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Great news for anyone doing crimes with bitcoin. Martin Marsich was arrested last week at a San Francisco airport and hit with charges related to hacking the servers of EA Games in order to steal in-game currency. According to the Palo Alto-based Daily Post, he appeared in federal court on Thursday and a judge agreed…
We’ve seen lots of machine learning systems create strange new phrases and dreamlike images after being trained on large amounts of data. But a new website lets you do the generating, and the results are just as bizarre as you’d expect: The web applet, built by researcher Cristóbal Valenzuela, is based on a new paper…
Donald Trump only understands the world through the lens of popular culture. And a new story from The Daily Beast illustrates that perfectly. President Trump was reportedly talking with some veterans organizations back in March of 2017 when the subject of Agent Orange came up. Trump asked if Agent Orange was “that stuff from the…
You no doubt know how to copy, move, rename and otherwise manipulate files on your Mac, but with the right power tricks you can get through all this digital admin much more quickly. Here’s our pick of the best expert tips for Finder and macOS file management that you might not have come across yet.…
Alex Jones has been hit with bans and suspensions by platforms ranging from Apple’s Podcasts app to YouTube to Google+ in recent weeks. There are few companies that want to be associated with dangerous claims that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. One consequential company that’s been overlooked is WordPress.com owner Automattic, which…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Thursday moved to discredit a former employee and self-proclaimed whistleblower whose attorneys have accused Musk of authorizing Tesla to allegedly engage in “unauthorized wiretapping and hacking” of another former employee of the electric car manufacturer. “This guy is super 🥜,” Musk told Gizmodo over Twitter DM. (That last bit is…
Rare movie posters are going up for sale later this month in a Sotheby’s auction that includes a very special find: The world’s first movie poster, according to the Guardian, created in 1895. The poster, designed by French artist Henri Brispot, was made in France in 1895 to advertise a showing of short films by…
In a sign that the U.S. will be taking a more aggressive approach to cybersecurity, President Trump has reportedly reversed Obama-era guidelines that dictated the process for approving the use of cyberweapons against an adversary. The change will theoretically make it easier for the U.S. to hack back. The Wall Street Journal spoke to several administration…
Asked only once at a Senate hearing Thursday about the fake security incident that’s hounded his agency for more than a year, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, acknowledged for the first time knowing secretly for several months that his office likely fed U.S. lawmakers false information. At an oversight hearing largely…
I enjoy a good puzzle (not the jigsaw kind) which is probably why I love games like The Legend of Zelda or The Room series on iOS. But as clever as I (mistakingly) believe I am, I don’t think I’d have any chance of discovering every last hidden panel, drawer, switch, and secret mechanism on…
Phone calls here in 2018 seem to be more and more rare, especially with younger people. But most Americans still know basic phone etiquette, like saying “hello” when you answer the phone, and not hanging up without some kind of goodbye. But in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a helpful guide from 1950 that was produced…
Scientists created this picture of the Mona Lisa using genetically modified E. coli bacteria. Such teeny little artists! The Italian researchers weren’t just playing around with bacteria for fun. Rather, they were attempting to unite different attributes so they could control large populations of bacteria—perhaps to one day build microscopic transport devices, or even 3D…
Following similar action against secretive AI drone imaging program for the U.S. military, Project Maven, Googlers are once again organizing internally to push back against their leadership—this time around a project dubbed Dragonfly, the proposed search product the company intends to build for the Chinese market in accordance with government-mandated censorship. The letter, first reported…
It’s a technique that’s often used for flashback sequences in movies when an older actor plays a much younger version of himself like Kurt Russell did in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. But the results are never quite perfect, or at least don’t reach the impressive level of pixel perfection that compositor Rousselos Aravantinos…
Just five years ago, not only was it possible for a reputable outlet to flatly characterize Upworthy—a website that didn’t make much but a system for testing what drew clicks on Facebook—as the “fastest-growing media company of all time,” but it happened more than once. By 2013, a year after its founding, Upworthy had favorable print…
After a recent trip to her local dispensary, my mom recalled how, when she was young, black-market cannabis was really only available by the “lid”—usually, a sandwich bag partly filled with ground-up plant, the official size of which tended to vary. Today, she can choose rich, cleverly named buds by the gram or quarter ounce…
A teenager in Melbourne, Australia, is facing criminal charges after he reportedly hacked Apple’s secure computer network multiple times. The boy’s lawyer explained to a Children’s Court on Thursday that the teen did it all “because he was such a fan” of Apple, according to Melbourne news outlet the Age. The teen hacker reportedly attends…
On Thursday, Ajit Pai will have his first appearance before a Senate oversight committee since an internal report revealed the FCC has been falsely claiming its comment system was hit by a cyberattack last year. It’s going to be good and you can watch it live this morning starting at 10am Eastern. For more than…
Recently, sentiment has been growing that smartphones aren’t as exciting as they used to be, and to a certain extent, that’s true. Smartphones have been getting faster, their cameras have gotten sharper, and their displays have gotten bigger, but at the same time, they are more or less the same rectangular pocket computers we’ve been…
Asus believes it’s made a big 15-inch and a giant 17-inch gaming laptop you’ll actually want to carry around with you. It’s August, which means a lot of laptops and desktops are about to be announced at Gamescom and IFA (pro-tip: don’t buy a laptop in the next couple of weeks). Asus, presumably hoping to…
