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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…
Martin Tripp is currently embroiled in a nasty legal dispute over claims he’s made about his former employer, Tesla. On Wednesday evening, Tripp began tweeting out details and photos about his time at Tesla and found himself suspended faster than you can say, “Infowars was an inside job.” A former technician for the electric vehicle…
Google has finally opened up about political ad-spending on its platforms and published a living archive of who’s paying what for your eyeballs while you’re just trying to consume some content. As we head into the heart of the midterm elections, Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign is outspending everyone. Google’s advertising library is similar to…
Not since Rick and Morty’s butter-passing robot has there been a more hyper-specific, purpose-built device than perhaps Alex Mikes’ automatic Kindle page turner. Instead of having to raise his arm to tap the edge of the screen while reading in bed, a simple click of a wireless remote makes the attached contraption do all of…
When students of Saint Louis University begin their fall semester this month, they’ll notice a new addition to the campus—hundreds of glowing blue hockey-puck robots. The university has announced it will “deploy more than 2,300” of the devices throughout student living spaces, including in “every student residence hall room and student apartment on campus.” As…
New research shows that children are more likely than adults to give in to peer pressure from robots, a disturbing finding given the rapidly increasing rate at which kids are interacting with socially intelligent machines. An experiment led by Anna-Lisa Vollmer from Bielefeld University in Germany is a potent reminder that modern technologies can have…
Currently, when it comes to smartwatches, it’s the Apple Watch and then everything else. However, if a report from Android Police is any indication, Google might have a plan to wrest some sales away from Tim Cook and co. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of concrete details so far, with even the…
For years, tech bloggers have lamented the boring sameness of cell phones. “They’re all slabs of glass and metal,” we groaned in 2016. “Phone design has plateaued.” These days, the same could be said of many electronic devices, all housed in generic brushed aluminum and dark plastic that doesn’t so much “wow” as inspire a…
Tracking down dangerous, hidden materials typically requires either a substantial labor force, costly and specific tools, or both. But a group of researchers is exploring a way in which threatening objects hidden in boxes or bags can be detected using off-the-shelf wifi. The researchers, which include engineers from Rutgers University–New Brunswick, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis…
Cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin is understandably upset that he lost a combined $24 million in two different hacks of his phone over the course of seven months. Terpin alleges that the hacks were only possible because the hackers had an inside person at AT&T who provided access to Terpin’s account. And he’s suing the telecommunications…
319. That’s the number of discrete advertisements, both online and off, served to me over the course of one Tuesday in July. I know because I counted each and every one. Why catalog the informational noise that, in many cases, our brains have quite literally trained themselves to ignore? Hidden in plain sight, ad money…
In its heyday, the Fitbit Charge was, for most people, the best wearable you could buy. It was incredibly functional, focused, and attractive enough to only gently scream your fitness aspirations to whoever caught a glimpse of it on your wrist. That was long ago, before smartwatches got sleeker, slimmer, and more capable—before they started…
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the iMac G3, the original iMac that was designed by Jony Ive and was one of the first computers released by Steve Jobs after he rejoined Apple in 1997. It launched on August 15th, 1998. But before you go and get all misty-eyed over Apple’s cute little computer that…
Americans who opened the newspaper on January 5, 1961, were greeted with an article by Associated Press science writer John Barbour. He described the futuristic world of the year 2000 and the great medical advances that would be achieved by then. And quite frankly, reading about all of the medical miracles we were supposed to…
It only took a year, but Cortana is finally coming to Alexa speakers, and vice versa. Last year in a splashy announcement in the New York Times, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed that their digital assistants, Cortana and Alexa, would be able to work on both Amazon and Microsoft platforms…
Alex Jones, America’s most unhinged vitamin salesman, has been temporarily suspended from Twitter. The social media company has sent Jones to what users call “Twitter jail,” meaning that he can’t publish any tweets for the next seven days. The InfoWars Twitter account, which has just over 400,000 followers, is still active. Jones has been banned…
The agency in charge of Los Angeles’ subways announced at a press conference today that it is working with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to install body scanners in the city’s metro system. The plan to scan the bodies of passengers for “concealed threats” is said to be the first of its kind in the…
A spectre is haunting San Francisco—the spectre of feces. The Golden City has the second-highest cost of living in the U.S. and a major factor contributing to that fact is its housing crisis. Jeff Kositsky, director of the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, told ABC in June that homelessness isn’t on the…
For the first time in U.S. history, a death row inmate has been killed with a lethal injection containing fentanyl, a potent drug at the heart of the ongoing opioid overdose crisis. The execution of Carey Dean Moore happened this morning at Nebraska State Penitentiary, as reported by the Omaha World-Herald. Moore, 60, was convicted…
The State of New York is suing Purdue Pharma, one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of opioid painkillers, for what it says is the company’s role in driving the opioid crisis. On Tuesday morning, the attorney general’s office announced that it was filing a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company for allegedly misleading the public…
