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Amid a firestorm of legal and political salvoes fired at Huawei by the U.S. government, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei insisted this week that “there’s no way the U.S. can crush us” while denying that his company will give China’s government backdoor access to its next-generation 5G network. On Monday, Ren sat down with the BBC…
Chrome OS users are reporting an alarming bug in the latest stable version of the operating system. Something in the most recent update is causing the CPU usage to sky rocket to 50-100 percent capacity on certain systems. Amusingly, developers believe it may be related to checking the CPU usage in the task manager itself.…
Apple seems to really, really want people to commit to its services. According to 9to5Mac, Apple is pushing out notifications to current and former Apple Music subscribers attempting to either reel them back into a commitment or entice their friends with the gift of a three-month free trial. Notifications can already be a minor annoyance,…
For the last year, the Federal Aviation Administration has been conducting an investigation into Southwest Airlines’ practices for tracking the weight of baggage loaded onto its jets, according to documents seen by the Wall Street Journal. The regulator has reportedly considered these weight inaccuracies to be a “high-risk concern.” According to the Journal, Southwest Airlines…
For the privacy-minded among us, Chrome’s Incognito mode can offer at least some added peace of mind during browsing sessions. But some sites may know that you’re trying to access them in Incognito, and Google reportedly wants to put a lid on it. 9to5Google reported Friday that Google is planning to make it harder for…
A British parliamentary committee concluded its 18-month investigation into social media practices and issued its report on Monday. Facebook received particular focus in the report with lawmakers accusing the company of intentionally breaking the law and claiming that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has failed in his leadership of the social network. The UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture,…
It is a routine emotion in 2019 to urgently wish, four or five times in a day, to be launched not simply into space but to the very edge of the universe, as far as it is possible to get from the fever dream of bad weather, busted trains and potentially cancerous thigh lesions that…
Space enthusiasts collectively mourned this week with the death of Opportunity, the Martian rover that chugged along making important scientific discoveries for far, far longer than it was expected to explore the Red Planet. In case you missed it, Gizmodo wrote about the incredible distance traveled by Opportunity during its time on Mars, as well…
Jeff Bezos yanked his would-be HQ2 campus this week in a show that Amazon simply couldn’t take the heat from New Yorkers who opposed the secretive deal and its potential implications for the city’s residents, and the Queens community in particular. After Amazon announced it was pulling out, many progressive politicians viewed the outcome as…
Well over 300 chemical weapons attacks have occurred during the nearly eight years-long Syrian civil war, with President Bashar al-Assad’s government and its allies accounting for the vast majority of them, the Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing new research by the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPI). The Berlin-based nonprofit wrote in its report that…
If you were holding out for a folding phone from LG in the near future, you may be waiting a while. According to the company’s head of mobile communications and home entertainment divisions Brian Kwon, LG thinks it’s too soon for a such a release. Kwon was quoted by the Korean Times while speaking during…
Many U.S. airlines say they’re in the process of updating their booking systems in order to allow non-binary customers to use pronouns other than “male” or “female.” United Continental Holdings, which owns United Airlines, said that it will allow alternative gender options that include “U” for “undisclosed” and “X” for “unspecified,” the Wall Street Journal…
Thousands of convicted criminals and others accused of crimes in England and Wales will be required to wear GPS-coordinate-tracking bracelets, replacing an older generation of electronic tags not capable of monitoring someone’s movement in real time, the BBC reported on Saturday. According to the BBC, around 60,000 people are already required to wear electronic tags…
Facebook has suspended three video-centric pages run by Maffick Media, a company mostly owned by Ruptly, a subsidiary of the state-run RT (formerly Russia Today) network, CNN reported on Friday. According to CNN’s report, Facebook said it would reach out to the owners of the pages, who it said did not properly disclose where the…
Samsung has given up on Blu-ray—at least in the U.S., where it has given up on producing new models of Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray players, CNET reported on Friday. A prior report in Forbes suggested that Samsung was only planning on discontinuing the 4K players and would continue to release new 1080p devices, though the…
Apparently even Donald Trump is not immune to copyright takedowns. On Friday, the president tweeted a mocking video playing R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” over Democrats’ reaction to the State of the Union—originally created by some dude using the pseudonym “Carpe Donktum” and best known for winning an Infowars meme contest. By early Saturday ET, CNBC reported,…
Surely you haven’t forgotten about Fyre Festival, the event that scammed models, the rich, and many Bahamian vendors into believing it would be one of the greatest events of the decade—headlined by Blink 182 for god’s sake—before it all came crashing down. It appears now that Ja Rule is plotting some kind of Fyre 2.0.…
For months, reports have indicated that Apple was poised to give us a glimpse of its long-awaited Netflix competitor sometime this spring. Whether we will soon after have access to what increasingly sounds like an Apple Prime when the tech giant finally reveals it, however, is another story. We’ve known about Apple’s forthcoming streaming service…
Twitter has had a number of privacy issues recently, from failing to protect private tweets to surfacing deleted location information. Now, it appears Twitter may be holding on to data it claims it deletes. TechCrunch reported Friday that it was able to dig up direct messages dating back years that were associated with deactivated or…
After Nest contacted its customers earlier this month urging them to better secure their accounts, it appears the company is now taking the reins. The Verge reported Friday that the Google-owned smart home products company is effectively locking its users out of their accounts and prompting them to reset their passwords if it thinks they’re…
