Microsoft is trying to patent a new mobile authentication system that combines fingerprint and gesture recognition, reports Mobileidworld.com. It appears to be an attempt to one up biometric authentication systems, like Apple’s Touch ID based on fingerprints. Microsoft’s system would allow fingerprint sensing through the touchscreen and would work on other devices, like tablets. The move may have triggered a mini arms-race, as Apple is also working on touchscreen sensor technology. Time will tell who is first to market.

Some analysts warn that mobile ad-blocking technology threatens the future publishing. Felix Salmon thinks otherwise. “The argument here is an old one,” he writes in Fusion. “Back in 2010, Ken Fisher published an article headlined ‘Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love,’ and received a huge amount of pushback in return. In the end, it turned out that ad blocking was not a big deal: online ad revenues rose steadily at most websites for the subsequent five years, even as they exploded on Facebook.” 

Bloomberg Businessweek considers where Google went wrong in its defense of the European Union’s broad antitrust attack on the search giant. “Whatever goodwill it had stored up, Google started to lose in 2014, in the aftermath of the Snowden affair,” it reports. “Several of the leaked NSA documents revealed how Google and other companies had given the spy agency access to users’ accounts.” 

So much for a key component of criminal forensics. “New research … outlined new ways to attack Android devices to extract user fingerprints,” ZDNet reports. “The threat is for now confined mostly to Android devices that have fingerprint sensors, such as Samsung, Huawei, and HTC devices, which by volume remains low compared to iPhone shipments.” 

Twitter now allows for full landscape support for its iOS app on the iPhone 6 Plus. “Like with many of Apple’s bundled applications, Twitter app users on the larger, 5.5-inch iPhone can navigate their Timelines, Tweet, and Direct Message in landscape mode,” 9To5Mac reports. 

How much is Yahoo paying for social shopping service Polyvore? Sources tell Bloomberg Business that the figure is around $230 million. “The deal, announced last week, includes about $40 million in retention payments,” it reports. “Polyvore, which lets people put together collections of fashion goods on the Web, has been slightly profitable to break-even.” 

Microsoft just picked the gamification specialists at Incent Games. “The computing giant says that it will soon offer [Incent Games’] FantasySalesTeam platform to its own customers to ‘help them incentivize their sales teams to new heights and better results,’” Venture Beat reports.