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India’s controversial biometric database, Aadhaar, has been once again compromised, according to a three-month investigation launched by HuffPost India. In a report published Tuesday, HuffPost revealed the existence of a malicious patch said to disable critical security features, making it easier not only to create unauthorized Aadhaar numbers but to fool the system’s biometric recognition…
In July, a committee for the European Parliament voted to move forward with new copyright legislation that would totally overhaul the way the internet works and threaten the existence of everything from encyclopedias to memes. On Wednesday, amendments will come up for a vote, and the future of the world wide web is at stake.…
Google has been subject to the EU Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” law—a requirement that search engines delist requested pages from results—for years. The law enables anyone in the EU to pressure companies like Google to take down search results they don’t like. But this week, Google is pushing back against efforts to…
A British Airways data breach that exposed as least 380,000 card payments was caused by a card-skimming malware that customers were inadvertently exposed to through the airline’s website and mobile app, according to research from security firm RiskIQ. British Airways announced last week that hackers had breached the company’s system, compromising hundreds of thousands of…
You’re probably familiar with the old sayings, “where’s my flying car?” and “where’s my jetpack?” But the most depressing question for plenty of space nerds from the 20th century might be, “where’s my vacation on the moon?” And I just got really depressed reading a paper from 1987 about the space travel advances we were…
Amazon has taken down nine books written and self-published by Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh, the notorious reactionary misogynist, virulent homophobe, and self-described “pickup artist” behind a small web-based empire. According to HuffPost, Amazon booted nine of Valizadeh’s books from their catalog after their reporters inquired as to whether his writing violated guidelines: On Monday, Amazon took…
What made U.S. diplomats in Cuba and China severely sick over the past two years? We still don’t know for sure. But U.S. officials now suspect that the Russian government might have had something to do with it. At least that’s the theory being floated by anonymous sources to NBC News. The theory that Russia…
Elon Musk started the day with some much-needed good news after Space X pulled off an early morning satellite launch without any troubles. The good news didn’t last long because on Monday afternoon security researchers went public with claims that Tesla’s keyless entry system is vulnerable to a spoofing hack that could give a sophisticated…
In northern Spain, a local priest allowed an amateur artist to restore a series of wooden statues, including one featuring Jesus, Mary, and St. Anne. The technicolor outcome, however, had a local official calling it an act of “vengeance rather than a restoration.” The 15th century sculptures—part of a set at a chapel in El…
Robots in factories are really good at picking up objects they’ve been pre-programmed to handle, but it’s a different story when new objects are thrown into the mix. To overcome this frustrating inflexibility, a team of researchers from MIT devised a system that essentially teaches robots how to assess unfamiliar objects for themselves. As it…
He may be the most beleaguered and mistrusted CEO of any major tech company, but if an enormous new profile of Mark Zuckerberg makes one thing clear, he’s not as dumb as Twitter’s CEO. If you need catching up on the trials and tribulations of Zuck, the New Yorker has a 14,000-word profile that will…
Google recently rolled out a big update to Wear OS with improvements including a new streamlined UI, better health and fitness tracking, and an all-around smarter and more useful Google Assistant. But as nice as that all sounds, software is just one piece of what you need to make a good smartwatch, because without the…
Did you ever imagine what the future would be like when you were a kid? We all did. Some of us were obsessed with jetpacks and robots, while others dreamed of videophones and space travel. It was “all of the above” for two kids in Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania, who imagined what the futuristic world of 1999…
With Apple’s big fall event just two days away, iPhone speculation has reached peak turgidity. And so far, there’s a lot of info that’s trickled down via rumors and leaks that seem like a lock for September 12, including Apple’s plan to introduce three new iPhones, with the new iPhone Xs serving as the successor…
It’s easy to feel smug around kids. You might not have it all together—you might, in fact, be rapidly disintegrating professionally and psychologically—but at least you can spill some apple juice without wailing inconsolably for six hours. Comparatively terrible things happen to you all the time, and you don’t freak out about it, or if…
Even after spending $950 on the new self-emptying Roomba, there will still be lots of places in your home that require another vacuum to clean them. It’s a problem common to all robot vacuums—except the new Coral One. Built into this robovac is a removable hand vac that can be used to clean anywhere in…
Originally sold as the world’s first remote control ball, Sphero’s baseball-sized rolling toy has evolved over the years to eventually become one of the most accessible ways to learn the basics of coding robots. Bolt, the company’s latest creation, adds new abilities and ways to automate the bot’s behavior, including identifying and interacting with other…
We’re up for a big week in the news, folks. There’s a lot going to happen, from Apple’s big September 12th announcement event to the notably less fun Hurricane Florence, which is currently projected to barrel into the East Coast at a minimum Category 3 status or possibly even worse before the weekend. As the…
Google took down a series of YouTube ads for Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny before a vote for regional governors on Sunday and amid protests over President Vladimir Putin’s plans to raise the retirement age for state pensions, the Guardian reported. Navalny’s team is obviously condemning YouTube for the decision, with aide Leonid Volkov calling…
In 2014, some 76 million JPMorgan Chase customers were less than thrilled to hear that hackers were roaming around company databases containing their records for two months. Now, U.S. officials have secured the extradition of the Russian citizen believed to be responsible, Andrei Tyurin, from the nation of Georgia where he was captured last year.…
