A group of child advocates is sounding an alarm about Messenger Kids, saying young people should be shielded from these types of services until they're older.

Facebook says it designed Messenger Kids to help parents and children chat in a safe way and give parents control of their kids' contacts and interactions.

The study also revealed user attitudes about biometric authentication technologies. 44 percent or respondents identified fingerprint biometrics as the most secure method of authentication. In contrast, only 27 percent rated passwords as being the most secure from of authentication.

"The study results show that millennials place higher value on convenience and memorizing dozens of new, complex, unique passwords is cumbersome, especially as these users are likely to have a growing number of accounts that require such passwords."

It is alleged that others who wanted to increase their follower count, including actors, entrepreneurs and political commentators, could then pay to be followed by the bots.

On social media, high follower accounts boost influence, which can impact public opinion, or bring advantages, such as job offers or sponsorship deals, to account holders.

"Devumi has helped over 200,000 businesses, celebrities, musicians, YouTubers and other pros gain more exposure and make a big impact to their audience," says its website.

Millions of new cars sold in the US and Europe are "connected," having some mechanism for exchanging data with their manufacturers after the cars are sold; these cars stream or batch-upload location data and other telemetry to their manufacturers, who argue that they are allowed to do virtually anything they want with this data, thanks to the "explicit consent" of the car owners -- who signed a lengthy contract at purchase time that contained a vague and misleading clause deep in its fine-print.

After being asked on multiple occasions what the company does with collected data, Natalie Kumaratne, a Honda spokeswoman, said that the company “cannot provide specifics at this time.”

You might not think that factory industrial controls would be directly accessible from the Internet. But a quick survey of devices open on the network port mentioned in the advisory (TCP port 102) using the Shodan search engine revealed over 1,000 Siemens devices directly accessible on the Internet (plus a certain number of honeypots set up to detect attacks).

Ironically, the credential-stealing vulnerability may not even be an issue in some cases, because a substantial number of the devices surveyed in the Shodan search had no authentication configured at all.

The clock is now two minutes to midnight. “Because of the extraordinary danger of the current moment, the Science and Security Board today moves the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to catastrophe," said Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Scientists blamed a cocktail of threats ranging from dangerous political rhetoric to the potential of a nuclear threat as the catalysts for moving the clock closer toward doomsday.

One GP called the situation "chaos" and said: "I can't do anything. I need this system for everything."

Another doctor, working from a GP Surgery in the Abertawe Bro Morgannwg health board area that covers Swansea and Bridgend, described it as "chaos", adding: "I can't do anything. I need this system for everything."

Speed is of the essence in Mozilla's recovery plan, and Firefox 58 does better than its predecessor in some graphics tasks by splitting work better across the multiple processor cores that computer chips have these days.

Firefox 58 can get WebAssembly software running faster so you don't have to twiddle your thumbs waiting as long after clicking a link.

Linus calls it "very much part of the whole 'this is complete garbage' issue. The whole IBRS_ALL feature to me very clearly says 'Intel is not serious about this, we'll have a ugly hack that will be so expensive that we don't want to enable it by default, because that would look bad in benchmarks'."

"The whole point of having cpuid and flags from the microarchitecture is that we can use those to make decisions. But since we already know that the IBRS overhead is huge on existing hardware, all those hardware capability bits are just complete and utter garbage. Nobody sane will use them, since the cost is too damn high."

Mrs Merkel's centre-right CDU and its Bavarian CSU ally have been unable to form a government since September's inconclusive election.

Initially the SPD ruled out governing with Mrs Merkel in charge again. But leader Martin Schulz changed his mind after CDU/CSU coalition talks with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens broke down.