Signal, an encrypted messaging app that competes with other services including Facebook’s WhatsApp, said Thursday that verification codes used to create new accounts were delayed because of a flood of new users.

The surge came just hours after Elon Musk endorsed the service and amid reported changes to WhatsApp’s terms of service.

“Consumers are being squeezed by data algorithms and becoming the targets of technical bullying,” the association said.

China also warned its internet giants to brace for increased scrutiny, as it slapped fines and announced investigations into deals involving Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings.

Chinese state media have become increasingly vocal about infringement of consumer rights by tech companies.

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts.

In 2016, WhatsApp gave users a one-time ability to opt out of having account data turned over to Facebook. Now, an updated privacy policy is changing that. Come next month, users will no longer have that choice.

China’s highest-profile entrepreneur has not appeared in a public setting since a late October forum in Shanghai where he blasted China’s regulatory system in a speech that put him on a collision course with officials, resulting in the suspension of a $37 billion IPO of Alibaba’s Ant Group fintech arm.

Mozilla did change several interface elements after the release of Firefox 57, recently the controversial address bar overhaul that it launched in Firefox 75 Stable.

He notes that Firefox will look more modern when the designs land and that Mozilla plans to introduce useful improvements, especially in regards to the user experience.

Originally written as a SVG browser ("because SVG was way faster than HTML," according to Ekioh CEO Piers Wombwell), everything is rendered entirely on the GPU.

The Flow executable weighed in at just under 34MB and was blessedly free of the chaff other browser makers tend to include with their wares. It was also, however, free of such fripperies as a history, navigation buttons, or even somewhere to type in a URL.

To be clear, this is very much a browser in development, and the fact that a small team has been able to produce a rendering engine that not only handles some of the more esoteric CSS out there but also with decent performance is not to be sniffed at.

Boston Dynamics' family of robots is having some fun to celebrate the close of 2020. Spot and Atlas were joined by their oddball sibling Handle to shake their booties on the dance floor to "Do You Love Me" by The Contours. The video starts off impressive enough with just a single Atlas showing its incredible dexterity while busting out some sweet dance moves that would have made the late Patrick Swayze envious.

It's all fun and games in the headline above of course, but you have to admit the skills on display here are just a little funky-freaky.

More than 100,000 Zyxel firewalls, VPN gateways, and access point controllers contain a hardcoded admin-level backdoor account that can grant attackers root access to devices via either the SSH interface or the web administration panel.

Installing patches removes the backdoor account, which, according to Eye Control researchers, uses the "zyfwp" username and the "PrOw!aN_fXp" password.

Game developer Zynga announced in September it would shut down the game on Dec. 31, a victim of Adobe's decision to stop distributing and updating its Flash Player for web browsers, which in turn led Facebook to announce an end to support for Flash games on its platform.

The manufacturer had tricked Amazon into displaying thousands of reviews for an unrelated product below its drone, helping the drone to unfairly rise to the top of Amazon's search results.

This kind of review bait-and-switch is not a new problem. More than two years ago, Buzzfeed's Nicole Nguyen wrote about other online sellers using the same scam. For example, she found that many of the five-star reviews for a highly-rated iPhone charging dock were actually reviews for a culinary torch.