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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says that the company plans to put self-driving cars back on the road “within the next few months.” The transportation company suspended tests in March after one of its vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. The incident is believed to be the first human death from an autonomous car.…
Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen is starting to take heat from the big guy himself over a brewing scandal involving a shady front company that bears every outward appearance of a thinly veiled pay-to-play scheme peddling whatever influence Cohen had on the president. Reports have indicated that a number of companies including AT&T and…
Newly minted National Security Adviser and possible evil mustache mind-controlling a man’s body John Bolton thinks that cybersecurity issues are a big waste of time, according to a Wednesday report in Politico, and is pushing to eliminate the top White House job dealing with it. Politico writes that Bolton wants to “abolish the role of…
A burned-out husk of a home in San Jose, California that looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie—but which happens to be close to the proposed site of the $67 million Google Village lots—has sold for far more than its original listing price of $800,000. Real estate listings show that the fire-ravaged shack (as…
New York is big, bewildering, and complicated. When I first moved to this city, I didn’t quite grasp the subway despite my eagerness to learn. I took public transportation to the wrong boroughs, got lost each time I set foot in Brooklyn, and accidentally sent at least a handful of trusting tourists off in the…
A recently published patent filed by Nike depicts a new “rotatable conveyor element” designed to help people put on their shoes. Essentially a tiny treadmill, the proposed device is a conveyer belt that’s embedded in a shoe’s insole and “configured to rotatably engage a body part of the wearer as the foot enters the space and…
Multiple outlets are reporting that the $200,000 payment AT&T admitted it made to an obscure shell company owned by Donald Trump’s “fixer” is actually several times that amount. The payment raises numerous questions about pay-to-play deals, and AT&T is scrambling to make it all seem perfectly normal. On Tuesday, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, released…
When trucks full of stuff flip, they sometimes spill their contents on the ground. Sometimes it’s money. Sometimes it’s a ton of skittles. This time it’s warm, brown goo. A truck spilled tons of liquid chocolate along a highway in western Poland on Wednesday, initially blocking six lanes of traffic, the Associated Press reports. This might…
Ireland is less than two weeks out from a historic vote on its abortion referendum, and anti-choice groups have been trying to manipulate people online in order to sway their decision. And tech companies are just now restricting some of these efforts. Most recently, Google announced that it would suspend all ads related to the…
When the Department of Commerce slapped a seven-year ban on ZTE, blocking it from buying or using components made by U.S. companies, things looked bad for the world’s fifth-largest smartphone maker. Though until ZTE had a chance to sort things out, we didn’t know exactly what the full impact would be. However, based on a…
Democrats on Wednesday officially filed a petition to force a vote in the Senate to save net neutrality. With a single Republican supporting the effort, only one vote is needed to advance a resolution that may one day soon reinstate the net neutrality rules overturned by the FCC last year. “The American people know that…
Well this is odd. It looks like Yahoo is releasing a new messaging app. The invite-only service is called Squirrel, as Android Police reports, and honestly it looks a lot like Slack, but with a focus on families instead of office productivity. It might turn out to be a huge hit, just a new, creepy…
The five year long struggle to free a pair of captive chimps in the state of New York has finally come to an end. Yesterday, New York’s highest court denied an appeal by the Nonhuman Rights Project, but one of the judges was clearly unsatisfied with the ruling, pointing out deficiencies in the legal system’s…
For grassroots pro-choice organizations, visibility is a double-edged sword. This was especially clear during the National Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon cyberattack two years ago. For the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), which led the event, more visibility meant the potential to raise more money to help those in need of abortion access. It also made…
At a time when every tech company is desperate to avoid news that third-parties got their hands on user data without their knowledge, Apple is reportedly cracking down on app developers who’ve been transmitting users’ locations without their consent. The practice has long been part of Apple’s guidelines, but apparently wasn’t being properly enforced. According…
A bevy of secure messaging options exist to serve the needs of whistleblowers, journalists, and those wanting greater privacy in general, and among them Signal has become one of the most trusted. It even comes baked in with “disappearing” messages that users can set to self-destruct anywhere from five seconds to one week after they’re…
Bad apps are draining your battery life, sucking up your local storage, and causing your devices to crash more often than they should—and the worst part is, you might not realize who the worst offenders are. Here’s how to track down badly behaving apps on the major desktop and mobile platforms, and kick them to…
Tidal, the Jay-Z-backed streaming service that is supposed to put artists first, might’ve gone a bit overboard with that mantra. The Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv reports that in 2016 the streaming service falsified and inflated streaming numbers for Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo and Beyoncé’s Lemonade albums. The disputed numbers in question were that…
President Trump announced yesterday that he was unilaterally pulling the U.S. out of the so-called Iran Deal, an international agreement that lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for the cessation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But now that the sanctions are being reinstated, some American companies stand to lose a lot of money. Boeing alone…
Apple’s latest move in its ongoing war of words with the FBI, National Security Agency, and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies over encryption is a feature that turns off USB data access on locked iOS devices. According to TechCrunch and MacRumors, Elcomsoft researchers recently discovered a feature called “USB Restricted Mode” hidden in the…
