The New York State Public Service Commission is doing something that just about every consumer wishes they could do to their internet service provider: telling them to actually provide the service promised or get bent. The agency ordered Charter to pay a multi-million dollar fine and complete required expansion of its…
Most social media users know that bot accounts are among us, whether as fake voters with loud opinions or obsessive re-tweeters of a single corporation’s content. When it comes to telling many ‘fake’ accounts from real ones, however—or just knowing how many non-individuals are active online—even savvy users are mostly…
“Loss” is one of the modern internet’s most pervasive, and most strange, memes. Now, it’s, uh, a little different.
There’s a very simple new website making the rounds that all the kids are talking about. It’s called “Did Thanos Kill Me?”
Since Russia banned the Telegram messaging app, the government has embarked on a campaign of hitting itself in the face. The functionality of the Russian internet has been hobbled for two weeks as regulators wildly block IP addresses, and on Thursday a Kremlin spokesperson admitted he still uses Telegram. “It works…
Facebook is connecting the world to the internet, for better or worse. According to the company’s earnings report for the first quarter of 2018, Facebook has now connected more than 100 million people to its very narrow version of the internet provided by Internet.org.
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…
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…
