Now your friends can see exactly how much time you spend lurking on Instagram.

Instagram announced Thursday the rollout of a new feature that will let your followers see when you’re using the app. The concept is similar to Facebook Messenger: when someone you follow or have previously messaged with, is “active” in the app, Instagram will show a small green bubble next to their name to let you know that they’re online.

Instagram explained that the goal of the feature is to make it easier for users to chat within the app.

“This update gives you the ability to have more of those realtime conversations while giving you the control to hide your status altogether,” the company wrote in a blog post. Read more…

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It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Thursday morning at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco, and the emcee is stoked. 

A booming welcome worthy of a Vegas boxing match is being delivered over the PA as attendees at the Distributed blockchain conference gather to hear the gospel of “unlocking the global power of decentralized business.” 

However, if the half-full auditorium is any indication, it’s a message that needs a few more converts. 

Distributed lacked the over-the-top hysterics and flash of Consensus, the major blockchain event held in New York City this past May. There were no Lamborghinis parked outside, no fake protests, and no blockchain-based beer vending machine. Instead, Distributed presented a sober and cautious evaluation of the cryptocurrency, ICO, blockchain, and token space as it now exists.  Read more…

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Twitter is doing a better job at teaching sex ed than most schools in the United States. 

In case your high school education failed you, too, doctors recommend that people pee after sex to help prevent urinary tract infections. It’s become popular for Twitter users to leave wholesome nightly messages for each other, like reminding people to take off their makeup, leave trash exes on read, and pee after sex. After all, nobody wants to wake up with a UTI and resort to a week-long cranberry juice cleanse.

Twitter user @trashychick mixed it up, tweeting, “pee after sex or u will get a dui.” 

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WhatsApp may soon have a new weapon in the fight  against one of the most insidious forms of spam: shady links.

The messaging app is testing a new feature that can detect suspicious links within messages and warns users before they click, a company rep confirmed to Mashable.

The feature is aimed at a specific type of exploit favored by spammers and phishers: links that mimic legitimate URLs by using characters from other alphabets that look similar to other letters. In the example below, for instance, the URL in the message looks like a link to whatsapp.com, but the “w” character is actually an entirely different letter (note the small dot under the w). Read more…

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Get ready for an entirely new Starbucks experience in the U.S. 

The coffee company announced Thursday that it will open the first U.S. store to be run in American Sign Language (ASL). The store will begin welcoming customers in Washington, D.C., in October. Starbucks launched its first-ever “Signing Store,” located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, two years ago.

The Washington, D.C., store will hire roughly two dozen deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing employees, all of whom will be proficient in ASL. 

The store itself will include “DeafSpace” design modifications and service practices that create the best possible experience for deaf and hard of hearing customers, including low-glare reflective surfaces and clear sight lines for open communication. In general, deaf-accessible design focuses on architectural elements in five categories: acoustics, sensory reach, space and proximity, mobility and proximity, and light and color.  Read more…

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The minds behind Better Call Saul have said that Walter White and Jesse Pinkman will not appear in Season 4 of the Breaking Bad spinoff — but by the look of this trailer, things are getting bad for Saul. As he tries to claw his way back to being a lawyer after the events of Season 3, a darker underground calls to him. Who knows who might be lurking there? Read more…

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Several billion miles from Earth, Neptune’s looking particularly sharp in a set of new images captured by one of the most powerful telescopes in the world.

Located in Chile, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) used what’s known as laser tomography to capture test images of the planet and surrounding star clusters.

The telescope’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument works with what’s called the GALACSI adaptive optics module. This allows the telescope to correct for turbulence at different altitudes in the atmosphere, resulting in some incredibly clear, sharp images captured from Earth. Read more…

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Long live Cassini, which has delivered the clearest views of Saturn’s moon, Titan, to date.

Six infrared images of Titan have been captured by the noble Cassini spacecraft, which, after 13 years of exploration, finally (and sadly) burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere in September 2017.

The images are some of the clearest global views of the moon’s surface produced to date. You can spy Titan’s icy surface in incredibly clear detail. 

According to NASA, the photographs were created using 13 years of combined data from the Cassini spacecraft, acquired by an on-board instrument called the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer.  Read more…

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Are you ready for translucent phones? What about wood, or snakeskin? That’s the promise of Gorilla Glass 6, Corning’s newest generation of Gorilla Glass. 

The next-gen display tech, which is used by Apple and Samsung, comes with the usual upgrades in scratch and impact resistance, but perhaps more exciting is that the glass can also be engineered to look and feel nothing like actual glass.

During a press event at the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif. facility Wednesday, the company showed off new designs that add realistic textures to its glass. It’s called “Vibrant” Gorilla Glass, and it was first introduced in 2016 with the promise that phone makers could print high resolution images directly onto it. Read more…

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Look, cryptocurrency is complicated. We get it. What with all the different coins, tokens, ICOs, exchanges, scams, protocols, and DApps, it’s borderline impossible for the casual observer to keep it all straight. 

And so, with that in mind, let us now turn to approximately three combined hours of our elected officials rambling on about the blockchain and our decentralized future.

The fun started early Wednesday, when members of the House Committee on Agriculture held a hearing to discuss the future of the crypto-verse.  Read more…

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