Snapchat "Groups" enables group messaging

Via Dennizn

The makers of Snapchat, Snap Inc., announced on Tuesday a variety of new features, including a new group chat feature.

"Groups" is allows users to send pictures, video and text in a group of up to 16 people at a time.

MacRumors explains that just like Snapchat's normal Stories section, messages are deleted after 24 hours. Messages can be replayed just once by each participant and if it's opened after 24 hours, it's gone for good.

Snapchat gave the how-to rundown on their site:

"Groups can be created while sending a Snap, or when you’re making a new Chat. When your friends are present in a Group Chat, we show their name at the bottom of the Chat. Simply tap their name to start a 1:1 Chat, and then easily return to the Group in one swipe! We call this Quick Chat, and it’s the fastest way to keep the conversation going with one friend without spamming the entire Group."

All of the group members are listed at the bottom of each group chat, and are emphasized with color when said group member is currently in the group. To have a quick one-on one discussion with a group member, simply click on a person's name to start a "Quick Chat" then swipe back to return to the larger group.

Via TechCrunch

TechCrunch explains that all the rest of Snapchat's new features such as Bitmoji, vote and video notes, stickers, etc. are are all available in Groups.

It's been an exciting year for Snap Inc. What began as a self-destructing picture sharing app in 2012 has grown into a viable tech company projected to generate more than $935 million this year alone.

The company filed for an initial public offering in November of this year with a projected valuation between $25 billion to $35 billion.

Although at the core Snapchat claims to be simply "a camera company," the company continues to add innovative new features as it grows into a more mature messaging platform. Originally dubbed a "millenial sexting app," Snapchat has come a long way.

New Emojis Promote Gender Equality

Apple has added hundreds of new emojis to their lineup. Image: Mashable. 

Monday brought the newest wave of  politically correct emojis as Apple rolled out their iOS 10.2 software update for the iPhone.

TechCrunch highlights female occupations.

Various tech companies and organizations have made efforts to develop emoji that are more gender, race and ethnic inclusive to cater to and represent a broader range of people, activities and interests.

Time Magazine reports that back in May of this year a group of Google employees proposed a new set of "gender-diverse" emoji, followed by Facebook's new Messenger options in June.

Their proposal suggested adding the new female emoji to "better reflect the pivotal roles women play in the world."

Google reported that Unicode Emoji Subcommittee agreed in July to add 11 new professional emoji, in both male and female options and with all the skin tones.  Google indicated the proposed emoji could be "included in future platform versions" and they arrived last week with the new Android 7.1.1 rollout.

Apple's emojis have had skin modifying options since early 2015 but this week's update features "more diverse characters and new professions"  like teacher, scientist and firefighter, (with both male and female options) as well as more updates for the people-themed emojis, for the first time including a pregnant woman.

Whether on Apple or Android platforms, one can now send texts that feature female farmers, mechanics, scientists, chefs, teachers, welders and more- in an accurate skin tone and hair color.

Google celebrated the move toward gender equality in its July announcement: "We hope these updates help make emoji just a little more representative of the millions of people around the 🌎 who use them.".

For a complete list of all the new emojis and changes, check out the Emojipedia.

Via Google blog.

DDoS attack "breaks" internet for hours

The cloud-based internet company Dyn was the target of a DDoS attack today. (dyn.com)

For over two hours Friday morning, many United States internet users experienced painfully slow internet or had no connection at all. This Internet breakdown wasn't due to Kim K or the new iPhone release but in fact a large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on cloud-based Internet performance company Dyn.

The company hosts a variety of domain name systems and many popular sites were brought to a standstill such as The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, EA, the Playstation network, and others, according to user reports and the web-tracking site downdetector.com.

Steven Morgan, founder of the research firm Cybersecurity Ventures said in an interview the problem is that hackers move much more quickly than cyber-defenders.

"A DDoS attack can be launched in literally seconds, or under an hour if it's coordinated by a larger group," he said. "Right now, we're in the phase of figuring out where did this come from."

Outages like this one have been increasing in occurrence lately.

“Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them,” the security technologist Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post in September. “Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they're used to seeing. They last longer. They're more sophisticated. And they look like probing.”

In a statement, Dyn said that this morning, October 21, Dyn received a DDoS attack on its DNS infrastructure on the east coast starting at around 5:10 a.m. MDT.

“DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service interruption during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available,” the company wrote.

In an update posted at 6:45 a.m. MDT, the company confirmed the attack, noting that "this attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue."

The Dyn status website posted the following update at 4 p.m. this afternoon:

"On Friday October 21, 2016 at approximately 11:10 UTC, Dyn came under attack by a large Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against our Managed DNS infrastructure in the US-East region. Customers affected may have seen regional resolution failures in US-East and intermittent spikes in latency globally. Dyn’s engineers were able to successfully mitigate the attack at approximately 13:20 UTC, and shortly after, the attack subsided.

At roughly 15:50 UTC a second DDoS attack began against the Managed DNS platform. This attack was distributed in a more global fashion. Affected customers may have seen intermittent resolution issues as well as increased global latency. At approximately 17:00 UTC, our engineers were again able to mitigate the attack and service was restored.

At Dyn, we take every incident seriously and work hard to ensure we deliver the service our customers have come to expect. We will continue to evaluate every situation with the goal of improving our systems and processes to deliver the utmost customer experience. Thank you for your continued support."