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Right now, Samsung’s Galaxy Fold and Huawei’s Mate X represent two opposing viewpoints in foldable phone design. And while Xiaomi still hasn’t set a release date for its upcoming flexible handset, a new teaser video for Xiaomi’s Mi Fold shows that more combatants are still to come in the upcoming bendy phone wars. Featuring a…
Budget airline Wow Air has ceased all operations and canceled all flights, leaving many passengers very screwed and very stranded. Before Thursday, Wow Air offered flights to 23 airports for fares as low as $50. The airline has been struggling in recent months. In November competing airline Icelandair pulled out of a plan to acquire…
Do you miss the old days of YouTube? When the platform was dominated by random videos of people’s everyday lives; instead of movie trailers, commercials, clickbait, and lots of awfulness all vying for a place in your queue? A website called defaultfile.name manages to strip that all away by randomly playing videos that were uploaded…
If you’ve ever walked into McDonald’s and thought you’d like a side of tech with your Big Mac, don’t worry—the fast food chain as you covered. McDonald’s has just dropped $300 million to revamp its electronic menus with the help of some machine learning. This week, Mickey Dees bought Dynamic Yield Ltd, a New York-based…
Artificial intelligence is already everywhere, and its influence is growing. It can be hard to get your head around exactly what AI does and how it can be deployed though, which is why we present to you these five fun online experiments—all you need is a web browser and a few minutes to see some…
Picking a smartphone isn’t just about picking between iOS and Android because if you choose Android you also need to weigh up all the different flavors of Android on the market. Google, Samsung, Sony, LG, OnePlus, HTC, Motorola and the rest all do Android differently, and Samsung recently revamped its own mobile OS under the…
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Thursday charged Facebook with discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. HUD says it believes the company was “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination through the company’s advertising platform.” Facebook allegedly allowed advertisements on its platform to exclude certain people from targeting based on categories like race,…
A Chinese dating app for lesbian and queer women exposed the profiles and private data of over 5.3 million users, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday, possibly since June 2018. The app, Rela, reportedly vanished from app stores in 2017, with Reuters noting similar apps had been taken down by the Cyberspace Administration of China in the…
Secretary of Energy Rick Perry approved six “secret authorizations” to allow companies to sell “nuclear power technology and assistance” to Saudi Arabia as part of a plan to win a deal to help build at least two nuclear power facilities in the country, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing a document written by the Department of…
The Federal Trade Commission says it has stopped four robocalling outfits responsible for spamming U.S. consumers with billions of illegal and predatory calls, getting them to agree to stop using automatic dialers and collectively pay millions of dollars. The FTC said Tuesday that the nature of the calls ranged from spam like auto warranty pitches…
According to Australian authorities, a 57-year-old British man tried to flee the country (and an outstanding warrant for drug-related charges) by escaping on a well-stocked jet ski. But just as he was making it to an island respite, he was arrested on the mudflats. The Australian Border Force (ABF) say they were first alerted about…
America’s top aviation official on Wednesday defended the Trump administration’s decision not to immediately suspend use of the Boeing 737 Max 8 earlier this month following the deadly crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, even as aviation officials in virtually every other country chose to ground the jets. In testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Daniel…
Reports of the death of Silicon Valley’s relationship with the Pentagon have been greatly exaggerated. The U.S. Army just awarded a landmark contract to Palantir, the Palo Alto data analytics company, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. The contract marks the latest string tying Bay Area technology companies to the U.S. Defense Department, even as…
Following mass worker action in Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and San Diego this week, an anonymous Uber employee—whose identity was verified by staffers at Medium—published an open letter in unequivocal support of the disgruntled contractors. “The strikes called on Monday by Rideshare Drivers United (RDU) in Southern California and Gig Workers Rising in San Francisco…
Currently, when it comes to not getting pregnant, the burden falls almost entirely on women. And unless you’ve had a harrowingly painful IUD insertion, a lot of commonly used methods require consistent use for peak effectiveness. That’s why researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology want women to have the option to wear their contraception…
Have you seen a lot of posts about St. Louis-style food today? It’s not a very appetizing sight, to say the least. But it’s damn funny if you know how it all got started. Alek Krautmann, a program coordination officer at NOAA in Washington, D.C., tweeted on Monday about how he introduced his coworkers to…
It’s easy to shrug off a few dings on your car, but the touchscreen you’re staring at all day long? To some, a scratch on their smartphone is like being personally wounded, and it’s spawned an entire sub-industry selling cases and protectors for babying your gear. But what if the next time your smartphone got…
Beijing Kunlun Tech, the parent company of dating app Grindr, is planning to sell the service after a national security committee in the U.S. found its acquisition of the dating app last year posed a national security risk, Reuters reported Monday. Citing two sources familiar with the matter, Reuters reported that the Committee on Foreign…
Of all the days of the year, April Fools’ is the most cursed day on the internet. Cringey branded memes, inconvenient pranks, and annoying social media scares—this age-old tradition is now the day when anyone looking to preserve their sanity should just log off. But in 2019, Microsoft has emerged as a hero among tech…
Facebook and Instagram will finally ban white nationalism and white separatism on their networks in a move that will be implemented next week. The decision, first reported by Motherboard but announced by Facebook on its website, comes after the social media giant spent years splitting hairs about the difference between white nationalism and white supremacy.…
