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Last year was not great for Facebook’s embattled chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg—particularly after it was revealed that she personally requested information on vocal Facebook critic George Soros after he publicly deemed the company a “menace.” But Soros conspiracy ordeal notwithstanding, the company she’s partly responsible for running experienced the most disastrous year in its…
Apps! They’re everywhere! Even Pope Francis is endorsing them. On Sunday, the pontiff touted an app called ClickToPray ahead of the World Youth Day festival in Panama. Francis told fellow Catholics from his window overlooking St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican to download and begin using the app, which Agence France-Press noted was first launched…
Faced with impossible circumstances forced by the longest shutdown in U.S. history, hundreds of government workers have turned to GoFundMe to help pay for things like medicine and groceries. Now, GoFundMe has initiated its own relief fund to help ease the burden for workers without pay. The company partnered with Deepak Chopra on the campaign…
Amazon has begun rolling out a “new worker safety wearable” to over 25 of its locations over the past year, TechCrunch reported on Friday—namely, a “Robotic Tech Vest” that alerts robots to the location of workers within a facility in order to prevent workplace accidents. The vest in question has built-in sensors that allow Amazon…
With reported ambitions for growth ahead of a possible IPO, Airbnb may have discussed a deal to buy travel bookings service Hotel Tonight, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. To what extent these conversations ever gained serious traction isn’t clear, and the Journal reported that talks have since petered out between the two companies for…
Federal Trade Commission staff assessing whether social media giant Facebook violated a legally binding user privacy agreement with the agency are considering slapping the company with a “record-setting fine,” the Washington Post reported Friday, citing “three people familiar with the deliberations but not authorized to speak on the record.” At issue is whether Facebook violated…
At least 66 people are dead and over 70 more are injured following a massive gasoline pipeline explosion Friday night in the town of Tlahuelilpan, north of Mexico City in the state of Hidalgo, with authorities putting the blame on fuel thieves. According to the New York Times, “hundreds of residents” were drawn to the…
A week before CES, I finally pulled the trigger and swapped my SIM card from my sputtering iPhone 6S to a new BlackBerry Key2. The decision to switch to the BlackBerry, like many the best decisions I’ve made in my life, was driven by a combination of whim, nostalgia, and spite. Given that we’re upon…
Snap has reportedly ousted multiple high-ranking employees after an investigation into an alleged scandal involving its now former head of global security Francis Racioppi, the Wall Street Journal’s Maureen Farrell reported Friday. Racioppi was reportedly fired after the investigation found that he had an undisclosed affair with an outside contractor whose contract he later ended…
With older generations turning away from Facebook after a litany of fake news, privacy, and security-related debacles, Facebook has renewed its efforts to capture and monetize the memes of teens in hopes of raking in future revenue streams. So following in the footsteps of Lasso, Lifestage, and Slingshot comes LOL, which might be Facebook’s most…
If you’ve never played around with Teenage Engineering’s tiny synthesizers—like its iPod-sized Pocket Operators or the impressively-capable OP-1—you’re missing out on some fun, accessible ways to get into music. And the company is now expanding its Pocket Operators line with a series of new build-it-yourself modular instruments featuring affordable price tags for those not churning out…
If you search words like “shutdown” on Craigslist in any major city in the country right now, you’ll likely find increasingly desperate people. Roughly 800,000 government workers and countless contractors aren’t getting a paycheck right now. And the resulting classified ads one sign of the heavy toll the shutdown is taking on those stuck in…
We’ve all had that moment. Your smartphone battery is running low, and you’re desperate for some juice. But just how desperate have you gotten? Desperate enough to plug your phone into an NSA charging station? Because some people are seriously facing that choice right now. Shmoocon, a hacker conference that started today and runs through…
One of the purported benefits of modern day app stores is to make it easier for companies to review and ensure that the software you download isn’t harmful or malicious. But with upwards of 2.1 million apps on Google Play, sometimes things slip through the cracks, which seems precisely how at least 19 different free…
This week, hitman and hobbyist runner Mark “Iceman” Fellows was convicted of the murders of English gangland figures Paul Massey and John Kinsella. Among the crucial pieces of evidence in his trial was a Garmin Forerunner—a GPS-linked fitness watch that tied Fellows to pre-assassination reconnaissance on one his targets. For those interested in the particulars…
When we talk about how artificial threatens to impact jobs, we’re usually talking about how machine learning threatens to impact jobs. As the ‘hottest’ subfield of AI going, i.e. the one receiving the lion’s share of the research dollars and commercial investment, it’s pretty crucial to understand how, specifically, it’s going to roll out in…
Facebook’s nightmare 2018 might be over, but its 2019 is just getting started. A federal judge ruled Monday to make public a new batch of court documents detailing how Facebook made money off children. The documents come from a 2012 class-action lawsuit and will be made public thanks to requests by Reveal from the Center…
It’s fair to say that the Touch Bar—that little display strip above the keyboard on newer MacBook Pro laptops—hasn’t been the most successful of Apple’s recent attempts at innovation. It mostly sits unloved and unneeded, sacrificing keys that were useful for not much benefit. There are apps that try to make the most of the…
A lot of what we do on our computers goes through the browser, and that means any extensions you choose to add on top of that browser have a very privileged position: They can see where you’re going online, they can see the data you’re passing to and from the web, and they can send…
After streaming giant Netflix came under fire for including footage of a real-life, deadly incident that occurred in Canada in its breakout monster movie Bird Box, the company said Thursday it will not pull that imagery from the film. Reached for comment about the controversy, a Netflix spokesperson told the Associated Press said that it…
