10 things in tech you need to know today

Even Spiegel and Miranda Kerr

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday.

  1. Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel and wife Miranda Kerr only allow their seven-year-old child to have 1.5 hours of screen time per week. In an interview with the Financial Times, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel also said that he wasn't allowed to watch TV while growing up.
  2. China has ended its freeze on licensing video games. China has approved 80 new video game titles after a nine-month freeze.
  3. Documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux was among those targeted by a Twitter hack perpetrated by a security company to expose a security flaw. British cybersecurity company Insinia was able to post tweets on other people's accounts, The Guardian reports.
  4. A startup may have found a way to build longer lasting, less expensive lithium batteries for electric cars. 24M launched in 2010, and in an interview last week, its chief executive said it's working to deliver its first products by 2020, according to the MIT Tech Report.
  5. A clinic is using a $3 million grant from the US Department of Defense to develop a treatment for PTSD using VR. The clinic specialises in treating emergency services workers and veterans.
  6. Players who have been barred for cheating in videogame "Fallout 76" are being told to write an essay to reclaim their account. Players accused of cheating by Bethesda, the game's developer, received an email from the company saying that to appeal their ban, they would need to write an essay explaining why "cheat software" is detrimental to online games.
  7. A judge dismissed a suit against Google over the use of its facial recognition software. A woman filed the suit in 2016 and accused Google of taking her biometric data without informed consent.
  8. Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook is on the right track in fixing its problems, and people are watching 50 million fewer hours of viral videos a day. Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Friday that he's "proud of the progress we've made."
  9. Instagram accidentally released an update last week that removed scrolling and replaced it with a horizontal feed, resulting in a backlash from users. Instagram said it didn't mean to roll the update out as widely as it did, and that it was only intended as "a very small test."
  10. Amazon's Alexa suffered outages on Christmas Day in Europe as people around the world started using their new Echos. The connection issues lasted a few hours but were ultimately corrected by Amazon.

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