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States around the country are considering legislation to preserve the net neutrality protections that were recently repealed by the FCC, but Connecticut won’t be one of them. That’s because Republican state senators there used a procedural technicality to kill one such piece of legislation in committee. Last week, Connecticut’s Energy and Technology Committee took up consideration…
Bans on phones in schools are increasingly becoming a thing of the past, new research shows. A survey from the National Center for Education Statistics exploring crime and safety at schools indicates that there is a trend toward relaxing student smartphone bans. The survey reports that the percentage of public schools that banned cell phones…
Snapchat’s parent company Snap may be in the fiscal shitter, but Snapchat’s still an incredibly popular app: Last we heard, 187 million people (teens) use it daily. For those folks, as well as Instagram’s uninspired product team, Snapchat is adding a new group video chat feature akin to what’s already available on WhatsApp and Skype.…
1-Click ordering a massively discounted flat-screen TV, or seventy pounds of coarse-grained salt, it can be easy to forget, or temporarily repress, all those stories you’ve read about, say, working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses, or its propagation of the gig economy through contract labor. The same applies, of course, to Uber rides, or Big Macs.…
Sumner Redstone, the 94-year-old billionaire media tycoon, is in failing health. He’s unable to speak, but is still in the headlines due to his voting stakes in both CBS and Viacom. So how will he communicate when it comes to the upcoming CBS-Viacom merger? He’s reportedly got an iPad equipped with phrases like “yes,” “no,”…
You will be forgiven if you’ve been perplexed by Intel’s 8th generation Core computer processors. Back in October 2017 I called this 8th-gen “a confusing Frankenstein-like monster” and that still holds true! The generation is a mishmash of microarchitectures cobbled together under a single umbrella term of “8th Generation,” and the processors have slowly trickled…
The i9 designation is reserved for Intel’s fastest processors that can go in a desktop you or your friend (and not a multimillion dollar business) might own. These things are very fast—with up to 18 cores in each processor, capable of running 32 threads simultaneously. The i9 processors, which were first introduced back in the…
Praise Intel for its CPUs all you want, but for my money the coolest thing Intel is doing right now is in the storage space. I know. What a yawn, storage. But upgrading your storage is one of the absolutely best ways to improve the performance of your computer, and Intel providing support for its…
Even your damn bread bowl is now a security risk. Panera Bread left the information of up to 37 million customers who signed up for delivery and other services including “names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and the last four digits of the customer’s credit card number” in plain text format accessible via its web…
Sohrab “Sam” Sharma and Robert Farkas were the operators of an initial coin offering that—according to a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint filed today in the District Court of Southern New York—fleeced investors out of more than $32 million though a business called Centra Tech. Inc. What led to Farkas’s arrest yesterday while trying to…
The InfoWars crew is facing yet another lawsuit, this time for alleged defamation over a blog published on the site that falsely implicated a Massachusetts man in the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The conspiracy site run by Alex Jones drums up millions of views by concocting wild…
Russia’s inaugural parcel delivery drone crashed into a wall on Monday, stunning residents and politicians gathered at the ceremony christening its first flight. According to Reuters, the drone, with estimated cost of about $20,000, hovered for only “several seconds” before crashing into a wall and crumbling into pieces. No one was hurt in the crash.…
The Apple Watch has been a niche product from the beginning, but its health and fitness tracking features have started to catch on with the public. One overlooked feature, however, is that it can be useful for police trying to track down a victim’s murderer. According to the Australian Associated Press, Myrna Nilsson, 57, was…
If you’re a kid in one of 16 selected US school districts, get ready to browse the web from the comfort of your seatbelt-eschewing school bus. Google’s latest educational endeavor is an expansion of its Rolling Study Halls initiative, which provides students in rural areas access to Chromebooks and Wi-Fi-equipped buses so they can get…
Piling onto months of rumors, Mark Gurman and Ian King of Bloomberg News are reporting that Apple plans to move to Apple-built CPUs for its computers, ending the use of Intel CPUs in Apple hardware. Apple is currently the third-largest maker of computers in the US and the loss for Intel would be significant. But…
A post on Google’s Chromium blog today makes it clear: The search giant won’t allow any new cryptocurrency mining extensions on its browser’s web store, and those already on it will soon get the boot. Google’s Play Store has been laden with phony crypto-based apps that have developed a reputation for robbing the people who…
It was recently revealed that Facebook lost control of 50 million users private data and it ended up in the hands of a sleazy political data analytics company. Then Mark Zuckerberg took five days to acknowledge the scandal. Now, Zuck is on a media tour and he’s refining his ruminative, valueless answers by the day.…
The plan to 3D-print a bridge in mid-air was always bonkers. How could a technology best known for creating flimsy prototypes and personalized action figures be used for permanent construction projects? Well, the team at MX3D in Amsterdam just answered all of the hard questions and revealed it: the world’s first 3D-printed bridge. It’s made…
Popular gay dating app Grindr has been sharing users’ HIV statuses with third parties without informing users, BuzzFeed reported Monday. Researchers at Norwegian nonprofit SINTEF found that the popular hookup app had shared sensitive personal information, including users’ HIV status, GPS data, and the last time they were tested for the virus, with multiple third-party…
Did you ever record a video on Facebook to post directly to your friend’s wall, only to discard the take and film a new version? You may have thought those embarrassing draft versions were deleted, but Facebook kept a copy. The company is blaming it on a “bug” and swears that it’s going to delete…
