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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…
Russian state TV apparently became confused yesterday while airing footage of a technology forum aimed at kids. A TV reporter proclaimed that Boris the robot, seen above, “has already learned to dance and he’s not that bad.” The only problem? Boris isn’t a real robot. It’s just a man in a suit. This “robot” actually…
Last year, I was trying to solve a mystery. Facebook’s “People You May Know” tool was outing sex workers’ real identities to their clients, and vice versa, and I was trying to figure out how. A sex worker using the pseudonym Leila told me she had gone to great lengths to hide her identity from…
Remember two days ago when Samsung introduced the Galaxy A8s in China and trotted out the CEOs of the fake Supreme brand to announce a collaboration for future products? After much backlash from fans who love paying a premium for branded tchotchkes, Samsung wants you to know that it’s possibly, maybe, considering not pursuing that partnership…
Intel’s had a rough year, with major departures, security disasters, dwindling sales compared to its competitor, and the general appearance of a company trailing the competition technologically speaking. But in the twilight days of 2018 Intel’s laid out a plan of action to remind us all of exactly why Intel first crushed the competition to…
Did you see the tweets supposedly “debunking” the huge fires that were burning during the protests in Paris? In reality, the “debunkers” are bullshit. The photos weren’t merely taken from different perspectives—they were taken on completely different days on completely different streets. First take a look at the the bullshit “debunkers” with sarcastic titles like…
Numerous buildings on Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California were evacuated Tuesday evening after local police were forwarded a tip about a bomb threat. Police searched the area and determined there were no explosives that could be found. Menlo Park PD tweeted overnight: At 4:32 PM, Menlo Park Police communications center received a call from…
Verizon disclosed on Tuesday that Oath, the subsidiary company which it created to manage acquisitions like its $4.5 billion takeover of Yahoo in 2017 and its $4.4 billion purchase of AOL in 2015, is worth a whole hell of a lot less than it thought. According to CNN, Verizon previously claimed that Oath’s brand value…
Google CEO Sundar Pichai finally swung by the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for a real clown show of a hearing which—including a denial that the company is planning to launch a censored Chinese search engine “right now”—contained little useful information. Instead, it was mostly Republican members of the committee yelling at Pichai for alleged…
The Huawei executive detained in Canada for extradition to the U.S. over allegations of financial fraud and sanctions violations, Meng Wanzhou, has been released on $7.5 million bail, CNN reported on Tuesday. Meng, the chief financial officer of Huawei and the daughter of its founder Ren Zhengfei, could face decades in prison if she is…
Martin Tripp, a former technician at Tesla’s Gigafactory turned whistleblower, is embroiled in a nasty lawsuit with the EV manufacturer and recently released court documents show that Tesla is not taking Tripp’s alleged “sabotage” lightly. The company wants Tripp to pay $167 million in damages for public statements he’s made that Tesla claims are false.…
Update, 12/13: Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon reversed course and has now decided to sign the House discharge petition. Read more about that here. Our original report continues below: Net neutrality proponents now have less than two weeks to convince 38 House lawmakers to support an effort to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of…
Newly released proposal documents reveal the extent to which New York was willing to bend over backwards to win the bid for an Amazon branch office, as well as the sites the retail giant passed on in lieu of a hefty chunk of Long Island City. The documents, which embarrassingly refer to New York as…
On March 13, 2018, an Uber manager reportedly sent an email to company executives, alerting them to the safety concerns of the self-driving car software, the high rate of self-driving car accidents, and the “dangerous behavior” of the backup drivers, according to a new report from the Information. Five days later, an Uber self-driving test…
If the internet has benefitted humanity in any way, it’s by spotlighting people’s amazing-yet-questionably-useful talents. Is blowing bubbles and filling them with upside-down smoke tornadoes that spew fire a lucrative pursuit? I don’t know, but I sincerely hope bubble artist Dustin Skye finds a way to make some coin from his unique skillset. Using specialized…
Today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing was a clownshow—accurately predicted by Minority Leader Nadler as focusing mainly on the outgoing Republican majority’s apoplectic rage towards imaginary conservative bias on Alphabet’s platforms, and largely a rehash of the browbeating doled out to Twitter and Facebook earlier in the year. Given that Google is a mammoth company setting…
Copying one of Mother Nature’s designs is a clever shortcut when building robots that need to navigate our complex world. But those designs aren’t always adaptable—a fish can’t do much when it’s out of the water. Adding some human ingenuity, however, results in the best of both worlds; a robot that swims like a fish,…
Russian cosmonauts are preparing to inspect a mysterious hole on the exterior of a damaged Soyuz capsule, a complex spacewalk that could take upwards of six hours to complete. The mission is scheduled to start at 11:00 am ET, and you can watch it live right here. As TASS reports, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and…
Two mysterious videos recently appeared online that allegedly show protected rock formations in the Utah desert being destroyed with explosives. The videos raise more questions than they answer, but if they’re fake, they’re very well done. In one clip, we see a natural arch in a relatively high-res shot and a person’s head briefly pokes…
The concept of today’s smart, connected wearables just didn’t exist back in the 1980s when text-only operating systems like MS-DOS were still popular. But that didn’t stop Puma from releasing what was possibly the world’s first modern fitness tracker by strapping a chunky computer to the back of a sneaker. Thirty-two years later, Puma is…
