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Porn is not, let’s say, difficult to find online. This prevalence and accessibility of sexual imagery on the web has prompted many parents and political figures to try and sieve the smut from screens of the youth. But a new study indicates that these efforts are largely a waste of time and money. This month,…
This week, a German federal court ruled that Facebook must give the mother of a dead 15-year-old access to her entire account. They’re not just talking about access to a memorial page, either. The mother gets access to everything, including private messages. In Germany, the judges decided, heirs should be able to inherit a social…
As you know by now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team at the U.S. Justice Department issued an indictment against more Russian operatives believed to be involved in tampering with the 2016 election. The 29-page document names 12 such Russian military intelligence (GRU) operatives, details exploits involving the hacking and exfiltration of Democratic National…
YouTube got a lot of crap earlier this week when its budding cable TV substitute, YouTube TV, went down during England and Croatia’s World Cup semi-final match. At 3pm ET, YouTube acknowledged the screw-up, saying “the timing is horrible but we’re working to be up and running again ASAP!” Fans predictably lost their shit, and…
An Air China flight crew had to enact emergency protocols during a flight from Hong Kong to the city of Dalian on Tuesday, all because a co-pilot tried to sneak in a vape break. China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) began investigating the alarming incident and found that the co-pilot tried to turn off air-recycling fans…
The U.S. Justice Department on Friday announced new charges against 12 Russian military officers accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by hacking into computers and stealing confidential documents, which they later allegedly disseminated to the public. The charges were announced at a press conference by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and…
MLB and Clear announced a partnership on Thursday that will soon let baseball fans enter stadiums using fingerprints, and eventually, just their face, instead of tickets. Clear, which offers similar biometric fast-tracking for participating airports, says it will let baseball fans link their Clear and MLB.com accounts. By sharing fingerprint data, visitors can bypass long lines…
Adobe is bringing the “full version” of its industry-standard Photoshop app to the iPad, and its other desktop apps may follow suit, according to a report from Bloomberg today. Get ready to unsharp mask all the things. Bloomberg reports that the “full version of its Photoshop app for Apple Inc.’s iPad” is on the way,…
If your smartphone of choice has forced you to upgrade to wireless headphones, you probably hate having to swap them out for a corded pair when you want to play your Nintendo Switch with a little privacy. The portable console doesn’t come with Bluetooth, but a tiny dongle called the Genki does, theoretically making it…
Getting iPhones to play nice with Windows can be a challenge, but so can getting Android to play nice with Macs—and it’s that second setup we’re going to tackle here. Read on to find out how to get all your apps working together and your files seamlessly synced between a Google-powered phone and an Apple-powered…
Hamilton County sends more prisoners to death row than any other county in Ohio. And the prosecutor there is fed up with complaints from human rights activists about lethal injection being inhumane. Joe Deters, the county prosecutor, told a local TV station that Ohio needs to bring back firing squads. “We had an electric chair.…
In addition to flooding social media with false news stories, propaganda-spreading bots, and all sorts of online chicanery during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Russian trolls also reportedly attempted to erode Americans’ trust in local news by posing as city newspapers. According to NPR, operatives working for the Kremlin-linked troll farm known as the Internet…
The last two Blockbuster stores in Alaska are shutting their doors for good next week according to the Anchorage Daily News, which means there is just one remaining relic of the video rental giant still up and operating in the entire United States. The final Blockbuster storefront standing is located in Bend, Oregon. It outlasted…
There’s a twisted new sextortion scam going around. Some reports have been shared by Bleeping Computer, Krebs on Security, and TechCrunch of a new scam in which the perpetrators send people emails claiming they know the recipient’s password and have used that password to install malware on their computer and captured a video of them…
Facebook has quietly changed its privacy standards for closed groups to eliminate the option of manually viewing members’ private information and after it threatened legal action, a Chrome extension that made it possible to download the details of all group members at once has been shuttered. But the question of why this was possible in…
Sprint, mirroring its competition, has engaged in some grammatical gymnastics with its new unlimited strategy, announcing not one, but two different unlimited plans, each with their own limitations. One might almost say they’re not unlimited plans at all, and instead amount to yet another attempt by carriers to squeeze consumers’ wallets. “Today we’re introducing Unlimited Plus—a feature-rich…
After the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, in which 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were killed, a slew of companies sought to distance themselves from the National Rifle Association. Car rental companies like Enterprise, National, and Alamo, all announced they would no longer provide discounts to NRA members. MetLife, the insurance company,…
An Ohio school district is gearing up for a surprising security upgrade for the new year: smart pepper spray. Beginning in the fall, schools in the Columbiana Exempted Village School District in Ohio will begin using devices called ‘Threat Extinguishers.’ Modeled after fire extinguishers, these are pepper spray canisters capable of firing “tactical grade” incapacitating…
People in cities around the world—from Taos, New Mexico, to Windsor, Ontario, to Blackburn, England, to Auckland, New Zealand—have reported hearing strange humming noises that have no obvious source. The hums are often compared to the sound of idling trucks, and for the people who can hear them, they can be maddening, causing nausea and…
Today, Apple finally pulled the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro from its store. This marks the end of the dongle-free MacBook Pro, and now only the super-outdated MacBook Air, which you shouldn’t buy anyways, still has ports besides USB-C. Headphone jacks aside, Apple just moved one step closer to being a USB-C only laptop shop. And…
