Geek News

You've long had the option to remove Instagram followers if you keep your account private, but that's something of a compromise. Why do you have to shut yourself off from the outside world just to keep out a few undesirables? You might not have to make that choice going forward. Instagram has confirmed that it's testing an option to remove followers while maintaining a public account. While it hasn't share more details than that, the app informs test ers that it won't notify soon-to-be-former followers that you're leaving them behind. Much as with other social networks, that's likely to minimize outrage from people who can't handle the rejection. It's easy to see why you'd want the option with a public account. You may not want an ex or former friend commenting on everything you do, for instance. And if you've ever s...

Twitter has spent the past several months trying to fix its verification mess , but it looks like you'll have to wait a while longer for a solution. New product lead Kayvon Beykpour has announced that Twitter is putting its verification reform efforts on hold to focus on "information quality" in the run-up to the US mid-term elections. The move is meant to help the social network "move faster" on areas it thinks are "most important," Beykpour said. The company will come back to the verification issue once it makes "more progress," Beykpour added, referencing an email that hinted it might take a few weeks. He also acknowledge that the ad hoc verification in the meantime has produced "frustration" from people who already saw Twitter verification as a mysterious, inconsistent process. The pause isn't going t...

Trump administration's initial lack of a unified front in the wake of Russian election-hacking indictments worries cybersecurity experts. via Dark Reading: https://ift.tt/2NXw31N If New feed item from http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml , then send

In 2016, Netflix launched Fast.com , a simple, easy way for anybody to check their internet speeds. Now, the company has announced that it's adding more information to the site. Fast.com will now let users see their connection's latency and upload speed, and latency will be broken down into both loaded and unloaded connections. So, you'll be able to see if more traffic on your network affects your latency values. "We're adding these new measurements to Fast.com so that consumers will have a more comprehensive view of their internet connection speed at any given time," Netflix said in a statement . Netflix also has app versions of the speed test for both Android and iOS. The streaming giant said that Fast.com has generated over half a billion speed tests since launching and its usage rate has doubled over the past seven months alone. ...

Instagram is working on a two-factor authentication solution that would not require a user's phone number, according to a report from TechCrunch . Instagram has confirmed that it's working on the more secure method, just hours after a prominent Motherboard investigation on SIM hacking was published earlier today. Like other social media platforms, the upcoming option will let you authenticate with code-generating apps like Google Authenticator and Authy. Though Instagram's confirmation was likely prompted by the investigation, it appears that the company has been working on moving beyond phone numbers for some time. Engineer and tipster Jane Manchun Wong discovered a prototype version of the updated two-factor feature in the Android... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2Ls6Drv ...

Twitter doesn't presently "have the bandwidth" to overhaul its verification system, the company's new head of product announced today. This comes despite Twitter's continued acknowledgement that it must bring transparency and a clear process to verification and the blue checkmark, which has been stamped on accounts belonging to an erratic mix of world leaders, celebrities, athletes, business executives, journalists, and also alt-right nationalists . The company maintains that verification is fundamentally intended to confirm an account's authenticity — not signal any sort of endorsement. But a lack of any real rhyme or reason to the verification system has made it easy to conflate the two. Back in March , CEO Jack Dorsey envisioned a... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2mm7PSe ...

Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz is stepping down as the smart home gadget maker is reshuffled yet again, now operating under the Google division responsible for the company's Home smart speakers, according to a report from CNET . Just five months ago, Fawaz oversaw Nest's reintegration under Google; for the last three years, Nest operated as an independent entity under Google parent company Alphabet. The decision to bring Nest back under the Google umbrella was designed to help hardware chief Rick Osterloh better integrate Nest products with Google's own hardware and software, much of it increasingly driven by artificial intelligence advances. Now, Fawaz is taking on an advisory role, and Nest will be overseen by Rishi Chandra, the vice president... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2uvbYrC ...

VirtualLink, a consortium of companies including AMD, NVIDIA, Oculus, Valve, and Microsoft, has just announced that the oodles of cables needed to connect VR headsets to PCs will soon be whittled down to a single USB-C connection. The new open industry standard is a big improvement on the system of multiple USBs and HDMIs that people use now to hook up devices like the Oculus Rift to their PC. This might bring VR to a lot more people Not only will this cut down on clutter, but it will also bring PC-based VR to more people. Right now, these devices are limited to people using computers that can support multiple connectors. By using the new VirtualLink standard, VR can be bright to smaller devices — like light notebooks, tablets and... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2Jw8NEB ...

According to CNET , Nest has announced today that Marwan Fawaz will no longer be its CEO. As part of his departure, Nest will now be folded into Google's home and living room products team. In a joint interview with Fawaz, Rishi Chandra, vice president of product management for Google's home and living room products, said that the combination would make it easier for Google to integrate some of its machine learning technology and artificial intelligence into Nest products. This move comes six months after Nest merged with Google's hardware division . Nest co-founder Matt Rogers left soon after as well. Now, Nest will live under Google's home devices (like the Home smart speakers) umbrella, which is led by Chandra. "This is the natural evolution," he said to CNET . "We thought, let's connect these things and build experiences that we really ...

Health Breast and prostate cancers seem to be more common amongst those who eat dinner late, but it may just be a correlation. Individuals who eat dinner before 9:00 p.m. or wait at least two hours after finishing dinner before going to bed have about a 26 percent lower risk of developing… via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2NpbQAP"

Election Systems and Software (ES&S) has admitted that it sold election management systems which included remote-access software to multiple US states over six years. The company said in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden it had included off-the-shelf pcAnywhere software on some machines, which it sold "to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," Motherboard reports . That admission raises a lot of questions over how seriously ES&S took its security, and it contradicts statements it previously made to reporters that it had no knowledge of selling machines with remote-access capabilities. Lying to lawmakers can carry severe consequences down the line if that deception is discovered, so ES&S was forced to make the confession. In 2006, at least 60 percent of US ballots were logged using ES&S election management systems. Those machines cou...