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Apple has been steadily positioning itself as the anti-Facebook for a while now, and between verbal jabs aimed at the social media giant and privacy-focused product decisions, the patient goodwill campaign seems to be working. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t going to save us, and now’s the time to keep your guard up. There’s likely no other…
Verizon paid billions last year for the privilege of ushering Yahoo’s services into the great unknown and on Friday it announced that Yahoo Messenger will bite the dust on July 17. Yahoo’s new messaging service, Squirrel, is currently in private beta, but there’s no direct replacement for Messenger at this time. You have six months…
Heading to Japan next week? You should probably double-check your Airbnb rental, because it might be cancelled. The country will soon enforce a law requiring vacation rentals like Airbnb residences to be registered with the Japanese government, prompting the removal of more than 48,000 Japan-based Airbnb listings, and the cancellation of reservations for as early…
You’ve got to appreciate a company that doesn’t give up even when things are looking down. Despite a rocky launch plagued by delayed shipments, unfinished software, and a laggy camera app, Essential has done an admirable job of turning an over-hyped (and expensive) phone into something you might actually want to buy. And now, even…
The internet is always there, vast and accessible, from wherever you happen to be—until it isn’t. Maybe you’ve got a long flight ahead of you and need some reading material, maybe you just want to store something for safe-keeping. Whatever your reason here’s how you can download just about anything you come across on the…
Craig Brittain, the creator of defunct revenge porn site IsAnybodyDown who is now running for Jeff Flake’s vacated Arizona Senate seat (and recently failed to gather enough signatures to appear on the official ballot), is suing Twitter for allegedly violating his First Amendment rights by suspending his Twitter accounts. While Brittain’s primary account was suspended…
Kids See Ghosts, a collaboration between Kanye West and Kid Cudi, was supposed to debut its self-titled album during a livestreamed listening party set to be broadcast Thursday night on the semi-obscure app Wav. It didn’t go very well. The stream missed its original start time of 8:00pm Pacific time and began incrementally pushing back…
Facebook has been on the receiving end of a lot of government scrutiny in recent months, but it looks like Google’s turn is coming soon. According to a report from Politico, the European Commission is preparing to hand down its decision on an antitrust investigation into the search giant’s Android mobile operating system. A fine…
On Thursday, the Trump administration made official its deal to save Chinese phone manufacturer ZTE—a company that was almost dead and buried thanks to crushing sanctions put in place by the president’s own Commerce Department. In response, a bipartisan group of senators announced a plan to reverse the agreement. Under the terms of the deal…
Years ago, Facebook fired its Trending News team and replaced them with algorithms after a Gizmodo article featured former workers claiming the site discriminated against conservative news. Then, Facebook tried and failed to suppress hoax news sites and propaganda with a series of methods designed to avoid the ire of conservatives, like third-party fact checkers…
One week after suffering a hack that took its website and services offline, events ticketing company Ticketfly revealed Thursday just how bad the data breach was, and it certainly doesn’t look great. According to the company, the personal information of 27 million accounts—including ticket buyers and venue operators—was accessed by a hacker. The stolen information…
An international team of researchers is claiming to have discovered the world’s oldest footprints. Dating back a whopping 550 million years and found in a limestone bed in China, the prints were made by an unknown sea creature that was undoubtedly very strange. Fossils from the Ediacaran Period, sometimes called the Vendian Period, are exceptionally…
I wish I knew how to quit Facebook. But the site has me locked in its grasp.
It’s happened to everyone: You’re walking home, minding your own business, when no random devices suddenly screaming at you about how the police are coming if you happen to bump into them. Fortunately, someone is finally disrupting that space. Scooter startup LimeBike, one of several services clogging cities across the U.S. with dockless electric scooters…
WWDC 2018 is coming to a close, but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of developers, who continue to tweet, blog, and take to Reddit with the things they’ve noticed about the next version of iOS. There’s only one problem with that. It’s a violation of the agreement they signed with Apple to become developers in…
The New York State Senate just approved a bill aiming to curb the scourge of cyberbullying. Sounds great, but enforcement might be a bit difficult. See, while the New York State Senate, in its infinite wisdom, voted unanimously to pass Senate Bill S2318A, they neglected to actually say what “cyberbullying” is. The actual text of…
For ten days in May, a Facebook “bug” changed the default privacy settings of new posts for as many as 14 million users, Recode reports. As a result, posts meant to be shared privately may have instead been shared publicly. Typically, users can opt to make all their Facebook posts private, meaning only certain friends can…
Google is committing to not using artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance after employees protested the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to analyze drone footage. However, Google says it will continue to work with the United States military on cybersecurity, search and rescue, and other non-offensive projects.…
A former FCC senior official who issued false statements to reporters, claiming a cyberattack hobbled the agency’s comment system in 2014 and that the ex-chairman ordered it kept quiet, is now backpedaling amid renewed scrutiny by U.S. lawmakers and a wholesale denial by the former chairman himself. The FCC, meanwhile, has commenced a media blackout…
Google will not seek to renew its artificial intelligence contract with the Department of Defense after it expires next year, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene told employees last week. But despite the revelation that the contract has an end date, the pushback against it continues—within the company and externally. Under the contract, Google is providing…
