(The Loop)

Not long ago, Twitter released version 3.3 of its iOS app, which introduced what the company called the QuickBar--a translucent strip showcasing popular and sponsored trends from the microblogging site. (Daring Fireballist John Gruber gave it .) On Tuesday night, the company released a new update that minimizes the seeming offensiveness of the QuickBar, so that it no longer obfuscates the tweets you're trying to read. Fun mental exercise: imagine explaining any part of this story to a time traveler from 2006.

(sq-skim.com)

makes a dongle that you plug into your iPhone, which then lets you swipe credit cards and take payments with the device. VeriFone makes more traditional credit card scanners, like you see at most retail stores. In VeriFone's new open letter, the company calls on Square to recall all of its dongles, since evil folks could theoretically steal a person's name and credit card number with the devices and a custom app for sniffing that data. Of course, the Square-wielder could steal such data just by . Thus, calls on VeriFone to offer invisible credit cards post-haste.

(AppleInsider)