Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Earlier this year, Google revamped its search engine on mobile devices, adding tabs for “the most common and relevant subtopics” to the top of results. Search for, say, The Grinch, on your phone, and you might see a suggested tab listing upcoming showtimes. Or, until yesterday, one called “fanfiction” that surfaced stories like “How the…
In the war of notches and bezels, Sharp has landed firmly on Team Notch with its upcoming Aquos R2 Compact. Yup, your eyes do not deceive you. That is a phone with two notches. The design is an update of last year’s Aquos R Compact—which, with its tiny camera notch up top and a thicc…
The strange case of a couple in New Jersey who raised $400,000 on GoFundMe for a homeless good Samaritan appears to be skidding into a surprise ending. Following earlier legal turmoil, the couple reportedly turned themselves in to authorities on Wednesday and will face charges for allegedly conspiring with the man to make up a…
There’s a new way to cut the cord, and for do-it-yourself nerds like me, it might be the best way, too. SiliconDust is best known for its series of HDHomeRun DVR devices that you hook up to a hard drive or NAS you already own to record TV content and stream it anywhere in the…
Yoshitaka Sakurada, Japan’s new cybersecurity minister, has never used a computer. Not even once. But he insists that his lack of real-world experience doesn’t have a negative impact on his job. Seriously. “Since I was 25 years old and independent I have instructed my staff and secretaries. I have never used a computer in my…
The Open Society Foundations (OSF), a international philanthropic and grantmaking organization, has responded to a bombshell report that senior management at Facebook including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and chief lobbyist Joel Kaplan were involved in hiring a Republican opposition research firm named Definers Public Affairs to counter the company’s growing list…
A judge has ordered Amazon to turn over any data it has pertaining to a New Hampshire double homicide that happened in January of 2017, saying the court has probable cause to believe an Echo may have created recordings that could be useful to the case. But Amazon doesn’t seem eager to fork over audio…
Facebook has been exposed as utter garbage yet again. The company allegedly hired a political research firm to spread a conspiracy theory about its critics. And yes, the conspiracy theory reportedly involves George Soros. The New York Times has the bombshell new story about the way that Facebook has conducted damage control in the wake…
It’s nicknamed the “humongous fungus”—an unusually large fungal growth belonging to a single genetic individual. An updated analysis of this gigantic fungal beast shows it’s substantially larger and older than scientists initially thought. This single genetic individual, known as C1, belongs to a species of fungus called Armillaria gallica, otherwise known as the honey mushroom.…
Comcast will cancel the debts of more than 20,000 customers and pay back $700,000 in Massachusetts as part of a settlement with the state’s Attorney General over deceptive advertising. Back in 2015 and early 2016, the cable giant advertised a $99 lock-in rate for plans that didn’t include equipment costs and had additional fees that…
Long Island City—Hundreds gathered this afternoon at Gordon Triangle, smack dab in the middle of a newly proposed campus for Amazon employees. Ringed by local news crews, a coalition of local politicians led by City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer and State Senator Michael Gianaris stated their intent to stop Bezos’s highly incentivized land grab…
DeepMind’s health app Streams is being consumed by its sister company, Google, and some privacy advocates see the move as a violation of patient trust. Streams was originally developed by the Alphabet-owned British AI company DeepMind to send data and alerts to doctors and nurses. But the app drew controversy last year when watchdogs found…
An unusually large asteroid crater measuring 19 miles wide has been discovered under a continental ice sheet in Greenland. Roughly the size of Paris, it’s now among the 25 biggest asteroid craters on Earth. An iron-rich asteroid measuring nearly a kilometer wide (0.6 miles) struck Greenland’s ice-covered surface at some point between 3 million and…
As good as the Pixel 3 is, when Google released the phone last month, it sort of felt incomplete. Part of that feeling is due to Google’s software-first approach to smartphone design which means there’s always code being tinkered with, but the other part was simply because Google still hadn’t delivered two major Pixel 3…
The Pixel 3 is a pretty good smartphone, but it’s gotten off to a buggy start since launching last month. From unsaved photos and extra notches to wonky RAM management, the latest bug for Google to fix is vanishing text messages, according to recent complaints from Pixel 3 owners. Numerous Reddit users say they’ve discovered…
The societal, psychological, and sometimes violent consequences of social media are now reverberating from the inside: A recent survey of Facebook employees reportedly found that their opinion of the company has begun to tank. Facebook’s roughly 29,000 employees take an internal survey twice a year so the company can measure the overall morale, according to…
Customers of the Infowars store are getting scammed every day but this time it’s different. A security researcher discovered a form of malware embedded in the conspiracy site’s checkout process that records credit card details and transmits them to a remote server. ZDNet interviewed Dutch security researcher Willem de Groot about his discovery of a…
Google has a new, experimental web app for you to try: Squoosh. It uses the latest in image compression technology to cram your pictures into smaller file sizes with a minimal loss of quality, but what really impresses about the app—coded in the WebAssembly programming language—is its speed, even under a relatively heavy load. “This…
Tyler Barriss, the California man authorities say was behind a wave of “swatting” incidents, has pleaded guilty to a total of 51 federal charges and will receive a minimum of 20 years in prison if his plea deal is approved by the judge in the case, the AP reported on Tuesday. Swatting is a crime…
Twitter is never, ever going to ban or otherwise take direct action against the president, who besides being the site’s number one power user has in the past skirted uncomfortably close to using it as ground zero for nuclear war. The logic goes that as the president, Trump’s tweets are inherently newsworthy—a sensible argument in…
