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Engineers in Switzerland say they’ve found a way to make a four-legged robot even harder to fight off during the eventual robopocalypse. In a new paper, published Wednesday in Science Robotics, they describe a system that trains the bot to move faster than ever, while still being able to resist attempts to knock it down.…
The Motorola Razr was undoubtedly the phone of the mid-2000s. It was a tantalizing vision of the future that featured a super compact body with slick metallic keys and two freaking screens. And while its debut in 2004 came about a decade and a half ago, if this new report from the Wall Street Journal…
A year and a half after Gina Martin began a campaign against taking invasive photos, the British Parliament’s House of Lords has approved legislation that would make taking upskirt photos a criminal offense punishable of up to two years in prison, in England and Wales, reports the BBC. “Eighteen months ago I was upskirted at…
The one thing no one expects on a job interview is North Korean hackers picking up on the other line. But that’s apparently exactly what happened to a hapless employee at Redbanc, the company that handles Chile’s ATM network. The bizarre story was reported in trendTIC, a Chilean tech site. A Redbanc employee found a…
Some of the most interesting predictions for the future don’t come from expert futurists or well-financed think tanks, they come from average kids. Today, we have video from the 1960s that features kids talking about their own vision for tomorrow. And it’s depressing as hell. The footage comes from a December 28, 1966 program on…
Las Vegas might not be the first place you think of when it comes to the future of skin care—it’s in the desert after all. But at this year’s CES, skin care tech was at the show in full force. Some tech we saw was borderline magical. Opté’s spot-erasing wand had us doing double takes…
We live in an age of super-smart technology built to make our lives easier, so don’t struggle with the menial chores of the day when your phone could be doing the job for you. Here are some of the best automations you can set up on your phone, freeing you from the task and giving…
President Donald Trump seems to have figured out a solution to the government shutdown: Just make everybody work for free. It’s day 26 of Trump’s shutdown and the president still insists that he’ll keep the government closed until he gets over $5 billion for his stupid wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. But airplanes aren’t being…
YouTube has changed its policies in an attempt to cut down on potentially dangerous challenges and pranks, Engadget reported on Tuesday, updating its rules to explicitly ban them from the site. In a thread on the YouTube Help Community, a Google employee wrote that while the site already has rules banning “content that encourages violence…
Alex Jones, chief of noxious conspiracy website and suspicious supplement sales front Infowars, was kicked off most of the web’s biggest platforms last year amid legal battles over his alleged harassment and defamation of mass shooting survivors’ families: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Apple, Spotify, and Pinterest, to name a few. But recently, Digiday noted on Tuesday,…
U.S. authorities have charged “a suspected Ukrainian computer hacker and several traders” with attempting to cash in on “market-moving corporate earnings news” stolen from Securities and Exchange Commission systems, Reuters reported on Tuesday. There are 10 defendants charged, two of whom are facing criminal charges, Reuters wrote. The incident in question relates to a 2016…
Citing an ongoing partial shutdown of the U.S. government, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Tuesday moved to postpone the next phase of the lawsuit challenging its 2017 decision to repeal net neutrality protections nationwide. In a motion before the District of Columbia appeals court, the FCC’s counsel wrote that the shutdown would prevent the…
One of the nation’s leading purveyors of security access badges and plastic ID cards is scrambling to patch multiple vulnerabilities in its system, which could allow attackers to covertly enter secured buildings and obtain top-level access privileges, granting them the ability to modify a building’s list of authorized visitors. Cybersecurity firm Tenable Research on Tuesday…
One day, while unboxing the latest deliveries of iPhones and headphone dongles, an employee at the Grand Central Apple store in New York City came across a package that was out of the ordinary. Rather than being filled with addictive gadgets that cost a month’s worth of rent, it contained a pound of crystal meth.…
In the world of Merger, the worker sits alone in front of a screen or eight, surrounded by a sea of constantly compounding data, anxiously trying to handle tasks as they rapidly pile up, and attempting to make sense of the nearly incomprehensible world it all somehow fits into. It’s a film apparently set in…
Hotel owner Hideo Sawada said he wanted to run “the most efficient hotel in the world” by staffing it almost exclusively with robots. According to a new report, however, the hotel has laid off more than half of its bots for being inefficient since its launch in 2015. Sawada told the Guardian in 2015 that…
Some hardware hacks only exist as a way to prove they’re actually possible. Such is the case with this ‘Computer Mouse’ that was designed, 3D-printed, and assembled by YouTube’s Electronic Grenade. It’s a fully working portable computer that’s smaller than even the thinnest laptops, but at the same time infinitely less convenient to use. The…
The “Mona Lisa Effect” is a term used to describe the perception that the subject of an artwork’s eyes are following the viewer as they move. Scientists now say the actual Mona Lisa simply doesn’t have it. Aside from her flickering smile, the Mona Lisa’s gaze is probably the most famous aspect of the DaVinci…
It’s been a long time since the iPod was Apple’s most important gadget, and while the iPod Classic, the iPod Nano, and the iPod Shuffle are no longer available, the iPod Touch is still keeping the name alive. And if rumors are true, it seems Apple’s last remaining iPod is in line for at least…
I am not on board with 8K. The TVs will be expensive, there’s zero content for them, and they’ll heavily rely on internal processors for upscaling that already struggle to upscale HD content properly to 4K. It seems smarter to work on HDR tech, which makes a more substantial improvement at this time than higher…
