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The Olympics are supposed to be a series of competitions that test the physical capabilities of the competing athletes. But increasingly, it seems like it’s become a competition over which athlete brings the best gear: be it highly-engineered running shoes, swimsuits, or sleds. So why shouldn’t track and field athletes be allowed to use a…
A kid-sized submarine arrived in northern Thailand, just a few hours before the final four members of a youth soccer team and their coach were rescued from the flooded Tham Luang cave complex. Elon Musk, whose minions had built the sub out of SpaceX rocket materials for the sole purpose of moving the trapped boys…
Over the past two years, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been digitizing old, never-before-seen films of nuclear tests and uploading them to YouTube. The LLNL just uploaded a new batch of films last week, and I couldn’t help but notice that one in particular is incredibly cinematic. This particular test was part of…
Apple’s latest version of iOS, released yesterday, includes USB Restricted Mode, a security measure that seems designed to prevent unwanted decryption of iPhones by both bad actors and law enforcement using passcode cracking tools. But a team of researchers claim they have found a loophole. While that may be good news for law enforcement, it’s…
Photographers already face an uphill battle in trying to preventing people from using their digital photos without permission. But Nvidia could make protecting photos online much harder with a new advancement in artificial intelligence that can automatically remove artifacts from a photograph, including text and watermarks, no matter how obtrusive they may be. In previous…
An 18-day ordeal in which the Wild Boars soccer team was trapped inside a flooded cave complex in northern Thailand has finally come to an end, with the twelfth team member and the coach exiting the cave earlier today. Four boys were rescued from the caves on Sunday, four yesterday, and now the remaining five…
The attempted rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach from a Thai cave has captivated the world. So when billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk announced that he was going to help, some in the tech community beamed with pride. But Musk’s Thai adventure is looking more and more silly with each passing day. Rescue…
On Monday night, President Donald Trump announced his second Supreme Court nominee of his term: the DC Court of Appeals’ Judge Brett Kavanaugh. On a range of issues—but particularly net neutrality, the principle that service providers should be required to treat all data on their networks equally—he is likely to be a total disaster if…
With a ridiculous 83x zoom, people have used the super long lens on Nikon’s Coolpix P900 to snap pics of Saturn or pull off the kind of shots you normally only see in spy movies. But apparently that wasn’t good enough, so today, Nikon is announcing the new Coolpix P1000 featuring frankly ridiculous 125x zoom,…
It’s really, really hard to find a good Microsoft Windows device for under $500. There are some diamonds in the rough—devices that sacrifice display quality or form or speed to get the price way down. Yet until today there was no clear winner. Microsoft’s new Surface Go could change that. The new 10-inch Windows tablet…
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who this weekend announced he had directed a team of engineers to build a “tiny, kid-size submarine” (really more of an air-filled metal box) to help extract the 12 boys and coach of Thai soccer team Wild Boars stranded in the flooded Tham Luang cave complex for weeks, is…
Top House Republicans of the Energy and Commerce Committee sent the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet letters today, requesting they answer questions about the collection of data through their devices—such as emails, location data, and users’ voices. The letters, addressed to Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Larry Page, are in part a response to reports…
It’s finally here. Apple’s long-awaited feature that is intended to keep bad actors from bypassing Apple’s encryption and breaking into your phone is now available. On Monday, the component went live in the latest iOS update and you should just go ahead and download it. The feature, dubbed USB Restricted Mode, works by shutting off…
Snapchat’s owner Snap appears to be working on a new search tool that would give you yet another avenue to absentmindedly buy shit from Amazon. The unreleased “camera search” feature is codenamed Eagle, according to code hidden within the Snapchat Android app that was discovered by researcher Ishan Agarwal. The feature would let users “press…
Last month, three women at a senior living facility in Georgia made a Snapchat video in the room of a 76-year-old woman who had a stroke, according to police. The women, who were all at the time working at the facility, reportedly titled the story “The End.” They were arrested on June 22 for allegedly…
It’s dangerous to take your pet on an airplane. This is a lesson that Michelle Burt learned the hard way. On a recent JetBlue flight from Florida to Massachusetts, her French bulldog started to appear uncomfortable while the plane was in the air. Soon, the poor pup’s tongue was blue, and Burt knew there was…
Instead of a quaint “Home Sweet Home” cross-stitch pattern hanging in her living room, iOS and game developer Glenda Adams has a pixel-perfect recreation of the original Mac OS control panel, which she painstakingly hand-stitched over six months. Despite being limited to a black and white color palette, the original version of Mac OS is…
Rescue teams working in northern Thailand have pulled four more boys from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave complex, raising the total number of rescued boys to eight. After nearly two agonizing weeks in Thailand, things are starting to look brighter for the 12 trapped boys and their 25-year-old coach. Four members of the Wild…
Timehop, an app that reminds social media users about posts from their past, has disclosed that it suffered a major security breach on July 4. According to the company, 21 million users had some form of personal data stolen. Attackers were also able to retrieve access tokens that would have enabled them to view users’…
Authorities in Iran arrested four girls and women last week for posting videos of themselves dancing on Instagram. Only one of the girls, 17-year-old gymnast Maedeh Hojabri, has been identified. State TV in Iran aired her “confession” on Friday. Instagram is one of the few Western social media sites not heavily blocked in Iran, and…
