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After weeks of deplatforming efforts by social media companies, Infowars founders Alex Jones has lost his last refuge: Twitter. Twitter took the unusual step of confirming its ban of both Alex Jones and Infowars via the Twitter Safety account, citing abusive behavior. Jones’s Twitter page had accumulated nearly 900,000 followers before the suspension, while the…
British Airways revealed on Thursday that hackers managed to lurk in its systems for two weeks, exposing around 380,000 card payments. The company released a statement through its parent company, IAG, saying that the attack on its website (ba.com) and mobile app began late on August 21 and was interrupted on Wednesday evening. It said…
The workers of Whole Foods, the health-focused grocery chain purchased by Amazon just over one year ago, are beginning to organize. An email—first reported on this morning by the Wall Street Journal, then obtained with one redaction by New Food Economy—proposes collective action by the store’s rank-and-file employees to obtain an increased minimum wage, among…
Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced it seized nine copycat websites set up to look like U.S. military recruitment pages. The websites, including Army.com and Air-Force.com, encouraged potential recruits to hand over their personal contact information. But that data was then sold to for-profit schools for their own recruitment. The FTC filed a complaint…
On Thursday, authorities executed a search warrant at the home of a New Jersey couple who raised $400,000 to help a homeless man last year. The raid comes two days after the couple’s lawyer revealed that the money is all gone despite the fact that it wasn’t properly transferred to its intended recipient. The couple…
Security experts have identified thousands of instances in which owners of 3D printers have made their devices available online and without the need for authentication. That certainly makes remote access to 3D printers convenient, but wow, what an awful idea given the tremendous potential for abuse. SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC) has issued an alert…
After Apple announced plans to acquire Shazam at the end of 2017, the deal was put on hold when the EU launched an antitrust investigation to determine if it would decrease competition between streaming music providers. The worry was that, because one of Shazam’s functions is recommending where users can buy or stream a song…
With the new i7+, it looks like iRobot is taking robot vacuums a step closer to truly being a hands-free way to keep your floors clean. Instead of having to constantly empty the robot’s tiny dirt bin, the i7+ has an oversized dock that transfers dust and debris into a larger reservoir with disposable bags…
Today the U.S. Justice Department is expected to announce charges against Pak Jin Hyok, an alleged North Korean spy, in the 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures and the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack. Pak is part of North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, a military intelligence group. The charges are the first against a North Korean cyber…
Android 9 Pie has been out for a month, and while the addition of things like digital wellness controls and handy app actions have made Google’s mobile OS friendlier to use, I can’t help but think one of Android 9’s most glaring omissions is the lack of an OS-wide dark mode. Dark mode UIs help…
President Trump’s former press secretary, Sean Spicer, famously insisted that the 2017 presidential inauguration crowd was the biggest ever. That, of course, was a lie. But Spicer eventually trotted out the photos to “prove” it. The part we didn’t know at the time? The White House had requested photos from the National Park Service on…
Tired of new mirrorless cameras yet? I hope not, because with today’s launch of the new Fujifilm X-T3 and the possible debut of Panasonic’s first full-frame mirrorless camera later this month, there’s going to be a ton of pixel peeping going on between now and the end of the year. However, unlike Canon and Nikon,…
mSpy, a company that sells software designed to let users spy on their children, partners, or anyone else they want to keep their eye on, left exposed more than two million records “including software purchases and iCloud usernames and authentication tokens of devices running mSky,” TechCrunch reported. mSpy markets its software as the “ultimate monitoring…
At hearing before the House Energy & Commerce Committee, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey addressed politicians’ concerns about harassment and abuse, the impact of propaganda on American elections, and, to a much lesser extent than had been expected, the unfounded allegations that Twitter is silencing conservative voices. In prepared remarks, Dorsey put to rest claims that…
The President recently came out and accused Jeff Sessions of aiding the Democrats and reportedly calls the Attorney General a “dumb Southerner” behind his back. Despite all that, the very stable genius president has kept this traitorous moron in one of the most powerful positions in government. Sessions needs some red meat to keep Trump…
Uber announced it was “getting serious about safety” in April—just shy of a decade since Uber was founded—and pointed to a number of forthcoming features that would support that declaration. On Wednesday, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi asserted in a blog post that the company was “raising the bar on safety” with another round of new safety…
Wednesday’s congressional hearing on social media and election security was relatively sedate and on-topic, but outside the chamber, two deeply dislikable people were getting heated in front of the camera. Confronted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Florida Senator Marco Rubio tried to keep his cool while insisting that he didn’t know who was standing in…
Openly recognizing their companies’ past failures in rare displays of modesty, Facebook and Twitter executives touted new efforts to combat state-sponsored propaganda across their platforms before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, acknowledging that the task is often “overwhelming” and proving a massive drain on their resources. Despite frequent and contradictory remarks by President Donald…
Bernie Sanders introduced a bill today that culminates weeks of feuding between the Vermont senator and Amazon, a company he views as indicative of a “rigged economy” that rewards the rich and harms workers. https://gizmodo.com/why-is-amazon-scared-of-bernie-sanders-1828688943 The bill—titled the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act—would impose a tax on companies with 500…
Sure, smartphones and smartphone apps can waste our time and bring out the worst in people, but they can most definitely also be a force for good: They can educate, inform, and inspire. With that in mind we’ve put together a list of our favorite apps that can teach you something new every day, in…
