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(credit: Shawn Campbell)

Twitter confirmed it will allow all of its users to apply for "verified account" status on the same day that it permanently booted an outspoken conservative from its site amid claims of abusive tweets.

Up to now, the coveted blue tick badge was the preserve of celebrities, journalists, and high-profile users—some of whom run the risk of parody or fake accounts in their name.

However, while the online form to request verification on Twitter is now available to anyone, the micro-blogging site said that only accounts “determined to be of public interest” will receive the badge of honour.

The site Hyperloop One is using to test its sled. (credit: Hyperloop One)

In a new lawsuit filed Tuesday, the remaining executives at startup Hyperloop One accused four former employees, including former co-founder and CTO Brogan BamBrogan, of a slew of breaches of duty to the company. The suit comes just a week after those four former employees sued Hyperloop One, accusing the remaining executives—including co-founder Shervin Pishevar—of mismanaging the company, mistreating the engineers, and even placing a “hangman’s noose” on BamBrogan’s desk.

The Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One had enjoyed some real success in prior months. The startup is trying to build a Hyperloop—a train-like method of transportation imagined by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that would use a low-pressure tube and magnetism to propel pods of cargo or humans at 700mph. In May, the company successfully tested the propeller mechanism for its test track in North Las Vegas.

But rifts within the company were apparently already growing. The cross-complaint from Hyperloop One is just as incendiary and intrigue-filled as the original complaint, with accusations of screaming, sexist comments, and poor performance. Hyperloop One is demanding $250 million in damages from the four former employees.

(credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Tesla Motors' charging stations for electric cars can be described as the fastest currently available in the world, the UK's ad watchdog has ruled.

While there might be EV charging technology which might one day surpass Tesla's stations, specifically the GB/T charger from the Chinese manufacturer GuoBiao, the American company was found to be unsurpassed in the current market.

The Advertising Standards Authority investigated two complaints from British green energy company Ecotricity—which operates a number of EV charging stations in the UK—about claims Tesla had made on its website in October last year.

The new UWP Skype client. (credit: Microsoft)

It has been a slow transition, but Skype is finalizing its move away from a peer-to-peer system to a cloud-based one.

When it was first created, the Skype network was built as a decentralized peer-to-peer system. PCs that had enough processing power and bandwidth would be elected as "supernodes" and used to coordinate connections between other machines on the network. Similarly, text, voice, and video traffic would flow between peers, directly when possible (when intervening firewalls and routers were cooperative) or indirectly through other systems on the network when required.

This peer-to-peer system was generally perceived as being relatively private; with no central servers the assumption was that there was no central ability to perform wiretaps or other forms of eavesdropping. This belief was in fact mistaken.

(credit: nrkbeta)

The high court of Paris has ruled that Google and Microsoft do not have to censor their search engines to remove all results involving the world "torrent" used in conjunction with the names of three French musicians.

The French music producers' association "Syndicat national de l’édition phonographique" (SNEP) had sought a court order to force the US companies to remove results for searches pairing the word "torrent" with the artists' names, which they claimed directed users to pirate sites.

As an article on the French site NextInpact explains, the Tribunal de grande instance de Paris refused to grant SNEP's request for Google's search results to be censored because of a legal technicality raised by Google's lawyers. SNEP's request referred to only three artists, and should have been on behalf of its entire membership, the high court ruled.