Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
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…
The future of artificial intelligence and war sounds dizzyingly high-tech, but that’s not always the case. The truth, for at least one multimillion-dollar San Francisco startup and its customers Google and the U.S. military, is that building cutting-edge AI apparently involves a group of old-fashioned human beings grinding through mountains of data, often with no…
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner and public health services agency are reportedly investigating how the private data of a patient who had an abortion may have landed in the hands of a harasser. In an anonymous Facebook post, a woman from Ireland said that after she had a medical abortion and an internal scan at the…
A few months after Trump’s inauguration, an attorney appointed by the president to a top post at the Justice Department produced a memo in which he outlined the administration’s views on congressional oversight. The memo stated simply that, because Democrats were in the minority, they had no legal authority to conduct oversight of, or demand…
Samsung’s Unpacked Event is coming up in less than three weeks, so naturally, a number of leaks have started trickling out and alongside the new Galaxy S10, it seems Samsung is also prepping to release a new Galaxy wearable. But strangely, a new leaked image of the alleged Galaxy Sport shows a device that appears…
Few things are more annoying when surfing the internet than some random video autoplaying in one of your 10,000 open tabs. Thankfully, Firefox users will finally be able to automatically disable autoplay starting next month. According to Mozilla, the feature will go live on March 19, once Firefox 66 launches on both desktop and Android.…
In what sounds like a half-baked movie script about corporate espionage, an FBI sting conducted in collaboration with a specialized glass maker (and watched from a gelato stand by a reporter from Bloomberg) led investigators to a meeting at a burger joint in Vegas during CES. However, despite getting enough evidence to obtain a warrant…
A software chief of a Chinese bank reportedly found a loophole in his company’s system and managed to stealthily withdraw seven million yuan ($1.03 million USD) over the course of 14 months. When he was caught, he explained he was testing the system. Huaxia Bank bought it, but the authorities didn’t. The South China Morning…
The collaboration no one asked for or particularly wanted is now dead. In a Weibo post on Sunday, Samsung China says it has decided to axe its partnership with Supreme Italia, the knock-off version of the New York City-based streetwear brand you always see hypebeasts lining up for outside of stores. The demise of this…
There are a lot of reasons to delete Facebook. The company has been violating your privacy and secretly giving away your data for years. Last year, in particular, was a bad one for the company. Still, it’s easy to forget, when thumbing through its endless stream of glamorous images, how one beloved app is a…
For decades, every town had its spin on the story: the distant cousin or friend of a friend who took a bunch of acid and never came down from their trip. Rumor had it that many of these people were consigned to state asylums, unshakably convinced that they’d morphed into tall, precariously balanced glasses of…
It can be hard to keep up with all the features being added to all the apps you’ve got on your phone—which is why we’ve pulled together this rundown of recently added or particularly obscure features you might not have noticed in the apps you use every day. From staying safe in an Uber to…
Update: Flickr has extended the deadline to March 12. See below for more details. Flickr, one of the best social media services of the 2000s, will begin mass deleting photos tomorrow, February 5. If you’d like to keep any of the photos that you uploaded to the service and maybe forgot about, now is the…
It’s Super Bowl Sunday! There will be drinking (if you partake)! And wings (also if you partake)! And fervid screaming about sports! It’s one of the biggest of days of the year for many sports fans. But reader, if this isn’t you, no worries. Around here we know “super” pairs best with sci-fi, and this…
Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX says it cannot repay most of $190 million in client holdings after its 30-year-old founder Gerald Cotten, the only person who knew the passwords to its “cold storage,” unexpectedly died in India in December 2018, Coindesk reported on Friday. In a sworn affidavit with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, widow Jennifer…
A small plane on Sunday crashed into a residential area in Yorba Linda, a city in California’s Orange County. Video shared to Twitter by an individual who said they were a resident of the area appeared to show the scene of the crash, with a home totally engulfed in flames as residents in the area…
A “Taser-style device” set a man’s clothing on fire on South Street in Philadelphia early Saturday morning after a security guard attempted to stun him, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported this weekend. Details on the incident are limited, but a video posted to Twitter shows that the man’s pants caught fire after an electroshock weapon was…
A hand grenade that authorities say is from World War I turned up unexpectedly at a potato chip factory at an industrial estate in Hong Kong last week, the South China Morning Post reported Saturday. The grenade is thought to have originated in France before being shipped to a Calbee snack factory in Hong Kong,…
Google yanked some 29 photo apps from the Play Store this week after they were discovered to have malicious code that pushes full-screen ads, steals information from users by tricking them into believing they have won a contest, and in some cases even lifted photos from devices to send to the malware designers behind the…
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has some more muddled thoughts on moderation on his platform, including a half-assed explanation of why he banned Infowars host Alex Jones and why the president should be allowed to use his platform to threaten nuclear war with North Korea. Per the Daily Beast, Dorsey took to comedian-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan’s show…