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Instagram Bug Brings Social Media Accountability to the Forefront, Again

If you’re one of the 35 percent of US adults who use Instagram, you may have awoken Wednesday morning to a bit of a shock: Follower counts across the platform had dropped overnight, with some of the more prolific users losing millions. While many at first speculated that this dramatic reduction was due to yet another round of bot purges, Instagram soon confirmed that a bug was the real culprit.

While this story may at first seem trivial – is it really such a huge deal that Selena Gomez’s depleted follower numbers led to Ariana Grande being crowned the new Instagram pop queen? – it does bring a much more important issue back to the forefront, one posed just last September by cybersecurity expert Raj Goel:

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Plaid's Account Verification Now Available to All US Banks and Credit Unions

Plaid, API and solution provider to the financial services industry, has expanded its Auth product offering to work with every bank and credit union in the US. That's roughly 11,500 financial institutions. The expansion greatly improves on the last release that covered about 3,800 US-based institutions. The Auth product allows banks and credit unions of all sizes to authenticate accounts.

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Feature Detection With Modernizr for Cross-Browser Compatibility

Modernizr is an open source and compact JavaScript library that allows developers to craft various levels of experiences for users with respect to cross-browser compatibility. Modernizr helps developers to perform cross-browser testing to check whether new the generation of HTML5 and CSS3 features are natively supported by their visitor’s browsers or not and to provide dedicated fallbacks for older browsers that are notorious for their poor feature support. Modernizr coupled with the principle of progressive enhancement helps to design cutting-edge websites layer by layer, taking advantage of powerful modern web technologies without discarding users that are still using older browsers like IE.

How Does Modernizr Work?

Modernizr was launched in July 2009 by Faruk Ateş to battle cross-browser compatibility issues in a uniform, standardized manner. Today, Modernizr as feature detection library is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, offering more than 270 tests, and is being used in 8.76% websites globally (half a million websites in the US alone). Instead of relying on highly untrustworthy browser detection methods using “User-Agent” sniffing, Modernizr is, instead, based on feature detection. While browser detection is centered around the question “what browser is the visitor using?” feature detection revolves around the question, “what features are supported by the visitor’s browser?” Modernizr runs a series of JavaScript-based feature detection tests in a user’s browser to check for cross-browser compatibility for HTML and CSS by allowing you to target each browser's functionality separately.