Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
An external drive is the easiest way to boost the storage capacity of your computer, but at the cost of bulk, convenience, and speed. There’s not a lot to be done about the added bulk or pain of wrangling cables, and while an external SSD usually can’t compete with the transfer speeds of having a…
The world of invention is famous for its patent disputes. But what happens when your dispute wasn’t with another inventor but whether the Patent Office saw you as a person at all? In 1864, a black man named Benjamin T. Montgomery tried to patent his new propeller for steamboats. The Patent Office said that he…
The prefix nano calls to mind something microscopic. Tiny robots invisible to the eye, or an iPod many orders smaller than its predecessors. When I hear the word I expect tiny. Apparently when Blue, the respected studio microphone maker that has spent nearly a decade producing great USB mics, hears the word nano it expects…
President Trump’s first tweet of the day, sent at 5:24am local time, has accused Google of rigging search results against conservatives. Right-wing media personalities often claim, without evidence, that companies like Twitter and Facebook are conspiring against them, but Google search results aren’t often part of that conversation. They certainly are now. “Google search results…
A U.S. district judge in Seattle extended a ban preventing Austin, Texas-based Defense Distributed, which designs and releases digital blueprints for small arms that can be produced by 3D printers and CNC-milling machines, from continuing to do so until a lawsuit by 19 states and the District of Columbia is resolved. In 2015, the Barack…
The research arm of Y Combinator plans to begin a study on universal basic income next year in which it will give unconditional cash payments to 3,000 participants. The test is partially intended to see if receiving routine payments will quell anxieties around losing jobs to automation. As Wired reports, the study will be called…
On Friday, someone tweeted that texts from a social app called “IRL” were connected to a sex trafficking scheme, and by Monday afternoon, the warning had more than one hundred thousand retweets and likes. But while the app is real, the claim—that the message is somehow linked to human trafficking—is completely unsubstantiated. The tweet reads:…
Even though the digital wellbeing features in Android 9 Pie are still in beta (and only currently available on Pixel phones), today, Google is expanding its online health and wellness endeavors to YouTube, ostensibly to help you prevent yourself from watching too many bad videos. The new tools themselves are pretty straightforward and consist of…
Today, Bloomberg posted an updated story on what to expect from the upcoming (though still officially unannounced) fall Apple event. And while many things, like the announcement of three new iPhones with 5.8-, 6.1-, and 6.5-inch screens and designs based on the iPhone X have long been rumored, there was another tidbit that piqued my…
When President Trump attended a “groundbreaking” for a new Foxconn plant in Wisconsin this past June, headlines suggested that tens of thousands of jobs could be created. But things in Wisconsin are looking a little more modest these days for Taiwan-based Foxconn. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, Democratic members of the state government are…
For years, an ethnic cleansing campaign by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority against its Muslim Rohingya has torn the country apart. Facebook has faced scrutiny for its role in the spread of false information that incited violence. On Monday, it announced that it has banned several members of the Myanmar military and organizations that were named by…
The harassment of Julia and her team started in May. That’s when Facebook expanded its fact-checking effort to Brazil. Fact-checkers at one of the participating organizations where Julia (not her real name) serves as director, were targeted by groups who thought the organization was censoring the right. The harassment became so vitriolic, the small team shut…
The world’s most valuable company and a business run by the richest man in modern history have been engaged in an irritating cold war for years, and they need to knock it off. When I say that Amazon and Apple are engaged in tech’s most annoying feud, I don’t mean it’s the most important battle…
If you ever wanted to own a piece of Apple Computer history, now’s your chance. Provided you have a spare $300,000 lying around. A fully functional Apple-1 computer, just one of 60 believed to still exist, is going up for auction next month. Just 200 were originally produced by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in…
The end of summer is fast approaching, though the fun in the sun is coming to an even swifter conclusion for some of us: Take the tale of Paul Ceglia, the man who allegedly used forged documents naming him as a Facebook co-owner to try and rip off CEO Mark Zuckerberg in court. This week,…
A few years ago, a man named Paul Ceglia filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that the two signed a software development contract in 2003 with provisions conveniently giving Ceglia retroactive co-ownership of the site. Authorities later alleged that Ceglia, an upstate New York wood pellet salesman who has had…
Earlier this month, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk added to his seemingly never-ending drama by announcing via Twitter that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share. The tweet quickly blew up in his face, drawing Securities and Exchange Commission attention and generating chaos for the company. When Musk finally…
Chinese ridesharing service Didi Chuxing has suspended Hitch, its free/tip-supported carpooling component that allows passengers to ride along with drivers headed in the same direction, after the second murder of a passenger this year. Per the South China Morning Post, authorities in Leqing city in eastern Zhejiang province have arrested a suspect identified by the…
If you’ve seen a viral Facebook post about a spider “from Hell” killing people in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi, I have some good news: It’s completely false. Since it was first posted on Tuesday, “NEW DEADLY SPIDER SPREADS ACROSS USA” has been shared on the social network over a million times, but the spider…
One of the world’s foremost public health voices is now facing criminal charges of sexual misconduct. On Friday, STAT reported that Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was arrested by the New York Police Department in Brooklyn for allegedly groping a woman in 2017. The alleged incident is…
