Technology, software in particular, has taken us places never thought imaginable. So it's not surprising a conversation about apps can take a turn into a deeper dialogue about art, childhood, and deep-seated insecurities. The aforementioned discussion took place between Download.com and Alex Karpovsky, in late July, in San Francisco, while he was on a promotional tour for his film "Red Flag," a smart satire about...a moviemaker (Alex Karpovsky) on a promotional tour (his 2008 film "Woodpecker," following a brutal breakup).

Karpovsky, best known for his role on the hit HBO series "Girls" chatted with Download.com about his favorite apps, how his parents have informed his relationship with software, and how recent tech innovations have helped the indie film industry.

Alex Karpovsky, in effect.

In "Red Flag," your character is someone who wears a watch, makes phone calls, and writes down notes. Why doesn't he rely on his phone's clock, and text and type? I think that's less a reflection of who I am and more of what I find cinematically engaging. I just don't want to see too much text and e-mailing in movies. I'm just not personally, visually, or aesthetically drawn to that and I think it's more interesting to tell the story that way. But I text and e-mail all the time -- compulsively.

Your character in "Red Flag" is on a promotional tour, yet we never se... [Read more]

On Tuesday, McAfee updated its Mobile Security app (now called McAfee Antivirus & Security) for Android and added several new features that include custom profile setups, improved analysis of data exposure, and backup operations over Wi-Fi.

These updates are added on top of Mobile Security's Basic free tier features like mobile antivirus, anti-theft, and backup services. McAfee aims to protect their users through both preventative and post-catastrophic measures, with added security features in the Premium service.

According to Ari Jaaksi, McAfee's SVP of Mobile Engineering, "When consumers contemplate securing their smartphones and tablets, they often think in terms of their susceptibility to mobile malware, overlooking the very real threat to their privacy should their devices become lost or stolen."

Even with security apps in place, McAfee's latest updates reflect a movement toward teaching users how to prevent unsafe mobile habits. Mobile Security is now directly integrated with McAfee's own Global Threat Intelligence network, which catalogs and analyzes the risk level of an app. The intention is to guide a user's decision on whether to use an app and inform them of any suspicious app behavior and data exposure to risky sites.

For those of us who don't have access yet to Android 4.3, McAfee's latest update brings an alternate method of cre... [Read more]

Instagram's native application doesn't work with Windows Phone 8. And if a new report is true, it appears Instagram wants no part in allowing other app providers to use its private API to create their own alternative.

Speaking to The Verge in an interview published on Tuesday, Daniel Gary, the creator of Instance, a third-party Windows Phone app, says that Instagram has stopped allowing his app's customers from uploading pictures to the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service.

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According to Gary, he used Instagram's private API to reverse engineer the uploading process and allow Windows Phone users to snap pictures and share them on the social service. However, Instagram recently began "detecting when photos are not uploading via the official app," Gary told The Verge. After Instance users upload images, it takes only a few seco... [Read more]