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Meeting up with friends or heading to the movies isn’t quite as easy as it used to be—in some place, it’s not even possible. But streaming services are filling in the gaps with a growing number of ways to watch something with other people, even when you’re physically alone. This isn’t exactly a new trend—we’ve…
In its push to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the U.K., the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday published a superseding indictment aimed at broadening “the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.” The names of certain organizations and individuals are masked, including that of a paid FBI…
Twitter does not have to stop a merry cow from dunking on California Republican Congressperson and Trump bootlicker Devin Nunes, a court has ruled. She will mock him until her last breath. Which will not be today. To greet the arrival of the good news, the cow squirted celebratory milk all over Nunes’s face. In…
There’s a buffet of things to be scared shitless about these days, but for those who have sampled even a taste of big tech’s eagerness to build and sell facial recognition surveillance software to law enforcement, it’s uniquely rancid. Among the challenges in reining in this dangerous class of artificial intelligence—which marries the lack of…
Cox has officially rolled out its own “Elite Gamer” internet add-on service in the U.S., something it started testing in April 2019 in select cities. Elite Gamer is a Gamers Private Network (GPN) that helps reduce lag while playing an online game. New and existing customers anywhere in the U.S. can now try Cox’s new…
It only took 84 years but someone involved with distributing Gone With the Wind has finally acknowledged that its glorification of the antebellum south is racist and that it perhaps should not be disseminated to audiences without some kind of warning. While Disney was quick to put disclaimers on some of its more offensive content…
Google’s push to become a privacy-positive company over the past year has been, depending on how you look at it, an act of genuine benevolence, a brilliant marketing decision, or straight-up bullshit. So when Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company’s latest moves in the privacy-protecting space on Twitter yesterday, the biggest surprise—at least to…
Faced with the increasingly vocal criticism that it’s one of the primary reasons why newsrooms are struggling, Google announced today a new licensing program that will pay certain publishers for content ahead of launching a “new news experience” later this year. In a blog, Brad Bender, Google’s vice president of news products, writes that the…
Earlier this week, after years of rumors, Apple finally announced its third major CPU transition for the Mac by moving away from Intel to custom-designed Apple processors. But now that the dust has settled, a lot of people are asking why. On a broader level, the reasons are clear: Not only does switching to custom…
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…
Lightroom might not have seeped into the common vernacular like Photoshop has, but in some ways it’s just as useful as the powerhouse image editor—and you get both as part of the $20 Creative Cloud Photography subscription and the deluxe CC package. Whether you’re just getting started with the software or you’re used to tweaking…
A trio of Republican senators have introduced a bill that would force tech firms to engineer backdoors into their encryption techniques whenever a judge asks them to—essentially banning encryption that prevents hackers from stealing stored data and end-to-end encryption that prevents anyone but senders and recipients from accessing data. If passed, the would inevitably compromise…
Following a series of grievances with the social media networks that millions of people actually use, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is floating the idea of setting up shop on a new platform, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Well, there’s a perfectly good network sitting right there. Facebook has taken down some of the…
It’s been a long road to regulation for Uber and Lyft in their home state of California, but it may be coming to an equitable end—one that would see their massive workforce of driver-contractors finally given legal employee status. State AG Xavier Becerra, along with the Attorneys General of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San…
A recent investigation into arsenic contamination levels in bottled water has found that a brand sold by Whole Foods—and, by extension, on Amazon—contains high levels of the toxic metal, butting up against the federal cap for maximum contamination. And not everyone agrees that the federal cap is safe enough. A new Consumer Reports investigation found…
In a spectacularly rare admission of likely very common fuckery, police copped to using face recognition to make a wrongful arrest, according to the ACLU, confirming a long-suspected but nearly-impossible-to-prove practice. On Wednesday, the civil rights litigation group lodged a complaint against the Detroit Police Department for allegedly arresting Robert Williams in early January and…
It’s official, as of today, Boston’s become the second-largest US community to ban police use of facial recognition technology, thanks to a unanimous vote by more than a dozen city council people. The move follows similar bans by the neighboring cities Brookline, Somerville, and Cambridge a few months back, along with San Francisco and other…
The Internet Archive set out in the 1990s with an improbable mission to become the “Library of Alexandria Two”; by 2020, they’ve arguably surpassed that goal, plus delivered their collection straight to the masses. It’s the only repository where a NASA recap of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster logically coexists with a 1990 recording of the…
On Tuesday, China launched the final satellite in its BeiDou Navigation Satellite (BDS) System, marking the completion of its homegrown GPS-esque navigation system. The project has been decades in the making. It began in the 1990s, and the first satellite launch was in October 2000, according to Space.com. BDS is currently one of four global…
Netflix appears to have quietly rolled out a feature to let Android users edit their “continue watching” sections—a feature that, quite frankly, should be available across all streaming services with this designated row. When clicking on a title from the “continue watching” navigation section on the homepage, Android users should see an option to “remove…
