If you’ve been wondering why you couldn’t order food without leaving Facebook, you’re in luck. Facebook just launched this very feature and it sounds simply awful. Remember when Facebook was just a utility that helped you find your friends’ email addresses? We were such dorks back then.
The galaxy far, far away is jam-packed with trivia and information to make the most diehard of Star Wars fans salivate. Ever wondered who’s rescued who (and how many times) across the Star Wars saga? Or how many lightsaber colors have been shown across the movies and TV shows? This new infographic book is just for you.
iRobot, the maker of Roomba, made big news this week when an interview with its CEO mentioned plans to sell the map data of customers’ homes to third parties. Today, the company launched damage control measures and the CEO is spreading assurances that this is all just a big misunderstanding.
It can be hard to look for the bright side in a tragedy. But resolving tragedies often requires an immense amount of human effort, and that effort results in new knowledge. New genetic forensics techniques emerged from the identification of 9/11 victims, for example. Another tragedy, the disappearance of Malaysia…
We’re all aware of the deal we make when we sign up with Facebook: we get somewhere to post vacation photos and stalk friends, and Mark Zuckerberg gets to sell your passion for fishing trips to fishing equipment retailers. What you might not realize is how deep or extensive the tracking goes—so let’s shed some light…
Crunching the numbers on the millions upon millions of Reddit comments just to crack the code on upvotes would be difficult work. Thankfully, two software engineers, a Google big data project, and some careful analysis have already done the heavy lifting, revealing the simple trick to getting the top comment in most…
Have you heard? Internet service providers want to sell your data and a virtual private network (VPN) is the best way to tell them to shove off. There’s a problem though. VPNs are notoriously shady, are more complicated than they look, they’re unregulated, and can be more of a security risk than they’re worth if you…
Until today, March 2 marked the date that internet service providers would be required to adopt “reasonable” measures to protect sensitive customer info like browsing histories, location data and Social Security numbers. Thanks to the Federal Communications Commission’s new leadership, however, that deadline will now…
BOSTON—Days after the inauguration, many folks panicked on seeing immediate changes to government websites. Others worried that scientists would be forced to have their work reviewed by the government first. One of the biggest worries: What would happen to the potentially petabytes of data (spreadsheets enough to fill…
The National Weather Service warns us about potentially dangerous weather, so it would be pretty scary if their highly reliable data analysis and warning system, the one they use to disseminate all their predictions, went down.
We are visual beings: Our perception of the world is intrinsically tied to our ability to perceive light. But what about the places where light doesn’t fall? Do places in shadow still encode information for the visual cortex to process? Can shadows actually tell us something meaningful about the landscapes they darken?
Thomas Barber Coberly died, without warning, on May 1st, 2016, at exactly 7:04 in the morning. A heart attack, or maybe an aneurysm. It really doesn’t matter, at this point. The ambulance came promptly, but he died shortly after arriving at the hospital.
If your current phone has seen better days, Verizon’s running a pretty incredible deal on top-of-the-line handsets right now, with relatively few strings attached.
Earlier this week, Evernote updated its privacy policy to make machine learning features—which let some employees read your notes—mandatory for all users. Now, the company’s walking that policy back, but there are still some problems.
Evernote just posted an update to its Privacy Policy that details how the company will make use of some new machine learning tools. In order for those tools to work, Evernote will need to allow a human review of your notes, and that’s not the only reason an employee would look at your notes.
Tinder, with its data-driven approach to romance, has always had a slightly creepy feel—it’s basically just a game to win, after all. But now, with a new feature called Smart Photos, the app has gone one step further in turning its users into human guinea pigs whose every swipe is catalogued and carefully tracked.
If you include the main cast, it’s fairly obvious who has the most lines: It’s Homer, by hundreds of thousand of words, followed by Marge, Bart, and Lisa all bunched up pretty close together. But what if you just count the words spoken by the supporting cast from season one to twenty six? Which supporting character do…
The Next Generation’s android crewman was pretty efficient. So when his best friend is the captain of a starship, why wouldn’t he just get himself an entire crew of Datas to staff it? See how delightful that is in a new preview from IDW’s incoming Star Trek anthology series, right now!
Valarie Gerbus switched carriers after she received a bill from Verizon for $9,153.46. While this is certainly an extreme case, there have been a number of FCC complaints against Verizon this week, after other customers said that their data usage skyrocketed for no obvious reason.
