Kate Knibbs

Have You Ever Been Catfished or Impersonated Online? 

Catfishing is what we call it when people lie about their identity online. It’s unsettling, and it happens often: Last week, I wrote about how the DEA catfished drug dealers on Facebook by impersonating a woman arrested on drug charges. Today, Jezebel covered a disturbing story about a woman named Ellie Flynn who realized some…

Colleges Stalk Your Facebook To See How They Should Hit You Up for Money

On the scale of “irritating” to “soul-boiling” telemarketers, college alumni fundraisers aren’t the worst. The way that school alumni relations offices decide which former students to contact, however, is a liiittle creepy. Colleges are scouring former students’ Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to figure out who to hit up for cash, and using targets’ interests to…

GoFundMe Is a Great Way to Scam People

I’m not the morality police over here, but I’m just gonna go ahead and say that people should not scam each other. Think of a scam free world! We would be free to trust unlucky Nigerian princes and Publisher’s Clearing House. So, first of all: Don’t rip people off. It’s rude. But if you were…

I2P: The Super-Anonymous Network That Silk Road Calls Home

The infamous Silk Road resurrected itself like a junkie phoenix this month, leaving its long-time residence on Tor for a new anonymizing service called the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P. News of the high-profile dark market’s new address nudged the little-known I2P into the spotlight. Now, after a decade in the dark, the project is…

Uber Is Punishing Drivers for Following the Law 

Uber drivers attempting to follow the law are getting screwed by Uber in California. A Buzzfeed investigation revealed that Uber suspended at least 12 drivers last month for properly registering their cars as commercial vehicles. To get their jobs back, Uber said the drivers had to re-register the cars as personal vehicles, which is a…

BlackBerry Tries to Guilt Everyone Into Making Apps for Its Platform

BlackBerry has jumped into the debate on net neutrality the way that BlackBerry does just about everything these days: ass-backwards. Last night, BlackBerry CEO John Chen wrote a blog post that contorted the standard definition of net neutrality into a complicated pretzel of crazy, insisting that Apple and Netflix are violating the principle of net…

You Can Watch The Wire Remastered in HD on Amazon BUT SHOULD YOU

Like The Wire, but wish it was NOT filmed in standard definition with a 4:3 ratio? Enjoy streaming things on Amazon? Today is your day and no one can take that away from you, not even David Simon, creator of The Wire, who is decidedly ambivalent about the remastered HD version of The Wire that…

These Underwater Mountains Are More Dangerous Than They Look

The ocean can look enormously peaceful, like a postcard sent from heaven by someone on Xanax. Under the surface, things aren’t nearly so calm and picturesque. And on the coast of North Africa, the U.K.’s Royal Navy found another salty hazard: Two previously unmapped underwater mountains, jutting up from the seabed. The HMS Enterprise mapped…

DEA Used a Woman’s Private Photos to Catfish Drug Dealers on Facebook

The U.S. government is neck-deep in creeptastic digital impersonation schemes. The Justice Department just paid a woman $134,000 in a settlement after she sued them for stealing her private pictures to set up a fake Facebook profile in her name so that DEA agents could catfish drug dealers. Back in 2010, Sondra Arquiett went by…

The Idaho Government Once Forced Beavers to Skydive With WWII Parachutes

“The Saga of the Skydiving Beavers” sounds like the title for a quirky children’s book, but it’s also a fitting epitaph for a strange, true story of an unconventional approach to habitat resettlement. In 1948, Idaho’s Fish and Game service decided the best way to keep beavers away from growing urban centers was to strap…

Meet Twindr, the Twitter/Tinder Mashup You Never Knew You Didn’t Need

There are so many apps! Some are useful. Most are not. Only a select few, however, manage to summarize a fundamental paucity of creativity with just their name. Twindr is one of those rare and magnificently solipsistic birds. Twindr is not Tinder for twins, unfortunately, although there is a parody app that uses the same…

Amazon’s Plan to Make Films and Debut Them on Prime Right After Theaters

Amazon is already killing it with original streaming content. Transparent just won the Golden Globe for best comedy series and The Man in the High Castle is getting good early reviews. But Amazon is not resting on its streaming service laurels. No, Amazon has its eyes on a bigger screen: The company is preparing to…

Republican Bills Would Strip the FCC of Its Power to Regulate the Web

Republicans in the House and Senate have introduced net neutrality bills that would strip the Federal Communications Commission of its ability to effectively regulate the internet. The new legislation is, at its root, a way to deregulate the telecom industry by curbing the FCC’s powers. And unsurprisingly, this kind of legislation is being championed by…

How to Stop Data Thieves From Stealing Information Off Your Old Gadgets

Considering our collective thirst to upgrade to the latest shiny gadget, it’s not surprising that consumer electronics generate a nasty amount of waste—some 3.4 million tons of e-waste year. We are device-gobbling monsters who grow strong on the gleaming newness of our machines. But tossing out “old” devices creates an overlooked hazard. You might think…

These Failures Are the Worst Sports Mascots Ever Designed 

Creating a good, crowd-rousing, kid-pleasing mascot is more difficult than it might appear. Some just look too goofy. Others fall into the lowest crevasse in Uncanny Valley and scare the shit out of people. Most Olympic mascots end up being oddly sexual, creepy, scary, or all three. Olympic mascots aren’t the only offenders. Sports history…

The New CISPA Bill Is Literally Exactly the Same as the Last One

The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over expecting different results. That’s a cliche, but politicians often follow the hoariest routes to power, and attempting to enact change by doing the same thing repeatedly is one of them. When word broke last week that the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act,…

Facebook has started testing Facebook at Work, the colleagues-only app it is designing to encourage workday use. “Pilot partners” began using the app today. It will initially debut on iOS and Android, and will also be available from the mobile site. [The Guardian]

Spike Lee Put His New Joint on Vimeo a Month Before Its Theater Debut

This is a big get for Vimeo: Spike Lee made his latest movie, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, available to stream on the video-sharing site today, a month before its theatrical release. From Snowpiercer to The Interview, we’re seeing movies debut on streaming services before or at the same time as their big-screen releases more…

Stephen Hawking on Space Colonization, Villainy, and Predictive Text 

The fictional version of Stephen Hawking is getting a lot of attention thanks to the biopic The Theory of Everything. But real-life Stephen Hawking is far more badass than his big-screen counterpart. He’s also up for discussing his theories on pretty much everything, as Wired’s recent interview shows. The world’s most famous theoretical physicist used…

See George Clooney In Peak Lovable Scamp Mode in Out of Sight 

Lovable scamp George Clooney was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award at last night’s Golden Globes for his prank-laden acting career. Clooney is perhaps the first person to receive a lifetime achievement award for portraying a lovable scamp in dozens of variations, but the man does know how to smirk ruefully. Some of…