Hey, do you have heard that your car’s extended warranty is about to expire? That’s what the disembodied voice of the robot on the other end of the phone wants you to think, anyway. Fortunately, these incessant spams may soon become less frequent.
This week, the US Federal Communications Commission closed a loophole in a policy that requires voice carriers to meet a standard that would help block robocalls. All carriers in the United States are now required to use a technology known as Stir/Shaken (an acronym for a very long and unwieldy title federal standards for appeals). It’s a way to identify legitimate carriers and allow them to connect calls, while blocking those trying to spam you.
Major carriers were already using the standard when the FCC announced this policy Last year. But there was an exception for landlines and businesses with less than 100,000 customers. It turns out that a surprising number of spam calls are being filtered out by these small businesses, and this week the FCC said it requires everyone to adhere to the Stir/Shaken standard, regardless of size.
As Ars-Technica pointed out, it’s not a perfect plan and it won’t eliminate unwanted calls entirely. The Stir/Shaken standard doesn’t work on landlines, so old-school scammers can still make calls home. Additionally, the standard only applies in the United States, so anyone spoofing numbers overseas might find a way around it. And you’re still likely to get some real weird scams by text message. In the meantime, our best advice is, if in doubt, don’t commit yourself, even if your car’s warranty is really bad. is about to expire.
Here are some more gimmicky news.
Insta-Delete
If you’re an iPhone user who at some point decided you were done with Instagram, it was probably a bit difficult to delete your account. You couldn’t do it in the app itself; instead, you had to log in through a web browser. It is now possible to delete your Instagram account on iOS directly in the app.
The move follows a new policy Apple implemented in its App Store on Thursday that requires any app that asks users to create an account to also give them a way to end it. It’s still not a clean break, at least not right away. The app tries to trick you into “disabling” the account rather than deleting it, which would just put it in a suspended state. And if you do delete it, there’s still a 30-day grace period before the account is fully erased, and if you log back in, the account will automatically be restored. It sounds a lot like… deleting Facebook.
Speaking of which, did you know that you can also delete your Facebook account?
Like every other app, TikTok is all about shopping now
Get ready to buy more things in TikTok. Last year, TikTok in partnership with Shopify to allow creators to sell products on the platform. Now he’s testing a feature to show those store features more prominently in the app.
Tech Crunch unearthed screenshots of Shop option, which appears to allow users to browse product categories and add items to a cart directly within the app. The Shop tab is displayed prominently, at the top along with TikTok’s main Follow and For You tabs.
