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It’s happened to all of us. Your congressperson tweets something stupid, and you jump into the comments with the devastating reply: “Sir, this is an Arby’s.” It might feel good, but wouldn’t it feel better if you had some assurance that your representative was actually seeing your display of wit? Well, there’s a Chrome extension…
While it’s hard not to roll your eyes at voice assistants getting added to every single thing in the smart home, a Los Angeles hospital is actually putting Amazon Alexa to good use. About 100 patient rooms at Cedars-Sinai will now be equipped with Amazon Echos to help patients and caregivers interact more efficiently. The…
National news broke early this morning that an Amtrak train near Oakridge, Oregon on its way to California had been stranded with 183 people for over 30 hours. And many people reasonably assumed that it would be an apocalyptic situation by now. But aside from some modest inconveniences, it actually sounds pretty relaxed now 36…
We’re up to the fourth iteration of Apple’s wearable, and the thing still can’t natively track my sleep. The Fitbit has been doing that almost from the beginning, and Apple has looked a little silly for lacking the feature. However, Bloomberg is reporting that Apple’s finally started testing sleep tracking, and it could appear on…
Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Fold flexible smartphone-slash-tablet isn’t without tradeoffs. For one, it might be way thicker when folded than virtually any other modern smartphone—potentially as thick as a Nintendo Switch—while the way it folds is pretty awkward. And like its competitor the Huawei Mate X, it has a big old crease running right through the…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has once again gotten himself into trouble over a tweet. Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission struck a settlement with Musk requiring him to pay tens of millions in fines and resign as Tesla’s chairman over a disastrous tweet in which he claimed he had “funding secured” to take the…
At the end of 2018, in a dramatic series of events, lawmakers in England had a sergeant-at-arms storm to an American tech executive’s hotel room and insisted on the release of confidential documents from his company’s ongoing lawsuit against Facebook. Then, in the style of vigilante hackers, the lawmakers posted many of those court-sealed records,…
Berkeley, California became the nation’s first sanctuary city in 1971, and tomorrow its city council will prepare to refine what that means in 2019 with an ordinance designed to pressure private companies who collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Following a similar policy passed last year in Richmond, CA, the Sanctuary Contracting Ordinance (SCO) would…
Last month, I tried to find out what Amazon learns about people who have an Amazon Rewards Visa Signature Card from Chase. Neither Chase nor Amazon would give me a straight answer. In fact, Chase’s spokesperson, Mary Jane Rogers, gave me a wrong answer in telling me that Amazon fell into a category that it…
Israel’s privately built Beresheet lunar lander is currently en route to the Moon—and tucked away on it is a small disk that’s crammed with 30 million pages of documents offering a primer on human knowledge. The collection of images, text, and symbols is the first step in a project to build a “Lunar Library” and…
It’s no secret that the workforce tasked with reviewing the most offensive content on the web is underpaid, overworked, and poorly supported. A new story from The Verge on Facebook moderators in Phoenix, Arizona further illustrates the disturbing reality of life for these workers—who reportedly make just $28,800 a year and use sex and drugs…
While the avalanche of announcements may have made it seem otherwise, today officially marks the first day of Mobile World Congress 2019, and aside from all the ambitious, weird, and sophisticated new handsets on display at the show, without a doubt the other big topic for the show is 5G. By now almost all the…
Maybe you’ve got yourself some Apple hardware, but you prefer Google’s apps and services, or maybe you just find Google a less scary Big Brother in your iPhone than Apple (though both companies should inspire concerns about privacy)—to what extent can you live the Google life on your iPhone? We’ll talk you through the steps…
From the outside a dog’s life can seem close to ideal, at least at those moments when your desire to do nothing runs up against the imperatives of being alive (going to work, doing dishes, buying food for the dog, etc.). Plus, dogs generally don’t require fistfulls of Advil just to make it through the…
Most people associate voice assistants with smart speakers, but Google is looking to expand Google Assistant’s mobile offerings. At Mobile World Congress, Google announced it’s adding Assistant into the Messages app in Android, expanding integration in Google Maps worldwide, and adding more supported languages. Adding Assistant to the Messages app is new. Users will be…
Hopefully your week has been better than leading New York politicians, like NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew “Amazon” Cuomo—both of whom are still dealing with the disastrous fallout from the failed deal to subsidize a new Amazon facility in Queens’s Long Island City neighborhood. (Adding insult to injury: de Blasio, who has…
LG is not one to be outdone by its South Korean rival, so following the launch of the Galaxy S10 5G, LG naturally had to follow suit with its own 5G phone announcement in the form of the new V50 ThinQ 5G. From the outside, the V50 5G features essentially the same chassis as last…
LG’s G series phones have been in a weird spot for a little while. Take the G7 for example. It’s a solid phone, but it’s not quite techy or beautiful enough to keep up with Samsung or Huawei’s flagships. It’s also a bit too expensive to really compete with mid-range handsets like the OnePlus 6…
When Microsoft introduced HoloLens four years ago, it allegedly changed the industry. But did it really? I mean, you can’t really buy a HoloLens, and its applications have largely been relegated to an assortment of niche enterprises purposes and potentially the military. To me, HoloLens was incredibly promising tech that always seemed like it was…
A federal judge in Washington has thrown out the state’s 2004 law prohibiting cyberstalking after finding that its barriers against speech that is intended to “harass, intimidate, torment, or embarrass” were too vague and violated the Constitution, per the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In his ruling, United States District Judge Ronald Bruce Leighton wrote that the…
