Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Ten former and current Tinder executives, including some of its founders, filed a lawsuit against the dating app’s owners IAC and Match Group on Tuesday, accusing them of scheming to intentionally lower Tinder’s valuation and cheat employees out of billions of dollars. The lawsuit, filed in the New York State Supreme Court, claims IAC and…
Democratic lawmakers have a message for Ajit Pai: Ignorance is no excuse. Ahead of a Senate oversight hearing this week, where the FCC chairman will face questions over the false statements he and his staff gave members of Congress, House members misled by the FCC are demanding answers of their own. In a letter on…
Last year, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull became the subject of ridicule when he insisted his country’s laws would “prevail” in a war with mathematics to ensure law enforcement’s access to encrypted data. Now we know what the anti-encryption law says, and legislators have apparently changed tactics but learned very little. Like the Department of…
A scam victim may have been plotting to kill her mother in order to pay the person who was catfishing her. Police in Garner, North Carolina, believe that Roxanne Reed, 55, got caught up in a romance scam. The department first found out about the con when Reed’s family alerted authorities that Reed had been…
Advertising for The Nun, an upcoming horror film centered around the inexplicable suicide of a nun in 1950s Romania, is predictably terrorizing. But a YouTube ad for the film has seemingly crossed the line, driving a flood of users to complain about it online and, ultimately, get it removed from the platform. A tweet cautioning…
After months of waiting, Fortnite, the most popular game on the planet, is finally ready for its debut on Android. Unfortunately, when the news was first announced alongside the Galaxy Note 9’s launch last week, there were a couple catches. First, Fortnite creator Epic Games said the game would not be available on the Google…
Project management apps help teams collaborate more effectively and hit their deadlines, but you can use the same apps to put some order into your life. Here are the management tools worth checking out, whether you’ve only got yourself to look after or a whole family of disorganized people. It’s worth pointing out there are…
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the country of 81 million people will boycott American consumer electronics, including Apple’s iPhone. The declaration comes as a trade war between the United States and Turkey has caused the Turkish currency, the lira, to plummet over the past few days, sending shockwaves throughout global markets. During an…
Embattled electric car manufacturer Tesla racked up its third class-action suit, filed this evening in California’s Northern District Court, stemming from bizarre and potentially unfounded tweets sent last week by CEO Elon Musk. The first such suit was filed Friday by Tesla short seller Kalman Isaacs, who contended that the tweets were solely intended to…
It’s finally time to admit that MoviePass is fumbling around like a wounded golden goose that needs to be put out of its misery. It may still give up the gift of “free” movies every now and then, but this weekend’s latest service changes and screwups show the free ride is coming to an end.…
Since 2016, Sacramento County officials have been accessing license plate reader data to track welfare recipients suspected of fraud, the Sacramento Bee reported over the weekend. Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance Director Ann Edwards confirmed to the paper that welfare fraud investigators working under the DHA have used the data for two years on…
In 2018, you go unhinged or you go home. Azealia Banks, the prodigious MC who remains a Twitter villain even after being banned from the service and an underground rapper even after being dropped from multiple record labels, let loose on Instagram after an allegedly disastrous weekend at Elon Musk’s home to see Grimes, Musk’s…
Once lauded as tools to enhance police accountability, body cameras have been facing increasing scrutiny from privacy advocates, and now one researcher has identified them as cybersecurity time bombs. Speaking to Wired ahead of a Def Con presentation, Josh Mitchell, a consultant at the security firm Nuix, demonstrated that many body cameras are vulnerable to…
Thousands of security officers in Silicon Valley just ratified their first union contract. The guards, numbering at about 3,000, work at tech giants like Facebook and Google and have been organizing and negotiating for more than five years. The news was announced on Monday in a press release from SEIU United Service Workers West, a…
Never say never. Thomas Edison was both a great inventor and an amusing prognosticator. But nobody, no matter how smart, knows the future. And that goes for Edison as well. Back in 1894, Edison predicted that transatlantic phone calls would be impossible. But his doubts would prove silly roughly 30 years later when the first…
A French theme park has begun using six trained birds belonging to the crow family to pick up litter and cigarette butts, the BBC reports. Puy du Fou is a historical theme park in Les Epesses, France, where its estimated 2 million annual visitors can learn about the French Revolution, Vikings, the Middle Ages, and…
If you’re someone who can’t work, play, or kill time online without your desktop PC blinding you with a spectacle of flashing LEDs, ASUS will now let your external hard drive join the desktop rave. The company’s new FX HDD drive includes its own set of LEDs, illuminating a circuit trace pattern that will sync…
Imagine standing before an iconic piece of Baroque architecture—and starting a giant fight. That’s effectively what happened earlier this month at the Trevi Fountain in Rome, where a 44-year-old American woman and a 19-year-old Dutch woman got into a violent argument over the best selfie spot. On Facebook, Rome police wrote that the two tourists…
When a user chooses to pause Google’s collection of location data with the “Location History” option, the search giant continues to collect and store that information. It’s a sleight of hand that’s enough to make someone shut off everything just to be safe. Following a blog post by K. Shankari, a graduate researcher at UC…
While some folks may be worrying about Google’s next phone, especially with leaks suggesting the Pixel 3 could sport the biggest notch we’ve seen on a handset yet, it seems Google may have more immediate concerns after the release of Android 9 Pie created issues with charging speeds on the original Pixel XL. According to…
