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Earlier this year, billionaires Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Jamie Dimon promised to launch a new partnership that would upend the healthcare industry and lower the cost of care for the employees of their very large companies. That has yet to come to fruition, in large part due to one very big problem: they can’t…
Russian phone accessory maker Caviar has begun sales of a $4,500 “iPhone X Tesla” with an attached solar panel, if for some reason you happened to have thousands of dollars lying around you don’t need, and also feel like leaving your pricey electronics sitting around baking in the sun. The iPhone X Tesla is not…
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new task force Wednesday dedicated to studying the social impact of algorithms on the public. The Automated Decision Systems Task Force will produce a report in December 2019 examining algorithms used across the public sector, making recommendations for how agencies can use them more transparently and make…
A surprising thing happened on Wednesday: The Senate did something good. Not only did it pass a resolution to save net neutrality but more Republicans than expected actually voted in favor of the resolution. But there were still a lot of senators who disagree with the overwhelming majority of their constituents, and I guess they…
A woman who is legally blind has filed a class-action lawsuit against beauty brand Glossier for failing to create an accessible website. The woman, Kathleen Sypert, claims that she “encountered multiple access barriers” when visiting the website, denying her and other visually impaired and legally blind users equal access to Glossier’s amenities. Sypert’s complaint is…
Scammers have been dining out on the excitement around cryptocurrency and its vey large, very uninformed pool of main street investors. And no matter how many fraud charges get handed out to the people running these schemes, regular folks keep falling for sketchy initial coin offerings. So the SEC made its own. HoweyCoins is a…
The United States Senate on Wednesday passed a resolution to nullify the Federal Communication Commission’s rollback of net neutrality, which is slated to go into effect less than four weeks from now. The vote was both a significant victory for net neutrality supporters and a stinging rebuke of Ajit Pai, who’s time as FCC chair…
Eric Alexander, a former top executive with Uber, has sent a complaint to his former employer alleging he was wrongfully terminated last year, Recode reports. Recode’s sources say Alexander sent a draft complaint letter to Uber offices, claiming that he was not only wrongfully fired, but also unfairly targeted internally by company executives. Uber fired…
Apple has been granted a patent, first filed in 2015, that could lead to huge enhancements in the iPhone’s biometric powers by using “pulsed radiation” to peer into users’ veins. A relatively recent wave of similar patents could point to a new sub-dermal standard in future generations of smartphones and wearables. Spotted by Apple Insider,…
A hacker has reportedly provided journalists with login credentials and other data stolen from the servers of Securus, a company that was recently revealed to be selling cellphone location information to U.S. law enforcement agencies without a warrant. The hacker reportedly provided Motherboard with several internal files, including a database of over 2,800 Securus usernames—primarily…
In a monumental decision that will resonate through election season, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted 52-47 to reinstate the net neutrality protections the Federal Communications Commission decided to repeal last December. For months, procedural red tape has delayed the full implementation of the FCC’s decision to drop Title II protections that prevent internet service…
It takes a lot of electricity to mine bitcoins, and as more miners try to cash in on the crypto craze, the amount of energy required to win new coins increases accordingly. New research suggests the entire bitcoin network could consume as much as 7.7 gigawatts of electricity by the end of this year—enough to…
We tend to associate industrial pollution with the modern era, but human civilizations have been contaminating the planet for thousands of years. By drilling deep into Greenland’s ice sheet, an interdisciplinary team of researchers has chronicled the industrial waste produced by the ancient Greeks and Romans over a 1,900-year period, linking pollution to economic booms,…
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is opening up its free denial-of-service protection program to political groups in the United States, a move that will help political campaigns defend themselves against online attacks during the upcoming election season. The program is known as Project Shield, and it’s run by Jigsaw, a group within Alphabet that focuses on…
The US Senate about to vote on a resolution to nullify new FCC rules that will rollback net neutrality. Overwhelmingly, Republican lawmakers oppose the action, despite the fact that Americans are united against them on this issue. The rules the FCC’s Republican majority voted to overturn in December prohibited internet service providers from throttling or…
The San Francisco District Attorney’s office is partnering with Code for America to trial a new algorithm to hasten clearing marijuana convictions. California’s landmark Proposition 64 opened the door for people with old marijuana convictions to petition to have the charges removed from their record. The algorithm would automatically review the petitions and associated criminal…
Google graced us with a fancy, new Gmail.com last month, and like, great! It’s nice to have new stuff to play with, including a snooze option that should have arrived ages ago, and a smart replies feature I’ll try out but probably never consistently use. But there is one thing about the redesign that’s driving…
Waves of bad news keep crashing down upon Tidal. On Wednesday Dagens Næringsliv, a Norwegian newspaper, reported claims from Norweign record labels that the struggling music service has stopped sending out royalty payments. Music Business Worldwide translated the article, which quoted record executives who said they haven’t received payments since October 2017. Sveinung Rindal, the…
We all have at least one show that we watched as a mistake. Either you were drunk, optimistic, or just curious to see what the dude from college was up to. Whatever your reason, you watched one damn episode and the show has stalked you around Hulu ever since. Now the company is finally fixing…
In its early days, OnePlus was often accused of copying big name phone makers. Insinuations peaked following the launch of the OP3—which some feeling the company was just cribbing from the iPhone. But fast-forward two years later, and now it seems OnePlus has a new design inspiration because the new OnePlus 6 is looking at…
