing here, but we reckon the R15,000 price tag — or the fact that it requires a PS5 to work — might have something to do with the declining sales. Don’t even get us started on the lacklustre support for games since its debut, riding on the Horizon Call of the Mountain high ever since. The closing of the PlayStation London division, reportedly working on VR titles, hasn’t helped.

The company’s saving grace could be its decision to allow PC support for the PSVR 2 headset. Or it might continue to sink deeper into this mess, as more people flock towards the similarly priced Meta Quest 3.

Source

Google’s Gemini on Apple iPhones

AI might be coming to Apple’s iPhones sooner, rather than later. That isn’t thanks to a massive push to get Apple’s in-house AI out sooner, but because of a possible deal that’ll put Google’s Gemini engine on Apple’s devices, according to Bloomberg’s sources familiar with the matter. If the reports are true, Apple’s also explored the possibility of plugging OpenAI’s engine into the development of its next phone.

Whatever the case, we won’t be hearing about it until June at the earliest at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. It seems that nothing has yet been agreed upon between Apple and Google — with no ideas of how a partnership would work, or how the AI would be introduced to the devices.

Whether this will affect Apple’s long-rumoured plans to develop its own artificial intelligence in-house has yet to be seen. Just last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook was going on about the massive potential of AI, and that the company was investing heavily in the area in general.

Source

But why is Google considering Gemini as such an important milestone, and what does this mean for users of Google’s services? And generally speaking, what does it mean in the context of the current hyperfast-paced developments of AI?

AI everywhere

Google is betting on Gemini to transform most of its products by enhancing current functionalities and creating new ones for services such as search, Gmail, YouTube and its office productivity suite. This would also allow improvements to their online advertising business — their main source of revenue — as well as for Android phone software, with trimmed versions of Gemini running on limited capacity hardware.

For users, Gemini means new features and improved capacities that would make Google services harder to shun, strengthening an already dominant position in areas such as search engines. The potential and opportunities for Google are considerable, given the bulk of their software is easily upgradable cloud services.

But the huge and unexpected success of ChatGPT attracted a lot of attention and enhanced the credibility of OpenAI. Gemini will allow Google to reinstate itself as a major player in AI in the public view. Google is a powerhouse in AI, with large and strong research teams at the origin of many major advances of the last decade.

There is public discussion about these new technologies, both on the benefits they provide and the disruption they create in fields such as education, design and health care.

Strengthening AI

At its core, Gemini relies on transformer networks. Originally devised by a research team at Google, the same technology is used to power other LLMs such as GPT-4.

A distinctive element of Gemini is its capacity to deal with different data modalities: text, audio, image and video. This provides the AI model with the capacity to execute tasks over several modalities, like answering questions regarding the content of an image or conducting a keyword search on specific types of content discussed in podcasts.

But more importantly, that the models can handle distinct modalities enables the training of globally superior AI models, compared to distinct models trained independently for each modality. Indeed, such multimodal models are deemed to be stronger since they are exposed to different perspectives of the same concepts.

For example, the concept of birds may be better understood through learning from a mix of birds’ textual descriptions, vocalizations, images and videos. This idea of multimodal transformer models has been explored in previous research at Google, Gemini being the first full-fledged commercial implementation of the approach.

Such a model is seen as a step in the direction of stronger generalist AI models, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Risks of AGI

Given the rate at which AI is advancing, the expectations that AGI with superhuman capabilities will be designed in the near future generates discussions in the research community and more broadly in the society.

On one hand, some anticipate the risk of catastrophic events if a powerful AGI falls into the hands of ill-intentioned groups, and request that developments be slowed down.

Others claim that we are still very far from such actionable AGI, that the current approaches allow for a shallow modelling of intelligence, mimicking the data on which they are trained, and lack an effective world model — a detailed understanding of actual reality — required to achieve human-level intelligence.

On the other hand, one could argue that focusing the conversation on existential risk is distracting attention from more immediate impacts brought on by recent advances of AI, including perpetuating biases, producing incorrect and misleading content — prompting Google to pause its Gemini image generator, increasing environmental impacts and enforcing the dominance of Big Tech.

Read More: Google Gemini replaces Bard as catch-all AI platform

The line to follow lies somewhere in between all of these considerations. We are still far from the advent of actionable AGI — additional breakthroughs are required, including introducing stronger capacities for symbolic modelling and reasoning.

In the meantime, we should not be distracted from the important ethical and societal impacts of modern AI. These considerations are important and should be addressed by people with diverse expertise, spanning technological and social science backgrounds.

Nevertheless, although this is not a short-term threat, achieving AI with superhuman capacity is a matter of concern. It is important that we, collectively, become ready to responsibly manage the emergence of AGI when this significant milestone is reached.

• Christian Gagné is a Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Université Laval
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

SIMA, which stands for Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent, is currently still in its research phase and is being trained to learn a broad range of gaming skills across a variety of scenarios — instead of just destroying humans at StarCraft II.

Through partnerships with video game developers Hello Games, Embracer, Tuxedo Labs, Coffee Stain, and others, SIMA is learning how games work and how to apply what it learns to games it’s never seen before. DeepMind’s eventual aim with SIMA, other than furthering natural language AI model research, is for it to be a devoted member of your party that does what it’s told and doesn’t take all the good loot.

Does this SIMA good idea?

“SIMA isn’t trained to win a game; it’s trained to run it and do what it’s told,” said Google DeepMind researcher and SIMA co-lead Tim Harley, according to The Verge.

SIMA researchers have focused on games that involve open-world play, rather than linear or story-driven titles, so the agent can learn to follow instructions. To achieve this, SIMA was trained by watching pairs of humans play a game — where one watched and gave instructions while the other carried them out. In a different scenario, players played freely while DeepMind researchers recorded instructions that would’ve resulted in what the player did.

We’ll admit this sounds rather appealing. If you’ve ever played an online co-op game that drops in randoms, you’ll know how risky that can be. There’s a good chance of them ruining your game, whether through incompetence or toxicity.

Having an AI party member who follows instructions means you won’t have to worry about watching your back or your hard-earned loot. Don’t feel like spending hours collecting resources? Tell SIMA to do it while you handle more important tasks.

Read More: DeepMind is back at it again, this time teaching AI how to play football

However, as appealing as this might sound, it’s worth remembering how training AI models on human behaviour — especially when online human interaction is involved — has gone in the past. TayTweets, anyone?

This probably isn’t a problem in a controlled research environment but, should SIMA ever be trained on average human-based online gameplay, we doubt it will take long before the griefing starts.

Source

This is the view of Ishmet Davidson, the chief executive officer of Media24, South Africa’s largest digital news publisher, which is owned by internet firm Naspers. He was testifying at the country’s Competition Commission inquiry into Google’s dominance in search and digital advertising.

Davidson has “played an active role in resisting any potential threat by government to interfere in or to curtail press freedom” in his 30-year career in publishing. But the biggest “threat to press freedom in our country is not from government, it’s from one of the wealthiest and most dominant companies in the world, Google.”

The Fourth Estate plays “a vital role in our democracy” which is “enshrined in our constitution,” he told the Media And Digital Platform Marketing Inquiry. “Yet today we find ourselves not just facing challenges relating to freedom of the press but challenges relating to the very existence of the press.”

The South African digital advertising revenue market grew from R3.5-billion in 2015 to R14.5-billion in 2022, Davidson said. But based on the latest statistics from the country’s IAB advertising body, with PwC, Google and Meta are “absolutely dominant with 97% market share, leaving publishers with the crumbs.”

“What’s particularly concerning is that in 2015, publishers had an 8% market share, which by 2022 had declined to 3%. On the other hand, during this time, Google’s dominance grew from 67% to 78% of the digital advertising market (with close to 100% of the search market).”

He added: “Even more shocking is Google’s advertising revenue growing to over R11-billion, at an average annual growth rate of 25%.”

In effect, Google’s dominance in digital advertising has done what South Africa’s apartheid government was never able to do and shut down critical voices, while weakening democracy. The National Party, which introduced Apartheid, spent decades trying to silence the mostly English-language newspapers, including independent media outlets like The Weekly Mail and Vrye Weekblad. It was voted out of power in South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, which saw Nelson Mandela elected as president.

Moneyweb editor Ryk van Niekerk told the hearing that the mainstream media has played a “critical role during the past decade in exposing state capture” and has “contributed significantly to protecting our constitutional democracy”.

State capture is the phrase used to describe government corruption under the current ruling ANC party, which has crippled the provision of electricity (with as much as 12 hours a day without power due to rolling blackouts), as well as infrastructure and logistics. As much as $34 billion (ZAR500 billion) was looted during the “nine wasted years” of former South African president Jacob Zuma, said his successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa.

‘Fundamentally misunderstand’

Google and Meta have made written submissions and will testify later this month. X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by South African-born Elon Musk, has refused to participate.

Google claims in its written submission that it does not make much revenue from news. “While we appreciate that both publishers and search engines have an ads-funded business model, there is no competitive interaction between Google Search and a news publisher in relation to searches with news intent,” said the Google submission.

Meta’s submission claimed the competition investigation “fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between publishers and the Meta platforms, and materially exaggerate the degree to which publishers’ content drives users to access Feeds and, by corollary, advertising content on Meta’s platforms.”

Referring to its global Google News initiative, the search giant said it gave publications funding and training.

But Davidson said this $300-million it has given to the world’s media in the past six years represents just 0,03% of its global advertising, totalling $1,07-trillion, according to figures from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Google for the years 2018 to 2023.

This “is just altruism disguising greed” much “like tossing crumbs to appease the peasants,” he told the commission, adding it “is designed to increase their stranglehold over the media industry”.

“We don’t want their charity. What we do want is to be fairly compensated for our content.”

‘40% of Google Search from news’

A Swiss media study last year found that Google makes as much as 40% of its revenue from media content, or “$176-million per year in Switzerland alone,” while news content “accounts for the majority of Google’s $280-billion annual revenue,” wrote Courtney Radsch, the director of the Centre for Journalism & Liberty and a fellow at the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy.

The study, conducted by FehrAdvice & Partners, concluded that Google searches using media content bring in an estimated revenue of around $440-million a year.

US publishers are owed between $11-billion and $14-billion a year by Google and Meta, according to research published last year by academics from Columbia University and the University of Houston.

Davidson’s views were echoed by Van Niekerk, who is also Moneyweb’s commercial manager. He said his digital publication “is trapped in Google’s ecosystem” with 43% of its traffic directed to it by the search giant.

Publishers are also at the mercy of Google’s own agendas. “Unfortunately, Google changes the algorithm often without informing publishers, which, in Moneyweb’s case, has led to a sudden drop in traffic. It is a big problem for us,” he told the hearing. “If Moneyweb is not part of this [Google] ecosystem, we will close our doors.”

Google reaps the rewards

Google reaps the major economic rewards from the work the media does. “Moneyweb invests heavily in editorial content, and it seems that Google and other digital platforms benefit financially from the content,” Van Niekerk said.

“Journalism is in danger,” Caxton chairman Paul Jenkins told me. “Digital advertising follows eyeballs and does not discriminate between clickbait, fake news and cutting-edge journalism.” Moneyweb is part of the Caxton stable.

Despite generating 2.36-billion search page impressions in 2023, News24, part of Media24 which is South Africa’s largest digital news publisher, received only 4% of click-throughs. The balance was “monetized by Google,” CEO Davidson told the hearing.

News24’s total number of Google impressions – from its search, News and Discover offerings – totalled 5,2 billion, with a 5% click-through rate. Some 5 billion – or 95% – of the impressions were “for Google’s benefit.”

But, said Davidson, that 5% clickthrough, represents 44% of News24’s referral traffic.

“So, without Google, we’d lose almost half of our referral traffic and would be in even deeper trouble.”

“As Google likes to pretend, news may well be ‘insignificant’ in the global Google universe, but it’s hardly insignificant when we take the contribution in impressions.”

Sbu Ngalwa, the chairperson of the South African National Editors’ Forum, told the hearing the day before that “the entire industry is in trouble.”

“Fair compensation to us should be based on the value that the platforms derive from the content. The reality is that we don’t know what that value is because the tech companies do not provide that information,” he said.

Khadija Patel, from the International Fund for Public Interest Media, and a former editor of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper, warned that “what we are mourning is not the death of newspapers. What instead we are really afraid of is a future without access to news at a low price point. When I say news, I mean high-quality independent news. That’s what newspapers ultimately represented.”

Adriaan Basson, News24’s editor-in-chief, summed up the dilemma for the media industry, which actually creates the content, in that Google, “without a newsroom” and without generating its own content, makes the most money from that content.

This article first appeared on Forbes, where Toby Shapshak is a senior contributor.

Room for refining

One of the ways it’ll be doing so is by “refining some of [its] core ranking systems” to get a better sense of when web pages feature poor user experiences, downright unhelpful, or “feel like they were created for search engines instead of people.” The big idea here is for Search to sift through the nonsense, bringing the most helpful information to the surface, simultaneously burying unoriginal and unhelpful content.

It’s specifically looking to clear out those results designed to game the SEO (search engine optimisation) at scale — especially where automation might be involved. “This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries,” it said.

“We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%,” the king of Search said.

Google’s announcement may not mention generative AI specifically, but it is a concern that’s being addressed, according to a Google spokesperson speaking with Gizmodo. The changes target “low-quality AI-generated content that’s designed to attract clicks, but that doesn’t add much original value.”

Google reckons it’s dealing with a “more complex” update than usual and changes could take up to a month to begin rolling out.

Read More: Google recognises South Africa as it launches its first Cloud region in Joburg

Spammers Paradise no more

Another change tackles spam, with more content being considered worthy of being on that list. It’s updating its spam policies to “better address new and evolving abusive practices that lead to unoriginal, low-quality content showing up on Search,” starting today.

“Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn’t always as clear,” it said. “…we’re strengthening our policy to focus on this abusive behavior — producing content at scale to boost search ranking — whether automation, humans or a combination are involved. This will allow us to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content.”

Part of those changes involves stemming the flow of low-quality third-party intent on “capitalizing on the hosting site’s strong reputation” that might usually contain “great content.” Google mentions how a third-party producer might publish a payday loan review article on a trusted education website to “gain ranking benefits from the site.”

Starting 5 May, Google will consider this sort of result ‘spam’ and it’s giving affected sites time to make changes.

“The tech giants have argued that news is not essential and that publishers are lucky to have their platforms driving traffic to their sites, which can then convert that traffic into subscriptions,” writes Haaris Mateen, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, and Anya Schiffrin, a senior lecturer in Discipline of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

But their study finds that “news is important to Big Tech platforms” even if value is created for both sides.

Big tech companies have “resisted paying traditional licensing and copyright fees” and are not forthcoming about providing audience traffic and impression numbers. What payments they make are “meagre” and often through small grants or private arrangements with major outlets, the academics found.

“Unsurprisingly, by keeping the cost of goods sold (news) down, Google and Meta have grown rich off the advertising revenue they reap from attracting the world’s eyeballs to their sites.”

“Meanwhile, news deserts have become a global problem as outlets struggle with the loss of revenue, although some – like The New York Times and The Guardian – have been able to offset the losses with subscriptions and other income.”

In South Africa, publisher Caxton with the Centre for Free Expression has asked Google to “provide transparent answers to a list of well-considered questions,” Caxton chairman Paul Jenkins tells the FM. These are the “very questions which media around the world seek answers to and yet we as the media face the byzantine maze of confidentiality protection that secretive organisations such as Google hide behind”.

This aims at “redressing of the disproportionate power of digital advertising platforms over the news industry”.

Caxton, like other media organisations in South Africa, has been wrestling with the digital revolution for nearly 25 years, he adds, and in that time the “behemoths of the digital world” have come to dominate the industry. The average American now spends seven hours a day on a screen, he says.

“Our ability as news organisations to hold government to account and report on society has never been more under threat. Journalism is in danger – and digital advertising follows eyeballs and does not discriminate between clickbait, fake news and cutting-edge journalism.”

“It is not melodramatic to say news as a public good and freedom of expression is at a tipping point, not unlike the climate crisis. But the blame game and finger-pointing are unhelpful,” Jenkins adds.

“News publishers all over the world have tried to estimate what Google and Meta owe them for the news they distribute to audiences. This is a difficult task due to a lack of publicly available data about audience behaviour and because a lack of competition makes the price tech companies pay for news artificially low,” Mateen and Schiffrin concur.

The academics have created a methodology they say is “transparent and replicable,” having used insights from over 50 years of research in the economics of bargaining to find the “fair” payment for news.

The “methodology offers the flexibility to change underlying assumptions based on the market and geography being analysed”.

It’s also important that publishers stick together as they negotiate, they say, as “more value is created when bargaining is collective”.

Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, which was enacted in 2021, is a good template, they argue, and has forced Google and Meta to strike deals with Australian media organisations, resulting in payments of A$200-million a year.

“It’s no surprise other governments are looking at Australia’s law to find ways to get payments for their news too,” say Mateen and Schiffrin.

Read More: What’s wrong with programmatic advertising – and why you should never trust Google or Facebook again

Other countries considering similar laws are Indonesia, New Zealand, South Africa and Switzerland, they add. Japan has done its own study and “warned tech platforms [that] low payments to publishers could violate antimonopoly laws”.

Caxton and the Centre for Free Expression want to “use our generous South African constitution to protect our rights to freedom of expression and information, and to provide us with access to the data we need to protect these rights,” Jenkins tells the FM.

“We don’t accept that the trope of commercial confidentiality is an excuse for secrecy”.

• This feature originally appeared in the Financial Mail

Firstly, make sure the phone you’re setting up is either brand new or a properly formatted hand-me-down or secondhand phone. Either way, there are a few steps to follow that’ll streamline the setup process.

Step 1: Preparing for setup

Before diving into the setup process, it’s vital you go out and gather everything you need.

Back up your old phone: Start by backing up your old phone to ensure a smooth transition to your new one. Luckily, this part is pretty straightforward. Use Google’s backup feature to save your contacts, calendars, text messages and other essential data. Navigate to Settings > System > Backup (or Settings > Accounts and backup > Backup and restore for Samsung Galaxy phones) to initiate the backup.

Gather necessary items: Have your SIM card (or eSIM activation details), Wi-Fi network information, and Google account credentials ready. Additionally, if you plan to transfer data from your old phone, a USB-C to USB-C cable will come in handy.

Step 2: Okay, it’s time

Now that you’re prepared, let’s get started with setting up your new Android phone.

Insert SIM card and power on: Insert your SIM card into the new phone and power it on. Follow the on-screen instructions to select your region and language, connect to Wi-Fi, and sign in with your Google account details. That last step isn’t strictly required straight away but it could save you a few headaches later on.

Set up security features: It’s always a good idea to enhance the security of your device by setting up a screen lock method, such as a PIN, pattern or biometric authentication (fingerprint or facial recognition). While you’re at it, consider enabling your preferred electronic payment method, like Google Pay, Samsung Pay, or any of the other locally supported systems.

Restore backup: If you didn’t do it earlier, sign in with your Google account to restore data from your backup. This includes contacts, calendars, app settings and more. During this process, you’ll have the option to choose which data to restore.

Step 3: Post-setup details

After completing the initial setup, don’t forget these important post-setup tasks.

Update system and apps: Ensure your device is up to date by checking for system updates in Settings > System > System update. Additionally, head to the Play Store to update your apps, ensuring you have access to the latest features and security patches.

Add other accounts: Integrate additional accounts, such as social media, email, and cloud storage accounts, to your device for easy access. Navigate to Settings > Accounts (or Passwords & accounts) > Add account to add new accounts.

Step 4: Personalisation and Customisation

Configure Google Assistant: Maximise the capabilities of Google Assistant by customising its settings. Access Assistant settings by saying “Hey Google, open Assistant settings” or navigating to Settings > Google > Search, Assistant and Voice > Google Assistant.

Explore additional customisation options: Delve into the settings menu to explore customisation options such as home screen layout, display settings, and notification preferences. Android offers a wide range of customisation possibilities, so feel free to go mad here and really make the phone your own.

Read More: Exploring the walled garden: First-time iPhone setup tips

Step 5: Explore advanced Android features

Now that your phone is set up, take some time to explore advanced features and tips to enhance your Android experience.

Utilise gestures and shortcuts: Familiarise yourself with gesture controls and shortcuts to navigate your phone more efficiently. From swipe gestures to app shortcuts, mastering these features can significantly improve your productivity — even if that’s just reordering your apps so you don’t have to swipe and scroll to look for it.

Explore built-in apps and services: Take advantage of the built-in apps and services offered by Android, such as Google Photos, Google Drive and Google Maps. These apps seamlessly integrate with your device, offering powerful features for managing photos, files, and navigation.

Discover accessibility features: Explore accessibility features designed to make your phone more accessible to users with disabilities. From screen readers to magnification gestures, Android provides a range of accessibility options to accommodate diverse needs.

In short: Google and Facebook lied. They promised a range of never-seen-before, easy-to-communicate nonsense about how to market to individual consumers.

But they have never actually delivered on this promise and 25 years later, their hyperbole has become fact. After over two decades of this, the marketing industry is convinced that programmatic advertising actually works.

Just like first-time voters in the 2024 election will have never known anything but load shitting, a generation of marketers has grown up thinking programmatic advertising works – when all evidence proves it doesn’t. Research shows that 70% of such adverts are just ignored, while fraud is so rife it accounts for $20- to $50-billion a year.

Worse, it has sucked all the oxygen out of the media. For instance, the cost-per-impression (CPI) for programmatic adverts is 8c – of which Stuff only receives 1c. That’s just 12,5% for the actual media publisher – which has built up the exact following advertisers are looking for. Google gets 87% of the revenue for providing the mechanism.

Additionally, Meta is the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally” according to New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez.

Here is a selection of the articles and columns I have written for the Financial Mail and Daily Maverick. (As a quick aside, here’s how to beef up your cybersecurity.)

Why Facebook and Google can’t be trusted

I wrote this cover story for the FM in 2022, detailing all of the scandalous lies told by programmatic advertisers and pointing out how surveillance capitalism only makes Facebook and Google richer – and society poorer. The headline says it all.

Google’s “dominance” succeeded where Apartheid couldn’t – forcing South Africa’s Fourth Estate onto “its knees”

South Africa’s Fourth Estate “is on its knees” as Google and Meta’s dominance has captured 97% of all digital advertising in the country, creating an “extinction crisis” for the media.

Programmatic advertising is killing local media

The media plays a vital role in democracy, but, globally and in South Africa, the media is dying. This is caused in no small part by the growth of programmatic advertising that has drained the media of its financial lifeblood.

Google lied: it’s making a fortune from news media

Google makes as much as 40% of its revenue from media content for its search business in Switzerland, according to new research. “The value of news is far higher than policymakers or publishers think it is, at least on Google Search, which accounts for the majority of Google’s $280-billion annual revenue.”

Show us the money, SA media tells Google 

Google and Facebook owe United States news publishers between $11bn and $14bn a year, according to new research, which proves that “news is important to Big Tech platforms”. In South Africa, news publishers Caxton and News24, with the Centre for Free Expression, have served an access-to-information request on Google to “provide transparent answers” about how its data is used. “Journalism is in danger,” warns Caxton chairman Paul Jenkins.

Why Google and Meta owe news publishers much more than you think – and billions more than they’d like to admit

New research by Columbia University and the University of Houston found that Google and Meta owe news publishers between $11- and $14-billion a year in the US alone.

Google’s ads like selling “cigarettes or drugs”

Only “illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) that could rival these economics” said Google Vice President for Finance Michael Roszak in a note that the search giant fought to keep from being made public. It is an apt comparison which has hooked the world on a habit it can’t kick.

“Search advertising is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created,” Roszak started the July 2017 note, adding, “We are fortunate to have an amazing business”.

Not a happy 25th birthday for “monopolist” Google

It wasn’t a happy 25th birthday for Google, which went on trial in September 2023 for monopolising the online search industry.

“Everybody talks about the open web — but there is really the Google web”

Google’s dominance is being challenged out by the US government in court – having bought or squashed any competition for the last two decades. “There is really the Google web” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the blockbuster antitrust court case against the search giant.

Facebook is no better – it enables child sexual exploitation for profit

Zuckerberg has “blood on his hands”

Every day 100,000 children experience sexual harassment on Instagram and Facebook, according to a lawsuit by the New Mexico attorney general. Every day. Your marketing money is propping up a business used by criminals “to buy and sell children for sex”.

Facebook is a “product that’s killing people”

Facebook Messenger is being used “to coordinate trafficking activities,” according to Meta’s own internal documents. “Every human exploitation stage (recruitment, coordination, exploitation) is represented on our platform,” one document says. Facebook decided not to scan Messenger for harmful content as it would put the company at “a competitive disadvantage vs other apps who might offer more privacy,” according to a 2017 email.

Instagram’s child porn problem

The social network’s algorithms promote accounts used by a “vast paedophile network,” investigations reveal.

Facebook’s teen mental health Waterloo

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens,” according to a 233-page lawsuit by attorneys general of 42 States that have sued Instagram owner Meta. “Its motive is profit.”

Facebook lied: it knew teens were in danger

“Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James, part of a lawsuit by 33 attorneys general filed in California in October.

It’s personal: Facebook’s execs named in lawsuits

“Facebook, now Meta, has failed to protect young people on its platforms and instead chose to ignore or, in some cases, double down on known manipulations that pose a real threat to physical and mental health – exploiting children in the interest of profit,” said Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey. They allege that Facebook knowingly “put the public at risk” by, as Haugen so famously said, “prioritising growth over safety”.

Other investigations

A marketplace of girl influencers managed by moms and stalked by men – New York Times

Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.

How Facebook and Instagram became marketplaces for child sex trafficking – The Guardian

A two-year Guardian investigation found that the messaging service was used by criminals “to buy and sell children for sex” – which Meta is struggling to prevent.

Meta is the world’s ‘single largest marketplace for paedophiles’, says New Mexico attorney general – The Guardian

Raúl Torrez is taking the company to court and expects further details to emerge about its knowledge of child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

‘Not letting me on Snapchat was the best thing my mum ever did for me’ – The Guardian

When her 14-year-old child asked for social media, Guardian advice columnist Annalisa Barbieri held firm. Thank goodness, says her daughter, now all grown up.

Meanwhile, programmatic advertising is actually useless – and misinformation is rife

Why Google gets it wrong about me

Google replies on snooping through your search activity primarily to target you with advertising. The only problem – for Google – is that I stopped using it six years ago, and most of the things I searched for (tech product prices) were for Stuff, and not me personally. Also, who wears such fugly shoes?

Google scored “billions” for video ads nobody watched

For the last three years, Google’s video partner ads missed the firm’s own targets by 80% and such ads often appeared as muted ads in hard-to-see places on no-name websites.

How websites trick you into accepting cookies

You may have heard of dark patterns – which are the unethical ways that websites force users into accepting cookies.

Chatbots spew fake info via clickbait websites

Generative AI has a dark side, already, as scammers use it for “proliferating” misinformation websites, powered by programmatic advertising.

What’s wrong with so-called influencers

Anybody can be famous. But famous for what?

South Africa’s competition authorities have finally woken up to the economic damage of these advertising monopolies

SA’s Competition Commission disrupts Google’s unrepentant advertising monopoly

A blockbuster announcement in August 2022 means Google needs to highlight better which results are paid for, potentially disrupting how the search engine giant shows its advertising. It also focused on Google’s monopoly as the default search engine for Android smartphones. The only surprising thing about this is why it took so long.

Google tracks phones even when people opt-out

The search giant has been accused — again — of snooping on its users and invading their privacy to obtain their location data.

Google is coming for your privacy in new and scary ways

Only Google would have the chutzpah to call an invasive new way to track people online “Privacy Sandbox”. The ironically named feature will track you so it can monetise you by serving ads. It’s not about privacy.

Google finally faces the antitrust music

There has been a massive turnaround in the last few years, with the US Department of Justice launching its biggest antitrust lawsuit in two decades against Google in 2023. Brought forward by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and several States’ attorneys-general, they argue Google stifled innovation and therefore cost consumers more. There are two major issues they are being sued over.

The first is that Google broke antitrust laws by locking browser makers into using its services. The second important aspect the lawsuit raised is how Google pressurises smartphone manufacturers to preload its apps, as well as its Play Store and Gmail services.

Think Google is too big? So does the US government.

The Department of Justice launched its second lawsuit accusing the ‘behemoth’ of illegally building a monopoly — this time in online advertising.

Google “distorts platform competition” in the country – Competition Commission

The Competition Commission’s two-year process found similar monopolistic behaviour as international inquiries.

“Google influences platform competition because it is where most online journeys start,” says commission chair James Hodge. “The inquiry finds that Google search’s dominance and business model distort platform competition, as small and new platforms struggle for visibility and customer acquisition.” And: “Google search is a critical gateway to consumers for all platform categories, and its business model of paid search alongside free results favours large established platforms.”

Is Google, Facebook and adtech anti-competitive? SA’s watchdog is investigating

The Competition Commission will investigate the impact of adtech through its Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI). The inquiry is based on the “commission’s view that there may exist market features in digital platforms that distribute news media content, and associated Adtech markets, that impede, distort, or restrict competition and which may have adverse implications for the news media sector of South Africa”.

How the EU is saving the internet

The European Union is doing what American lawmakers have been unable to do – rein in the dominant and unmitigated powers of big tech and social platforms.

A quick glossary:

• GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation privacy legislation.
• DSA – Digital Services Act
• DMA – Digital Services Act

Big tech meets big EU

New European legislation aims to rein in the surveillance capitalism of social media and tech giants. They made billions of dollars in profit before anyone realised they were, er, overstating their abilities — except, arguably, for overturning democracies (see Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election).

The EU’s Digital Services Act will make the internet a safer place

The European Union’s wide-ranging Digital Services Act came into effect on 25 August 2023 to provide much-needed oversight for “very large online platforms” which the EU defines as having over 45 million users. They now “must apply the new law,” tweeted European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “We’re bringing our European values into the digital world.”

The new DSA laws have far-reaching consequences for the 40 Big Tech firms if they fail to stop abuse, misinformation, propaganda, child porn, vaccine denialism, and the selling of fake and counterfeit goods.

EU watchdog ruling threatens Facebook’s ad revenue

Because Facebook – and all the other Big Tech firms – have their European headquarters in tax-friendly Ireland, that country’s Data Protection Commission is the lead EU regulator. It fined Facebook €390-million (R7.3-billion) in February 2023.

This effectively undermines Facebook’s business model for selling advertising in a market of 450-million people in 27 countries. This is 5% to 7% of the social giant’s advertising revenue, says Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. “This could be a major gut punch,” he said. Facebook made a whopping $118-billion in revenue in 2021.

How much is your privacy worth?

Apple’s ad-tracking costs social media $10-billion

After it introduced controversial privacy settings in early 2021, which reduced the ability for advertisers to track iPhone users and their app activity, it cost Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as much as $10-billion (R156-billion) that year, according to an investigation by The Financial Times.

Apple gets 36% cut of Google’s search deal

Google pays Apple a whopping 36% of the advertising revenue it generates from its deal as the exclusive search engine for Safari. This gobsmacking revelation was made in the US government’s anti-monopoly court case against Google – which both Apple and Google have tried to keep from going public.

Misinformation is rife on social media

How social media became the new frontiers of propaganda

Social media has allowed conspiracy theories, disinformation and anti-vaxxers to spread because it brings more eyeballs, and therefore more advertising, as I wrote in 2022.

Chatbots spew fake info via clickbait websites

Generative AI has a dark side, already, as scammers use it for “proliferating” misinformation websites, powered by programmatic advertising.

None of the other social giants are any better – especially TikTok

TikTok data privacy comes to the EU

Europe’s war against privacy issues keeps on rolling, with TikTok being the latest social media platform to be fined. This fine – amounting to €345-million or R6.8-billion – was for how it dealt with children’s accounts under the EU’s very strict GDPR privacy legislation.

The Titanic never sank on TikTok

Misinformation’s newest frontier is the short-form video app, where conspiracy theories regularly run rampant.

Advertising is not the only industry Google throws its weight around

Sonos beats Google in first of three patent lawsuits

Google’s voice-activated speakers are amazing but the technology was invented by Sonos, the maker of the gold standard in music streaming speakers. “Google has been blatantly and knowingly copying our patented technology,” Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said in August 2021 of the lawsuit, where the courts ruled Google had stolen the patented technology.

Okay, fine, it can technically detect burps as well, but it’s not the product’s aim. You can still have Taco Bell, onions, pork sausages, or whatever else it is that makes you pass gas. Yes, your poo-powered tractor is probably also safe (for now). Google and the EDF have their eyes on large game.

Google’s gas geas

Specifically, the MethaneSAT project is going after methane polluters, industries that emit large quantities of the gas as a byproduct of their operations. It has no designs on bodily functions that we know of but we’re reasonably sure that certain areas of the planet will demonstrate a larger-than-expected methane signature.

MethaneSAT will use a to-be-launched satellite, designed for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in March, to scan areas of the planets looking for signs of the smelly gas. Google will assist with algorithms and artificial intelligence analysis to create a heatmap like the one pictured above (taken from Google Earth Engine). The yellow areas show high methane emission areas, which could be anything from polluting factories to your uncle Jerry after a particularly nasty curry (he really should stop eating that stuff).

MethaneSAT isn’t likely to be spending much time over Jerry’s place, however. It’ll orbit the planet at a height of about 560 kilometres, keeping an eye on the major oil and gas production areas. Folks with a fondness for tacos can breathe a sigh of relief (just not too deeply, yeah?). The data the project gathers will be made publicly available, on the EDF’s website set up for the task and on Google Earth Engine. Just what you do with this deeper insight into the presence of methane on Earth… that’s up to you. And maybe Greenpeace’s militant wing.