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A week ago, the British House of Commons asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to fly to London and face questions about the way that the company handles private user data. Facebook just sent a letter back this morning. Zuck’s response? Thanks, but no thanks. We’ll send a lackey. But British lawmakers aren’t giving up. They’ve…
Elon Musk claims his Boring Company, which is currently in the middle of two tunnel-digging projects in Los Angeles and the Washington, D.C. region, will soon be in the business of selling its leftover rocks. In a Twitter post early Monday morning ET, Musk announced that the Boring Company will in the future be selling…
A vulnerability in the way iOS’ camera app handles QR codes could potentially result in users being unknowingly redirected to malicious destinations. Per 9to5Mac, security researcher Roman Mueller of Infosec recently discovered that a flaw in the camera app’s automatic QR code scanning function could result in it displaying a link and then sending users…
An Uber car took an ill-advised turn in San Francisco’s Castro district on Monday and ended up stuck on a concrete staircase with nowhere to go outside a Safeway supermarket. Per Business Insider, the white Toyota Camry got stuck on the pedestrian walkway at around 4:23pm ET (1:23pm local time), and “was driven by a human…
Delta Airlines announced Monday that it’s rolling out biometric entry at its line of airport lounges. With the press of two fingers, Delta members will be able to enter any of Delta’s 50 exclusive lounges for drinks, comfortably unaware of the encroaching dystopian biometric surveillance structure closing around travel. Thanks to a partnership with Clear,…
With a valuation of $20 billion, WeWork is one of the most baffling startups in the tech world. It’s a glorified landlord with an app and some kegs. It’s pretty damn expensive and the spaces it offers are as generic as they come. But if you’re in Tokyo, Hooters has a better flexible workplace solution.…
Illinois’ Cook County, which includes Chicago and surrounding areas, is joining the legal fight against Facebook and Cambridge Analytica over the misuse of data scraped from social media profiles, claiming that both companies violated state fraud law. The lawsuit claims that Cambridge Analytica, which worked on the campaigns of Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Donald…
Facebook is in hot water for both helping turn America’s collective brains into mush and exposing millions of users’ data to shadowy political operators. But now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has an open invitation to tell Congress his side of the story. That is, if he accepts an invitation sent out today by the Senate…
A number of Facebook users discovered over the past few days that the social media company had collected a creepy level of information about their calls and texts. Many users claimed they never gave Facebook permission to gather this information. However, in response to the uproar, Facebook says the “feature” is opt-in only. Basically, the…
A little-known Canadian data firm ensnared by an international investigation into alleged wrongdoing during the Brexit campaign created an election software platform marketed by Cambridge Analytica, according to a batch of internal files obtained exclusively by Gizmodo. Discovered by a security researcher last week, the files confirm that AggregateIQ, a British Columbia-based data firm, developed…
What started out as a super lightweight OS for low-powered laptops, Chrome OS has expanded to run on desktops, pricey 2-in-1s, and even mini PCs, while also adding support for most of your favorite Android apps. But now, it seems Chrome OS is headed to the classroom, in tablet form only, with the oddly named…
In a series of targeted malware attacks that began in 2013, a “cybercrime gang” of hackers stole over a billion euros (or about $1.2 billion) from banks worldwide. On Monday, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) announced they’d arrested the gang’s apparent leader in Spain. In a statement, Europol officials say they…
For a long time it seemed like Facebook and its corral of code-cowboys were untouchable. That illusion has evaporated in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and now, Facebook is officially the target of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation. It’s about damn time, am I right? The FTC investigation is specifically looking into…
A software engineer in Long Island, New York, claims the automatic door on his BMW X5 chopped off his right thumb, and now he is suing the luxury auto manufacturer. The severing occurred on July 6, 2016, when Godwin Boateng was waiting on a friend, reports the New York Post. In Boateng’s suit, he claims…
Few apps are getting as much hype from Google right now as Google Lens, which taps into the machine learning AI that Google is currently so fond of. That AI lets the app recognize all kinds of stuff through your phone’s camera, and take action on it. It’s available now through Google Photos for Android…
If you ask Google whether it has a discrimination problem, the company might point you to its industry-leading diversity efforts or its program for responding to complaints. But employees who challenge that narrative by asserting that it has created anything but a healthy, supportive environment are being labeled troublemakers and, in some instances, pushed out…
We’ve all had to improvise when realizing we’ve run out of clean dishes. A pot becomes a bowl, a ladel a spoon, but finding a substitute for a sharp kitchen knife requires a little more effort. As long as you’ve got a roll of aluminum foil on hand, and some unmatched knife-making skills, however, you’ll…
Not every week makes you thankful to not be a billionaire—or, at least, not a specific, 33-year-old billionaire who still has a ways to go with his media training. Facebook had perhaps its worse week since it began to “serve” us—Mark Zuckerberg’s word, not ours—one that was so bad, the fact that an Uber self-driving…
Facebook may be having a very bad week stateside and in the UK over its Cambridge Analytica data scandal, but over in the continental European Union officials are maintaining that fellow tech giant Google may ultimately need to be broken up, lest it swallow the internet whole. Per the Telegraph, the EU’s competition commissioner Margrethe…
A department of the US State Department dedicated to diplomatic security has reportedly procured a $15,000, Apple TV-sized device its manufacturers advertise as being able to break iPhone encryption in anywhere from two hours to three days. Per Motherboard, public federal procurement documents show that the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security purchased a GrayKey…
