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All across the country this week, pipe bombs have been showing up in the mail of prominent Democrats and critics of Donald Trump—with NBC News listing former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Maxine Waters, billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and former CIA Director John Brennan as…
That people would generally prefer to minimize casualties in a hypothetical autonomous car crash has been found to be true in past research, but what happens when people are presented with more complex scenarios? And what happens when autonomous vehicles must choose between two scenarios in which at least one individual could die? Who might…
Donald Trump has never been a person who comes to mind when one thinks “cybersecurity”—he may not even know how to use a computer—but even by that low bar, the president and his administration have barely been able to keep it together when it comes to the security risk posed by cell phones. A report…
Let’s say there is a hundred dollar bill wedged behind a bookshelf just beyond your reach, and beside the shelf is a set of TinkerToys. Even a toddler could probably snap together a few of the sticks to fish the bill out. But what about an animal? One especially smart crow species seems to have…
The Antarctic desolation and cold could be too much for some people—even folks you would think are used to some cold weather. A Russian researcher has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly stabbing a peer at the Bellingshausen Station on Antarctica’s King George Island. The apparent stabbing took place on October 9 after the…
Facebook is rolling out new anti-harassment tools for its virtual reality platform as it continues to push for more users to plug in. On Wednesday, Facebook-owned Oculus published a blog post announcing new ways to report abuse within the virtual reality platform. Now, Oculus Go and Gear VR users can report harassment from within apps…
Apple’s latest iteration of iOS has reportedly turned the GrayKey hacking device into an expensive doorstop. Law enforcement around the world has taken to using GrayKey to break into locked iPhones but it appears Apple has finally gotten ahead of the device’s crafty manufacturers. For now. Forbes’ Thomas Brewster has been on top of the…
A few weeks back my coworker Mario Aguilar set about buying the first ever Android phone to commemorate the mobile OS’s 10 year anniversary. He succeeded, and the T-Mobile G1 came with a surprise—a micro SD card with exactly 11 mp3s on it. So the question we’re left with is, hey, do we have your…
Facebook is using new machine learning tech to flag child exploitation and nudity on the service, the company’s global safety head Antigone Davis announced today. In the last quarter alone, Davis says the new tools helped the company delete “8.7 million pieces of content” that “violated our child nudity or sexual exploitation of children policies.”…
For at least 11 years, an unnerving story has made the rounds on Disney fan blogs: people regularly scatter the ashes of loved ones at Disneyland and Disney World. Well, today, the Wall Street Journal has confirmed the urban legend. And we’re not talking about a couple of isolated cases. This happens on a monthly…
You’ve probably cleared your local browser history before. Maybe you did it just moments ago. Perhaps you didn’t want your partner, roommate, or coworkers to see what kind of weirdness you’d been searching for. But clearing the activity data that’s on Google’s servers has never been especially easy—deterring many users from clearing the record of…
You’ve probably heard about Thomas Edison’s infamous 1903 film where he electrocuted an elephant. It’s just as horrifying as you’d imagine. But fewer people know that this wasn’t actually Edison’s first electrocution film. Two years earlier, in 1901, he produced a film re-enacting a famous execution. Perversely, it also served as a national advertisement for…
Your photos and videos are likely to be some of the most precious files you have on your smartphone. Even if you’ve got new photos and videos taken with the camera synced to the cloud though, what about the pictures your family send you over WhatsApp? Or the Instagram Stories you post? Here’s how to…
Yahoo’s ongoing legal troubles related to the biggest data breach in history appear to be coming to a close. It has submitted a settlement to a U.S. district court agreeing to pay victims $50 million along with some other benefits. Anyone who spent time undoing damage from the breach should pay attention. The settlement was…
If you’re considering getting one of Google’s new Pixel 3 devices, beware: Unless you use a Google-certified accessory, wireless fast charging will only work at half of the phone’s maximum 10 watt charging speed. Per reports in Android Police and the Verge, unapproved models of wireless fast chargers will only work at 5 watt speed…
At least 20 people, many of them Russian fans on their way to attend a Champions League soccer match between AS Roma and CSKA Moscow, were injured after an escalator in the metro station at Rome’s Piazza Repubblica went haywire, CNN International reported on Tuesday. The incident was captured in an alarming video posted to…
The German Luftwaffe suffered another devastating defeat today when a plane bearing its World War II-era insignia crash-landed on the center divider of U.S. 101 in California on Tuesday, promptly going up in an inferno like its historical predecessors. Per CBS Sacramento, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said the pilot was safely extracted from…
According to new plans filed with city officials, the Boring Company is building a car elevator inside the garage of a nondescript house near Los Angeles. The steel shaft is designed to lower a vehicle down to a test tunnel that snakes beneath the city of Hawthorne. And as some jokesters have pointed out, the…
At least one Facebook app will soon be bathed in the shadowy beauty that is dark mode, that coveted color scheme where the background is black and my eyes aren’t so angry. Tucked into an announcement that Messenger is getting a redesign “over the coming weeks,” Facebook said its chat app will also get a…
A pernicious bug has struck some Pixel 3 devices, leaving smartphone photographers missing many of the images they take. Per Android Police, a fix for Google’s latest smartphone is on the way. While we found photos taken with the Pixel 3 to be mighty appealing, we have also been fortunate enough to not run into…
