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Records obtained by the ACLU of Northern California in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit show that local city governments are piping automated license plate reader (ALPR) data to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the organization wrote on Wednesday. The ACLU-NC wrote the records show that more than 9,000 ICE officers have been granted access…
Man, it would be great if tech CEOs would maybe not appear as guests for podcasts during which they smoke blunts or engage in casual conversation with anti-vaxxers. And yet here we are. In a move that unsurprisingly resulted in Jack Dorsey getting ratioed to hell, the Twitter CEO on Tuesday evening thanked Ben Greenfield—a…
Here’s a change in Google’s Chrome browser that’s raising eyebrows: In 60 global markets, Chrome now includes the option of using pro-privacy competitor search engine DuckDuckGo. The change, first spotted by TechCrunch, is written into Chromium 73, the recently released version of the Chromium engine that is the open source foundation of the Chrome browser…
Facebook is under criminal investigation for massive data deals between the social media giant and many of the world’s biggest technology firms, according to a Wednesday evening report on the New York Times. Facebook confirmed the investigations in a statement. “We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously,” a Facebook spokesman told the Times…
At least a dozen times in the past year I could have sworn Moviepass—the spectacular theater subscription flameout venture—had finally gone bankrupt. Certain movies were unavailable, prices were raised and funding got tight, the unlimited plan died and was reborn worse, and each time one of these catastrophes became public, I was positive Moviepass would…
President Donald Trump announced this afternoon that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would order all Boeing 737 Max-8 and Max-9 planes grounded in the U.S. following Sunday’s plane crash in Ethiopia that killed 157 people and an October crash in Indonesia that killed 189. The U.S. is the last major country on the planet to…
Facebook is down! For some people, anyway. So are Instagram and other platforms in the “Facebook family of apps,” news the company communicated on Twitter, a different social media platform that is currently loading. Soak in the sense of freedom while it lasts. Update: Still walking it off. Update: Virtual reality also mildly bricked.
Over the past few years, Google has been pushing deeper into the hardware business with products like the Pixelbook, Pixel Slate, multiple Google Homes, and of course, Pixel phones, with the latter getting a big boost thanks to Google’s $1.1 billion acquisition of tech and personnel from HTC last year. But now, according to a…
Researchers have uncovered a new adware strain that, until recently, was running rampant on the Google Play Store. More than 200 applications are said to have carried the malware. In a post Wednesday, Israeli security firm Check Point said applications known to contain this particular adware strain—dubbed “SimBad”—had been downloaded almost 150 million times, primarily…
Leading them around practically by the tie, neatly dressed NSA handlers guided the American spy agency’s most powerful leaders through labyrinthine crowds in San Francisco’s Moscone Center last week at the annual RSA Conference. With 50,000 attendees, RSA is the biggest cybersecurity conference in the world, known for attracting industry start-ups, giant corporations, and top…
This week, a third whistleblower came forward with damning allegations against Tesla. A former member of the Tesla security team, he is now corroborating claims by previous whistleblowers that Tesla hid information about the theft of raw materials from shareholders and conducted unauthorized surveillance on employees that included hacking at least one person’s phone. Since…
Despite getting announced last fall, we are only now finally getting some concrete info about Motorola’s 5G mod attachment for the Moto Z3, and with it comes some interesting insight on the early days of 5G as a whole. Starting at $350, the mod—which will attach to the Moto Z3 and empower it with 5G…
After a decade of worsening relations with Apple, Swedish music streaming giant Spotify took the extraordinary step today of filing a formal antitrust complaint with the European Commission, “after trying unsuccessfully to resolve the issues directly with Apple,” according to CEO Daniel Ek. Apple controls what’s allowed into its app store and how those programs…
What musicians that you enjoy today will still be around in 20 years? It’s tough to say. But the good people of 1999 tried to predict just that in an article that might raise a few eyebrows here in the year 2019. A weekend editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Scott Mervis, made his predictions in…
Amazon has pulled two books peddling pseudoscientific “autism cures” that promote giving children potentially toxic chemical baths and medication for mercury poisoning. Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism and Fight Autism and Win, the books in question, were amongst those highlighted in a recent report from Wired about Amazon carrying multiple books peddling dubious, potentially…
City officials in Portland, Oregon are preparing a Wednesday vote to oppose the rollout of next-generation 5G networks in the city, Inverse reported on Tuesday. The move, which is supported by Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioners Chloe Eudaly and Amanda Fritz, is motivated in part because of disputes with the federal government over telecommunications rules,…
Garmin has a solid track record when it comes to making smartwatches that don’t look like smartwatches. Its Vívomove HR manages to completely hide its smart capabilities under a non-descript analog face. Inspired by feature-packed watches from company’s like Breitling and Omega (and the big prices they command), the company’s new MARQ smartwatch line isn’t…
A YouTuber arrested on Sunday by Mountain View, California police for suspicion of threatening Google drove all the way from Waterville, Maine to confront staff for allegedly terminating his account on Google subsidiary YouTube—unaware that it was actually his spouse who deleted it, BuzzFeed News reported on Tuesday. According to BuzzFeed, Kyle Long, 33, has…
The rollout of a Yelp-like phone app aimed at helping Donald Trump’s supporters find businesses friendly to MAGA-hat wearing chuds is going about as well as you’d imagine. After security flaws in the app were made public Monday night, the developer behind “63red Safe” flipped his shit online and threatened to sic the FBI on…
Has the past decade of advertising innovation taught us nothing? Do we really need more devices tracking us and parsing us into ever-smaller quadrants of monetizable products? If you ask Vizio, the answer is abso-fucking-lutely. The TV manufacturing giant announced on Tuesday that it’s joined forces with some of the biggest media companies in the…
