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The Arizona border patrol agent who used a firearm to detonate explosives during a “gender reveal” party in April 2017, sparking a wildfire which eventually spread across 47,000 acres and caused $8.2. million in damage, pleaded guilty earlier this year to a misdemeanor and received a sentence of five years’ probation and an order to…
Facebook’s so-called “War Room,” the office it set up with some monitors and staff to supposedly fight propaganda and disinformation during elections or at least fight the perception it wasn’t doing that, has been shuttered—in that form, anyhow. Per a report in Bloomberg on Monday on the many scandals surrounding the company’s embattled chief operating…
On Monday, Apple finally had its highly anticipated hearing before the United States Supreme Court. Since 2011, the tech giant has been fighting antitrust litigation that claims its App Store policies amount to an unfair monopoly. Those who were present at today’s hearing say the case’s outcome isn’t looking great for Apple. The case of…
Tech giant Google is on the long list of firms caught donating to a Mississippi senator who has praised the Confederacy, expressed excitement at the prospect of attending a public hanging, and has been called a white supremacist. It seems the company has now, at its own sluggish pace, gone to the trouble of asking…
There’s no such thing as easy money—unless you’re one of the lucky few who happened upon an incorrectly loaded ATM on the side of an interstate near Houston, Texas on Sunday night. According to local media, a Bank of America ATM mistakenly spat out $100 bills instead of $10 bills when customers withdrew cash for…
If you’ve ever been on the fence about trying an extreme sport like hang gliding, this video will have you keeping your feet firmly planted on terra firma. On his first day of a holiday in Switzerland, YouTuber Gursk3 decided to try hang gliding, but the excursion didn’t go exactly as planned. He was supposed…
For the last decade, Illinois has had the nation’s most rigorous law protecting citizens’ biometric privacy information. It’s also a heavily litigated piece of legislation that’s pulled high-profile companies like Google and Facebook into class action lawsuits. Now, Six Flags is contesting a suit that threatens to totally defang the statute. The Biometric Information Privacy…
A city council in Scotland is considering a crack down on “silent discos,” which residents have complained are too loud—making them just regular discos, I guess. According to the Telegraph, the Edinburgh City Council is examining how to reign in the events after increased complaints that they are too noisy and put people at risk of…
Phones with two or more rear cameras are already quite widespread, but with its recently granted patent, LG is dreaming of something much more ambitious. That’s because even though LG already has a five-camera phone in the V40, the company may be looking to more than triple that number up to 16. A phone with…
China’s surveillance system is becoming increasingly omnipresent, with an estimated 200 million cameras and counting. While this state of existence alone is unsettling, it’s even more troubling that the machines are fucking up even the simplest task. Last week, the face of Dong Mingzhu—the chairwoman of a leading air conditioner manufacturer in China—was displayed on…
While you might assume that wifi will always trounce cellular data, a new study shows that in many countries the opposite is true. Mobile analytics firm Open Signal has pitted wifi and mobile internet against each other in 80 countries and found that average mobile download speeds were faster in 33 countries. The 33 countries…
The best way to keep up with your teacher's lecture
Compared to even the dumbest human being, your average tulip is a moron. But you’d have to be dumber than a tulip to deny that something—maybe not intelligence in its dictionary definition, but some guiding, autonomic power—is at work among the members of the plant kingdom. And if we grant plants this quasi-intelligence, then we…
Ohio is poised to become the first state to allow businesses to pay taxes with bitcoin in a new initiative that may become available to individual taxpayers as well. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that businesses in the state will be able to register at OhioCrypto.com to pay state taxes with bitcoin beginning this…
The British Parliament has seized internal Facebook documents in “an extraordinary attempt to hold the U.S. social media giant to account” after being repeatedly spurned in their attempts to have the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg testify about its data privacy practices, the Observer reported on Saturday. Culture, media and sport select committee chair Damian Collins…
Samsung has issued a formal apology to its workers who were sickened and died at its chip and display factories. The apology arrived as part of a settlement the company reached with victims of maladies that reportedly included cancer and miscarriages. “Our effort was insufficient to better understand the pain affected workers and their families…
In a video that looks like something a special effects shop would produce, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst has captured one of the most remarkable views of a rocket launch we’ve ever seen. This extraordinary timelapse shows the launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket that took flight on November 16, 2018 from the Baikonur cosmodrome in…
Mars is lacking in the vast supply of natural resources we’ve come to rely on here on Earth, and astronauts attempting to colonize, or even just visit, the red planet can only bring a limited supply of materials with them. Learning to make do with what Mars has to offer is one of the biggest…
As humans, we like to think we’re the only species capable of using others to get what we want. New research shows that chimpanzees, in the right circumstances, are also capable of social manipulation, highlighting a previously unknown cognitive capacity in our ape relatives. Social animals are equipped with an assortment of cognitive tricks to…
Amazon employees across parts of Europe are striking and protesting what they describe as dangerous work conditions and anti-union tactics. The protests coincide with Black Friday, one of the busiest and most stressful days of the year for workers in retail. Amazon employees in the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain participated in the strike. Workers…
