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Verizon enables apps/websites to pay for the data you download with FreeBee Data

Twitter is making headlines this morning due to outages across the globe, prompting people to wonder: “If I didn’t tweet it, did it actually happen?” The outages started early this morning, with Twitter acknowledging the problem as recently as 4 A.M. Eastern. As of 8 A.M. Eastern, problems were still being reported.

All sorts of users are making astute observations about the outage, including Facebook user Lyndsay Pole, who said, “When Twitter is down, you can’t tweet that Twitter is down” (courtesy CNN Money.) It’s these kinds of revelations that are causing Twitter stock to decline when Twitter executives are busy trying to prove that they can deliver bigger revenue and profits.

This begs the question: Should the standard by which we judge a social media organization come down to its frequency and duration of outages? Tweet us your opinion at @digitaltrends and cross your fingers we get it.

Verizon has just introduced a toll-free data service designed to give third parties the option to pick up the bill when you download their content.

Verizon’s “FreeBee Data” will allow banks, streaming video services — you name it – to cover the cost of the data you consume whenever you use their app or visit their website. Checking your bank balance, streaming a news story, and other smaller data transactions wouldn’t hit your data cap under the plan.

On a transaction-by-transactional basis, the consumption may not look like much, but added up over the month, it could free up a considerable chunk of data.

And finally, password management firm, SplashData, has issued its list of the worst passwords in 2015, and true to form, there are some real winners in there.

Some of the usual suspects remain, including the number one winner/loser, “123456,” which kept its spot from last year. But the trend being noted this time around is that these moronic passwords are at least getting longer. “1234567890” is brand new to the list, appearing in spot number 12. All told, there are seven variations of this password, all starting at 1 and going up from there.

There are some fresh new entries this year, including “welcome,” “qwertyuiop,” “login,” “princess,” and my personal favorite, at number 25: “starwars.” Old favorites like “letmein” and “login” slipped an average of 6 spots to make way for the newcomers … that’s gotta be good, right?

The moral of this story is that we need retina scanners and we need them now, because passwords are a pain in the ass, and you all know what I’m talking about.

As always, you can dig deeper into these stories and read up on all the latest tech news at DigitalTrends.com That’s it for DT Daily today, we’ll see you again tomorrow!

Caleb Denison
Digital Trends Editor at Large Caleb Denison is a sought-after writer, speaker, and television correspondent with unmatched…
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