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It’s still weird, isn’t it? German Chancellor Angela Merkel is palling around with robots at every opportunity, with her most recent robo-encounter happening just yesterday on ‘Girl’s Day’ at the chancellery in Berlin. Does Merkel know something that we don’t about the impending robot uprising? Probably. Will she finally tell us what’s going on? Almost…
The US Air Force conducted America’s first successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test of the year, firing an unarmed Minuteman III from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California yesterday morning. The missile landed in the Pacific Ocean at an undisclosed location. The test comes in the wake of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un proclaiming…
Google has partnered with the Drug Enforcement Administration to mark locations where people can safely dispose of excess prescription drugs on its Maps platform, the company announced in a blog post on Wednesday. The search giant wrote that prescription drugs are a driver of opioid addiction and that the “majority of abused prescription drugs are…
The voracious hell mouth of Twitter opened up on Wednesday and promptly swallowed whole hip hop artist, mogul, and level one RPG character Kanye West, who spent much of the day in an increasingly ill-advised tweetstorm praising and declaring his “dragon energy” brotherhood with President Donald Trump. While this was all going on, Twitter users…
Yelp’s algorithms are being criticized after search results implied Korean and Chinese restaurants were serving diners dogs and cats. In cities across the US, Yelp suggested Korean and Chinese restaurants when “dog meat” or “cat meat” was entered into the search bar, alluding to a longstanding stereotype about East Asian restaurants in America. The Tampa…
Digg has been sold by its former owner, Betaworks, to ad-tech company BuySellAds for an undisclosed amount. The story, first reported by FastCompany, comes nearly a month after the news aggregation site shut down its RSS client Digg Reader. You could call this sale the death of an internet icon, but that happened when the…
In its latest display of public penitence in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook released a new ad today acknowledging past fuckups while promising to do better. Titled “Facebook Here Together”—an apparent reference to our everlasting blood pact with the social media giant—the video serves as the company’s most explicit admission yet that,…
In 2017, the US Department of Commerce fined ZTE almost $900 million for violating sanctions by illegally shipping US goods to Iran. Then, last week the DoC stepped up the punishment after ZTE failed to fully comply with its restrictions by slapping a ban on ZTE, preventing it from purchasing parts and components from all…
China’s state-owned aerospace corporation is embarking on a plan that would see tens of thousands of fuel-burning, cloud-seeding chambers dispersed across the Tibetan Plateau in an attempt to increase rainfall in the region. It sounds impressive, but it’s an open question as to whether this extensive rain-making system will even work, or how it may…
A leaky database discovered online contains a wealth of sensitive data belonging to thousands of investors in Bezop cryptocurrency, including photocopies their driver’s licenses and passports, according to a report from Kromtech Security. Kromtech announced on Wednesday that Bezop, which offers its own cryptocurrency “tokens” in addition to… some sort of blockchain-based e-commerce app, left…
On Wednesday, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) released a report singling out 12 companies that most put their workers at risk, and Amazon and Tesla both made the list. “Every day there are workers who don’t come home to their families because of tragedies we know could have been prevented,”…
Amazon Logistics acted discriminatorily and unlawfully fired a former senior human resources administrator, a suit filed in Florida’s Southern District Court alleges. The HR staffer, Jorge Mejia, started performing HR duties for Amazon Logistics in late 2014, working a “flexible” schedule. But nearly three years later, when Mejia claims all other senior HR admins would…
Google may have paused development on Allo, but it seems the company can’t quite quit its habit of churning out apps just to keeps the wheels moving. Today it launched Google Tasks on Android and iOS, which actually rises above Google’s overloaded app cycle thanks to a clean UI and handy integration with Gmail and…
Security experts often warn that it’s much easier for hackers to compromise a device if they have physical access to it. This security scenario is often referred to as an “evil maid” attack, the idea being that an attacker could sneak into a target’s hotel room and tamper with his laptop while he’s out of…
Earlier this year, the Chinese government reportedly outlined plans to limit energy use by cryptocurrency miners and encourage their “orderly” exit from the industry. In the wake of intensified crackdown efforts, some of China’s largest miners opened operations abroad, but it seems at least one mining group tried to operate underground instead. On Tuesday, police…
Shen Yue works as a “programmer motivator” at a consumer finance company in China. As the name suggests, her job is to inspirit programmers at her company, which involves chatting them up, coordinating social activities, and even giving them massages, according to a recent report from the New York Times. Ms. Shen is 25-years-old with…
Scientists in Sweden have completed a preliminary investigation of one of the most disturbing archaeological sites to be uncovered in recent memory. Over 1,500 years ago, scores of villagers were mercilessly killed in their homes by an unknown band of marauders, who left the bodies where they fell. And inexplicably, the killers refrained from collecting…
Google has officially announced the new look that’s coming to Gmail.com after images of its redesign leaked a few days prior. The revamp brings with it, besides a much-need paint job, some long-awaited features that users could only get through third-party email clients. The visual refresh puts Gmail in line with the rest of Google’s…
Popular in Turkey and parts of Asia, ebru is a unique form of painting that swaps a canvas for a liquid-filled pan that’s sprinkled and splattered with vibrant colored pigments. Using specialized tools, unique patterns can be created by carefully mixing the floating pigments through a process that might be even more satisfying than the…
The age of digital assistants is already here, and with them, we have easy-to-use disembodied voices that attempt to answer our every beck and call. However, sometimes those answers aren’t exactly things you’d want a child to hear (Warning: NSFW audio), so Amazon went and created a version of Alexa specifically meant for kids. Starting…
