Oh no, our world’s children are succumbing to the perils of the World Wide Web. A new survey of 19,000 parents worldwide said their kids browse porn as early as age six and begin e-flirting at eight years old. The news comes from Bitdefender, a Bucharest-based antivirus company, that compiled the results from talking with parents and monitoring which sites parents block. Read More
It's Zuck's World We're Just Living In It
Heedlessly disregarding the bad luck of looking anything like MySpace, Facebook recently added the option of emoticons for status updates. But, according to Popular Science, the social network couldn’t simply use the same smiley faces that’ve done the Internet perfectly good for more than a decade. No, besides the old standbys you’ll have the option of expressing your feelings with a custom-designed, “compassion-research-based set of emoticons.”
Hey, we’re willing to try anything that’ll keep drama out of our News Feed. Read More
The crooner Bing Crosby might’ve been a total dick, but it turns out he was a pretty smart angel investor. Guess the Biebs isn’t so special, after all! [New Yorker]
“They became a virtual criminal flash mob, going from machine to machine, drawing as much money as they could, before these accounts were shut down.” Don’t look now but someone lived out your wildest ATM-related dreams. [The Verge]
If you’re going to I/O, keep your eyes peeled for all the sensors tracking air quality, noise levels and lord knows what else. [TechCrunch]
Square’s TOS was recently updated to add that you can’t sell “firearms, firearm parts or hardware, and ammunition; or… weapons and other devices designed to cause physical injury” using the service. Guess you’re gonna have to start bringing duffle bags full of cash to the gun show again. [CNN Money]
Aereo launches in Atlanta June 17. [Aereo]
Update: Facebook has revoked API access for Social Roulette, effectively killing the app. Bang.
If you’ve long considered acquiescing to the groans of privacy wonks and straight up deleting your Facebook account, but couldn’t quite bring yourself to commit social media suicide, we may have found a solution for you.
Social Roulette is a game that gives you a one in six chance of deleting your Facebook account. If you lose, the game will delete all of your posts, friends, photos and other elements of your profile before completely deactivating it. If you’re lucky enough to survive, the message “I just played Social Roulette and survived” will be published to your wall. Read More
Muscley toddler Vin Diesel is a big deal on Facebook. He has 41 million likes, where the incessant over-sharer documents much of his weird life. Scrolling through his timeline, there’s a picture of him posing shirtless with a leopard that has nearly 1 million likes, a picture of him smiling with some WordArt-created slogan reading “Sing and the world sings with you…” that somehow garnered 10,000 likes, and an open thread about his acting career that has collected 50,000 comments. Read More
Last week, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo reportedly quit as director of the company’s U.K. arm. The news comes just days after government regulators forced TweetDeck to dissolve following accounting issues. [Sky News]
Bloomberg is apologizing to its clients after allegations that reporters snooped on client terminals to see their Seamless orders or whatever. [CNN Money]
JackThreads’ recent push into international waters, like Australia and the U.K., is doing well for the company’s bottom line as sales overseas now make up 10 percent of its business. [AllThingsD]
Facebook Home is missing features that Android users love (widgets, docks, oh my!) because all of the developers use iPhones. The lack of “droidfooding” is causing them to scramble to add those features to turn around Home’s slow downloads. [TechCrunch]
Here’s a groovy map that shows you where in the world Wikipedia is being edited right now. [Ars Technica]
Elon Musk and David Sacks have left Mark Zuckerberg’s political action group over growing concerns over the support of certain politicians. [AllThingsD]
Yesterday on a grey and drizzly New York morning, hackers, designers and educators gathered in a loft space in Chelsea to participate in the Project: Connect hackathon. Hosted in conjunction with the MacArthur Foundation, Facebook, Mozilla and the Family Online Safety Institute, the event focused on building a “more equitable, social, and participatory internet.” Teams showed up at the space and were treated to a hot breakfast and escorted to the third floor for opening remarks before breaking into groups to start the hacking. Read More
Love in the Time of Algorithms
It’s really just not a good day for those of us with sexual urges. However, it’s a great day for doxxing. First there was the life-altering news about photos on Snapchat never being fully dissolved, and now all of your friends can see that you are using Bang With Friends and also are a pervert.
The Daily Dot writes about the hypocrisy of the hack since the app labels itself as “completely private.” First log into Facebook, then click on this link, and that’s it. Nobody from our results was too unexpected since it was just a mish-mosh of our experimental writer friends (for journalism) and horny bros, but it’s still amusing. Read More
Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer earned $68.6 million last year. Think about that while you’re scraping together change to refill your metrocard. [Bloomberg]
Rumor has it that Facebook is looking into buying mobile map app Waze for up to $1B. Waze really gets around–last we heard it was dating Apple. [TechCrunch]
Microsoft might be mulling a $1 billion purchase of Nook Media LLC, its joint venture with Barnes and Noble. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, guys. [TechCrunch]
Time and Google have teamed up to produce Timelapse, a new package that shows how the Earth’s surface has changed over the last thirty years. (Spoiler: Not for the better, if you like nature.) [Time]
Can’t patent software in New Zealand any more, sorry. [Forbes]
The White House has tapped Twitter’s former legal director Nicole Wong for chief privacy officer, a newly created position. Before joining Twitter six months ago, she was at Google where her nickname was “The Decider.” [ReadWrite]
Yahoo reportedly really really wants out of its search deal with Microsoft because it’s killing the company’s revenue. [WSJ]
Betaworks’ first game, Dots, has racked up 1 million downloads in its first week of release. [TechCrunch]
Syria’s government said it’s working to repair the country’s connection to the Internet. Who is faster with customer service: Syria or Time Warner? [CNN]
In an effort to get more people back into its brick-and-mortar stores, Target is rolling out deals on people’s Facebook News Feeds that you can take to the store and redeem. [AdAge]
