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Apple has finally announced its long-rumored transition away from Intel chips and will now make its own homegrown CPUs based on the ARM architecture for future Macs. The company’s goal is to shed its dependence on Intel so that it can control even more of its production and development pipeline. It’s an interesting move at…
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to advance the EARN IT Act, a ruinous waste of bipartisanship that once threatened to destroy online platforms should they refuse to grant federal agencies unfettered access to the private communications of their users. The bill was designed to preclude services like Facebook from offering users access…
Google announced Wednesday that it had implemented its SmartReply system for YouTube creators, which will give those users access to suggested replies based on what someone has commented. Unlike the SmartReply system Google currently uses for Gmail, SmartReply on YouTube required some further tweaking because of the way people us language on that platform compared…
Popular Information recently exposed how the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s right-wing news aggregator, was able to get an unusually high engagement rate on Facebook, even though the website publishes far fewer articles than other major publications and does no original reporting of its own. Through a network of five large Facebook pages controlled by Mad…
With so many people now video-conferencing while working from home, webcams have suddenly become hard to find—a number of top models are sold out or have seen massive price hikes. So to help make video calls a little easier to setup, today Olympus is introducing a new app that can turn your mirrorless camera into a…
Microsoft has struggled to convince people to use its cloud storage service, OneDrive, for quite some time. Whether that’s because of the cost or the feature set is unclear—which storage service you choose comes down to your personal needs, and OneDrive may not do it for you, especially if you don’t use Microsoft Office. But…
In order to stop enterprising young people from using rented Airbnb properties to throw absolute ragers in their region, the company has announced new booking rules for some people under 25. Going forward, users younger than 25 will not be able to book entire houses in their area if the user has fewer than three…
Nostalgia for the ‘90s is rampant online. You can’t escape it. Old shows from the ‘90s are making their way back to streaming platforms. BuzzFeed has an entire tag dedicated to quizzes and listicles about how only ‘90s kids will remember shit from 30 years ago. Apparently, chokers, bucket hats, and claw clips are also…
Facebook is facing new allegations of racial discrimination by an African American manager and two Black job applicants whose qualifications reportedly exceeded the requirements but were nevertheless rejected, according to the Washington Post. The Post reports that Oscar Veneszee Jr., an operations program manager, filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the…
For a long time, different people would typically give you different answers about which Silicon Valley giant is, definitively, The Worst. Recently though, Facebook seems to be the name that comes up first in a lot of people’s minds, for any number of reasons. Maybe it’s the way the company’s CEO just stood there while…
When news broke earlier this year that Apple had snapped up Dark Sky, the weather app said at the time that while the app would continue working for iOS users, it would be shut down for Android and Wear OS users and subscribers beginning July 1. But in an updated notice on its website this…
If you’ve got a mountain of digital data to store but don’t necessarily need to access it every day, tape cartridges are the way to go. Twelve terabytes of storage will set you back about $100 these days, but in the coming years, Fujifilm believes it can push the technology to 400TB capacities in a…
Cue up “Mad World” and reflect on the folly of having more money than sense: Facebook confirmed today that it’s shitcanning Lasso and Hobbi, two sad products you’ve probably never heard of. What’s Lasso? A dating app for cowboys would be a good guess, but no, Lasso was Facebook’s misguided attempt to rip off Bytdance’s…
The Pixel 3a has been one of our favorite phones over the past year, but it seems its time has come to an end as Google has confirmed that the Pixel 3a has been officially discontinued. After a little more than a year on the market supply for the Pixel 3a on Google Store began…
Are you a frontline worker dealing with new stresses or irresponsible management? Is working (or not working) from home starting to take a psychological toll? How are you coping with reopening? Submit a story using this Google form or send me an email with the subject line “My Covid Story” and provide as much detail as…
Earlier this week, MIT permanently pulled its 80 Million Tiny Images dataset—a popular image database used to train machine learning systems to identify people and objects in an environment. The reason? It used racist, misogynistic, and other offensive terms to label photos. In a letter published Monday to MIT’s CSAIL website, Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus,…
As movie theaters struggle to re-open and attract patrons again, even while the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, they’ll be facing yet another obstacle to financial recovery this summer as Walmart has revealed plans to turn its parking lots into drive-in movie theaters starting in August. It doesn’t matter how much disinfectant is sprayed into a…
Cinemark will, in fact, require you to wear a face mask in its theaters after first releasing a murky policy that encouraged—but did not require—face coverings. That policy naturally received blowback as we have been, and continue to be, in the midst of a deadly pandemic. The company now states on its website that as…
As part of T-Mobile’s contentious mega-merger with Sprint, one of the Federal Communications Commission’s stipulations was that new T-Mobile would have to sell off some its holdings, including Boost Mobile. And today, in a deal worth $1.4 billion, Boost Mobile’s new owner Dish has finally begun its attempt to become the U.S.’s fourth nationwide wireless carrier.…
Fellow film streamers, should you find yourself looking for something to stream amid the muck of the overwhelmingly mediocre titles available on Netflix, I strongly advise against relying solely on the algorithmically driven top 10 trending carousels to inform your viewing options. If you do, you may find yourself confusing the seemingly okay Netflix original…
