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Tech News Today for March 1, 2017

Tech News for Wednesday March 1, 2017

Another week, another Twitter anti-harrassment feature, which by the way, is a very good thing. Twitter users can now mute specific usernames and words from appearing on their timeline indefinitely, or short term if they prefer a cooling off period instead. Also, users can now mute those pesky egg profiles from their timeline. Egg avatars often represent troll accounts as it's the default image when someone creates a new account. Read more at recode.net.

In a Microsoft blog today, the company says they'll give you more choice and control in the new Creators update that comes out in a month. Mary Jo Foley from Windows Weekly says there will be more granular controls around privacy, location, speech recognition, and the ability to snooze your updates. Windows Insiders can start testing the new features today. Read more at zdnet.com.

Spotify appears to be preparing for a hifi streaming tier, according to sources to the Verge as well as users on Reddit who were briefly offered a landing page for the as yet unannounced service. Spotify HiFi would be a $5 to $10 monthly price on top of the $10 Spotify Premium service and offers lossless CD quality audio (44.1khz 16bit) as well as discounts on vinyl along with a free record, according to screenshots of the splash page from the app. Read more at theverge.com.

Facebook is updating its suite of suicide prevention tools and for the first time, they will add their sophisticated self-harm reporting tools to Facebook Live. The company said today that it will use artificial intelligence to try to detect and prevent users from comitting suicide based on pattern recognition and previously flagged posts. Users watching live videos will now have the ability to reach out to streamers to attempt to help. Read more at businessinsider.com.

Yahoo may have only lost around $350 million dollars of value in its pending sale to Verizon, but there’s still plenty of blame flying around internally. Ron Bell, Yahoo’s head lawyer, was given the axe for not pursuing inquiry into the hacking back in 2014 when presented with, Yahoo says, sufficient information to warrant it. And CEO Marissa MAY-er’s pay has been hit as she saw her cash bonuses from 2016 and stock award for 2017 disappear. Read more at recode.net.

Tech News Today with Megan Morrone and Jason Howell streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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