The New iPhone is Definitely Water Resistant

This is a daily opinion column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder of How-To Geek, featuring his take on the latest in the world of technology.

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Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

Hackers have published almost 15 gigabytes’ worth of password data, donation records, and source code taken during the recent hack of the Patreon funding website.

Like I was just saying yesterday, everybody everywhere is getting hacked. This hack is just terrible, because Patreon is a great service that helps fund comic book artists, independent websites, and artists. If you do have a Patreon account, your password has been compromised.

Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.

There’s really no surprise here, in many poor parts of the world people can buy “Facebook plans” that give them access to only Facebook.

But if you think about it, with the rise of mobile devices, younger people will increasingly think of Facebook as an app, and not realize that it is actually part of the internet. For many young people, Facebook really is the internet.

Apple’s Clever Tech Makes the iPhone 6s Nearly Waterproof

you may have seen reports that the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are waterproof. In fact, not just reports; there now exist multiple videos that show Apple’s new smartphones surviving extended periods of water submersion. Those videos aren’t fabrications or pranks. Apple’s new iPhones really do hold up under water, thanks to a brilliant new technique that the company quietly pioneered.

The new iPhone is pretty much waterproof… but is technically water resistant. There’s a difference between the two terms – you can’t drop your iPhone into the bottom of a deep pool and hope that it will work, because the pressure from all that water will push its way into the phone. A nice stainless steel watch is probably waterproof to 100 meters, but most electronics can’t withstand the pressure, so they are just water resistant.

But a short dip in water, like dropping your phone into the sink, is unlikely to hurt it. I’ve actually done this by accident.

Apple doesn’t (yet) officially market their phones as waterproof, of course, because then people will start taking them in the swimming pool or in the ocean, and then trying to claim manufacturer defect when they break. So Apple gets the best of both worlds – a phone that will rarely be destroyed by water, and not having to pay out those insurance claims for people that take it too far.