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A Southwest Airlines flight traveling from Chicago to Newark, New Jersey, was forced to make an emergency landing in Cleveland today. The cause was reportedly a cracked window, an eerie reminder of the emergency landing last month when a Southwest engine exploded, breaking a window and killing a passenger. Photos posted to social media show…
Our species, Homo sapiens, weren’t the first humans to leave Africa—not by a long shot. The remarkable discovery of a 709,000-year-old butchered rhino fossil in the Philippines shows that so-called archaic humans were romping around the islands of southeast Asia a full 400,000 years before our species even existed. That premodern humans had made their…
The only thing more terrifying than being stuck on a roller coaster, is being stuck at the highest part of the ride. And the only thing more terrifying than that is if it happens to be one of those coasters where you’re hanging upside down from a harness, leaving nothing but 98-feet of free-fall space between…
Just when you thought all data breaches amounted to hacker shenanigans, the largest bank in Australia has belatedly confirmed a different sort of breach story. BuzzFeed reports that the Commonwealth Bank lost 12 million customers’ data after magnetic tape backups containing their personal financial history from 2004 to 2014 went missing. It just lost them.…
Facebook’s consistent lack of transparency has helped fuel the pernicious notion that the company deliberately censors conservative views, and the problem has reached a boiling point. Now, the company is reportedly launching an internal probe of potential conservative bias and it will be led by a man who’s spread fake news that just won’t die.…
On Monday, Facebook said that it was investigating claims that one if its security engineers was using their data access privileges to stalk women online. Facebook confirmed to Gizmodo that the employee has been fired. “We are investigating this as a matter of urgency,” Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos told NBC News on Tuesday.…
The walls of your house keep the roof up, give your family some privacy, and maybe provide a place to hang some art. But researchers at Disney and Carnegie Mellon University have come up with a way for walls to do more. A cheap paint treatment turns them into giant sensors, creating new ways to…
Hulu subscribers are soon going to be able to watch their favorite shows offline. On Wednesday Hulu announced that the streaming service has plans to offer a new, “ad-supported downloadable content experience” sometime “during the 2018-19 upfront season.” Subscribers will finally be able to watch programming without being tied to an internet connection, but Hulu…
Another day, another company snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This time it’s Nokia, as the company has decided to sell its health division— formerly known as Withings—which it purchased for $191 million in 2016. The sale itself seemed inevitable, and its price undisclosed, but its buyer is a huge surprise: the original co-founder…
Mathematician Kokichi Sugihara, of Meiji University in Japan, once again proves he’s the greatest illusion inventor of our time. Instead of just creating mind-melting images, he creates real-life 3D objects that appear to ignore the laws of our universe. How can this arrow, that perpetually points right, no matter how you turn it, actually exist?…
LG Mobile is in a rut. Over the last two and a half years, its smartphone division has posted losses totaling over $1.5 billion, and a big reason for the company’s struggles has been poor sales of its flagship phones. When you look back to 2016, the LG G5 was doomed from the start. It…
Security researchers are warning that malware with suspected links to Russian cyber-espionage group and alleged Democratic National Committee hackers Fancy Bear is turning up in installations of Lojack, an anti-computer theft program used by many corporations to guard their assets. On Tuesday, researchers with Arbor Networks’ ASERT lab said in a new report that they…
United Airlines has announced that it will allow cats and dogs to travel in the cargo holds of its planes again starting this summer. Earlier this year, the airline suspended its cargo hold pet program following two high-profile incidents involving dogs on its flights, one of which died. United is partnering with American Humane, an…
Vulnerabilities in two applications widely used by manufacturers and power plant operators may have given hackers a foothold in America’s critical infrastructure, prior to being discovered by a Maryland-based cybersecurity firm. Tenable announced Wednesday that flaws in two human-machine interface (HMI) tools developed by Schneider Electric, a global energy management and automation company, are being…
For all the tortuous interactions with now-President Donald Trump that Apple CEO Tim Cook has endured over the past few years, in late April he was still making the rounds at fancy White House events—probably because his company has, all told, been a major beneficiary of Republican-backed tax cuts. On Tuesday, Apple revealed where a…
Code repository GitHub warned “a select number of users” on Tuesday that due to a flaw in its password reset system, the company had stored their passwords in plain text on internal logs. Per BleepingComputer, the site says this security flaw was discovered during “regular auditing” and no one but a small number of GitHub…
Mark Zuckerberg may have ditched the dark suit he wore during his congressional appearances last month, but the serious data-privacy and election-security issues raised during his testimony are still very much on his mind. Zuckerberg said it to members of the House and Senate in mid-April and repeated it to a convention center packed with…
Telegram has been putting up an impressive fight against the governments of Russia and Iran in high-profile efforts to censor the messaging service over the last few weeks. But we’ve heard little about its fellow encrypted messaging app Signal. Both services have used an anti-censorship technique called “domain fronting” to get around tyrants—and now, Google…
Snapchat’s big, controversial redesign—the one that really put us in our place by separating our social from our media—doesn’t appear to have done the app much good. Snapchat still has 191 million daily users, but things aren’t looking up for the company that Facebook has done everything in its power to destroy. Snapchat is growing…
It’s still unclear who, exactly, has been begging to give Facebook even more intimate data, but the social giant’s newly announced dating features nevertheless pose a significant threat to other online dating businesses. News of Facebook Dating sent shares of the Match Group (the parent company of Tinder, OkCupid and Match.com) tumbling on Tuesday, and…
