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The New York Attorney General’s office has announced a settlement with Devumi LLC, a social media-marketing firm whose tactics were exposed by the New York Times last year, in what the office wrote is “the first finding by a law enforcement agency that selling fake social media engagement and using stolen identities to engage in online…
As phishing scams become increasingly sophisticated, Google’s engineers have been exploring ways to help users better identify potentially nefarious URLs. Google Chrome is currently testing a new warning to flag these types of domains, CNET reported Tuesday. The feature was highlighted this week by Emily Stark, an engineer on Google Chrome’s security team, who spoke…
Windows 10 has had dark mode settings for a quite some time, and Apple added it to macOS with its Mojave update last year. But strangely, neither iOS nor stock Android offers a true system-wide dark mode option right now. However, based on leaks and rumors about upcoming software, that could all change in 2019…
“It’s a cold day in New York,” Stuart Applebaum told a crowd of shivering protesters that included members of Make the Road, the Tech Workers Coalition, the Democratic Socialists of America, Desis Rising Up and Moving, and the group he presides over, the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union, “but it’s not as cold as…
When the National Enquirer published alleged text message exchanges between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and media personality Lauren Sánchez in January, many people immediately began cooking up a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was involved with the leak. According to a new report, Bezos’ investigators actually think that might be the case and they’re looking…
Facebook may not be the only tech giant violating Apple’s developer program policies. Less than a day after Facebook got busted paying users, including teens, $20 a month in gift cards to use its Research App that collected troves of users’ personal data, a new TechCrunch report revealed that Google is guilty of a similar…
Following news yesterday that Facebook paid teens in order to monitor their phones via an unsettling “research” app, Apple has pulled Facebook’s Enterprise Certificate. As a result, Facebook can no longer access its internal iOS apps, such as pre-release versions of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, “as well as the employee apps for coordinating commutes or…
The deployment of facial recognition technology by government bodies in cities around the world continues to spread, even as lawmakers and technologists point out the ethical issues still plaguing these systems. That’s why a San Francisco elected official’s recent proposal is so important—it effectively bans the city from using the technology. Aaron Peskin, a member…
A steady hand is needed to play a game like Jenga without toppling the tower, but being a successful block-stacker also requires a fine-tuned sense of touch as you try to find the perfect piece to remove. Until recently it meant robots relying solely on visual data weren’t actually great at playing Jenga (yay, humanity!)…
As Apple developers scramble to fix a disturbing bug in FaceTime that allowed users to eavesdrop on the people they call with the Group FaceTime function, we’ve learned the company was allegedly notified about the issue before it was widely known, repeatedly. At least one lawsuit has already been filed against the tech giant. And…
Foxconn, one of the largest electronics manufacturing companies in the world, received $4 billion worth of subsidies and infrastructure spending from the state of Wisconsin to build a new factory there. But the plan for that factory seems to be unraveling by the day. In fact, Foxconn now admits that they’re no longer building a…
Even though base storage on phones has increased from 8GB to 16GB to even 64GB on some newer handsets, with the ever increasing size of photos, videos, and apps, sometimes it still feels like there’s never enough room. To help address the situation, Samsung announced that it has created the world’s first 1TB embedded flash…
If you don’t pick up the phone anymore because each time it seems to be one of those annoying robocallers, you’re not alone. A newly released report found that 26.3 billion robocalls were made to U.S. phone numbers in 2018, up 46 percent from 18 billion in 2017. Yikes. The report was compiled by Hiya,…
Fox News is no longer tweeting from the cable network’s main account, but that doesn’t mean that President Trump’s favorite channel has abandoned Twitter altogether. In fact, Fox News still relies on Twitter to harvest free content that airs on its network all day long. Fox News Channel sent its last tweet almost three months…
Facebook has stealthily launched a service similar to Onavo Protect, its vampiric psuedo-VPN that claims to protect users’ privacy but actually collects and analyzes their data. This time it’s worse—Facebook is targeting teens to install a similar app via third-party beta testing services, in possible violation of Apple’s rules for enterprise developers. According to a…
After years of rumors, iRobot’s finally announced its robot lawnmower: the Terra. Now, instead of getting up early and mowing and annoying the neighbors, you can sleep in and let the robot do it for you. On top of being able to mow your lawn, it seems the Terra will borrow quite a few features…
Tech giant Apple last year took advantage of Republican tax cuts to announce it was bringing home a hoard of $252 billion it had stashed overseas at a meager 15.5 percent tax rate ($100 billion of which it later said would go to stock buybacks). As of Tuesday, when the company announced its first-quarter earnings,…
Over the last five years, the global management consulting company Accenture has developed proprietary automation software called the SynOps platform that it says has helped it cut 40,000 jobs within the company. First, allow me to apologize for being forced to string together some of the dullest words in the English language, as few industries…
Last week in a company blog post, YouTube informed its approximately 2 billion users that it would begin to change how recommendations function, reducing instances of content that “comes close to—but doesn’t quite cross the line of—violating our Community Guidelines.” What defines “borderline” content, and who does the defining? That’s where things get hazy. It’s…
In June 1972, David Bowie made his debut as Ziggy Stardust on British TV show Lift Off with Ayshea, but years later a technician accidentally wiped the only known footage of the performance instead of converting it to digital. Audio of the show is available online, but a video archive of the iconic moment was…
