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In the annals of technology, no two devices have dominated the human condition more completely than the thing you’re reading this article on, and that other thing you could have read it on but just aren’t right now. I’m talking about phone and computer. Given the importance of these contraptions in our lives, it’s worth…
Lava from Hawaii’s erupting Kilauea volcano has reached the Puna Geothermal Venture plant, covering a well and threatening another. At the same time, fast-moving lava flows are now threatening nearby communities, prompting new evacuations. “Lava flow from Fissures 7 and 21 crossed into PGV [Puna Geothermal Venture] property overnight and has now covered one well…
Want to trade the tattered remains of your privacy for a very minor convenience? Ever wish your computer would stare back at you while you hunt for that one good SNL skit on YouTube? If “yes” is your answer, do I have the tool for you. FacePause is a Chrome extension that tracks your face…
Animal rights activists have done stellar work in foregrounding the question of creature-consciousness: no meat-eater is now ignorant of the fact that their food once lived, breathed, maybe nuzzled its kin in a blood-soaked slaughterhouse. Environmentalists have a harder go of it. Fracking footage will always be less upsetting than your average fast food expose:…
It’s not your fault, but it is very likely that you’re using the wrong HDMI cord to plug that 4K Apple TV or PS4 Pro into your new TV. While you might have assumed that all HDMI cords are equal they are, unfortunately, not. And if you have the wrong cable, you could be missing…
“If I had to tell you, what invention I don’t like I would say that I don’t like the phone,” wrote a second grader in Louisiana in response to a school writing prompt. “I don’t like the phone because my panert are on their phone every day. A phone is sometimes a really bad habet.…
As Elon Musk’s ongoing campaign to piss off every journalist continued to make headlines, you may have missed a key bit of news: His secretive company Neuralink is funding primate research at the University of California as it pursues its quest to create brain-computer interfaces. So when, at some point in our weird inevitable future,…
Earlier this week, Vermont became the first state in the nation to enact a law that will regulate data brokers that buy and sell personal information in an attempt to add a new layer of accountability to the massive, data-trading companies that often operate without much oversight. As TechCrunch noted, under the guidelines of the…
Elon Musk, in the midst of a crusade against traditional media, offered up an example of an “excellent” analysis that could serve as an example of what good journalism should look like. Just one problem: as Slate pointed out, the publication seems to have ties to a cult. In a since-deleted tweet, Musk linked to…
Americans like their internet service providers even less than they did last year, which is quite the accomplishment since the companies weren’t all that popular then, either. The American Customer Satisfaction Index’s report on telecommunications companies found ISPs hit an all-time low this year. Not one single ISP saw an improvement in customer satisfaction over…
Alan Bean, the fourth of just 12 people to walk on the moon and one of the first Americans to spend an extended period living on a space station, died Saturday at Houston Methodist Hospital. He was 86. “Alan was the strongest and kindest man I ever knew. He was the love of my life…
Last month, a handful of extremely popular music videos on YouTube were defaced. Now two 18-year-old French citizens are in police custody and have been charged with crimes related to the hack of Vevo YouTube accounts. Per Variety, the teens were taken in by law enforcement officers in Paris. The 18-year-olds, identified as “Nassim B.”…
Telsa agreed this week to a settlement in a class action lawsuit filed against the company by buyers of Tesla vehicles who alleged the company semi-autonomous, assisted driving feature was “essentially unusable and demonstrably dangerous.” The terms of the agreement, which have yet to be approved by US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman, will require…
President Donald Trump announced Friday a deal to save Chinese phone manufacturer ZTE despite opposition from lawmakers in both parties, marking the latest in a bizarre and basically incoherent stretch of policymaking from the current administration. In a short series of tweets fired off late Friday afternoon, Trump said that he will allow ZTE to…
Apple dropped its bi-annual transparency report Friday and offered a new pledge to its customers going forward. Starting with its end of year report for 2018, the company will disclose government requests to remove apps from the App Store. Here’s the promise from Apple, filed under the header “Matters of note for future reports” at…
Ad-blocking tool Ghostery suffered from a pretty impressive, self-inflicted screwup Friday when the privacy-minded company accidentally CCed hundreds of its users in an email, revealing their addresses to all recipients. Fittingly, the inadvertent data exposure came in the form of an email updating Ghostery users about the company’s data collection policies. The ad blocker was…
Less than one month after instituting a new policy designed to punish artists for misconduct in their personal life, Spotify is partially walking back its “hateful content” rules that resulted in several artists being removed from the streaming service’s promoted playlists. R. Kelly will continue to be banned. Bloomberg reported that pushback from artists and…
The big new European data-privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is here, and it’s ushered in a host of changes to the way companies treat your personal information. One of the consumer benefits of GDPR is that it requires companies to make it possible for users to pack up their data…
Australia has completed the world’s longest cat-proof fence, because cats, an introduced species on the island continent, can be a huge freaking problem. Agence France-Presse reports: The Australian Wildlife Conservancy this month finished building and electrifying the 44-kilometre (27-mile) long fence to create a predator-free area of almost 9,400 hectares (23,200 acres) some 350 kilometres…
What’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine an Amazon Echo doing? Think realistically. Would it be something simple but sinister, like the artificially intelligent speaker recording a conversation between you and a loved one and then sending that recording to an acquaintance? That seems pretty bad to me. And guess what: it’s happening. A…
