Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
A Campbell Soup Company executive who tweeted about conspiracy theories involving former hedge fund manager George Soros is no longer with the company, a spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo. Campbell’s vice president of government affairs Kelly Johnston tweeted Monday that Soros’ Open Society Foundations was providing aid to a migrant caravan currently making its way to…
A Twitter account apparently belonging to Cesar Sayoc, Jr.—who has been charged with sending explosive devices to several prominent Democrats and CNN—had a history of threatening behavior on the site and was previously reported by at least one Twitter user to no avail. The social media platform is now apologizing despite previously having told the…
On Saturday, a firearm-wielding man massacred at least 11 people attending Shabbat services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood and injured a number of others. The Anti-Defamation League described it as likely the deadliest single attack on the Jewish community in U.S. history. Authorities identified the suspect, who was captured…
It’s arguably unfathomable that any human being slapped with a $20 million fine for a bad tweet would ever consider returning to the platform, much less continue to fire off word salad at all hours of the day and night. In the face of any logical explanation, however, one such man seemingly continues to insist…
A damning and detailed report from the New York Times this week outlined Google’s apparent handling of the departure of Andy Rubin—the creator of Android who left the company in 2014 following an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct—as well as other top executives. Now, Google is facing condemnation from its employees about Rubin’s reported…
Without fail when someone tells me they are going to buy a MacBook Air, I will cringe and reach for them—begging them not to make such a poor decision. The MacBook Air is a decrepit dinosaur—a relic of another time—and when Apple announces a new wave of devices Tuesday in Brooklyn, it will hopefully, finally,…
Just as the dust looked to be settling for Elon Musk’s Tesla, it appears the company has another investigation on its hands. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into whether the electric car company misled investors about its production goals for the Model 3, citing sources familiar…
In a soon-to-launch online social experiment that is definitely in no way going to backfire, researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab are reportedly planning to hand an individual’s free will over to the internet. The experiment, which is titled BeeMe and is being described by MIT as the “first reality augmented game,”…
If you’ve long been a user of Google Docs, Google Sheets, or any other various G Suite tools, you may be familiar with the semi-arduous process of navigating to a document, sheet, form, or other file every time you need to start a new one. On the scale of things to find incredibly annoying, taking…
The unstoppable stock market has been experiencing some turmoil this month with the S&P 500 experiencing the most daily losses since 2008. Tariffs, interest rate hikes, and tech stocks are getting a lot of the blame from financial tea-readers. Here’s the good and the bad we saw from the earnings reports of the tech giants…
Days before the arrest of Cesar Sayoc Jr., the man police say mailed up to 14 pipe bombs to chief political rivals of President Donald Trump, teams of Facebook employees were already busy combing the platform trying to remove as much content as possible praising the failed terrorist attacks. Relying on CrowdTangle, an analytics platform…
At one of the most prominent artificial intelligence (AI) conferences in the world last year, keynote speaker Elon Musk reportedly made a joke about “tits” on a stage in front hundreds of researchers and engineers. He seemed to be referring to the name of the mainstay AI conference, NIPS, and its unofficial pre-conference event, the…
Earlier this year, Amazon’s facial recognition tech Rekognition—which can scan photos and videos and match them against databases of faces—faced a flood of criticism from Amazon employees, shareholders, and civil rights activists who argued that its use by government agencies was unethical or even dangerous. That backlash was spurred by an ACLU report showing how…
Pee contains some pretty amazing stuff. Scientists have known for nearly a decade that it’s possible to produce bricks from bacteria, sand, and urea—a chemical found in urine. Researchers have gone ahead and produced those bricks, now for the first time with human pee. South African engineer Dyllon Randall from the University of Cape Town,…
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Friday entered into an agreement with the telecom industry groups currently suing California over its recently passed net neutrality law, potentially delaying its implementation until next year. The agreement between Becerra’s office and the telecom groups, which must be approved by a judge, prevents California’s net neutrality from going…
Facebook on Friday announced the removal of 82 pages, groups, and accounts linked to Iran, a majority of which had misrepresented themselves as being U.S. citizens and posted on “politically charged topics,” including immigration and race relations, as relevant to the United States. In a blog post, the company’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher,…
Cesar Sayoc Jr., the 56-year-old Floridian arrested in connection to a rash of pipe-bomb mailings directed at many of President Trump’s foremost political opponents, has a considerable criminal history (among them, a previous arrest for a pipe-bomb threat, according to the Washington Post.) But Sayoc’s history of violent threats was public and plain to see…
There are many, many jobs that are much worse than working at Netflix. But based on an extensive profile of the company’s culture, the streaming company certainly seems to have built a unique version of corporate hell. Citing interviews with more than 70 current and former employees (some on the record, some off), the Wall…
In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added words like beerfest, jumbotron, modder, antifa, binge-watch, and nothingburger, reflecting the awful, awful times we live in. But have you ever wondered what words officially entered our lexicon the year you were born? Probably not, but it turns out Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler tool is a fascinating archive of…
As AT&T rushes to pare down its business in an apparent attempt to not seem like a giant monopolistic media company sucking at the teat of the American public by relying on subsidies and overpriced data plans to stay afloat, some hard choices have to be made. The latest is devastating for anyone who likes…
