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An Amish resident of the Colon village in Michigan has launched his own ride-sharing service with his horse and buggy, and he’s calling it “Amish Uber.” For $5, Timothy Hochstedler will escort riders across the Amish-populated area in a carriage pulled by a Morgan horse. For someone immersed in a culture that is resistant to…
A lot of things were supposed to kill newspapers in the 20th century. There was radio, then TV, then the internet. Somehow newspapers have survived, in one form or another. But it’s still interesting to take a look at the predictions that people of yesterday had for how the news business would change. Like this…
Security researchers have found more than 20 bugs in the world’s most popular open source software for managing medical records. Many of the vulnerabilities were classified as severe, leaving the personal information of an estimated 90 million patients exposed to bad actors. OpenEMR is open source software that’s used by medical offices around the world…
Last year, we launched an investigation into how Facebook’s People You May Know tool makes its creepily accurate recommendations. By November, we had it mostly figured out: Facebook has nearly limitless access to all the phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and social media handles most people on Earth have ever used. That, plus its…
As the sun passed over Gizmodo’s New York office on Monday and staffers shook off the muggy torpor of the mid-afternoon, they found themselves drawn into a (seemingly simple, yet surprisingly contentious) debate: Is Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, a dry man? Or is he a wet one? The question first arose…
Facebook is looking to gobble up users’ financial information, including such tidbits as “card transactions and checking-account balances,” as part of its relentless effort to swallow up yet more of the web, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. According to the Journal’s report, sources say the social media giant—which, for the record, has been…
Amazon may have sold millions of Echoes and other devices equipped with its voice-controlled Alexa smart assistant partially in the hopes that it could nudge users into letting an upbeat voice convince them to buy more crap. But it doesn’t appear to be working, according to a report in the Information on Monday. Per the…
U.S. Representative Kathleen Rice, a New York Democrat, has introduced a new bill that compels the Transportation Security Administration to adopt gender-neutral technologies and screening techniques. The “Screening With Dignity Act” mandates new training protocols, new privacy protections, and, chiefly, a cost analysis of recalibrating full-body screening technology to be more inclusive of transgender and…
Verizon recently started offering a VPN service to make users feel more secure when connecting to public wi-fi, but the premium feature’s associated privacy policy is a disaster. The company is reportedly trying to fix it and says the whole thing was just a mistake. The age of the privacy grift is upon us. Over…
In a statement on Monday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said that he was “deeply disappointed” that the agency’s former chief information officer, David Bray, provided “inaccurate information” about an alleged cyberattack on the FCC’s comment system last summer as the agency was considering new rules to overturn Obama-era net neutrality protections. Pai’s remarks were circulated…
Members of the military and other Defense Department employees can no longer use apps or certain devices that track their location in operational areas. That means no more Fitbits in war zones, folks. Can you even believe this was ever allowed? “We don’t want to give the enemy any unfair advantage,” Army Col. Rob Manning,…
At long last, three months after it was first announced, today Google is finally ready to release the next version of its mobile OS. And now Android P officially becomes Android 9 Pie. To be honest, after Marshmallow, Nougat, and Oreo, Pie is kind of an underwhelming name. There’s no spice of fun fruity themes…
It’s been a rough day for Alex Jones and InfoWars. Hot on the heels of bans from Apple and Facebook, the conspiracy theory media empire has been banned on YouTube. It’s not yet clear if the video platform’s ban is permanent, but it appears that all InfoWars videos have been deleted. If you attempt to…
The Bangladeshi government has reportedly suspended 3G and 4G mobile internet services since last Saturday after more than a week of violent clashes between police and student protesters over road safety. Hundreds of students have walked out of class in Dhaka, the capital, to protest the transportation sector following the deaths of two students killed…
How much typing do you do on your smartphone? All those instant messages, search requests, snarky social media comments and more quickly add up to a whole load of text input, every single day. Speeding up that input can make a big difference to how much time you spend glued to the screen, so here’s…
After tens of thousands of women took to the streets this weekend, South Korea’s government announced a new plan to crack down on hidden cameras used to record people without their consent. Inspecting a public bathroom stall for a hidden camera has become a common practice among women in South Korea, who fear their intimate…
Every life-stage has its share of novelty—first kiss, first tax return, first twinge of certain death—but when it comes to new experiences most of us peak in infancy. Just laying there, gargling and soiling our diapers, we as infants cycle through thousands of firsts. It would be nice to remember some of them, as our…
Facebook has “unpublished” four pages belonging to InfoWars in a move that could financially devastate the conspiracy theory empire. Facebook is avoiding the word “ban,” since InfoWars can appeal the decision, unlike Apple’s recent move to ban InfoWars podcasts, something that’s understood to be permanent. Facebook “unpublished” the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones…
Alex Jones is no longer welcome at Apple. The trillion dollar company has removed five of the six podcasts produced by InfoWars, the conspiracy theory empire that Jones founded to spread misinformation. Podcasts like “The Alex Jones Show” and “War Room” have been pulled from all of Apple’s directories, but the company has left up…
August 2018 rolled in with a bang, literally, as explosions rocked Caracas, Venezuela on Saturday during a speech by President Nicolas Maduro—and government officials later said bomb-carrying drones were to blame. If the accounts of an attempted assassination using unmanned aerial vehicles is confirmed, the New York Times wrote, it would be the “first such…
