Friday, April 6, 2018

An Atmospheric River Will Hit California With a Month's Worth of Rain

An atmospheric river means this weekend is going to be as wet as an entire typical April.

One Woman Got Facebook to Police Opioid Sales On Instagram

After years of media reports and complaints, Instagram recently moved to restrict hashtags related to opioids and deleted some accounts.

DC's Stingray Mess Won't Get Cleaned Up

DHS this week confirmed that Washington, DC is littered with fake cell tower surveillance devices, but nothing will likely be done to fix it.

Scam Alert: ElectrumPro is not an upgrade to Electrum


If you are starting a new brand, remember to buy all the domains associated with that name. Electrum is learning this the hard way. Electrum, a popular bitcoin wallet service, uses electrum.org as its primary web address. “An alleged scammer has since bought the similar-sounding .com domain, which they’re using to mimic Electrum’s services. It’s styled as Electrum Pro, “the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet.” Electrum took to Twitter to clarify that it does not own electrum.com and that it is likely a ‘bitcoin stealing malware’. Electrum's website is https://t.co/aHiZIZH54e. We do not own electrum dot com, and "Electrum Pro" is very likely…

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This company aims to solve coder gender gap by getting girls hooked early


Every year, major tech companies publish their diversity reports, with special attention paid to their gender diversity. The lack of female employees in technical or engineering positions has become a yardstick for measuring efforts towards parity. For 10 Degrees, a company of WordPress specialists in the UK, it wasn’t enough just to wait for the gender imbalance to correct itself. The company’s employees decided to take a more proactive approach to gender diversity. For International Women’s Day, 10 Degrees’ business manager, Lynda Vaughan, posted a blog entry with the rather provocative title “Why We Don’t Employ Female Developers.” Addressing the…

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Twitter will publicize rules around abuse to test if behavior changes

As part of Twitter’s efforts to rid its platform of abuse and hate, the company is teaming up with researchers Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and J. Nathan Matias, a post-doc research associate at Princeton University, to study online abuse. Today, Twitter is […]

MIT’s new headset reads the ‘words in your head’

There’s always been a glaring issue with voice computing: Talking to a voice assistant with other people around makes you feel like a bit of a weirdo. It’s a big part of the reason we’ve been seeing the technology start to take off in the home, where people feel a little less self-conscious talking to […]

Facebook demands ID verification for big Pages, “issue” ad buyers

Facebook is looking to self-police by implementing parts of the proposed Honest Ads Act before the government tries to regulate it. To fight fake news and election interference, Facebook will require the admins of popular Facebook Pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion […]

Skype targets podcasters and live streamers with a new feature for recording video calls

Microsoft is hoping to capitalize on the popularity of podcasts and videos to make Skype more appealing to content creators. The company is now testing a new “Skype for Content Creators” mode for its desktop app that will allow creators to place and record calls using Skype software, which can either be streamed live or […]

Making policing more responsive, SPIDR Tech raises $2.5 million

Across the country, police brutality and the series of fatal shootings of mostly black men have soured many on the role that police officers play in the community. To combat those negative assessments, police forces are turning to an array of new technologies, such as body cameras, new communications technologies and social media monitoring services […]

With Squadbox, friends moderate harassing messages in your email

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a tool aimed at fighting harassment online. It's called Squadbox and the idea behind it is to have your friends or coworkers moderate your incoming messages f...

Apple voices support for Clean Power Plan ahead of pending repeal

In October, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced he would sign a proposed rule that would withdraw the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan (CPP). The environmental regulations have had a contentious history since initially being proposed in 2...

Facebook plans to allow everyone to ‘unsend’ messages

Facebook is obsequiously assuring everyone that it will be responsible with users' data and transparent with how it's shared. But evidence emerged yesterday that the company has been quietly deleting old messages Mark Zuckerberg and other executives...

Retired at 24: The life of a pro 'Call of Duty' player

Matthew "Burns" Potthoff retired when he was 24. He'd spent 11 years building a career as a professional Call of Duty player, and when he realized his time in front of the screen was up, he made a graceful transition into eSports management. Today, h...

The Weather Channel will bring mixed-reality disasters to broadcasts

It looks like The Weather Channel's broadcasts are about to get a lot more immersive. The channel's parent, The Weather Group, is teaming up with The Future Group, powered by the Unreal Engine, to present broadcasts in mixed reality. And, quite frank...

Boeing's first crewed space flight may be more than just a test

This week, NASA announced that it has updated its commercial crew contract with Boeing. Specifically, Boeing is one of two contractors that is building a crew vehicle that will eventually be able to carry astronauts to and from the International Spac...

Nearly two billion people have watched Facebook Live broadcasts

There's no doubt that Facebook Live has grown a lot in the two years since it launched, but by how much? Facebook is eager to share a few stats. The social network has chalked up more than 3.5 billion broadcasts since 2016, with the daily average c...

The high-stakes battle for the Pentagon’s winner-take-all cloud contract

There is a battle afoot, one you might not have heard about yet, but it involves a high-stakes winner-take-all contract for the Department of Defense’s cloud contract. It could involve billions of dollars and when a humongous sum of money meets a set of powerful tech companies, intrigue can’t be far behind. The story even […]

US Congressmen ask FCC to combat unauthorized Stingray use

Earlier this week, reports surfaced that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had detected activity in Washington DC that was consistent with the use of cell-site simulators, or Stingrays. The findings were a result of a short-term trial that to...

Albertsons will offer Plated’s meal kits across hundreds of stores this year

Following its $200 million acquisition of meal kit startup Plated last fall, grocery chain Albertsons announced this week it would roll out Plated’s meal kits to hundreds of stores by the end of 2018. The meal kits will also be made available for 2-hour delivery through Instacart, same-day and scheduled home delivery, and for in-store […]

Facebook plans to let everyone unsend messages, won’t let Zuckerberg until then

TechCrunch reported last night that Facebook retracted Facebook messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg and other executives from their recipients’ inboxes. That’s an ability normal Facebook users don’t have. But now Facebook tells me it plans to make an “unsend” feature available to all users in several months, and has already been considering how to build […]

Cliff Bleszinski's 'LawBreakers' is in a death spiral

LawBreakers, the gravity-defying shooter from Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski, is on borrowed time. The game has never had a huge player-base, even after doling out new game modes and offering up free-play weekends. Developer Boss Key took to i...

Selina raises $95M to create a boutique travel lodging experience built around communities

If you’re looking to travel abroad — and especially if you’re looking to work while doing so — it might be tough to convince yourself you can find a cool boutique hotel that caters to a lot of different price points, as well as surround yourself with people that will help you feel like you […]

Master three of the most powerful digital creative tools on Earth for under $40


With the training available in the Graphic Design Certification School ($39, over 90 percent off from TNW Deals), you’ll fully understand the full capabilities of each of these iconic programs and learn new innovative ways of employing them to craft your own videos, pictures, artwork, business materials...almost anything.

Amazon rolls out remote access to its FreeTime parental controls

Amazon is making it easier for parents to manage their child’s device usage from their own phone, tablet, or PC with an update to the Parent Dashboard in Amazon FreeTime. Since its launch in 2012, Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited has been one of the better implementations of combining kid-friendly content with customizable profiles and parental controls. […]

Here’s how Deliveroo plans to just eat its competitors


This interview is part of our series of Growth Stories. We interviewed the founders and CEOs of 20 of the fastest growing startups in Europe. We asked them about their companies, their companies’ culture, and their lives, trying to understand how these three factors played a role in the achievement of such impressive growth. The digital revolution disrupted almost all businesses. A fierce competition ensued and, in many cases, clear winners emerged. For example, nowadays, Spotify is synonymous with online music, Google has a near-monopoly on online searches, and Amazon is the gold standard of e-commerce. However, there are other sectors…

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