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Today at “ Muscle Beach ” in Venice, Calif.,  Netflix and Lyft joined forces for a promotional campaign in support of the streaming media site’s (really excellent) dramatization of the origin story for the women’s wrestling league — GLOW (or the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling). Your intrepid reporter was taking a walk on the beach and stumbled upon the marketing stunt (which was kind of genius). For those of y’all who don’t know, Muscle Beach is sort of a mecca for weight lifters and body builders — including, back in the ’80s, a young Ah-nold Schwarzenegger. A history that made it an ideal spot to celebrate Netflix’s (pretty terrific) ode to all things new wave-d, hair metal-ed, neon accented, high-waisted, cocaine addled and muscle-bound. Members of the cast posed for pictures, and wrestlers engaged in training sessions and ’80s-themed exercise classes throughout the day. The activation will be up for the next week and included a Reebok pop-up with limited-edition ’80s styl...

When police had difficulty identifying the man who they believed opened fire on a newsroom in Maryland, killing five people, they turned to one of the most controversial yet potent tools in the state’s law enforcement arsenal. As the New York Times reports , Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare’s department failed to ID its suspect through fingerprinting. The department then sent a picture of the suspect to the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center which combed through one of the nation’s largest databases of mug shots and driver’s license photos in search of a match. That database is the source of some debate. Maryland has some of the most aggressive facial recognition policies in the nation, according to a national report from Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy & Technology, and that practice is powered by one central system: a pool of face data known as the Maryland Image Repository System (MIRS). For facial recognition searches, Maryland police have ...

Shak Lakhani, the  21-year-old chief executive and co-founder of Avro Life Sciences , started researching biomaterials when he was 15 years old. Every summer and after school the teenager would travel nearly two hours by bus and train from the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Toronto where he lived to the tissue engineering lab at the University of Toronto and develop three dimensional, in-vitro models of tumors using biomaterials. For three years, Lakhani worked in the lab, before going on to study nanotechnology engineering at the University of Waterloo a short 73 miles away. It was there, in his first year, that Lakhani met another Richmond Hill resident, Keean Sarani, and launched Avro Life Sciences. Sarani, also 21, had his own history in life sciences. A former epidemiologist who worked as a research assistant at the aptly named Hospital for Sick Children, Sarani spent his high school years working in community pharmacies before going on to graduate from the University of Wat...

Popular Linux distribution Gentoo has been “totally pwned” according to researchers at Sophos and none of the current code can be trusted. The team immediately posted an update and noted that none of the real code has been compromised. However, they have pulled the GitHub repository until they can upload a fresh copy of the unadulterated code. “Today 28 June at approximately 20:20 UTC unknown individuals have gained control of the GitHub Gentoo organization, and modified the content of repositories as well as pages there. We are still working to determine the exact extent and to regain control of the organization and its repositories. All Gentoo code hosted on github should for the moment be considered compromised,” wrote Gentoo administrators. “This does NOT affect any code hosted on the Gentoo infrastructure. Since the master Gentoo ebuild repository is hosted on our own infrastructure and since Github is only a mirror for it, you are fine as long as you are using rsync or webrsync...

Facebook likes to keep it in the family. Gabe Madway, Instagram’s director of comms who’s run its day-to-day efforts for the past four years is departing to work for a new company later this summer, and he’ll be replaced by Anna White from Facebook’s internal PR team. She’ll report to Kristina Schake, Instagram’s Global Comms Director who leads from behind the scenes. Madway was formerly a correspondent with Reuters before becoming an executive comms manager at Google from 2011 to 2014 when he joined Instagram. He’s been one of the more level-headed and frank PR people I’ve worked with over the course of launches like the massively popular Instagram Stories. Gabe kept it real. White was also a communications manager at Google and YouTube before joining Facebook in 2015 where she’s been the Consumer Comms Director. She’d been handling some announcements around safety, accessibility, and Facebook’s Jobs feature that competes with LinkedIn. The role will see White oversee the massi...

Developers and creators, this is your shot to flex your technical building skills for a chance to win free passes to Disrupt SF 2018  — and maybe even $10,000! Sign up today to participate in the  TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 virtual hackathon ! Here’s how the  virtual Disrupt SF Hackathon  works. Our expert judges will review, evaluate and score every eligible submitted hack. The 70 highest-scoring teams will each receive 5  Innovator passes  to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 ,  where they’ll get to check out hundreds of early-stage startups in Startup and Hardware Alley, hear from  several entrepreneurs, investors and innovators  in a series of interviews and fireside chats and take in the illustrious  Startup Battlefield  competition. Plus, you’ll be able to attend all the parties and after-parties that take place during Disrupt, and keep the networking going long into the night. Of that group, the top 30 teams will e...

This week, Tinder responded to a letter from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden calling for the company to seal up security loopholes in its app that could lead to blackmail and other privacy incursions. In a letter to Sen. Wyden, Match Group General Counsel Jared Sine describes recent changes to the app, noting that as of June 19, “swipe data has been padded such that all actions are now the same size.” Sine added that images on the mobile app are fully encrypted as of February 6, while images on the web version of Tinder were already encrypted. The Tinder issues were first called out in a report by a research team at Checkmarx describing the app’s “disturbing vulnerabilities” and their propensity for blackmail: “The vulnerabilities, found in both the app’s Android and iOS versions, allow an attacker using the same network as the user to monitor the user’s every move on the app. It is also possible for an attacker to take control over the profile pictures the user sees, swapping them for...