Message.Undo, Twitter Video and WiFi slaying swords

Good morning folks! It’s a lovely Sunday and here’s the latest and greatest happening today in the world of tech.

Strings allows you to undo messages

Whether it’s at 2am after getting drunk or simply a random mistake, there’s probably a moment in all our lives where we wanted to take back what we said to someone.  While we are still ages away from taking back everything we say, there is progress and hope we’ll get there now.

Say hello to Strings, an app that lets you undo text messages. Yes you read that right folks, Strings would allow you to delete ANY messages you previously sent to anybody. Whether it’s a text, video or an embarrassing picture Strings will let you delete it.So what’s the catch? Well you AND the recipient need to have Strings installed on your phones. IPhones to be precise because it’s not on Android yet.

Twitter invests in video

Videos are the future. YouTube was a smart baby and knew that when it was born. Facebook and Instagram, recently made their investments in video. Now Twitter will soon join the fold with Twitter Video. As the name suggests, Twitter Video is Twitter’s in-house own video player. So how will Twitter Video work? Daniel Raffel has the answer.

https://t.co/2htJRqkmRs Twitter Video will support “mp4” and “mov” with an aspect ratio of 16:9, and videos can be up to 10 minutes long.

— Daniel Raffel (@danielraffel) January 3, 2015

Just like Tweets are limited to 140 characters, the videos will be limited to 10 minutes. Thankfully there’s no size limit and Twitter encourages it’s partners to use the highest resolution for their videos. Wait a minute….Partners?! Yup the word partner was mentioned in the FAQ.

Digging deeper into the FAQ, we found that at launch Twitter will offer simple analytics to all users. As for advertising, Twitter is only allowing people with a Twitter Amplify partnership to post ads on the videos. With the wording saying “at this time”, it looks like Twitter is getting ready for war with YouTube.

One sword to find them all

Be warned: One does not simply read this section without seeing minor spoilers for The Hobbit.

So in The Hobbit, the protagonist John Watson Bilbo Baggins has a magical sword (a dagger by the standards of men but lets be nice to the Hobbits) called Sting which glows in the presence of orcs.  Recently, a bunch of hackers at SparkIO decided to build their own version of Sting. But they had a problem: the only place you can find orcs is New Zealand. So they decided to build WarSting.

WarSting is a (plastic toy) version of the Sting sword, which glows blue when it detects unsecure WiFi connections. It can’t kill orcs (or anybody for that matter) but when you slash WarSting it’ll access the unsecure network and publish the message: ‘{YOUR WI-FI NETWORK} has been vanquished.’ So to all you hackers and J. R. R. Tolkien fans, here are the instructions to build your own WarSting. Happy Hacking!