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Verizon to stick with Yahoo! purchase, but at new scratch-and-dent price

And they’ll skip the anti-rust undercoat, too

It looks like Verizon is still going to buy Yahoo!, although after Verizon learned that Yahoo! had lost the details to about a billion Yahoo! users to hackers, there’s now a bit of a discount involved. Under the new terms of the deal, Verizon is going to $350 million less than the initial $4.8 billion deal they agreed upon. That’s actually a win for Yahoo!, who many insiders thought would have to drop the price by a billion dollars to salvage the deal.

Others thought Verizon might just walk away from the deal altogether, and of course, that’s always still possible if more bad news were to surface about the once-mighty icon of the early internet. And just to be safe, we’d still change that Yahoo email password one more time.

That’s a lot of lemonade

So, what do you do when you have a warehouse full of millions of recalled smartphones with possibly flammable batteries inside them? That’s what Samsung is trying to figure out following the Note 7 disaster last year that left them with millions of new, unsold phones, millions of sold and returned phones, and millions of batteries both good and bad stacked up… somewhere.

According to BGR, it looks like the plan is to refit the unsold “new” Note 7 phones with lower-capacity batteries – and put them back on the market in India and Vietnam. But even with the re-marketing effort, Samsung is sitting on nearly 3 million Note 7s that came back through the recall, plus possibly millions of new phones that never made it to retail, plus millions of batteries. And they can’t exactly just put them in the trash.

Current status: Tired of updating multiple statuses

WhatsApp rolled out a new feature today to its billion or so users, and it might sound familiar: it’s called Status. With Facebook owning WhatsApp, that may seem like a no brainer, but it is a bit different. Besides just letting your friends know if you’re awake or sober or otherwise, the Status feature will let users post photos, emojis, GIFs or short videos overlaid with drawings, and will be visible to select friends for 24 hours before turning to vapor.

Forbes added that in the very beginning, WhatsApp was actually just a status update tool – not a chat app – so this is going back to its roots in some way. However, the change also means you will also be able to scroll through you’re friends “status” posts at will now, rather than just do the usual text and photo thing. Hmmm…. It does sound sort of familiar.

Anyway, the feature rolls out today, so set your status for stun and get ready to see some ads in those status reports.

Bill Roberson
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I focus on producing Digital Trends' 'DT Daily' video news program along with photographing items we get in for review. I…
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