One of Lyft’s freshly-debuted e-bikes just caught fire

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A Lyft electric bicycle was spotted smoldering in San Francisco on Wednesday. 

Lyft’s new bike-sharing system in the Bay Area, dubbed Bay Wheels, includes black-and-pink electric-assist bicycles powered by a battery on the bike’s frame. These units used to be part of bike-sharing program Ford GoBike, similar to New York City’s Citi Bike. Now, it appears some are becoming a bit too hot to handle.

The San Francisco Examiner reported on Wednesday that a passerby saw flames coming from a bike parked in an official Bay Wheels dock in the Lower Haight area around noon. Apparently a separate Lyft e-bike caught fire over the weekend, also in San Francisco, with the fire emanating from its battery. Read more…

More about Lyft, Bike Sharing, E Bike, E Bikes, and Tech

Snapchat trolls Instagram with ‘real friends’ ad campaign

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Snapchat is finally growing again, and it’s using that momentum to engage in some (not so) subtle trolling of its biggest rival: Instagram.

Snap introduced a new ad campaign that’s all about promoting Snapchat as the home for “real friends.” The implications, of course, being that other platforms aren’t about “real friends.” Think that’s too subtle? Well, just in case there was any question of what they really meant, Snap kicked off the campaign. on none other than Instagram. 

Snap doesn’t have its own presence on Instagram, so it worked with dozens of “quotefluencers” — high-profile accounts that primarily post inspirational quotes. Together, these accounts flooded Instagram with cheery quotes about friends using the “#realfriends” and “#friendshipquotes” hashtags. The posts were all on a yellow background, complete with Snapchat’s ghost logo and “brought to you by Snapchat” captions. Read more…

More about Tech, Instagram, Snapchat, Snap Inc, and Social Media Companies

Accused Capital One hacker ‘had no malicious intent,’ insists friend

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Paige Thompson is accused of stealing the financial records of over 100 million Americans, but a self-described longtime friend says the situation is significantly more complicated than it first appears. 

The Department of Justice on Monday announced the arrest of Thompson, a 33-year-old former Amazon employee. Federal authorities alleged in a criminal complaint that she exploited a misconfigured firewall to access millions of Capital One customers’ records via a cloud company’s servers.

“She had no malicious intent and was not targeting anyone,” her friend insisted.

We got in touch with the friend, who we are not identifying by name, via a now-deleted Slack workspace that appears to have been set up by Thompson.  Read more…

More about Capital One, Data Breach, Tech, and Cybersecurity

The ‘Creeper Challenge’ has group chats fighting to finish song lyrics in the right order

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There’s nothing quite like trying to coordinate your group chat to complete any one, singular task. Even within my own friend group, on occasion it’s felt like herding several semi-sentient cats with opposable thumbs just to plan a date to meet up

Groups chats, especially with five people or more, can be almost comically chaotic. Someone’s pontificating on their crushing anxiety about the future, you put your phone down, five seconds later you’ve missed 50 messages, and now everyone’s going on about Minecraft parody songs

You may not think that’s relatable, but for several group chats across Discord, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter, they’ve attempted this exact scenario — bringing everyone together to collectively replicate the lyrics to a little Minecraft-themed ditty.   Read more…

More about Twitter, Minecraft, Group Chat, Discord, and Viral Game

There’s another Equifax reimbursement claim you may have missed

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By now, you’ve likely heard about Equifax’s settlement with the FTC for its massive data breach in 2017. News spread quickly regarding the restitution, a possible $125 cash payment (or 10 years of free credit monitoring services) to the nearly 150 million affected. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even tweeted about it. 

However, if you’re only requesting $125 from Equifax, you’re not asking for enough. If you spent hours dealing with the fallout, you should at least be asking for $375.

When filing at the Equifax settlement website, consumers can elect to claim $25 per hour, for up to 20 hours, for time spent dealing with the fallout of the breach. This is in addition to the $125. If an individual claims no more than 10 hours, no documentation proving identity theft or fraud is necessary. They just need to describe what actions they took and how much time was spent dealing with the breach. That’s $250! Read more…

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14 of the best online dating sites for geeks, nerds, sci-fi buffs, and more

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Mashable’s readers (and writers) are known for being OBSESSIVE about the things we love. You may say we kind of geek out about things. Okay, fine, we *are* geeks. Whatever, geeks are awesome.

But sometimes, awesome can use a bit of assistance in the dating department. Not because there aren’t enough geeks out there — how do you think Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing film of all time? (Thanks to geeks, that’s how.) Dating as a geek requires combing through normies and too much dating through the same group of localsFor women, it can involve a lot of creepy guys who want their manic pixie dream girlFor men, it can involve a lot of simply trying to not be that guy. If you’re in the majority of geeks who are a little bit introverted, dating can be hella intimidating. Read more…

More about Gaming, Online Dating, Swiping, Okcupid, and Mashable Shopping

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IMAGE: Match



BEST FULL DATING SITE EXPERIENCE

Match

If you’re serious about finding a soulmate and have the disposable income, Match is the place to go.

  • Basic Membership: Free
  • One month: $26.99/month
  • Three months: $23.99/month
  • Six months: $20.99/month
  • 12 months: $19.99/month
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IMAGE: Zoosk



BEST FOR SHY GEEKS

Zoosk

Zoosk’s automated messaging feature offers a pressure-free way to break the ice with potential dates.

  • One month: $29.95
  • Three months: $19.98/month
  • Six months: $12.49/month
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IMAGE: Mashable



BEST FOR HARDCORE GAMERS

Gamer Dating

Find your Player 2 on Gamer Dating, the charming (albeit outdated) site where gamers can totally be themselves.

  • Basic membership: Free
  • Silver Quest (two months): $17.50/month
  • Gold Quest (four months): $17.50/month
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IMAGE: Elite Singles



BEST FOR FINDING EDUCATED GEEKS

Elite Singles

Career-focused individuals take an advanced personality test that really analyzes who will complement you.

  • One month: $89.95
  • Three months: $49.95/month
  • Six Months: $39.95/month
  • One year: $24.95/month
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IMAGE: Mashable



BEST FOR SETTING UP REAL DATES

Coffee Meets Bagel

Screw endless browsing: CMB focus on in-depth profiles and only sends curated matches.

  • Basic membership: Free
  • One month: $34.99/month
  • Three months: $24.99/month
  • Six months: $19.99/month
  • 12 months: $14.99/month
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BEST IF YOU BELIEVE IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

Happn

Rom-com geeks will love how serendipitous Happn is, as it matches you with people you’ve seen in real life.

  • Basic membership: Free
  • One month of Premium: $20/month
  • Three months of Premium: $16/month
  • Six months of Premium: $12/month
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BEST FOR CYNICS

Hater

Hater’s hilarious premise of matching people through mutual dislikes is right in wheelhouse of cynical millennials.

  • Basic membership: Free
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IMAGE: Amazon



BEST FOR THOSE WHO APPRECIATE A GOOD ALGORITHM

eharmony

If you love gaming but hate playing games, eharmony could find you someone serious — if you can ignore the conservative vibe.

  • Basic Membership: Free
  • Three month membership : $57.95/month
  • One year: $26.95/month
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IMAGE: Mashable



BEST FOR CHEM AND BIOLOGY GEEKS

Pheramor

They say love is a chemical reaction — Pheramor attempts to measure it by matching singles via DNA swabs.

  • Basic membership: $29.99
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IMAGE: Mashable



BEST FOR NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE

Cams.com

Not ready to interact IRL? HD streaming and Bluetooth sex toys can help.

  • 100 tokens: $12
  • 250 tokens: $26
  • 500 tokens: $50
  • 1,000 tokens: $99
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BEST FOR SUPERFANS

SoulGeek

If Cosplay, Comic-Con, and Crunchy Roll are your love language, you can find a kindred spirit here.

  • Basic membership: Free
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IMAGE: Mashable



BEST FOR KINKY GEEKS

ALT

Geek in the streets but freak in the streets? Bond over bondage on this BDSM site.

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    IMAGE: Dating For Muggles



    BEST FOR POTTERHEADS

    Dating For Muggles

    Most Harry Potter fans refuse to date someone who isn’t up on their knowledge, so Dating for Muggles is a start.

    • Basic Membership: Free
    • One year: $6.99/month
    • 5-day trial : $1/day

    100 million Americans’ data accessed in massive Capitol One hack

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    Well, this is not good. 

    Finance services giant Capital One announced Monday that there had been a major cybersecurity incident directly affecting 100 million Americans and six million Canadians. Specifically, a host of their customers’ private financial data had been accessed by a hacker. 

    According to a statement issued by the company, two separates breaches occurred — once on March 22 and another on March 23 — and were discovered on July 19. 

    Bloomberg reports that a Seattle woman has been arrested and accused of hacking Capital One’s server at an unnamed cloud-computing company.

    Notably, it seems that although the customer data in question was encrypted, the hacker was able to decrypt it.  Read more…

    More about Capital One, Data Breach, Tech, and Cybersecurity

    ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’: How do you solve a puzzle like Cliff?

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    Spoilers follow for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 

    Though Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton is the big TV star and Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate the rising starlet, it is Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth who is undoubtedly the hero of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

    Cliff is the film’s resident badass, a stuntman who gets up to even cooler stuff off-camera than on. He spends his downtime on set sparring with Bruce Lee, and his days off picking up nubile young (too young, as it turns out) hippies. It is Cliff who gets the white-hot shirtless scene, Cliff who emerges victorious in not one but two face-offs against the Manson Family goons, Cliff who thus inadvertently saves Sharon and her friends from their grisly fates. Read more…

    More about Movies, Brad Pitt, Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and Entertainment

    Greta Thunberg ditches planes, will sail to U.S. for climate talks

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    Earth’s skyrocketing CO2 levels are now rising at rates that are unprecedented in both the historic and geologic record. 

    Already, levels of the potent heat-trapping gas are the highest they’ve been in at least 800,000 years, but more likely millions of years. Acknowledging that airliners emit prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg announced Monday that she will journey across the Atlantic Ocean to speak at the UN Climate Action Summit (and Mashable’s Social Good Summit) upon a technologically-advanced sailboat, the Malizia II.

    But Thunberg won’t stop there. She’ll continue on to a crucial UN climate conference in Chile.  Read more…

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    15 memes about student loans for when you’re in debt and need to laugh it off

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    Congrats graduates! Your student loan debt might be forgiven if, and only if, you are left-handed, live in Iowa, apprentice under a wizard, and it’s the third cycle of the fifth blood moon. 

    So in the mean time, we might just have to fork over the cash every month. It can be hard to be slapped with an adult-sized bill when you still feel like an exhausted child, except taller and with the ability to drink alcohol. Who gave us this responsibility of tens of thousands of dollars for the next few decades? After all, as so many people so eloquently put it, “I’m baby.” 

    SEE ALSO: Animal shelter finds forever homes for furry ‘aliens’ with Area 51 memes Read more…

    More about Twitter, Memes, Student Loans, Culture, and Web Culture