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On Friday afternoon, X officially launched XChat, the company's proprietary chat app. Unlike other chat app options, like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, you need an X account to use XChat, which limits the user base to one specific social media platform. X users with a large enough social circle on the platform may find this new app to be useful, but XChat does come with some security contradictions that all new users should be aware of. XChat is a standard chat app for X usersXChat's biggest sell, apart from being a place for X users to communicate, is that it is end-to-end encrypted. As the app reminds you upon setup, this encryption means there is no way for anyone—including X—to read the contents of your messages. Only the sender and receiver (or receivers) of an encrypted message hav...

AI-generated images are getting harder and harder to spot. There are the usual tells, of course, but those tells are minimizing with each new AI image model. You could count on AI-generated hands including too many or too few fingers on people, for example; nowadays, that's not necessarily the case. One particular area of weakness for AI image models has been text generation. The image itself might look convincing, but take a close look at the words, and you'll often notice they're not really right. Maybe some are accurate, while others are pretty close, but, in many cases, you'll notice a lot of inconsistencies: Too many repeating letters, letters that aren't really letters, characters that blend and squiggle in and out of one another. A lot of these quirks remind me of how Star Wars' lan...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. I've been covering e-readers and e-ink tablets for Lifehacker for a few years now, and I haven't ever encountered a product with as many enthusiastic fans as the Xteink X4, a teeny tiny, bare bones e-reader from China that has replaced my beloved phone-shaped Boox Palma 2 as my distraction-free reading device of choice—not the least because it's a heck of a lot cheaper, around $70 to the Palma 2's $250. And if you act fast, right now you can score an X4 for less than $60 during an Amazon flash sale. As I explain in my review, the X4 is a little fiddily, a little janky, and not for everyone—but it has a huge cult following of tinkerer...