Joshua Wong

A magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck near the town of Norcia in the Umbria region of central Italy, the strongest quake the country has felt since 1980. About a dozen injuries and no deaths have been reported so far. Authorities indicated that fatalities may have been avoided because many of the residents who might have been affected were driven from their homes by a pair of quakes that struck four days ago near Visso, in central Italy.

First Marmite, now Macs.

The messaging platform Line reported disappointing third-quarter earnings (pdf) yesterday (Oct. 26), and its stock dropped 5.7% as a result. It is struggling to grow its user base beyond its traditional markets, and its current users aren’t turning to the app as frequently for its most popular activity: sending digital stickers.

Apple debuted a refreshed line of its flagship laptops during a media event at its headquarters on Oct. 27.

Dyn, the domain name system provider that was attacked Friday (Oct. 21), has just published new detail on the incident that took down major web services like Github and Twitter.

Nintendo reported its second-quarter earnings (pdf) for 2016 today, and it broke out its profits from Pokémon Go for the first time. The company made ¥12 billion ($115 million) from licensing fees through from the game, which flow through affiliated firms including the Pokémon Company.

You may have noticed some of your Facebook friends posting updates in a giant font-size recently. They aren’t shouting, and it’s not their fault. Facebook has blown up the font size on status updates that are shorter than 35 characters.

Experts have long warned of the imminent security problems with the so-called Internet of Things. They didn’t reckon it would take shape as quickly and as dramatically as it did last Friday (Oct. 21), when IoT-connected devices like home surveillance cameras were hijacked and fashioned into weapons that disrupted vast swaths of the internet for hours.

Slack, the company that made office messaging apps cool, is seeing its torrid growth slow, even as a far larger rival has emerged. That would be Facebook Workplace, which launched two weeks ago (Oct. 10). Workplace is undercutting Slack on price and leveraging its consumer version’s existing userbase of 1.7 billion monthly active users.

An online attack early in the US overwhelmed a service from internet-naming service provider Dyn, causing the websites of its customers, including major destinations like Twitter, Spotify, Github and Shopify to be unavailable to swathes of internet users for several hours.

The Chinese government has published a “whitepaper” (link in Chinese) that sets out key milestones for the development of blockchain technology in the country, in the strongest signal yet that it’s encouraging the growth of the technology there. The move will give further impetus to firms pushing for blockchain applications in sectors ranging from payments to smart contracts on the mainland, which is already a central force for bitcoin mining (paywall).

It would be the ultimate user interface: a device the size of two stacked nickels that allows your thoughts to control computers. The only catch is it’ll have to be implanted in your brain.

When Salesforce is out hunting other companies to acquire, there’s one metric it looks up before that decision is made: Check how well it’s rated on Glassdoor, the recruitment site that lets employees post reviews of companies and rate their experiences. It’s a bit like consulting Yelp before picking a restaurant for dinner.

As the manager of a Premier League soccer club, do you dump your non-British players in anticipation of a “hard Brexit” or do you take your chances with the best foreign talent, hoping for the best, work permit-wise, when the UK eventually quits the European Union?

Get a bicycle for free, as long as you’re prepared to be a mobile ad billboard—and as long as you’re the right kind of mobile ad billboard. That’s the pitch from BuzzBike, which is using an ad-supported model—not unlike the ones beloved of the internet’s biggest companies—to disrupt urban cycle rentals, starting in London.

Twitter bots programmed to support Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of content around the first debate between the two candidates running for the US presidency on Sept. 26, according to new analysis (pdf) by the Project on Computational Propaganda at Oxford University.

Google is doubling down on its submarine cable investments in the Pacific ocean, this time with Facebook’s backing. The two tech companies announced last week (Oct. 12) that they are joining a consortium to build a new transpacific submarine cable system that will be ready in 2018.

Apple’s product launches are notoriously secretive, but the Cupertino, California tech giant is sure to do one thing ahead of a big reveal: file trademark paperwork in Jamaica.

For the first time since it set out to buy Yahoo in July, Verizon is making unhappy noises. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Verizon has said the hack of 500 million user accounts that Yahoo revealed last month could be “material” to the one-time internet titan’s business. This casts doubt over the $4.8 billion acquisition, because a “material adverse effect” is a get-out clause in the deal for the buyer.

The UK has a shot at leading the world in artificial intelligence and robotics governance, if not for Brexit. Britain’s impending exit from the EU has cast doubts over crucial legal provisions for AI and robots, according to the results of an inquiry by the British parliament published today (Oct. 12).

Imagine getting out of bed to find a freshly boiled kettle of water awaiting you, calibrated to perfect tea-brewing temperature. That’s what the iKettle 2.0 promises its users—which is great, except when you run into technical difficulties, as Mark Rittman did this morning:

Facebook made its new platform for businesses available to the public yesterday (Oct. 10). The product, called Workplace, looks very much like the consumer version of Facebook, with a news feed and a chat app, but there’s a fee to use it.

Blockchain technology has been slow to gain adoption in non-financial contexts, but it could turn out to have invaluable military applications. DARPA, the storied research unit of the US Department of Defense, is currently funding efforts to find out if blockchains could help secure highly sensitive data, with potential applications for everything from nuclear weapons to military satellites.

Facebook paid £4.2 million ($5.2 million) in tax in the UK, according to the latest accounts filed by its UK entity yesterday (Oct. 10). That’s quite an increase from the £4,372 its UK subsidiary paid in 2014. (The company is also, however, claiming an £11.3 million tax credit—in other words, a discount on future taxes—thanks to an accounting rule change on how its employee bonuses are taxed.)