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Mark Zuckerberg appears to be taking the “this is fine” route on the way out of what was arguably the worst year in his company’s decade-plus history. In a lengthy year-in-review post on Facebook, Zuckerberg began by writing that his “personal challenge has been to focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing…
Twitter is claiming to have resolved a bug that allowed a group of London-based security researchers to post unauthorized tweets to the accounts of British celebrities and journalists. But the hackers who initially disclosed the vulnerability says that’s rubbish. A Twitter spokesperson told reporters on Friday that it had “resolved a bug that allowed certain…
Everyone hates spam texts, but only some Android users are reporting they’re seeing alerts about a new spam protection feature from Google in their Messages app. According to Android Police, the update seems to be a limited rollout as it isn’t live on every single device yet. Those who do have the feature report seeing…
If you were were hoping to enjoy that new Black Mirror movie Bandersnatch on your fancy Apple TV, then apologies. You can’t. First reported by MacRumors, we’ve confirmed that attempting to watch the interactive flick on an Apple TV (we tested it with the newer, 4k version) results in a supercut of Black Mirror characters…
You’ve surely heard about Thursday’s incident at a Con Edison substation in New York City that temporarily knocked out power at LaGuardia airport and set the night skies glowing with an eerie aquamarine. We wondered: What made it so BLUE? Con Ed initially tweeted a laughably understated comment to describe the enormous explosion seen by…
A CenturyLink outage that started on Thursday has left customers across the country without internet and shut down vital services including 911 emergency calls. And now the federal government is launching an investigation. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced on Twitter on Friday morning that he’s instructed the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security…
Earlier this month we looked at predictions from kids at the turn of the 20th century. But what about more recently? Say, from the 1980s? Well, you’re in luck, because today we have predictions about the future from kids in 1984. And some of them are as dark and terrifying as you might guess for…
Hackers stole the personal information of 997 North Korean defectors after accessing a South Korean resettlement agency’s database, according to the South Korean Unification Ministry. The ministry announced on Friday it became aware of the breach last week when it found that names, addresses, and birth dates of nearly a 1,000 defectors were taken. Ministry…
Maybe you’ve grown tired of your current laptop or desktop operating system and you just want to try something different. Or maybe you need to use multiple OSes for work. Either way, the need for a new operating system doesn’t mean you need a whole new computer. There are numerous ways to run other operating…
There’s no shortage of slow-motion footage out there on the internet, but there is a shortage of original ideas. Slo-mo explosions just don’t hold our attention like they used to, but by attaching his high-speed camera to a spinning lawnmower blade, YouTube’s tesla500 gives us a fantastic front-row seat as old electronics get shredded and…
If you got an Amazon Alexa device for Christmas, you might want to keep a closer eye on the wily kids in your house. Last week, a New Jersey mom caught her son red-handed using the virtual assistant to cheat on his math homework. Yerelyn Cueva posted a short 11-second clip of her 6-year-old son…
Have you watched the new Netflix movie Bird Box starring Sandra Bullock yet? It’s been divisive, with some people saying they love it and other people claiming that they hate it. But I absolutely loved it, and I have a theory about one of the most difficult questions of the entire movie: What are the…
New York’s night sky was bathed in a green-blue light Thursday night, with police saying that an investigation into the cause is currently underway but that they believe it may have resulted from a transformer explosion at a power plant in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens. “The lights you have seen throughout the city appear…
There are mere days left in 2018, but Facebook’s eternal year of reckoning continues. A new report from the New York Times has pulled back the curtain on part of Facebook’s internal struggle to get its hands around the complex problems housed on its platform, not the least of which include disinformation and hate. The…
With the end of the year upon us, all of the most recent trends are officially dead and it’s time to make some new ones. But rather than thinking about which appliance should be connected to the internet next, we want to know which old tech features, gadgets, and doo-dads deserve to be rescued from…
CES is less than two weeks away and with it will come a whole slew of announcements about the TVs your living room will covet in 2019, but Samsung has made one announcement early that reads like a souped up version of Chromecast. Its 2019 TV sets will allow you to remote access your computer.…
James Weiss is a linguistic quality assurance software tester, but his true passion is studying single-celled eukaryotes. When he’s not staring at a screen, he films microscopic organisms and shares them on YouTube and Instagram so that he can, in his words, “introduce non-scientific communities to the wonders of the microcosmos.” But there’s something about…
Putting internet-connected cameras in your home requires some blind trust—namely, that these devices are designed without any major, easily discoverable security vulnerabilities. But that’s not always the case, as researchers at Rapid7 say they found with Guardzilla’s home security cameras. Recently spotted flaws mean it wouldn’t take a super skilled attacker to access users’ stored…
Elon Musk may be done with 2018, but 2018 ain’t done with Musk. On Wednesday, lawyers for the Tesla CEO filed a motion with a California court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Vernon Unsworth in September. Unsworth is an explorer and British ex-pat living in Thailand who helped a rescue team in the effort…
Instagram has given some users a new way to stalk everyone in their feeds: sideways. Instead of the vertical feed we’ve all become accustomed to, some users can now either tap or swipe left or right—much like how you would scroll through Stories. Now, scrolling down will just bring up comments, while viewing your DMs,…
