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It’s hard out there for people who play with imaginary money. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies plunged over the weekend after it was revealed that a South Korean exchange, Coinrail, was hacked. Roughly $42 billion of market value was destroyed in the sell-off, and Bitcoin has lost over 50 percent of its worth since December. Bitcoin,…
Congratulations! If you believed Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai’s evidence-free assertion that someone launched a cyber attack on the agency’s website in 2017, rather than crashed after comedian John Oliver directed the audience of his insanely popular show to weigh in on Pai’s crusade to kill net neutrality rules, oh boy do we have…
Switzerland has elected to allow online casinos, though a newly approved law intends to keep foreign operations from sharing in the take. Per the BBC, Swiss voters have overwhelmingly voted—well above rates suggested by early polling—a measure already approved in Parliament to legalize certified Swiss online casinos, but require internet access providers to block all…
Joe Kennedy, the Democratic congressmen representing Massachusetts’s 4th congressional district, is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a pretty reliable vote against just about anything President Trump wants. So it was more than a little weird to see him cast his lot Republicans and vote against an amendment that would cut spending on…
Telecom giant AT&T has been fighting like hell in court to pull off its $85 billion acquisition of content company Time Warner, which owns everything from HBO and Warner Bros to DC Comics. It’s been opposed by the Department of Justice, which has formally argued that it’s against the deal on antitrust grounds but many…
Last year, Canada introduced a new lottery system used to extend permanent-resident status to the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens. The process was designed to randomly select applicants in order to make the process fairer than the old first-come, first-served system. There’s just one problem: the software used to run the lottery isn’t actually…
Elizabeth Holmes lost everything—and nearly $900 million of other people’s money—when her bunk blood-testing startup Theranos went into full meltdown, resulting in the layoff of nearly all staff and civil charges of “massive” fraud for Holmes and former company president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. But she’s reportedly not done yet, according to an interview in Vanity…
Factory workers in China tasked with building Amazon’s popular Echo speakers and Kindle e-readers are exposed to horrendous work environments and conditions that often are in violation of Chinese law, a recent report from a watchdog group found. China Labor Watch spent nine months investigating the working conditions of a Foxconn-owned factory that manufactures Amazon…
The state of Florida failed to conduct national background checks on tens of thousands of applicants looking to procure a concealed weapon permit for more than a year, and the reason is about as dumb as it gets: the person in charge of performing the checks forgot their login information. An Office of Inspector General…
The National Institutes of Health has taken a whole lot of heat for allegedly cozying up to Big Alcohol in order to secure funding for a major study on the effects of having a daily drink. On Friday, the NIH lost one of its backers from the booze business, as brewing giant Anheuser-Busch InBev pulled…
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly informed his staff in an email that one of his personal email accounts hacked while he was still serving as Secretary of Homeland Security, confirming previous reports that suggested one of his phones may have been compromised. The breach, which the White House has previously declined to comment…
In case you haven’t heard, your once-favorite chat apps are going the way of the dinosaur. Yes, following the recent demise of AIM, Yahoo Messenger is saying goodbye next month, the company announced today. It’s got me thinking about my relationship with the concept of chats, especially chats in apps so intertwined in our lives.…
Hackers working for the Chinese government compromised a US Navy contractor and stole a massive cache of highly sensitive data, including details about a planned supersonic anti-ship missile, American officials said Friday. The hack, reported by the Washington Post, took place in January and February and resulted in more than 614 gigabytes of data being…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but it looks like Facebook may have been sharing more of your data than you thought it was. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the social network cut deals with a number of companies to provide access to user records and friend data even after its…
It looks like Uber has a growing interest in the behaviors of its users. According to a patent application filed by the company Thursday, Uber is planning to use machine learning to better understand the “state” of a passenger when they request a ride. The patent—which is pretty vague as to its purpose and full…
Amazon’s announcement for its new Fire TV Cube on Thursday was a great reminder that the cube just doesn’t get enough love in gadget design. Cubes are solid as hell. They’re elegant, simple, functional, and memorable. They beg the question: “What’s in the box?” As a reminder of all that and more, we’ve pulled together…
Quantum computing has made it to the United States Congress. If this field of quantum information is the new space race, the US doesn’t want to fall behind. After all, China has funded a National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences, set to open in 2020, and has launched a satellite meant to test long-distance quantum…
Behold Summit, a new supercomputer capable of making 200 million billion calculations per second. It marks the first time in five years that a machine from the United States has been ranked as the world’s most powerful. The specs for this $200 million machine defy comprehension. Built by IBM and Nvidia for the US Department…
Facebook says it’s “working to” reduce the number of annoying notifications it sends you when you add new friends. The alerts, which masquerade as Facebook Messenger notifications, were the subject of a BuzzFeed article lambasting the feature two days ago. Messenger, which was spun out of the main Facebook service in 2011, delivers a notification to…
SETI enthusiasts have devised all sorts of complicated ways for us to find signs of alien life, but a new paper suggests we may be overthinking it. Instead of looking for megastructures and spaceships, we should consider something a bit more obvious: alien satellites and space junk in orbit around distant exoplanets. Sufficiently dense fleets…
