Silicon Valley firms crunched their hardest in 2017 to rebrand ordinary merchandise long produced by other industries as uniquely innovative product lines. Some of them were pretty obnoxious, like Lyft’s totally-not-just-a-bus shuttle service, or WeLive’s attempt to market living in communal housing as a lived…
The first paper straw factory in the “last several decades” in Britain is planning to launch in Wales as fast-food chains prepare for a planned ban on single-use plastic products throughout the UK, the Guardian reported, with some chains already preparing their own plans to phase out plastic in favor of paper.
MoviePass, the movie-ticketing startup whose whole business model is essentially subsidizing enough impossibly cheap tickets with investors’ money that it gains leverage over theaters, is fast hemorrhaging cash. But with the firm possibly running out of funds by the end of next month (or turning to a line of credit)…
Axiom Zen’s CryptoKitties, which is essentially a digital version of Beanie Babies based on the Ethereum blockchain, sucked in a massive amount of funding just a few months ago. But it looks an awful lot like people bought into CryptoKitties looking for a quick return on their investment and are finding that digital…
Tech giant Apple has scored a huge victory in its $1 billion original programming push, signing a multiyear deal with host and media magnate Oprah Winfrey to produce as-of-yet unspecified streaming content. According to the Wall Street Journal, the signing of Winfrey is expected to play into its long-rumored launch of…
Let’s talk about how you’re perceiving color. The idea came to me when a coworker asked if they should get the computer with 100-percent sRGB or 100-percent Adobe RGB, which displays more shades of green. I jokingly told him to take this X-Rite color perception test to see if he could even perceive color well enough…
Tech giant Apple is reportedly planning to prevent anyone who wants to gain access to a encrypted iOS device via techniques like Cellebrite’s GrayKey phone-hacking box by introducing an option to lock USB data access an hour after it’s locked, essentially turning iPhones, iPads, and iPods into sealed black boxes.…
The trial of two men who allegedly made $20 million in an insider trading scheme involving hackers who stole corporate press releases before they were public began in Brooklyn on Tuesday, Reuters reported, with prosecutors telling jurors they had “electronic communications, trading records and testimony from witnesses…
Apple’s new App Store privacy guidelines restricting apps that collect data on users’ friends—specifically, the address books of iPhone users—already seemed to be in large part a response to Facebook’s sprawling Cambridge Analytica data scandal. But the company could also be targeting Facebook’s Onavo Protect VPN…
Ex-basketball star Dennis Rodman, who until Monday’s in-person negotiations between President Donald Trump and North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un could accurately claim himself to be one of the few people friends with both, crashed the closed-door event today in Singapore. He did so wearing a shirt advertising a…
Square, the online payments company helmed by Twitter CEO and Bitcoin fanboy Jack Dorsey, has settled a class-action lawsuit over allegations the company pocketed tips customers believed were going to drivers for its California-based food delivery service Caviar.
On the same day that the repeal of net neutrality became official, two US senators demanded answers from the FCC over its dubious claims about being targeted by cyberattacks.
Switzerland has elected to allow online casinos, though a newly approved law intends to keep foreign operations from sharing in the take.
Telecom giant AT&T has been fighting like hell in court to pull off its $85 billion acquisition of content company Time Warner, which owns everything from HBO and Warner Bros to DC Comics. It’s been opposed by the Department of Justice, which has formally argued that it’s against the deal on antitrust grounds but many…
Elizabeth Holmes lost everything—and nearly $900 million of other people’s money—when her bunk blood-testing startup Theranos went into full meltdown, resulting in the layoff of nearly all staff and civil charges of “massive” fraud for Holmes and former company president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.
Behold Summit, a new supercomputer capable of making 200 million billion calculations per second. It marks the first time in five years that a machine from the United States has been ranked as the world’s most powerful.
On Thursday, the Trump administration made official its deal to save Chinese phone manufacturer ZTE—a company that was almost dead and buried thanks to crushing sanctions put in place by the president’s own Commerce Department. In response, a bipartisan group of senators announced a plan to reverse the agreement.
Years ago, Facebook fired its Trending News team and replaced them with algorithms after a Gizmodo article featured former workers claiming the site discriminated against conservative news. Then, Facebook tried and failed to suppress hoax news sites and propaganda with a series of methods designed to avoid the ire of…
It’s happened to everyone: You’re walking home, minding your own business, when no random devices suddenly screaming at you about how the police are coming if you happen to bump into them. Fortunately, someone is finally disrupting that space.
Naval systems that track the current position of ships have an array of vulnerabilities that could make it simple for hackers to break in, the BBC reported on Thursday, which could enable attackers to set off collision alarms on other vessels.
