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Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, one of the women who accuses Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, will both testify in front of a Senate committee today. You can watch the livestreams below even if you’re not near a TV. The hearing is scheduled to start at 10:00am ET, 7:00am PT. And depending…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the company’s head of human resources, Gaby Toledano, discussed derailing United Auto Workers unionization efforts by promoting union activists to jobs in the safety department, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. According to Bloomberg, the two executives discussed whether reassigning the employees to management roles on the “Safety team” would make them…
On Wednesday, Donald Trump gave a mind-boggling press conference on the accusations of sexual assault facing his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, alternating between rambling thoughts on how a man named “Mr. Pillsbury” had said China has “total respect” for his “very, very large brain” and smearing the women behind allegations as part of a…
Today has been exciting for anyone who cares about tension among Big Tech’s ultra-rich, as two executives have thrown barbs over Facebook’s management ethos. The beef heated up this morning when Forbes published an interview with WhatsApp founder Brian Acton. Acton left Facebook a year ago—three and a half years after selling WhatsApp to Facebook…
“This is it,” Mark Zuckerberg said to a crowd of developers and press at Facebook’s annual VR developers conference, Oculus Connect. “This is the all-in-one VR experience that we have been waiting for. It’s wireless, its got hand presence, 6 degrees of freedom, and it runs Rift-quality experiences.” Zuckerberg was at Oculus Connect to announce…
Not every one wants email notifications or step-tracking on their timepieces, but Longines has created an analog watch that cleverly integrates one useful smartwatch feature: easy time zone adjustments, without requiring a wireless connection to your phone, or the watch to be charged every night. The new Conquest V.H.P. GMT Flash Setting looks like a…
Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook that was targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how privacy works on social networks and had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways. I was helping him test the theory by targeting him…
It’s all but impossible to keep phallic comparisons out of your head when staring up at a towering skyscraper, but residents of the Guangxi region in southeastern China have a new addition to their skyline that seems unmistakably penis-inspired—and a fake viral video isn’t helping to dissuade opinions. The Guangxi New Media Centre, which was…
VR is in a tricky spot. Devices like the Rift and the Vive have proven that immersive virtual worlds are within our reach, and yet, no one cares. The problem is that current VR headsets still have a lot of rough edges. They aren’t quite precise enough and the good ones are too expensive for…
Uber will pay a $148 million fine as part of a settlement reached with state law enforcement officials over allegations it attempted to conceal a 2016 data breach affecting millions of its users, the company said. The rideshare company has also agreed to adopt new data security and breach notification policies, not limited to the…
Sweden’s advertising watchdog ruled that an employer’s recruitment post on Facebook and Instagram discriminated against women. The offending content was the inclusion of the Distracted Boyfriend meme. The Distracted Boyfriend meme, also known as Man Looking at Other Woman, is a stock photo of a man looking at a woman facing away from him as…
Executives at six of the nation’s largest internet and technology companies gathered Wednesday on Capitol Hill for a data-privacy hearing called in response to growing concerns over the comparatively inadequate protections offered to consumers under U.S. law. Understanding that a national law not too dissimilar from Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) might one day…
India’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the country’s sweeping biometric database does not violate privacy rights. But the panel of five judges did decide to place restrictions on the program, according to the Times of India. Under the Aadhaar system, all citizens, residents, and visiting workers of India—an estimated 1.2 billion people—are virtually required…
Amazon, the country’s second-largest employer, has so far remained immune to any attempts by U.S. workers to form a union. With rumblings of employee organization at Whole Foods—which Amazon bought for $13.7 billion last year—a 45-minute union-busting training video produced by the company was sent to Team Leaders of the grocery chain last week, according…
Earlier this week, controversy arose around the latest release of Google’s Chrome web browser because it’s far too easy for users to be forced to log in without realizing they’re doing it. Google now says it’ll be making some changes to solve the problem. Chrome’s newest update has been in the wild since September 5,…
According to a new report, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) broke a record last year by flying more drone missions along America’s borders than ever before. CBP completed 635 missions in the 2017 fiscal year, totaling over 5,625 hours of flight. The agency uses unarmed MQ-9 Predator B drones that are equipped with sophisticated…
Fortnite did it. The battle royale game, which has become wildly popular over the last year, appears to have finally led to Sony’s capitulation. Because Sony, which has refused to play nice with other gaming platforms, will now offer cross-play, and the first game getting support is Fortnite. Kotaku first noted the announcement, which appeared…
With attendance hovering around 200,000, Photokina is the largest camera and imaging trade show on the planet. And since it’s held just once every two years (until 2019 when it switches over to being an annual event), cameras company often save major announcements for the show so they can all duke it out together during…
Today, representatives from tech companies including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Twitter, and Google will testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on issues of consumer data privacy at a hearing with the limply stated purpose of finding “what Congress can do to promote clear privacy expectations without hurting innovation.” A former Google senior research scientist who…
Google, which banned cryptocurrency advertisements from its platform earlier this year, will be partially rolling back that policy as of October. The policy was originally enacted to protect consumers from the burgeoning number of crypto-scams that have afflicted the market for years and reached a fever pitch as the price of several digital currencies exploded…
