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Tech News Today for July 14, 2016

Tech News for July 14, 2016

Sam Machkovech from Ars Technica detailed last week how Counter Strike: Global Offensive, or CS-GO, was being used as a mechanism for gambling among players of the game. Third party sites like CSGO Lotto allow players to bet weapon skins from the game and ultimately turn those winnings into real world money. All along, Valve, creator of the Steam gaming service said that these 3rd party sites used to run their gambling sites by way of Steam’s OpenID API, have been quiet. This had critics pointing fingers at Valve, wondering if they were intentionally complicit with what was going on. Today, Valve released a statement saying that gambling sites using their API’s in this way are not allowed per user agreements. Valve will begin to send cease and desist notices to the sites, and warned users to stay away. Read more at polygon.com

If you use Facebook Messenger, articles posted there have been rather slow going, even though Facebook has its Instant Articles format speeding up the delivery of news on Facebook itself. And now, like chocolate and peanut butter colliding, Instant Articles is supported inside Messenger beginning today. Read more at theverge.com.

Nest has taken one of its products and retooled it for the outdoors. The Nest Cam Outdoor was revealed today, taking its Nest Cam indoor camera that works to keep track of indoor places, and hardening it for outdoor use. Nest says its pursuit is to build the best security camera out there by recognizing when movement is worth alerting for or when its not. Read more at venturebeat.com.

Finally, in a quick update last May, Google proposed a broader set of emoji that included more professions for men and women to the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, and their work continued over the next few months. Today, the subcommittee agreed to the 11 new professional emoji, but also including women and men into 33 existing emoji, making it easier to find one that represents the real you. Read more at googleblog.blogspot.com.

Megan Morrone is out today, but Jason Howell is joined by Fr. Robert Ballecer. They talk with Mark Bergen from recode.net about EU's new antitrust charge against Google. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and download it on demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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