The DNS (Domain Name System) server settings on your laptop, phone, or router are your gateway to the web—converting easy-to-remember domain names into actual internet IP addresses, just like your contacts app converts names into actual phone numbers. You can change which DNS server your devices use though, and…
In 2016, Charter, the U.S.’s second largest cable provider bought out Time Warner Cable and rebranded the company as Spectrum. However, in order for the deal to get approved, the company promised New York State officials that it would increase broadband speeds to 100 Mbps by the end of 2018 while also extending cable…
On Tuesday, Google announced yet another massive subsea cable project, this time a private line stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to connect a data center in the US directly to another in Europe.
If the internet went down, America would devolve into chaos. A new study suggests that’s an increasingly likely possibility as rising sea levels submerge critical infrastructure buried along densely-populated coastlines.
The council tasked with ensuring consistency in criminal sentences in England and Wales has provided instruction on how courts should handle revenge porn cases: harshly.
If you’re a Comcast customer, you might have already realized your internet is borked today. That wave of sadness and despair you’re presumably experiencing seems to be the result of a few cut fiber cables, according to a tweet from Comcast. If it makes you feel any better, the company says it’s trying to fix it.
Leah Juliett was 14 when nude photos of her were circulated throughout her school without her consent. She had sent the photos privately to a boy, who then shared them with fellow students.
In April, the day before taxes were due, the IRS’ online filing system failed, just as procrastinators were settling into the annual TurboTax panic. How did this happen, especially before the most important tax day of the year? And why does this keep happening to government websites?
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…
