Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
One of the most egregious myths about automation is that it is a faceless and elemental force of nature that we puny humans are capable only of scrambling to adapt to. This is technological determinism at its most aggressive, and it’s generally a big fat fallacy. As I’ve tried to show in these pages, automation…
The European Union has spent the last year working on a controversial overhaul of its copyright laws and was scheduled to finalize the proposal on Monday. Lawmakers failed to come to an agreement and the legislation is stalled for the time being, but that hasn’t stopped Google from threatening to pull its News service from…
Arizona state Senator Gail Griffin, a Republican, has introduced a new bill that would force computer and phone retailers to install porn-blocking software, which could only be removed for a fee of at least $20. The weirdest part? The money that was collected by the state would be used to help build President Donald Trump’s…
I’ve been a fan of the Jabra Move wireless headphones for years. They’re super functional, lightweight, attractive, great-sounding, and at $100, surprisingly affordable. Jabra just released an updated version of the headphones, the Move Style, with improved battery life and a new range of colors. The best part is they’re still really good and really…
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple collectively make products that we love, products that we hate (but can’t stop using), and products that dictate how we communicate and how we are seen. Their devices and services make our lives easier than they’ve ever been before, yet more complicated in unforeseen ways. They are so ubiquitous…
Week 1: Amazon Apparently, I am a masochist. I am on a mission to live without the tech giants—to discover whether such a thing is even possible. Not just through sheer willpower but technologically, with the use of a custom-built tool that would literally prevent my devices from accessing these companies, and them from accessing…
Phishing is clearly bad, but it’s not always easy to suss out a sketchy email from a legitimate one. To help, Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw has made a quiz with Google to teach people how to better spot malicious emails. The quiz walks you through eight emails—some phishing, some real. All of them have been inspired…
DJI is the latest tech company to fall victim to vendor corruption in China. On Monday, it acknowledged that a group of employees had managed to inflate the costs of parts in order to funnel away profits for their own benefit. The privately-owned drone maker estimated that the scheme cost it an astonishing $147 million. In…
Partitioning your hard drive sounds like a technically involved task that most people don’t need to bother with—but it’s actually relatively simple to do, doesn’t have to cost you any money, and can make your computing life easier and more productive. Here are the advantages of a partitioned hard drive, and why you might want…
A pair of dueling Fyre Festival documentaries—one on Hulu and one on Netflix—are giving viewers a better idea of how a festival-turned-shitshow managed to so badly botch its spectacular promise of being one of the greatest events the world had ever known. While countless people were burned by the scam, Maryann Rolle’s story was one…
Don’t want to hear an artist in Spotify playlists or radio? You may soon be able to block them. Spotify appears to be testing an iOS feature that allows its users to mute artists from being played, tech blog Thurrott first reported Monday, giving even more control to listeners about what kinds of music they’re…
WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned chat service, has announced that it will cap the number of messages that can be forwarded at once at five, Reuters reported Monday. The move is WhatsApp’s latest effort to limit the spread of misinformation and fake news on its app. The change will reportedly be effective as of Monday. The app…
Google has been fined $56.8 million by privacy regulators in France, marking the country’s first use of the tough new privacy rules enacted in Europe last year. Specifically, the company is accused of violating provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by using, without proper consent, the private data of users to craft personalized…
I’m not entirely sure when it started or why. But at some point over the last couple of months, Instagram began showing me videos of gnarly dental procedures. I have a theory about how it happened. I’m a longtime fan and follower of the dermatologist Sandra Lee, aka Dr. Pimple Popper, whose Instagram account and…
President Donald Trump’s social media accounts are filled with vile racism, idiotic xenophobia, and inaccurate statistics. And now we can add another category to the list: fake photos. In recent months, Trump’s official Facebook and Instagram accounts have published photos of the president that have been manipulated to make him look thinner. If it only…
To live is to forget—account numbers, names, the precise locations of keys and wallets, friends from childhood, peripheral characters from prestige TV shows, inside jokes, past ambitions, U.S. history, much else. Goldfish with guns: that’s the human race. But every frailty, we know, serves some larger adaptive purpose. So it is worth asking, as we…
Apple and Google compete in a whole host of areas, from mobile operating systems to music platforms, so it follows that they have competing streaming media protocols as well—something that we’ve been hearing plenty about at CES 2019. But how exactly do these technologies work? And how do they stack up against each other? Here…
Facebook, a tech company that the United Nations said has been literally complicit in genocide, has a new feature that’s being rolled out this week. And there’s a very good chance that it’s going to be abused, no matter what assurances the company provides. Facebook’s new feature is called Community Actions and functions much like…
Friends, I have some good news and some bad news. That bad news, if you missed our PSA last week, is that a colossal breach exposed nearly 773 million emails and more than 21 million passwords. This is not ideal, I know. And if you have not already, this is as good an opportunity as…
Uber—the company that had to pull its self-driving cars off the road for most of 2018 following a lethal accident that allegedly came after warnings of routine accidents—is hiring for a program that may work on self-driving “micromobility” devices, TechCrunch reported on Sunday. Details are, as TechCrunch noted, “scarce,” but there’s a lot of speculation…
