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The password itself is shitty. It’s a fundamentally flawed mechanism for securing our accounts and data that should have died long ago. That means poorly crafted passwords are doubly bad. But with the release of iOS 12 and recent updates to Android, truly terrible passwords—your 123456, facebookpassw0rd, or dEadP3tsnAme—have lost all reason to exist. Apple…
Wikipedia is the place where we turn for information on topics large and small. And speaking of small, there’s currently a heated debate going on about whether to include the president’s penis on the Wikipedia page for the Nintendo character known as Toad. What a time to be alive. In case you somehow missed the…
North Korea pledged to shut down one of its nuclear test sites in a meeting today between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang. What does the North want in return? “Corresponding measures” from the United States. Unfortunately, we don’t know what that means yet. “The North has…
The Senate cleared a bill late on Tuesday, the Music Modernization Act, that will dramatically restructure the way royalties are handed out to artists and others involved in the creation process—although it did so under heavy opposition from satellite and digital broadcasting services, namely Sirius XM and Music Choice. According to Billboard, the legislation passed…
A federal judge ruled last week that the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission (currently chaired by Donald Trump appointee Ajit Pai) must release records related to millions of fraudulent public comments filed before the agency repealed net neutrality guidelines last year, Ars Technica reported. According to Ars Technica’s report, the records in question could shed light…
Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday added her voice to a chorus of California legislators and advocates calling on Governor Jerry Brown to sign Senate Bill 822, legislation that seeks to reenact for California’s 40 million residents the net neutrality protections stripped away by the Federal Communications Commission this year. Calling S.B. 822’s passage an…
Apple has an interesting new method for combatting fraud—administering “trust scores.” VentureBeat noticed a new provision inside the updated iTunes Store terms and privacy disclosure that came with Monday’s release of iOS 12, watchOS 5, and tvOS 12. Apple now says it will take into account certain information about how you use your iOS device…
The process of buying a new gadget is full of traps and pitfalls. How much should I spend? Which model is better? Do I really need that much storage? And then, just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, the real boss battle raises it head: What color do I get? For such a…
On election day, Georgia voters will cast their ballots and hope that in the end the results are accurate. Unfortunately, there will be no guarantees. A U.S. District Court judge determined late Monday that switching to paper ballots so close to an election was sure to cause a bureaucratic nightmare that would only serve to…
Twitter is finally leading the way in making a change to its platform that every social network should implement: It’s bringing back the chronological timeline. I’ve been using a workaround to do this for a bit and people have no idea how strong the algorithmic Stockholm syndrome can be. Aside from banning the Nazis and…
On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Facebook and 10 other companies over alleged age and gender discrimination in targeted employment ads. Facebook has repeatedly been called out for enabling advertisers to exclude certain groups of people from seeing certain types of ads, such as for…
Here are some quirky relics of a time when the world wanted to be constantly in touch, but the tech just wasn’t there yet.
Withings’ history reads like a rollecoaster tour of early wearable development, because after the company launched its first product—a connected body scale—almost 10 years ago in 2009, Withings quickly followed up by expanding into things like smartwatches, blood pressure monitors, smart alarm clocks, and more. But then, the company’s growth nearly ground to a halt…
The world is a cruel place. And nobody knows that better than Anthony Torres, a 56-year-old man in New York who was recently the butt of jokes when a video of him shaving on a train went viral. Torres talked with the Associated Press and explained that he doesn’t have a home right now and…
Amazon is planning on releasing at least eight new Alexa-powered devices before the end of the year, according to CNBC, including everything from some type of “in-car gadget” and audio equipment to, uh, a microwave oven. From the CNBC report, it’s not clear which of the devices will feature full Alexa voice control versus simply…
The advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence will make 75 million jobs obsolete by the year 2022, according to a new report. Sounds dreadful, but the same report goes on to predict the creation of 133 million new jobs over the same period. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now about the future of work,…
A California court will soon decide sentencing for a man who posted the entirety of Deadpool on his Facebook page. If the U.S. government gets its way, the man will spend half a year in prison. A week after Deadpool was released in theaters, millions of people watched the film on a viral Facebook post…
Can you think of anything creepier in the middle of the night than the distant, melancholy sounds of children singing? It’s pure nightmare fuel, but it was also the reality for a small family in eastern England who for months reportedly had to endure a haunting rendition of “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” from children who…
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas filed a lawsuit last week against Google, Twitter, and a number of other smaller tech companies for allegedly tracking children online without parental consent. Google and Twitter did not make the apps that allegedly violated a federal child-privacy law. Instead, the companies “marketed” these apps through their platforms, according…
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was scheduled to send a presidential alert to most cell phones in the U.S. on Thursday, but due to the agency’s continued response to Hurricane Florence, it has been delayed until October 3. The alert will still happen at the same scheduled time, 2:18pm ET, and will be sent…
