Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
It’s no secret that for just about everyone but Facebook and Google, online ad revenue is on the decline. That’s forced some of the biggest news publications, including The New York Times and The Atlantic, to limit free content and install paywalls. It’s hard to blame them, as quality content deserves fair compensation, however this…
The travel fare website Orbitz said on Tuesday that as many as 880,000 payment cards were impacted by a security breach, warning that hackers may have also accessed the personal information of its customers. The company, which is owned by Expedia, told Gizmodo that it discovered a potential breach on March 1st during an investigation…
Federal lawmakers are now calling for Mark Zuckerberg to personally testify before Congress after bombshell reports revealed late last week that the shadowy political consultancy Cambridge Analytica acquired personal information on as many as 50 million Facebook users, many without their explicit permission. Facebook remains under fire as British and American authorities are demanding an…
Delta is now implicated in the unnerving string of recent dog mishaps that’s rattled America’s skies. On Saturday, the airline was supposed to send a six-week-old dog named Ren from a breeder in Virginia to Boise, Idaho. Instead, the poor pup went to Detroit, where it spent the night, only to be again misrouted to…
Patent infringement suits are usually boring, but the ongoing Tinder vs. Bumble beef is full of soapy, corporate intrigue. Tinder’s parent company, Match Group, launched a patent infringement suit against rival Bumble on Monday. The suit alleges Bumble has stolen numerous design ideas since Tinder’s creation in 2014. CEO Mandy Ginsberg sent an internal memo…
Adam Pickard is a big fan of Ikea’s augmented reality app that lets you try out furniture in your home before buying it. But Pickard apparently thought a smartphone could be just as useful during the assembly process, so he mocked up a demo of an app that uses augmented reality to make building Swedish…
For a short while, listening to popular songs played on old-school calculators was a fun YouTube distraction. Fads come and go a lot faster on the internet, however, which is unfortunate for Casio. It’s releasing an updated version of a popular ‘80s calculator that plays music and a video game—but maybe a few weeks too…
Robotics engineers at Guangdong University of Technology’s School of Automation in China are bringing us one step—albeit a much larger step—closer to realizing Tony Stark’s fictitious Iron Man suit. Their new robot features jet-powered feet that greatly improve the bot’s balance, agility, and capabilities. Unlike Iron Man, who can take to the skies like a…
New research connects a powerful volcanic eruption—and a medieval poem that conjured memories of the dreaded event—to Iceland’s conversion to Christianity. At the turn of the 11th century, Iceland’s settlers formally replaced Odin, Thor, and Freya with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. A new paper published in Climatic Change suggests memories of the Eldgjá lava flood—the…
While Android phone makers have gotten a lot of hate for copying the notch on the iPhone X, not one of them has been able to recreate the tech stashed inside that notch: Face ID. And if a report from Reuters is true, that might not change until sometime in 2019. The problem for Android…
Facebook is having a really bad week. And it just got even worse for CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The British House of Commons has officially sent Zuck a letter asking him to come to London and testify about how he plans to “fix” Facebook. Best of luck with that, mate. The letter, which was just published…
As you may have realized by now, Facebook can’t be trusted with your data, and has been caught out time and time again letting it leak out to places it shouldn’t. If you can’t quite bring yourself to close down your account—maybe there’s a support group or family connections you’d like to keep active—then here’s…
There are some people who might take one look at this photo of Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, and freak the hell out. The Amazon founder is walking with a robotic “dog” called SpotMini—the same robot dog manufactured by Boston Dynamics, which was recently filmed opening doors like a velociraptor out of…
President Donald Trump’s administration issued an executive order on Monday that essentially bans “any transactions within the United States involving any digital currency issued by, for, or on behalf of the Government of Venezuela,” effectively making it illegal to purchase or use the oil-backed Petro cryptocurrency or any others launched by the Venezuelan government after…
Installing updates on Windows has always been a pain in the ass. Not only does Microsoft seem hellbent on forcing users to update their machines whether they want to or not—including in prior versions of Windows 10 a nightmare “feature” that forcibly seized control of users’ systems to start the installation process—the process is infamously…
Facebook has plans to part ways with its chief information security officer Alex Stamos amid an “internal dispute” regarding the “backlash over its role in spreading disinformation,” the New York Times reported on Monday. According to the Times report, Stamos originally made plans to leave in December 2017 when most of his day-to-day duties were…
Sure, you can share your friends’ posts on your Facebook page, or retweet a hot take to your followers on Twitter, but Instagram has been relatively conservative when it comes to letting users publicly redistribute posts on the social network. According to a report from TechCrunch, however, Instagram is testing a feature that makes it…
Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm involved in a scandal with Facebook over misuse of private data, is learning what it’s like to have their privacy invaded. Britain’s information commissioner announced on Monday that she is seeking a warrant to search the company’s office and servers for any evidence of illegal activity. It’s been an…
Two civil rights groups, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Color of Change (COC), have filed a motion asking a judge to force the Department of Homeland Security to un-redact a mysterious document known as the “Race Paper.” Following FOIA requests, the DHS turned over hundreds of pages to CCR and COC, but has…
The same way a human only knows as much as they’ve studied or experienced, an artificial intelligence is only as smart as its training. But unlike a child, you can selectively limit what an AI learns and knows, and then conduct fun experiments about how it sees and interprets the real world using its basic…
