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Scientists have created perhaps the most detailed view of the rust formation process yet, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rust is the result of a well-known chemical reaction in which iron turns into iron oxide in the presence of water. Rust can be a menace,…
The Start menu is your way into Windows and the web—it’s where you find your apps and start your searches, where you go to customize the system and organize your digital life. It’s the hub of everything you do on your Windows computer, so don’t settle for the default configuration: Make the Start menu your…
Apple’s head of retail and online stores, former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts, is departing the tech giant after five years, CNN reported on Tuesday. Ahrendts was not only one of the company’s highest-paid executives, but the sole senior female executive at the time of her hire in 2014. According to CNN’s report, Apple originally hired…
Snap Inc., the company behind the Snapchat app and a failed line of wearable cameras, is slightly less fucked than it was before, according to Q4 2018 earnings released on Tuesday. Per CBS News, Snap’s posting shows that it lost a staggering $192 million, less than the $350 million it lost in Q4 2017 but…
Today, I accidentally re-liked hundreds of years-old tweets, alarming some, delighting others, and leaving me very, very sorry.
Google is rolling out two new tools today to help the password-challenged beef up their security game. The first is a Chrome extension called Password Checkup that can identify if you’re using a password that’s been exposed in a third-party data breach. The second is a feature called Cross Account Protection, which helps protect apps…
Welcome to AIstrology. With the help of research scientist Janelle Shane, we built a bot to generate monthly horoscopes, trained on about 3,500 extant readings as well as current monthly horoscopes. Each horoscope below is therefore a prediction based on a wealth of predictions for each sign; a distillation of what the stars have in…
Hoping to color President Trump’s wall as a “medieval” solution to border security, Democratic leaders have offered up what they hope Americans view as a more suitable, 21st-century alternative. This so-called “technological wall” or “virtual fence” (they’re still working on the branding) would, first, cost significantly less. We could be talking about the difference between…
Researchers have built a massive dataset of hotel images with the intention of helping law enforcement in human trafficking investigations. The dataset, called Hotels-50k, consists over more than 1 million images from 50,000 hotels globally. “Recognizing a hotel from an image of a hotel room is important for human trafficking investigations,” the researchers wrote in…
Week 5: Apple When I first conceived of this experiment—cutting the tech giants out of my life one-by-one—I hadn’t thought to include Microsoft (because I use very few of their products) or Apple (because I use so many of theirs). I have two MacBook Airs, one for personal use and one supplied by my work.…
Last April, TechCrunch revealed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had used his executive power to remove his own messages sent in the Messenger app, an option that regular users don’t normally have at their disposal. Following the report, Facebook scrambled to make good and said we’d all soon have delete powers in the messaging app…
Some parents get their kids smartwatches to buy themselves a little peace of mind about their child’s safety. But as it turns out, these devices are a total privacy nightmare. The latest incident involves the Enox Safe-KID-One, which was just recalled by the European Commission as it was deemed particularly vulnerable to malicious actors. The…
A 24-year-old man in Fort Worth, Texas has died after a vape pen he was using exploded in his face and severed an artery to his brain, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner. The incident adds to a growing number of devastating vape explosions. William Brown died on January 29th according to the medical…
When the availability of the original iPhone X dried up almost immediately after the iPhone XS was announced, it sort of made sense. After all, the iPhone X was a limited-edition thing meant to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the iPhone. That said, it’s disappearance was a bit of a blow for people hoping to…
As violent ethnic clashes and a labyrinth of civil wars continue to plague Myanmar, Facebook banned four armed groups based in the country from using the platform. The Tuesday announcement came as part of an ongoing effort to oust “dangerous organizations” promoting violence on the social network. Facebook has a long and dark history in…
You might recall that grade-school experiment where an iron filing-covered sheet of paper draped over a magnet reveals the invisible lines of its magnetic forces. But with a strong enough magnet (the kind they won’t let you play with in school) and a miniature trampoline, you can actually see those invisible magnetic lines in three dimensions.…
Phone or tablet tethering can give you some precious internet connectivity when you’re out of wifi range, and in terms of connecting on the go, it’s much more secure than the public wifi you’ll find in hotels, coffee shops, and so on. Here’s how to do it, simply and painlessly, whether you’ve got Android or…
After a couple of false starts, President Donald Trump is scheduled to give the State of the Union address to Congress tonight at 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific, 5am Moscow time. And there are plenty of ways for cordcutters to watch the speech this year on YouTube, Facebook, and TV-connected devices like Roku and Fire TV.…
AT&T is continuing to move forward with its bullshit strategy to rebrand slightly enhanced 4G service as “5G E,” 9to5Mac reported on Monday, with some of its customers who have downloaded the latest iOS 12.2 beta reporting that the 5G E icon has replaced the LTE service icon on iPhones. To be clear, “5G E”…
Happy Zuckerversary! Facebook officially turned 15-years-old on Monday, and its founder has blessed us with yet another blog post explaining how he sees his own creation in its terrible teens. After all this time, Mark Zuckerberg still either can’t or won’t accept that he runs a platform, not the internet. From the very first sentence…
