“The Tinder dating app will soon be asking men to submit photos in order to verify their height,” writes long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike, sharing a post made Friday (March 29th) on the official Tinder blog.
Let’s be real, when it comes to online dating — honesty is the best policy. Yes, your height matters as long as every other shallow aspect of physical attraction does. Please try not to take it to heart…
Height-lying ends here. To require everyone under 6′ to own up to their real height, we’re bringing truthfulness back into the world of online dating. Introducing Tinder’s Height Verification Badge (HVB), because yes — sometimes it matters. It’s the tool we’ve had in our back-pockets for years, but we were hoping your honesty would allow us to keep it there… Simply input your true, accurate height with a screenshot of you standing next to any commercial building. We’ll do some state-of-the-art verifying and you’ll receive your badge directly on your profile.
Oh, and by the way? Only 14.5% of the U.S. male population is actually 6′ and beyond. So, we’re expecting to see a huge decline in the 80% of males on Tinder who are claiming that they are well over 6 feet.

The post concludes that “Tinder’s HVB is coming soon to a phone near you,” and Tinder’s official Twitter account described the feature as “the thing you never asked for, but definitely always wanted,” with a short video showing their app displaying errors for incorrect heights. (The second error message reads “Seriously… Please enter your correct height.”) The video has been viewed 2.78 million times. Its tagline? “Let’s bring honesty back to dating.”
“It’s unknown at this point if this is a real feature that the company is adding to its dating app,” reported one local news site, “or an early April Fool’s joke.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Tinder Announces New ‘Height Verification’ Feature. But They May Be Lying

“A former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday pleaded guilty to stealing secret defense information over two decades in what legal experts have described as the biggest breach of classified information in U.S. history.”
Long-time Slashdot reader mencik quotes USA Today:

In his plea deal in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Harold Thomas Martin III admitted to removing highly classified digital and hard copy documents, then storing them in his home and car from the late 1990s through 2016. Prosecutors say there is no indication Martin ever shared the stolen secrets. His defense attorneys say he simply hoarded the information… One of his lawyers previously described Martin as a “compulsive hoarder” who took home work documents…
Martin, who held multiple security clearances while working at government agencies as a private contractor, said he knew stealing the documents risked the country’s security. He pleaded guilty on Thursday to one felony count of willful retention of national defense information. He could be sentenced to nine years in prison.
Martin also told a federal judge that he’d been diagnosed with ADHD. “His actions were the product of mental illness,” his federal defenders’ statement said. “Not treason.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – In Massive Breach, Ex-NSA Contractor Pleads Guilty to Hoarding Highly Classified Secrets

“It’s like a time capsule of the end of the world,” reports USA Today:

66 million years ago, in what’s now North Dakota, a group of animals died together, only a few minutes after a huge asteroid smashed into the Earth near present-day Mexico. Scientists Friday announced the discovery of the jumbled, fossilized remains of the animals, all killed when a tsunami-like wave and a torrent of rocks, sand and glass buried them alive.

This graveyard of fish, mammals, insects and a dinosaur is a unique, first-of-its-kind discovery from the exact day that life on Earth changed forever, according to the study lead author Robert DePalma, a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History… DePalma added that the find provides spectacular new detail to what is perhaps the most important event to ever affect life on Earth… The asteroid impact and resulting mass extinction, which scientists call the K-T boundary, marked the end of the Cretaceous Era. The aftereffects of that infamous asteroid collision killed 75 percent of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. It’s the planet’s most recent mass extinction.

Scientists believe the asteroid was 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) wide, the BBC reports, and that it “hurled billions of tonnes of molten and vaporised rock into the sky in all directions – and across thousands of kilometres.” DePalma argues that moment “is tied directly to all of us — to every mammal on Earth, in fact. Because this is essentially where we inherited the planet.

“Nothing was the same after that impact. It became a planet of mammals rather than a planet of dinosaurs.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Find 66-Million-Year-Old Fossils From The Day The Dinosaurs Died

Remember when Microsoft announced they’d be switching to Google’s open source Chromium browser for developing their own Edge browser? At the time Google announced “We look forward to working with Microsoft and the web standards community to advance the open web, support user choice, and deliver great browsing experiences.”
Now MSPoweruser reports Microsoft has indeed started collaborating on Chromium — making suggestions like caret browsing and a native high-contrast mode — and at least one of Microsoft’s suggestions is already coming to Chrome.
it looks like there is one feature that Chromium approved which will be making its way to Chrome soon. According to a new bug (via Techdows) filing on Chromium, Google is working on bringing text suggestions for hardware keyboard to Chrome soon. The feature will allow users to get suggestions as they type which is currently available on Windows 10 and on Microsoft Edge.

Google has just started working on the feature and has set the priority to 2 which suggests that the feature should be available sooner than later.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Microsoft’s Collaboration On Google’s Chromium Brings a New Feature To Chrome