Tech

Tech News Today for February 21, 2017

Tech News for Tuesday February 21, 2017

Verizon will pay approximately $4.48 billion in cash for Yahoo's internet assets. That's $350 million dollars off for a company that's suffered two major privacy breaches, the first impacting at least 500 million accounts in 2014 and the second in 2013 that got a peek into over a billion accounts. Yahoo will have to pay expenses relating to the investigation and the two companies will split the bill for cash liabilities related to non-SEC government investigations and other third-party data breach litigation. Read more at verizon.com.

UPS isn’t willing to let Amazon eat its lunch when it comes to drone deliveries, so brown began testing its own drone in Tampa Bay Florida. The launchpad was the roof of one of the company’s brown delivery trucks, with the driver effectively mounting and activating the drone’s autonomous navigation with a tablet. That freed up the driver to deliver a package while another package flew itself through the air. Read more at reuters.com.

Today the Center for Democracy & Technology or the CDT published a public letter expressing their position against the proposed Social Media Password Requirement by the Department of Homeland Security. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon also sent a letter to the secretary of DHS, asking about the problem and demanding accountability. Right now you officially don't have to turn over your passwords and you can perform all kinds of elaborate tricks like disconnecting two factor or wiping your device when you go through security. Sadly, that's going to make you look pretty guilty and you're likely to be detained, or worse. According to Politico, some DHS representatives have been asking or passwords since December of last year, during the Obama administration. Read more at cdt.org.

Part of Snap’s plan of world domination at least tangentially at first involves its efforts in camera hardware, namely Snap Spectacles. Snap is opening up sales for the video recording glasses to anyone in the US via Spectacles.com after a series of pop-up stores in a small number of influential markets began last November. Now it seems the novelty of the glasses is wearing off. Read more at wsj.com.

If you were one of the many people who believed that over the Presidents Day weekend Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a kind old newspaper editor EAT the Sport's section of his local newspaper, then you might need a primer on how to spot fake news. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan DID take a casual photo reading the newspaper in front of the Selma-Times Journal and used it as an opportunity to thank tireless journalists. And one New Yorker Cartoonist on Twitter calling himself a "Fake Newsman" created a parody that involved Zuckerberg saying that he never felt more alive watching the man eat the paper. Read more at mashable.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Trey Ratcliff of stuckincustoms.com to talk about his decision to stop using Macs because he believes Apple has abandoned creatives. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and watch it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

All Tech posts