Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
The texts would come at all hours of the night, numbering in the thousands. “Have you been with an older guy?” “You’re really hot, so it’s worth the risk of getting in trouble.” “Has your daddy fucked you today?” For a few days, Jennifer, a 40-something stay-at-home mom from South Dakota, received messages like these…
Whether you love reading, photography, or just need a little extra organization, there is a subscription service out there for you.
With few places to turn, Alex Jones started publishing videos more frequently at Vimeo last week. But it looks like he’s not wanted there either. Vimeo deleted a number of InfoWars videos over the weekend, citing violations of its terms of service. Alex Jones and his conspiracy theory empire InfoWars have been banned from most…
First, the bad news: Sunday is the anniversary of the disastrous white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that culminated in a neo-Nazi car attack that killed local woman Heather Heyer and wounded scores of others, as well as resulted in the deaths of two police officers. The organizer of that rally, Jason…
The official sovereign wealth fund of the Saudi Arabian government may be considering a major investment in Elon Musk’s electric car giant Tesla, and sources say it is “in talks” to do so after Musk let slip via Twitter that he is considering taking the company private in a $60-billion-plus deal at $420 a share,…
Apple CEO Tim Cook has gotten a lot out of schmoozing with Donald Trump, from massive, inequality-fueling tax cuts that paved the way for a massive Apple stock buyback to some kind of vague and probably bad-faith guarantee that the president won’t suck the company into his pointless U.S.-China trade war. Likewise, Trump has gotten…
Twitter, one of the few tech platforms that has refused to ban conspiracy shitposter and Infowars grifter kingpin Alex Jones, admitted on Friday that he had a history of posts that were in clear violation of the site’s terms of service but still won’t terminate his accounts, CNN reported. Previously, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had…
Florida police made an arrest last month in an alleged “SIM-jacking” ring, with court documents claiming the scammers involved stole SIM cards belonging to other individuals and used them to amass a small fortune. Fraudulently obtaining a victim-specific SIM card, a small smart card that associates a mobile device with a specific subscriber’s account, allows…
A 29-year-old airline employee “thought to be suicidal” stole a 76-seat Q400 turboprop plane from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) on Friday night, eventually crashing some 30 miles away with fighter jets on his tail, the New York Times reported. Local authorities confirmed he is dead. Per local station KOMO News, the man flew “erratically” once…
Last month, a sunken Russian warship believed to have been carrying billions of dollars worth of gold was “discovered” by a South Korean company that immediately started making claims of how it was going to distribute its found treasure. Now, police are investigating leaders of the company and have reason to believe it was all…
In what may be a first for the American legal system, Wikileaks—the radical transparency organization turned Russia propaganda cell run—was served a lawsuit today in a tweet by law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. The firm, which has not tweeted from this account before or since, appears to have created it specifically for…
Nature isn’t always pretty. Sometimes it’s just gnarly as hell. A recent video titled “Raccoon vs Crow” illustrates this well, showing two of the world’s most iconic urban animals engaging in a dramatic—if brief—battle to the death. Gizmodo prefers not take sides in cases of natural predation, but according to science writer (and bird lover)…
On Friday, in the latest round of Facebook’s whack-a-mole attempts to fix itself, the company launched new requirements for admins of Pages. Today’s changes to the admin privileges for Pages has been in the works since April, when Facebook said it would “[require] people who manage high potential reach Pages to get authorized to publish…
Political fights online are always hazardous. But a recent Facebook dispute between two strangers in Florida led to a bullet in the butt. Brian Sebring, 44, faces felony charges after he decided to take an argument offline. “I went off the deep end,” he told the Tampa Bay Times. “I wasn’t thinking right. You know,…
With a budget of just $600—a mere pittance compared to what robots like ATLAS cost to develop—students from the University of California’s Davis’ College of Engineering created a machine that’s capable of tying a shoe all by itself. After mastering the skill when you’re five years old, you probably don’t give much thought to the…
Back in the 1950s and 60s, the American government’s foreign propaganda arm, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), invented fake names for journalists to plant stories in newspapers. In 2016, I wrote about Guy Sims Fitch, just one of the pseudonyms that was used globally. But I recently stumbled upon a few more names that might…
A summer student has been removed from an experiment after NASA decided that a completely accurate note mentioning the President attached to an experiment that fell in a New Jersey field was a “misguided attempt to be lighthearted,” a NASA spokesperson told WNBC-TV. The AP reports: South Brunswick police say the package, attached to a…
Set to appear before a Senate oversight committee next Thursday, Ajit Pai will face a barrage of questions about why senior officials at the agency he leads, the Federal Communications Commission, provided false information to Congress—a federal crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, had it been proved they did so knowingly. The…
The TSA admitted to surveilling about 5,000 citizens this year as part of its secretive “Quiet Skies” program, which places travelers on TSA watch lists even if they aren’t suspected of a crime, the Boston Globe reports. In a meeting with members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee last week, the TSA reportedly…
Paying for a premium service is the absolute best way to stream your favorite songs—you’ll get a better selection and more importantly, few, if any, frustrating ads. But Spotify is still pushing its free streaming option to keep growing, despite that being one of the biggest, dumbest sticking points in Spotify’s tussle with the music…
