The rise of beauty enhancement trends and tools online

  • Many photo apps and tools online provide some level of beauty enhancement capability designed to hide blemishes, remove age lines and thin your frame.
  • They are designed to make people more comfortable about sharing their selfies with their audience.
  • Research has shown that 32% of teenage girls feel worse about their bodies after scrolling Instagram.
  • Read more about the effects of beauty enhancement tools on the Social Media Today’s website.

75% of the world’s top websites allows bad passwords

  • An analysis of 120 of the top ranked English-language websites has shown that many allow weak or easily guessed passwords.
  • These include passwords such as ‘abc1234’ and ‘password’
  • The analysis included trying a random 20 passwords found in data breaches, as well as the first 20 cracked by password guessing tools. Only 15 of the 120 blocked all 40 tested passwords, including Google and Adobe.
  • Read more on this story on the New Scientist website.

Google Hangouts announces shut down in November

  • Following the shutdown of Google Hangouts for Workspace users in February, Google has announced that Hangouts will be also discontinued.
  • The service will be succeeded by ‘Chats’, which is not to be confused with ‘GChats’ that was also discontinued earlier this month.
  • All messages and data from Hangouts will be moved to this newer platform by Google, accompanied by reminders of the upcoming shut down.
  • For more information on this story, visit The Verge website.

York City Council to discuss plans to improve children’s services

  • York City Council have said they have an action plan detailing how they intend to improve their children’s services.
  • This followed a report in May in which Ofsted found the quality of its children’s services had declined since 2016 and required improvement.
  • Seven areas will be looked at, including the effectiveness of social work supervision and quality of assessments.
  • Inspectors had previously found that children remained in “neglectful situations” for too long.
  • You can read the full story on the BBC’s website.