Author: Tom Mendelsohn

Twitter has bought London-based machine learning outfit Magic Pony Technology, as it moves to bolster its video and image-sharing output.

The micro-blogging site has reportedly dropped $150 million (~£102 million) on Magic Pony, which offers tech that apparently improves low-quality pictures and videos on the fly by recognising patterns and textures.

Twitter's latest buyout represents its third machine-learning acquisition in two years: it scooped up Madbits in 2014, and Whetlab a year later.

Anton Yelchin, the Russian-American actor most famous for his portrayal of Pavel Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek movies, has been killed in an accident with his own car.

According to reports, the 27-year-old was found dead on Sunday morning, seemingly crushed between his Jeep Cherokee and a security fence at the bottom of his Los Angeles home's steep driveway.

Yelchin was born in St Petersburg to professional figure-skaters who moved to the US soon after his birth. He played Chekov in 2009's Star Trek and 2013's Star Trek: Return to Darkness, and is due to appear in the third, Star Trek Beyond, next month.

A hacker or hacking group going by the name of "OurMine Team" briefly took control of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts, apparently using information from a major LinkedIn security breech that occurred in 2012.

According to OurMine Team, the passwords to Zuckerberg's little-used Pinterest and totally dormant Twitter accounts were apparently the same as those for his LinkedIn login ("dadada"). Both Twitter and Pinterest rapidly restored control of the accounts over the weekend, and the rogue posts have now been removed—though not before they were screencapped:

Ouch. Mark Zuckerberg's social media accounts have been hacked pic.twitter.com/KvVmXOIg5s

— Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall) June 5, 2016

LinkedIn's 2012 breach was significant and embarrassing for the company, and resulted in the theft of millions of passwords and other user information. Users were warned at the time to change their LinkedIn passwords, and those on any other platform on which they were reused. This is clearly evergreen advice, as it isn't hard for a determined hacker to cross-reference someone's username and password information with other sites.

Google plans big changes in the way it delivers ads to users of core services such as Maps and Gmail.

The company said it would bring a feature dubbed "promoted pins" to its popular Maps app, allowing businesses to pay for additional presence when a user makes a relevant search.

Google's senior ads VP, Sridhar Ramaswamy, was careful to make the strategy sound benign. He said in a blog post: