TLDR 2021-07-28

WeChat has temporarily suspended registrations for new users in China while it upgrades its security technology to align with all relevant laws and regulations. The upgrade is expected to finish in early August. It is unclear what specific law WeChat is trying to comply with. Chinese regulators have cracked down on tech firms recently. Analysts believe that the Chinese government is concerned about the growing influence of tech firms and data privacy.

Facebook will create a product team to work on the metaverse. The team will be part of Facebook's Reality Labs. Tech companies have started to increasingly discuss building a metaverse as a successor technology to smartphones. The metaverse will use augmented and virtual reality technologies, which is why Facebook has invested heavily in AR and VR. Mark Zuckerberg hopes that Facebook will be viewed as a metaverse company in the future.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system and it holds more water than all of the Earth's oceans combined. It is covered in an icy crust and there may be a liquid ocean 100 miles beneath its surface. Some areas of the moon may get warm enough for the surface ice to release water molecules. The ESA plans to launch a mission to study Jupiter and its moons in 2022.

Scientists at the Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have developed an ultrathin magnet that operates at room temperature. The one-atom-thin magnet could make big advances in next-gen memory devices, computing, spintronics, and quantum physics. Researchers have been searching for decades for ways to make thinner and smaller 2D magnets to enable higher density data storage. Previous attempts have failed to perform at room temperature, but the new magnets still work at 100 degrees Celsius. The magnets can be mass-produced.

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a collection of APIs that allows for data to be transferred from peer-to-peer. It is used for streaming or P2P networks like Torrent. WebRTC still requires a server to connect peers, but the connection between peers is encrypted. This article explains how WebRTC works, covering only the core APIs.

This repository contains a learning path for Laravel. It lists topics to learn in order and provides links to resources.

Discord has a new feature called Threads that allows users to branch off a conversation away from the main channel feed. It creates a separate feed, which server admins can still moderate. Public threads will let any members of the channel participate. Private threads will only let certain members view them. Threads will be automatically archived within 24 hours. Screenshots showing the feature are available in the article.

YouTuber Shamook gained millions of views when he released deepfake videos that 'fixed' several CGI cameos from Star Wars and other big-budget movies. Instead of removing the videos, Lucasfilm decided to hire Shamook as a Senior Facial Capture Artist. Examples of Shamook's work are available in the article.