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A Pennsylvania Democrat who drew the scorn of activists and constituents after declining to sign on to a House effort aimed at overturning the FCC’s net neutrality repeal now says she will attach her name to the resolution. Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, who will next year represent the newly redrawn 5th congressional district, had initially…
All of a sudden, it seems like almost no one is making laptops like Alienware makes laptops: beefy, loud, and fast. Most of the top gaming laptop makers have embraced the design style popularized by Razer and supported by Nvidia’s Max-Q design ethos: thin and sacrificing a little power for portability. But not Alienware man.…
On Wednesday afternoon, a wave of bomb threats were reported at various locations across the United States. On social media, numerous law enforcement departments issued alerts notifying citizens that they’re looking into bomb threats targeting businesses, schools, government offices and even private residents. It appears the threats are being sent by email. NBC News quoted…
Robotic couriers that look a whole lot like Minions could be coming to your city next year. On Thursday, Postmates announced its plans for a fleet of semi-autonomous messengers that the company wants to deploy in some cities in 2019. Postmates designed the vehicle itself, and dubbed it Serve. The storage-cooler rover is supposed to…
What did kids from the year 1904 think would happen by the year 1919 or even the year 2019? They imagined fancy airships in the sky, “automobiles for everything,” and wondrous house-cleaning robots. They even imagined trips to Mars by the year 1919. Seriously. At the turn of the 20th century, the Minneapolis Journal newspaper…
Autonomous vehicles were supposed to make driving safer, and they may yet—some of the more optimistic research indicates self-driving cars could save tens of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. alone. But so far, a recklessness has defined the culture of the largest companies pursuing the technology—Uber, Google, and arguably even Tesla—and has…
Internal Google documents obtained by the Guardian warn full-time Google staff to treat temps, vendors, and contractors (TVCs)—which comprise just short of half of the company’s 170,000 workers around the globe—much differently than they treat fellow full-timers. According to the Guardian, an internal training document titled “The ABCs of TVCs” (seemingly written by parent company…
Courtesy of the New York Times, we just got another reminder of how invasive location tracking through apps can be—which might have caused you to turn off this particular permission for a bunch of apps on your smartphone. But location tracking goes a lot deeper than that. Here are five ways that apps, companies, and…
For the last seven years, SplashData has revealed its annual list of the most commonly used passwords of the year. This time around, the results reveal that, uh, we still have work to do. The 2018 Worst Passwords of the Year list was determined after SplashData evaluated over 5 million passwords that have leaked online…
Apple announced overnight that the tech giant will open a new $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, just a mile away from their existing presence in the city. The 133-acre campus will house 5,000 employees, with an eventual capacity for as many as 15,000 workers. Apple also plans to expand its presence in cities like…
A man who police suspect of attempting to rob a shuttered Chinese restaurant in San Lorenzo, California found himself in a potentially fatal situation after he became trapped in a metal duct, where he reportedly remained for two days before someone found him. Photos shared by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office showed the man trapped…
Gaming hardware manufacturer Razer has launched a cryptocurrency mining program named Razer SoftMiner to put spare graphics card capacity to work—for them, not for you. Some context: Mined cryptocurrencies (be they bitcoin, ether, etc.) operate by using a distributed network of processors to verify transactions and generate new coins by solving complicated math problems (mining).…
Should we hold companies like Equifax and Facebook responsible for the protection of our personal information in the same way we hold banks and hospitals responsible? Should we expect the same level of control over data we’ve given to Google as we do with information shared with our doctor or lawyer? A new bill introduced…
There is a lot more artificial intelligence, and it is sprouting and multiplying everywhere. In schools, in job openings, in media coverage. The number of AI-based startups, conferences, research papers, and patents is skyrocketing. That’s perhaps the simplest way to frame the findings of the 2018 AI Index Report, which collects data around a number…
One of the more annoying realities of ordering online is that if your package is left somewhere conspicuous before you’re able to grab it, there’s a good possibility some opportunistic bandit will nab it. This certainly goes for Amazon packages, for which reports of theft are a dime a dozen. And anyone who’s ever lost…
We’re less than a month away from the biggest tech show of the year(I can feel my heart rate rise just thinking about it), but it seems Samsung couldn’t wait until early January to announce its new Notebook 9 Pen. Available in 13 and 15-inch versions, Samsung’s 360-degree 2-in-1 is aimed at creative types, and…
At a Taylor Swift concert earlier this year, fans were reportedly treated to something they might not expect: a kiosk displaying clips of the pop star that served as a covert surveillance system. It’s a tale of creeping 21st-century surveillance as unnerving as it is predictable. But the whole ordeal has left us wondering what…
Laundry days are the worst. Not because I hate doing laundry—I love warm, fluffy, clean clothes—but because I need cold hard cash to use the machines at my local 24-hour laundromat. Legitimately, I’ve sat here for 20 minutes trying to think of anything besides laundry that I regularly use greenbacks for. I got nada. Apple…
A report on internet speeds across the country released on Wednesday shows which cities and states have the slowest and fastest broadband—and which providers are the fastest. Internet testing company Ookla says it measured internet speeds from more than 24 million unique users while making the report of fixed broadband speeds for the second and…
Solidifying its powerful monopoly on duck-related online content, the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo is now the proud owner of duck.com. The development comes after Google finally relented in an age-old dispute. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that draws on search results from hundreds of sources and doesn’t create profiles for user data and shows everyone…
