Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
If there is anything as quite as infuriating as internet data caps, having your internet speed throttled is up there—especially if you pay extra to have ultra-fast, uncapped internet. According to Ars Technica, Cox Communications not only wants certain customers to stop using so much data, it’s also reportedly punishing entire neighborhoods to get those…
“Dave, you’re the kind of customer I’m happy to lose,” Jeff Bezos captioned a recent Instagram post showing a customer email laden with expletives and racial slurs. As you might expect, Dave (his last name redacted) claimed to be speaking on behalf of “White America” against Amazon’s recently announced support of the Black Lives Matter…
Twitter shows no signs of letting up on fact-checking false tweets. The social media platform is now labeling tweets that falsely tie the rollout of 5G to the spread of covid-19 with a fact-checking link, Business Insider spotted. This comes just days after Twitter cracked down on President Trump with a voter-fraud fact check and…
As a software company in the browser space, Brave’s made a name for itself by putting user privacy first and monetization second. But now, some of its users are pointing out that the pledge might be a bit duplicitous. As first pointed out by the folks over at Decrypt, Brave has been quietly redirecting its…
Amazon’s poor handling of the covid-19 crisis affecting workers at its warehouses has made it the target of a new lawsuit filed by a group of workers at JFK8, an Amazon facility in Staten Island. The complaint, filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, claims that Amazon…
While Google, Apple, and Amazon generally do their best to keep their voice assistants apolitical, all three have decided to program answers to the questions “Do Black lives matter?” and “Do all lives matter?” It’s a good thing that all three affirm that Black lives, do in fact, matter. But where Google and Apple’s virtual…
The sun is a great source of free lighting if you’re in a home with lots of windows. But in the summer months, natural lighting can also quickly turn your home into an oven. Instead of spending all your waking hours opening and closing blinds to block direct blasts of the sun’s rays, Lutron’s new…
A popular painting app for the Nintendo DS and 3DS that relied on each handheld’s stylus is finally coming to the Switch. But instead of forcing users to paint with their fingers, Colors Live will include a stylus that cleverly uses the Switch’s headphone jack for pressure sensitivity and a better painting experience. The Switch’s…
At least five people have died trying to find it, but the hunt appears to be over. Forrest Fenn, an 89-year-old art and antiques dealer in New Mexico, announced that someone finally found the $1 million treasure chest he hid in the Rocky Mountains roughly a decade ago. “The guy who found it does not…
Watching your computer gradually slow down seems inevitable. Your local storage space eventually fills with crap (or important files), and your installed applications become bloated and wheezy. However, you don’t have to settle for this slow-motion performance decay—speeding things up can more straightforward than you think. While we can’t cover every single reason for a…
Most workers have no ownership stake in the companies to which they give their labor. This is, if you ask me, not ideal. But I’m not a CEO. If I was a CEO, I’d probably feel this was just as things should be, and would be able to justify this feeling with various statistics, theories,…
It can be difficult to return to business as usual during America’s first phase of reopening with federal social distancing recommendations still in effect. But a new patent from Apple gives us a glimpse into how one bit of normalcy—group selfies—might work even when we’re all at least six feet apart. As spotted by Patently…
I don’t know about y’all, but there’s been a lot going on in recent days. While my brain is intent on learning about the battles of 2020, including the ones against coronavirus and for racial justice, sometimes it just needs a break from the news. During those times, I binge on TV for a while.…
America is, you might be aware, expressing a groundswell of disgust against police brutality following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—a challenging scenario many local law enforcement departments have responded to with an increased escalation of said brutality. Considering the sheer number of videos circulating on social media of clear-cut violence incited solely…
Over the weekend, more than 140 scientists who have received funding from the Facebook CEO’s philanthropic group, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg denouncing his spineless response to the president’s most recent inflammatory comments. Included among them were 60 professors at leading U.S. research institutions, including Harvard University, Standford University, and…
Apparently, Twitter and Facebook take copyright infringement seriously, even if the entity infringing is President Donald Trump’s campaign. The platforms recently took down a tribute video to George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck in Minneapolis. The video the platforms took down featured Trump discussing Floyd’s…
Is this what he meant by “America First”? On Saturday, Twitter users noticed that when searching the word “racist,” President Donald Trump’s account shows up first among the results. You get the same outcome if you search “racism” too, though, sadly, other terms that have become synonymous with America’s commander-in-chief such as “white supremacist,” “orange,”…
The economic crisis stemming from the coronavirus pandemic has hit countries all over the world, costing millions of jobs and putting a freeze on a lot of non-essential spending, like upgrading your old phone or computer. Apple knows this, and that’s presumably why it’s reportedly planning to launch an installment program for its products. Bloomberg…
Facebook has purged nearly 200 accounts on its social media platforms associated with white supremacy groups, some of which pushed members to grab their weapons and crash protests against police brutality, according to a weekend Associated Press report. You’d think any idiot would consider this a cut-and-dry case of racists violating Facebook’s terms of service,…
For folks trying to get a grip on their digital privacy—whether you’re an activist or not.