If we’re being honest, the best thing about TSA Pre-Check isn’t that you spend $85 to keep your shoes on when you go through airport security. It’s that, for a brief moment, you get to be a Have, filing past the miserable Have Nots in the general security line. Sure, some of them might get to cut ahead in that line…
Comedy is hard, and the past was no better. Just look at, say, what 19th-century jerks considered acceptable territory for an April Fools’ Day prank.
George R.R. Martin is known as a bloodthirsty writer, lopping the heads off your favorite A Song of Ice and Fire characters (sometimes quite literally) with a reckless abandon that barely gives you time to grieve before the next blood-spattered literary massacre. His latest kill may be one of his most tragic though:…
It looks like we may have a winner in America’s great internet space race. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just authorized SpaceX to launch its broadband satellite service, Starlink. That means Americans could be accessing the internet from space as early as 2019. We’ll literally just be pointing our…
This week was full of startling, scary news about how carelessly Facebook treated user data, and how Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy previously led in part by Steve Bannon, abused access to that data, possibly for Trump’s presidential campaign. The news was all but obvious to those who follow the company…
If you’re shopping for a “garden and kitchen scale with 0.5 gram precision weighing technology,” you might be a drug dealer. And evidently some joker at Home Depot knows this. Buried in the website’s listing for such an item, there are a bunch of pictures that appear to show what appears to be a pile of weed on the…
One of the cool things about modern capitalism is how utterly patronizing and infantilizing it is. Ads are written in language that barely makes sense with the assumption that everyone reading them is a moron. You might therefore think that the advertisers are the morons, but no, it is you, somehow, who is the idiot!
There was a time when merely uttering “WWW.” caused investor eyeballs to blink dollar signs. Now, that excitement seems long gone. The digital space is near fully colonized. The .coms have been bought. Our grandparents are now on Facebook. If there’s a market to monetize, it’s been monetized.
With the inaugural launch of the super-powerful Falcon Heavy rocket now in the books, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is ready to set his sights on an ambitious project known as Starlink. On Saturday, SpaceX will launch two experimental mini-satellites—the first batch of what Musk hopes will eventually comprise a 4,000-satellite…
Contrary to what you might assume after hate-browsing Facebook, it seems the internet may have actually made people less dogmatic about religion. A recent study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion has found evidence that the more we use the internet, the less likely we are to have a specific…
Remember when surfing the web was a treat? A delicacy almost. You’d fire up the whatever-kilobaud modem and start the pay-per-minute meter running and read about politics on Salon or whatever. A fun time. That’s no longer the case, and I’m honestly rotting from overexposure to the online.
Almost 15 years ago, I bought an issue of Wired in an airport and read it on an airplane bound for San Francisco. In the magazine, a bright-eyed Chris Anderson described an emerging technology called wireless fidelity (or wi-fi, for short), and I simply didn’t believe it. The internet, in the air? Maybe in 15 years, I…
You probably don’t give it much thought, but your router is one of the most important gadgets in your home—without it there’s no wi-fi for your laptops, your phones, and all the other web-connected devices you’ve got set up.
For years, Twitch.tv has been the web’s go-to for gaming live streams, crowd-sourced experiments like Pokémon playthroughs and commenter-controlled investment portfolios, and other bits of acceptably time-killing content. Unfortunately, this droll peace is being threatened by the internet equivalent of the dumb…
With all the streaming, Instagramming, and everything else people are doing on their phones, your monthly allotment of data just doesn’t last as long as it used to, especially if you’re on one of those family plans with a shared data pool. And while most phones have some rudimentary tools for tracking how much…
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to dismantle net neutrality, potentially giving internet providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T free reign to throttle speeds, block websites they don’t like, and carve the internet up into slow and fast lanes.
While most people in the United States still aren’t familiar with Tencent, the Chinese digital media and telecom conglomerate has quickly become one of the biggest players on the internet. Just last week, Tencent’s market cap valuation of $530 billion propelled it past Facebook and into the fifth spot among the…
Today the CIA released close to 470,000 files recovered from the compound in Pakistan where US forces killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011. The files include Bin Laden’s journal as well as audio and video files from devices seized throughout the Abbottabad compound. Much of the entertainment recovered doesn’t exactly square…
When I give the dating app LoveFlutter my Twitter handle, it rewards me with a 28-axis breakdown of my personality: I’m an analytic Type A who’s unsettlingly sex-focused and neurotic (99th percentile). On the sidebar where my “Personality Snapshot” is broken down in further detail, a section called “Chat-Up Advice”…
