Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
In a stunning blow to companies like Uber and Lyft, the New York City Council today approved a one-year halt on issuing new licenses to rideshare drivers. The yearlong halt will give the council time to survey the current state of ridesharing in the city, and potentially enact minimum pay rules for drivers using these…
Security researchers released a tool this week that lets you collect social media profiles of a massive amount of people using face recognition. While that might sound like a terrible idea, the tool’s creators say it will help security professionals by giving them the same tools as the bad guys. The tool, Social Mapper, is…
You remember the feeling. Maybe it’s been a while, but you know what it’s like to walk into a climate-controlled space (that often smells good, too), find a nice item on a shelf, hold it in your hands, hand a clerk a few bucks, and walk out the door with that new thing in a…
Airbnb, a company that considers everyone’s home to be part of one big hotel, recently decided it might be a good idea to bring cultural heritage sites into its real estate portfolio. But a special offer to spend a night on the Great Wall of China has been canceled after complaints on social media. The…
If you’re worried that Google might change its mind about including the hated notch on its rumored Pixel 3 smartphone, don’t be: You’re still getting that terrible notch, if this alleged unboxing of a Pixel 3 XL is the real deal. According to Android Police, a Ukranian blogger published images and video on Telegram of…
If you find yourself living in a small apartment without a dishwasher, live alone, or have a roommate that’s as lazy as you when it comes to kitchen cleanup, there’s finally a better solution that doesn’t involve just tossing all your fine china once it gets dirty. This handheld motorized scrubbing brush does all the…
Instead of relying on just his imagination to make Lego toys fly, Adam Woodworth supersizes his favorite sets and upgrades them with motors and electronics so they can take to the skies all by themselves. But with a blocky rotor that’s clearly not designed for flight, can you figure out how this Lego helicopter manages…
Early one morning in April 2013, a stranger knocked on Virginia Hanlon’s door, identifying himself as a building contractor. That was the first lie. Hanlon, an elderly woman who split her time between her apartment in New York and her deceased mother’s home in New Jersey was wary—she had never seen this man before. She…
Long threatened to be the next in a line of cool shit turned vaporware, Magic Leap’s headset, the device that will supposedly change how we perceive reality itself, is finally available for pre-order for developers and really big AR and VR nerds. The announcement appeared early this morning on the Magic Leap blog, where the…
Anki doesn’t think it’s cracked the code and developed the perfect robot to work at the center of your smart home, but with Vector it feels it’s created a robot adorable enough, and smart enough, to tide you over until the future finally catches up with our desire. If Vector looks familiar, it’s because the…
In May 2008, Facebook announced what initially seemed like a fun, whimsical addition to its platform: People You May Know. “We built this feature with the intention of helping you connect to more of your friends, especially ones you might not have known were on Facebook,” said the post. It went on to become one…
Alex Jones and his conspiracy theory empire InfoWars have officially been booted from Apple, Facebook, and YouTube. But Twitter is one of the last big social media companies that has declined to ban Alex Jones. And Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended his decision to allow Jones on the platform in a series of tweets last…
Trade group the Rural Wireless Association (RWA) has filed a request that the Federal Communications Commission investigate whether Verizon is lying about the extent of its 4G LTE network, Ars Technica reported on Tuesday. According to Ars Technica, the request comes as the FCC prepares to determine how to distribute $4.5 billion in Mobility Fund…
A subpoena against chat service Discord could reveal the identities of many of the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other far-right organizers involved in the planning of the disastrous 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that resulted in widespread violence, three deaths, and scores of injuries. Per the Washington Post, a federal lawsuit by people…
Stalling growth is technically no longer Snapchat’s biggest problem. Instead, Snap shared worse news with the world today in its latest earnings report: For the first time, it’s shrinking. Snapchat says it lost 3 million daily users by the end of June, after peaking at 191 million daily users earlier this year. According to Snap…
Anti-government conspiracy theorist turned pro-Trump mouthpiece Alex Jones found his hard-won followings on the web’s biggest platforms stripped away this week. In this day and age, there’s just nowhere left online for a red-blooded patriot to speak his mind. Nowhere, it seems, except for Google+. The frequently shirtless Truth Crusader best known for repeatedly and…
A portion of Snapchat’s source code was leaked and hosted on the code repository platform GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft) before a copyright takedown request from Snap led the company to remove the offending leak. The leak occurred after a botched update to the company’s Snapchat iOS app in May. While the leak itself was…
Investors may be wondering what Elon is smoking this afternoon following a tweet in which he claimed he’s considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share. What seemed like a joke at first may be serious and as the company’s stock price went crazy, trading has been halted. Musk’s tweet came almost simultaneously with a new…
An investigation by the Federal Communication Commission’s own inspector general officially refutes controversial claims that a cyberattack was responsible for disrupting the FCC’s comment system in May 2017, at the height of the agency’s efforts to kill off net neutrality. The investigation also uncovered that the FCC provided false information to members of Congress regarding…
Have you heard the famous Winston Churchill quote that “the fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists”? Well, it’s a fake quote. Churchill never said it. But that didn’t stop Texas Governor Greg Abbott from tweeting the fake quote late last night. And while Abbott is rightly being taken to task, the responses to…
