Hackers can steal your phone number by reassigning it to a different SIM card, use it to reset your passwords, steal your Instagram and other accounts and sell them for bitcoin. As detailed in a harrowing Motherboard article today, Instagram accounts are especially vulnerable because the app only offers two-factor authentication through SMS that delivers…
Twitter is pausing its work on overhauling its verification process, which provides a blue checkmark to public figures, in favor of election integrity, Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour tweeted today. That’s because, as we enter another election season, “updating our verification program isn’t a top priority for us right now (election integrity is),” he wrote…
Five months ago, Google decided to rein in Nest. After four years as a mostly independent division of the company, Nest was rolled into Google’s hardware team. Today, more big changes: Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz is stepping down, according to a report by CNET. The reason? Employees at Nest had reportedly been pushing for a…
An undercover reporter with the UK’s Channel 4 visited a content moderation outsourcing firm in Dublin and came away rather discouraged at what they saw: queues of flagged content waiting, videos of kids fighting staying online, orders from above not to take action on underage users. It sounds bad, but the truth is there are…
Google gave us a hardware blitzkrieg at CES. Among other things, the company announced a new smart display category, aimed at taking on the Echo Show through sheer, brute force. The new Show Mode Dock isn’t a direct response, but it’s a clever one. Two years ago, Amazon introduced Alexa for the Fire tablet line.…
Niantic — the company behind Pokémon GO — is back at it with another acquisition. After acquiring Escher Reality back in February and Matrix Mill back in June, this morning the company announced it’s acquiring Seismic Games. Seismic Games is probably best known for its work on Marvel: Strike Force, a mobile, turn-based RPG that…
Remember the cinnamon challenge? Unknowing people on YouTube grabbed a teaspoonful of cinnamon and chugged it down before coughing up clouds of dust. It was stupid, but sometimes chuckle-worthy. Those were simpler times. But as things often do, they escalated from there. There was the Kylie Jenner challenge. This one saw young girls grabbing a…
A 21-year-old New Jersey woman has been charged with hacking into the email accounts of pop star and actress Selena Gomez, stealing her personal photos, and then leaked them to the Internet. Susan Atrach of Ridgefield Park was charged Thursday with 11 felony counts—five counts of identity theft, five counts of accessing and using computer…
NEWSBYTE Ericsson, Telstra, and Intel claim to have made the first end-to-end 5G data call over a commercial network. The call was made at Telstra’s 5G Innovation Centre on the Gold Coast of Australia, and was the first of its kind made over the 3.5GHz spectrum, according to the technology partners. The breakthrough has “taken…
As Slack continues to grow its paid business users, the company is looking for ways to help customers build integrations that make sense for the work they do. Slack announced today that it has acquired Robots and Pencils’ Missions, an app that allows Slack users to build tools to automate simple routines without code. Terms of the…
