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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said that he’ll pull out of a conference in Saudi Arabia called the Future Investment Initiative. The conference, known informally as Davos in the Desert, has become a focal point for people upset about the October 2 disappearance of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, believed to have been murdered in…
Years after we all jumped ship from Internet Explorer to Firefox and Chrome, we don’t really want to go back to a Microsoft browser, do we? While buggy and slow when it first appeared, Microsoft Edge has been given a continuing stream of new features and updates that make it worthy of your consideration now.…
If you’ve spent time on the Trump-supporting parts of social media, you’ve probably come across a strange meme in the past couple of years. MAGA-loving Twitter is constantly offering people “free helicopter rides.” But what does it mean? The offer of “free helicopter rides” is a reference to the practice of killing people by dropping…
The fitness company behind FitMetrix, a popular performance-tracking app, reportedly left the personal data of more than 100 million users exposed. Three servers belonging to Mindbody were discovered by security researcher Bob Diachenko, Hacker.io’s director of cyber risk research, containing the names, email addresses, phone numbers, workout locations, and other personal contact information of FitMetrix…
Using a technique called reinforcement learning, a researcher at Google Brain has shown that virtual robots can redesign their body parts to help them navigate challenging obstacle courses—even if the solutions they come up with are completely bizarre. Embodied cognition is the idea that an animal’s cognitive abilities are influenced and constrained by its body…
Capping off a probe launched in 2015—instigated by reporting from Oregon Live—Tesla Energy Solutions has agreed to pay $13 million back to Oregon after the investigation concluded the cost of 14 solar power projects in the state had been inflated to qualify for higher tax credits. While Tesla Energy Solutions (then known as SolarCity) did not…
Facebook has been fending off accusations of censorship and bias against conservatives over the last year or so and just ahead of the mid-term elections it has made a risky decision. On Thursday, the company announced that it had removed 559 Pages and 251 accounts for rule violations. It said many of the accounts were…
Do you remember the Boston Dynamics robots videos of just a few years ago? It was a big deal that robots like Atlas could walk on (gasp!) uneven ground. But Atlas keeps blowing through milestones left and right, like in this new video that shows Atlas effortlessly jumping over obstacles and hopping onto boxes like…
Billy McFarland, the organizer of the spectacular clusterfuck that was Fyre Festival, was sentenced Thursday to six years in prison for fraud. “Let’s just do it and be legends, man,” a marketing executive for the festival reportedly said as the event’s imminent catastrophe became increasingly evident. His reported divination came true, man, but not for…
Most of the major names in set-top boxes have been busy upgrading their devices this year, and that means you might well be in need of a refresher in terms of which 4K streamer is going to be the best buy for you. Here’s our (relatively) brief, point-by-point guide to the top devices on the…
Twitter has made a subtle, but not insignificant change to the way it counts emoji in its 280-character limit. Moving forward, all of its natively supported emoji will count as two characters. Previously, adding skin tone and gender modifiers to an emoji unintentionally penalized users and many likely didn’t even realize it. In a new…
After a fair amount of hype and even more leaks, Samsung’s Galaxy A9 finally got announced today in Malaysia. While it’s unclear if the Galaxy A9 will ever see an official release stateside, Samsung’s world-first phone with four rear cams could be a preview of what’s to come on the Galaxy S10 next year. Featuring…
Legged robots are superior to wheeled robots when it comes to traversing various types of terrain. But legs require balance, and if a two-, or even four-legged robot falls over, it might not be able to get back up. One solution would be to make a robot that is virtually all legs. Maybe a dozen…
The 1932 version of The Mummy starring Boris Karloff is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, right up there with the 1930s versions of Dracula and Frankenstein. And now an extremely rare movie poster for The Mummy could become the most expensive in the world after it goes up for auction starting today…
The two-person crew aboard a Russian-made Soyuz rocket made an emergency landing in Kazakhstan today shortly after launch. The crew, which was traveling to the International Space Station, is reportedly safe and in “good condition” after the scary failure was broadcast on the web. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin launched from…
People do astoundingly stupid shit online. But for all the noise we make about everything you should never post on social media, it should really go without saying that potentially implicating yourself in a felony crime by way of a publicly available video is a no-go. Alas, such is the case for one Missouri man…
The cryptocurrency markets saw a significant crash on Wednesday (Eastern local time), with just short of $13 billion in value wiped out over the course of just three hours, CNBC reported. As of late Wednesday, cryptocurrency-tracking site CoinMarketCap listed Bitcoin as down 4.26 percent, Ethereum down 9 percent, XRP down 9.95 percent, and Bitcoin Cash…
Facebook already has a veritable treasure trove of data on anyone who uses the site, including stuff users do on the web outside of it. It still has an appetite for even more. Per CNBC, Facebook’s head of health research Dr. Freddy Abnousi—the Facebook executive behind the company’s canceled plan to share anonymized health insights…
The first time you test something, you check out its design, you try all the new features, but even after an hour or more, the device still doesn’t feel as familiar as something you own and use every day. And yet, the first time I sat down and played a round of PUBG Mobile using…
You never realize how attached to a laptop’s color a brand is until you see it in a new shade. Razer’s known for black and green fingerprint magnets, so it’s a bit of a (pleasant) surprise to learn that the company has a new white laptop you can potentially use without showcasing your affection for…
