Developers on the Blink browser engine, the core component that powers both Google's Chrome browser and Opera, announced Friday that they're dropping support for the Pointer Events specification originally devised by Microsoft.

There are two competing specifications for handling touch input in the browser. The first, Touch Events, was devised by Apple and integrated into WebKit. While Touch Events was part of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standards track, for a long period they were held up in patent limbo, with Apple claiming that it owned patents that covered the specification and refusing to offer a royalty-free license for those patents. During this period of uncertainty, W3C stopped work on Touch Events.

In response to this, Microsoft devised a similar but different specification, which it called Pointer Events. Pointer Events both avoided Apple's patent claims, and offered some features not found in Touch Events. In particular, Pointer Events allowed Web content to handle mouse, touch, and stylus input in a more or less uniform way. With Pointer Events, developers can specialize these input methods where necessary, but also handle common behavior with common code.

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Bent Kure

All my life, I've been the kind of person who absorbs and chronicles trivial facts for easy recall later. So Good Job Brain is the kind of radio show/podcast I've been waiting for my whole life. Every week, the four members of a real-life pub quiz team get together for an hour or so to just chat about some of their favorite facts, all centered loosely around a different theme each week. Sometimes these facts will take the form of clever quizzes (with the other participants ringing in using hilarious "barnyard buzzers"), but more often than not, the hosts just present well-researched, interesting , yet mostly useless facts in a clean, clear, and conversational style.

I'll listen to Good Job Brain when I'm out doing errands, when making dinner, or, most enjoyably, when navigating the long waits and cramped spaces of air travel. For a know-it-all like me, using that "wasted" time to improve my stores of useless knowledge is a great way to multitask.

—Kyle Orland

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Shawn Campbell/CC BY 2.0

Twitter has pledged to update its policies regarding abuse and user safety, following a series of distressing incidents that caused Zelda Williams, daughter of the late comedian and actor Robin Williams, to leave the social network.

Two accounts have been removed by Twitter after Zelda Williams received abusive messages and doctored pictures and subsequently announced she would be leaving the social network. In a statement, Twitter's Vice President of Trust and Safety Del Harvey said the company would be addressing a variety of different issues that the event had raised and would update its policies accordingly.

"We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter. We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules, and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one. This includes expanding our policies regarding self-harm and private information, and improving support for family members of deceased users."

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New research suggests that the idea of "the thieving magpie" being attracted to shiny objects may be a myth.

Humanitarian aid is being distributed to hundreds of thousands of Yazidi people, fleeing Islamic militants in Northern Iraq.

Pope Francis has conducted a large open-air Mass to beatify 124 of South Korea's first Catholic martyrs at a ceremony in the capital Seoul on Saturday.

Opposition politician Imran Khan rallies supporters and demands the government's resignation after leading a march to the Pakistan capital Islamabad.

The family of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot dead on Saturday by a police officer in the US state of Missouri, has condemned the release of CCTV footage showing a robbery at a convenience store.

Rendered image showing the electric motor between the rear wheels, and the battery compartment stretching forward. Tesla Motors

In a Friday blog post, Elon Musk wrote that Tesla will remove mileage limits on its warranty policy for all Tesla Model S drive units. The warranty, which will still span eight years, won't have a cap on the number of owners for each vehicle.

People who purchased Teslas before today were told that the warranty period for the drive unit expired after eight years or once the car logged over 125,000 miles.

The revised warranty applies to new vehicles and Model S cars that are already on the road.

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Members of Michael Brown's family have been speaking to the press.

One of the slides Vringo lawyers showed the jury to win their case. Vringo

Vringo's win over Google was one of the biggest and most public jury wins for a "patent troll" in recent years. It won $30 million from a jury verdict in 2012, far less than the half-billion-dollar verdict it was seeking.

But last year, the judge overseeing the case revived Vringo's hopes, ordering Google to pay a running royalty amounting to 1.36 percent of US AdWords sales. Those additional payments could have been more than $200 million annually, pushing Vringo investors toward the billion-dollar payday they were pining for.

Today, the dream of getting rich by trading Vringo's lawsuit-driven stock is dead. A three-judge panel on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has eviscerated (PDF) Vringo's patents, ruling 2-1 that they are obvious.

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While most of the time enthusiasts are playing around with the latest and greatest, the cheaper low performance platforms are usually the high volume movers. As we explained in our Kabini review, AMD has taken the unusual step of producing an upgradable platform for as little as $74. The motherboards for the AM1 Kabini platform range from $31 to $47, and today we are reviewing the GIGABYTE AM1M-S2H which retails at $35.

Images Money

Two major supermarket chains announced that their customers' credit card information may have been stolen during a network intrusion.

SuperValu, the Minnesota parent company of Cub Foods, Farm Fresh, Hornbacher’s, Shop ’n Save, and Shoppers Food and Pharmacy, announced that 180 stores in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, North Dakota, and Minnesota were affected.

"The Company has not determined that any such cardholder data was in fact stolen by the intruder, and it has no evidence of any misuse of any such data, but is making this announcement out of an abundance of caution," SuperValu said in a statement Friday.

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A BBC crew has joined an RAF reconnaissance mission over Iraq to see how British Tornado aircraft are helping to plot Islamic State positions on the ground.

The English Premier League is planning to "clamp down on fans posting unofficial videos of goals online" and is developing technologies and working with Twitter to aid its quest, the BBC reported today.

"You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law," the league's director of communications, Dan Johnson, told the news organization. "It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it. We're developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity... I know it sounds as if we're killjoys, but we have to protect our intellectual property."

Football—also known as "soccer," a word coined by English people to describe their favorite sport—involves the kicking of a ball into a goal, feet-first slides into opponents' legs, and a variety of acrobatic dives. While players other than the goalie are not allowed to use their hands to touch the ball, they may use their heads, and—though generally frowned upon—occasionally attempt to influence the course of play by biting each other.

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A study of trained dolphins has suggested that the marine mammals use express pleasure with squeals of delight.

Not all links on Facebook will get slapped with a "satire" tag, but if users click through an Onion article and return to their feeds, they'll probably find some stuff that's been tagged.

Facebook is already an unbearable enough place as of late, at least in my case. Awful national and international news stories continue to appear in my personal feed alongside friends' amateur political commentary and personal quibbles, and that mix makes the occasional ray of satirical, hilarious sunshine from off-kilter sites like The Onion welcome. Sadly, Facebook has begun trying to ruin even these fun articles by appending their titles with a "satire" tag.

The major catch to this auto-tagging is that it only appears in a "related articles" box. Here's how it works: If a friend posts an Onion link to his or her Facebook feed, click on it for a laugh. Once you're done at The Onion and come back to your desktop or laptop browser, Facebook will have generated three related articles in a box directly below whatever you'd clicked on. In the case of an Onion link, that box will usually contain at least one article from the same site, only that article's headline will begin with the word "satire" in brackets. As of press time, we were able to duplicate this result on three different computers from different accounts, one of which is shown above.

We can only assume this was implemented as a reaction to users believing that Onion links are nonfiction reports (you can lose hours flipping through Literally Unbelievable, a site that catalogs such boneheaded moments), but we're not sure what compelled Facebook to go so far as to assert editorial control. Maybe the company still feels bad about how users reacted to its intentional News Feed manipulation from 2012.

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Microsoft could be shipping a preview release of the next major version of Windows—codenamed "Threshold" and expected to be named "Windows 9"—in either late September or early October, according to sources speaking to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley. The preview will be widely available to anyone who wants to install it.

The final version of the operating system is currently believed to be scheduled for spring 2015.

Microsoft has all but confirmed some of the features that Threshold will ship with, including a new hybrid Start menu that includes bits of the old Windows 7 Start menu alongside new live tiles and the ability to run modern Metro applications in windows.

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FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn (right) with former FCC Chairman and current NCTA CEO Michael Powell. National Cable & Telecommunications Association

Comcast and Time Warner Cable were planning to spend $132,000 to sponsor a dinner honoring FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn but are now redirecting the donations after accusations that the companies are trying to curry favor with Clyburn during the FCC's review of Comcast's proposed $45.2 billion acquisition of TWC.

Comcast was going to be a "presenting sponsor" with a $110,000 donation for next month's annual dinner of the Walter Kaitz Foundation, which seeks to "advance the contributions of women and multi-ethnic professionals in cable." TWC paid $22,000 for the event.

The dinner's previous honorees include Comcast itself, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, and Roberts' father, Comcast founder Ralph Roberts. Time Warner Cable and three of its employees have also been honored at previous fêtes. The annual dinners have raised $35 million, including $1.75 million last year. Kaitz uses that money to make grants to other organizations that promote diversity.

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Following the announcement of 10 million PS4 sales worldwide earlier this week, Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation 4 continues to outsell its console competition in the US. July was the seventh straight month that Sony's system has been the best-selling console in the country, according to Sony and NPD data.

Neither Sony nor Microsoft offered concrete sales numbers for the month of July, following NPD's monthly report on US retail video game sales, but Microsoft did say the console "continues to sell at a strong and steady pace following the release of the $399 console in June." Microsoft previously announced that US sales for the Xbox One had doubled in June following the unbundling of the Kinect sensor, and it said this month that "we continued to see this momentum in July.”

Combined, US sales for the Xbox One and PS4 are up 80 percent compared to the first nine months of sales of last generation's Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, NPD said. Those consoles sold a combined 3.82 million units in their first nine months in 2005 and 2006, putting current combined US sales of Sony and Microsoft's new consoles at around 6.87 million.

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