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BlackBerry Messenger is shutting down after nearly 14 years (unless you pay)

Apr19
by on April 19, 2019 at 12:53 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider


Before there was WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or WeChat, there was BlackBerry Messenger. Launched in August of 2005, BBM was the first popular mobile chat to pull people away from text messages or desktop clients.  Nearly 14 years later, the service will meet its end – unless you pay up. Since 2016, BBM has been managed by Emtek, which today announced the service would be shuttering on May 31 – at least the consumer version most people use. You can download the enterprise version of the app in the Play Store – and Apple’s App Store soon – but it’ll cost you…

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Women in AI need better allies. Here’s how we can all help

Apr18
by on April 18, 2019 at 11:57 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, artificial intelligence


Lin Classon, Director of Public Cloud Product at managed cloud provider Ensono and former Googler, has spent her entire career attending technology conferences – places where, unlike the public restrooms at most events, women tend to have the toilet all to themselves. The reason? Only about 25 percent of the speakers and audience of the average tech conference are female. That the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields have a problem with discrimination, harassment, and inequality towards women is a well-documented and almost universally known fact. But in the field of AI, where a lack of representation directly leads to…

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Facebook exposed millions more Instagram passwords than we realized

Apr18
by on April 18, 2019 at 10:53 pm
Posted In: Around the Web


Facebook today revealed it’d discovered millions of improperly secured passwords on its server. So, you know… business as usual. Facebook revealed in March it’d discovered a cache of Facebook passwords being stored in plain text form — meaning several thousand Facebook employees who had access could have read them at any time. The company stated then that the passwords included those of “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users” and only (only?) “tens of thousands of Instagram users.” The company today updated the same post with this: “Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being…

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Scientists take DNA test, learn they’re cousins who’ve collaborated in science journal

Apr18
by on April 18, 2019 at 10:00 pm
Posted In: Around the Web


When people submit their DNA to companies such as 23andMe for testing, they’re usually not too surprised to find out they have relatives they haven’t met. But, it’s a bit different when you realize you have a cousin who works in the same field, shares some colleagues and friends, and once collaborated with you on research that appeared in a science journal back in the 1970s. Byron Rubin and Bruce Gaber aren’t your average, run-of-the-mill septuagenarians. Rubin’s a PhD scientist and an incredible sculptor who works with metal to produce amazing recreations of molecular structures. Gaber is a gifted scientific…

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