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Tech News Today For August 11, 2016

Tech News for August 11, 2016

Twitter is once again under fire for creating an environment that is ripe for the picking when it comes to harrassment and trollish behavior. Charlie Warzel at BuzzFeed published a scathing article that illustrates how Twitter has been weak to respond to complaints about the service’s inhospitable nature, except when it comes to certain celebrities and public officials. Unnamed former employees shared their own personal experiences from inside the walls of the company that seemed to highlight a lack of understanding with the higher ups as to the gravity of abuse, and a general lack of action that would help curb that abuse and make the social network more hospitable.  Read Twitter's statement on the BuzzFeed story here.

Today The Verge is reporting that Ad Block Plus has offered a workaround to Facebooks block of ad blockers. Ad Block Plus is one of the most popular ad blocking tools with over 500 million users. In fact many of you wrote in to tell us that you use it for various reasons, many of which have more to do with your desire to save data and speed up your browsing experience. Facebook is blocking ad blockers only on the desktop and not on mobile, but the open source community ad Ad Block Plus accepted the challenge and created a new filter that was added to the main EasyList today. All you need to do is update your filter list to use it. Let the games begin.  Read more at theverge.com.

So many security stories this past week, but hey, it’s security conference season with BlackHat and Defcon wrapped up. And later this week at Usenix security conference in Austin, researchers will reveal two vulnerabilities of nearly every Volkswagon model since 1995. That’s an estimated 100 million cars in total. The vulnerabilities stem from the keyless entry system and can be manipulated using a $40 Arduino radio device, giving the would be thief wireless access to unlocking those vehicles. The device intercepts the signal that a key sends off, then those signals can be cloned and used for access.  Read more at wired.com.

Russians, Anonymous, the black hat hacker next door? Who should we be afraid of? Well according to an article in Slate's tech section today, the answer is squirrels. We should be afraid of squirrels. Cyber Squirrel 1 is a Twitter account and a website that catalogues all unclassified Cyber Squirrel Operations that have been released to the public. In other words, they monitor animal disruptions of technological infrastructure. You know, like that pesky little weasel that disrupted the Hadron particle collider. If you don't trust the account of a squirrel on Twitter, you can get a link to the news story that verifies the details of varmant interruptions to all the tech we have come to depend on. Varmants include birds, by the way.  Read more at slate.com.

Wired.com posted a piece today how the meteoric rise for Pokemon Go has created a need, not for Pokemon scooters or Pokemon scanners or even Pokemon Go survival knives. Instead, Wired says what we need right now is a code of ethics for augmented reality. Jason, Megan and Ron Richards discuss “PokeEthics”. Read more at wired.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by All About Android co-host Ron Richards from iFanboy.com. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show or download it later at twit.tv/tnt.

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