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SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook offered $3 billion to buy the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat in 2013. Snapchat’s founder, Evan Spiegel, turned down the offer. Ever since, Facebook and some of its top apps — including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger — have been trying to tap into the explosively popular photo-sharing features pioneered by Snapchat. The latest sign of that came on Monday as WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application used by 1.2 billion people, unveiled a version of its Status feature that takes a significant number of cues from Snapchat. Similar to Snapchat’s Stories feature, WhatsApp’s Status now lets people share images, GIFs and videos as a status update, all of which last for 24 hours before disappearing. The move follows a string of actions by Facebook to emulate Snapchat. In August, Instagram introduced a Stories feature that was a near exact copy of Snapchat’s. In December, Messenger revamped its look and feel to emphasize sending photos, just like Snapchat. ...

Last night, developer Victoria Fierce had some harsh words for Vice President Mike Pence. Incensed over the Trump administration's recent rollback of transgender protections, Fierce let loose on Pence. "F**k you," she tweeted. "I gotta piss, and you're putting me — an American — in danger of assault by your white supremacist brothers." Almost immediately, she got the notification. Twitter had detected "potentially abusive activity" on her account, and put her in temporary timeout as a result. For the next 12 hours, only followers could see her tweets — which meant she wouldn't be able to lobby the Vice President. It's part of a broader shift in the way Twitter deals with abuse — one that's drawn fire from many of the same communities calling for stronger enforcement. In some cases, the account-lock could even be triggered by quote-tweeting a profanity-laced tweet, since the resulting tweet would include both profanity and the s...

Each parent ought to reconsider before giving out Internet-associated toys or shrewd toys to their kids, as these unpleasant toys represent an alternate kind of threat: protection and information security dangers for children who play with them. This same occurrence was occurred over a year back when Hong Kong toymaker VTech was hacked, which uncovered individual subtle elements, including snaps of guardians and kids and visit logs, of around 6.4 million youngsters around the globe. Presently, in the most recent security fizzling of the web associated brilliant toys, more than 2 Million voice recordings of youngsters and their folks have been uncovered, alongside email locations and passwords for more than 820,000 client accounts. What's more, What's far and away more terrible? The programmers bolted this information and held it for Ransom. California-based Spiral Toys' line of web associated squishy toy toys, CloudPets, which permit youngsters and relatives t...