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Despite a big splash that had at least one asshole waiting in line for 5 hours just for the opportunity to buy a pair, the original Snap Spectacles were a flop. Snap sold only about 150,000 pairs and was forced to write off $40 million dollars in costs “related to Spectacles inventory.” Many companies would,…
In the hopes of catching whomever has been attacking Google and Apple buses in Northern California, officers are reportedly serving themselves up as bait. According to ABC7 News, the California Highway Patrol has deployed a “decoy bus” to catch the perp (or perps) in action. As of mid-January, CHP was aware of five incidents involving…
Not so long ago, being able to click a button and have the goods of your choice delivered to your front door in a day (or less) would’ve seemed like some kind of black magic—but as convenient as online shopping is, it does come with its own set of frustrations and problems. Here’s how to…
The 1985 Master Development Plan for the city of Las Vegas included a cover illustration straight out of Tron. It’s unclear who designed it, but if it wasn’t Syd Mead himself, it was someone who clearly took a lot of inspiration from the legendary artist. You can see the resemblance to Syd Mead’s work instantly.…
This week, a Fox News contributor claimed that the US Navy SEALs had tested the border wall prototypes near San Diego and couldn’t breach them. It sounded too incredible to be true. And that’s because it wasn’t true. “Special Forces operatives and members of our Navy SEAL community were asked to try and breach the…
Yesterday, the internet’s favorite code repository, GitHub, was hit by a record 1.35-terabits-per-second denial-of-service attack—the most powerful recorded so far. Yet, the website only endured a few minutes of intermittent downtime. The attacker, likely realizing their efforts were for naught, withdrew after less than an hour. GitHub was able to suffer the attack and keep…
It turns out, one of Facebook’s biggest News Feed experiments last year only made the service worse. Last October, the Guardian reported that Facebook was testing significant changes to its News Feed. For users in six countries, Facebook moved nearly all non-promoted posts from pages and publishers out of the main News Feed into a…
It’s been a wild week for InfoWars’s DC bureau chief Jerome Corsi. On Tuesday, Corsi, a proponent of the QAnon and Obama birther conspiracies, was riding high after being printed in USA Today, the country’s highest-circulating paper. Today, he was kicked off YouTube for life. Terminations usually require three “strikes,” each strike removing features from…
Rick Smith, the founder and CEO of Axon (formerly Taser), offered a bold new strategy for preventing school shootings on Thursday: approach the problem like a hackathon. In a letter to the President and an appearance on CNBC, he called for a national “Grand Challenge on School Safety,” a DARPA-funded contest where tech companies would…
Jack Dorsey, CEO of the turd pile we can’t stop pressing our collective faces into day after unbearable day, appeared to take some responsibility for Twitter’s unique ability to bring out the worst in human behavior in a thirteen (13!) part thread today. Let’s get to the bottom of what these statements might mean: We’re…
Those giant, curvy, concrete towers that rise above nuclear power plants aren’t only useful for cooling superheated water. Once decommissioned, the massive structures can also be used to naturally create amazing sounds and effects when playing instruments inside them. That’s what a band called Thunderpussy discovered while recording a performance inside one of the two…
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s crypto-fascist National Front party, could be required to pay a $90,000 fine and spend up to three years in prison for tweets she sent in 2015 that showed images of executions by ISIS, according to the Associated Press: French prosecutors filed preliminary charges Thursday against far-right leader Marine…
Equifax announced new details on Thursday regarding the personal consumer data stolen during its disastrous data breach last year. Previously undisclosed, the credit reporting agency said it had now identified approximately 2.4 million US consumers whose names and driver’s license information were stolen. In the “vast majority of cases,” the company said, the driver’s license…
I’m not going to lie, despite all the hype about 5G and new phones announced at MWC 2018, it still felt kind of like a down year. LG didn’t have much, HTC, Xiaomi, and Motorola were essentially no shows, and while I appreciate that Samsung went hard on the S9’s camera, aside from a new…
The engines are already pulling away by the time we get to a reported dryer fire. There won’t be any footage of flames lapping up from the basement or smoke inhalation victims being wheeled into ambulances through the drizzling gloom—not tonight anyway. The rain makes shootings unlikely too, in Adam’s opinion, but there might be…
The European Union really wants tech companies to get their shit together when it comes to policing content on their platforms. On Thursday, it issued new guidelines for how companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook should handle illegal content on its European websites: quickly, proactively, and with human oversight. The European Commission, the EU’s executive…
A drunk New Jersey native reportedly went out with friends in Morgantown, West Virginia, last Friday, and then called an Uber to take him home. Kenny Bachman says he thought he was going back to the place he was staying during his trip, near the West Virginia University Campus. Except, the Uber driver took Bachman…
Your smart speaker is getting smarter—and part of that involves taking over what’s on the big TV screen sat in the corner of your living room. You can buy Google Homes and Amazon Echos with screens built-in, but here’s how to use them with a separate display, whether you want to watch movies or see…
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual address to the country’s Federal Assembly today, showing off some impressive new weapons in the process. One of the concept videos even showed a nuclear strike using multiple warheads against the United States. The video depicts Florida, to be exact—the site of President Trump’s private club in Palm…
Stockholm-based streaming giant Spotify finally made it official and filed documents for its much-rumored plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, pursuing the unusual option of a direct listing instead of a traditional IPO. Per the New York Times, that process is one “in which no new stock is issued—and…
