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Given the embarrassing catastrophe that was the 2016 presidential election, staving off cyberattacks and foreign influence campaigns is a top priority for election officials nationwide as we get closer to November. Apparently, though, no one thought to apply that same level of scrutiny to their emails. Who’d have thought phishing scams would be the downfall of…
Competitive sports just aren’t quite the same without fans. Unfortunately, because we’re living through a global pandemic with a coronavirus that thrives in mass gatherings, having fans at games in person isn’t exactly possible right now. But that doesn’t mean professional sports leagues are ready to restart their seasons without them. So they’re doing something…
Infamous coronavirus skeptic Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, triumphantly declared on Saturday that he had recovered from covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. To celebrate, Bolsonaro posted a photo of himself doing a thumbs-up with hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug he has promoted nonstop as a treatment for the disease, despite the growing…
Apple’s iOS 14 beta has proven surprisingly handy at sussing out what apps are snooping on your phone’s data. It ratted out LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok for secretly copying clipboard content earlier this month, and now Instagram’s in hot water after several users reported that their camera’s “in use” indicator stays on even when they’re…
When it comes to spoilers, nowhere is safe. Even if they had all the right hashtags and words muted on their social media feeds, many overseas fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race had this season’s All Stars winner spoiled for them on Saturday courtesy of Netflix itself. (Because we’re not that dumb, we won’t be revealing…
Dish, the parent company of popular streaming service Sling TV, is reportedly pressuring employees to return to their offices despite employee concerns over the current covid-19 crisis—and despite two deaths and dozens of presumed positive cases within the company. Dish, meanwhile, is framing the move as a kind of necessary evil by characterizing itself as…
Ten Democratic senators are urging lawmakers with power over federal spending to explicitly prohibit Justice and Homeland Security Department officials from engaging with street protesters—as both are currently in Portland and other major cities, to sometimes injurious effect, in response to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley led the call on…
Even though Microsoft has been causing a lot of headaches lately with feature changes, bugs, and some other unnecessary tomfoolery, it seems like it will hit a few subtle home runs according to the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview build. It offers some cosmetic changes, like theme-aware tiles in Start that will change the color…
With weeks to decide how and whether to reopen schools, the CDC has released a broadsheet arguing for reopening schools. It is titled “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools this Fall,” and, though it’s a fact-based argument for the wellbeing of children, it’s also alarming heel-turn after the CDC—the last neutral stopgap between public health…
Look, OK, some of you are going to blast me as a chump who’s willing to give up her face to Big Tech for convenience, but I really hope this rumor that Face ID may be coming to Macs is true. 9to5Mac discovered code in the third beta of macOS Big Sur that refers to…
Even if you weren’t afraid of stepping onto an airplane before, the global coronavirus pandemic has given us a slew of new reasons to be stressed out by air travel. Even if you’re not turned off by the idea of being cooped up in a germ-filled metal tube in the sky for hours on end,…
About a month ago, Oculus announced that it was slimming down its VR headset portfolio by dropping support for the Oculus Go in order to focus more on Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S. But now, new photos have emerged depicting a revamped Oculus Quest with potentially a new set of lenses and a launch…
New leaked benchmarks that supposedly show Apple’s developer transition kit running Geekbench 5 Pro natively on the Mac mini are starting to make the rounds—meaning unlike the benchmarks that had leaked previously, which showed Geekbench 5 running virtually via Rosetta 2 on the transition kit, someone has supposedly found a way to run the program…
QAnon theorist and Julian Assange lookalike Agent Margaritaville is on the run, a wanted man, a scofflaw, maybe a threat to the system if you believe it. And he seems pleased. As Vice first reported, since May, when police put out a warrant for two counts of impeding justice, Gerald Brummell has been making a…
Quibi’s latest stab at cultural relevance is a screenshotting function meant to let fans meme-ify its content—which, given the paltry number of people actually watching its shows, will probably see mixed results. The screenshot function was announced on Twitter this week by Tom Conrad, the company’s chief product officer. As with anything else about Quibi,…
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Just a few days after the Trump administration announced it would be pouring $75 million to build three new national institutes dedicated to quantum computing, the Department of Energy took those plans one step further by rolling out its own blueprint for full-on quantum internet that could be up and running within the coming decade. According…
“If there’s one thing covid-19 has taught me, it’s that nothing really matters,” a complete stranger told me last night while I was tattooing him in my living room. It was time to do dumb stuff in March. In the months that followed, our mastery grew into idiot-expertise, and as July yawns into the doldrums…
Due to their shape and previous lack of an official name, we’ve been calling Samsung’s next wireless earbuds the Galaxy Bud Beans. But now, it appears an early update to Samsung’s Galaxy Buds app on iOS has finally revealed a proper name for Samsung’s AirPods Pro competitors: the Galaxy Buds Live. While a number of…
Few things are more devastating to self-quantifying fitness nerds than not getting credit for that run, bike, or walk—but that’s exactly what’s happening to owners of Garmin wearables. Since yesterday, Garmin’s website, app, and call centers have been offline due to a major outage that may have been caused by ransomware. The outage was first…
