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With Mobile World Congress coming up at the end of the month, the smartphone world is ramping up to peak hype in preparation for the Samsung Galaxy S9’s expected debut there on February 25th. The rumors are flying so we scoured the net and gathered up the most credible leaks and rumors to give you…
Messenger Kids, Facebook’s messaging service for children, is rolling out to Android users today. It’s a bold move, given that the app has gotten a lot of heat since its launch in December. Nearly 100 child health advocates signed a letter to Mark Zuckerberg last month urging him to delete the app, and Wired reported…
Uber is huge and blowing lots of cash to stay huge. Finance reports revealed to investors show the ride sharing titan lost $4.5 billion in 2017, its annus horribilis that began with accusations of heinous sexism and ended with bombshell revelations about a dubiously legal network of spies. Co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick was replaced…
Gary Cooper was one of Hollywood’s most iconic leading men. He starred in classic movies like High Noon (1952), Sergeant York (1941) and For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943) just to name a few. But while Cooper was a conservative Republican, there was a brief moment when the FBI thought he might be a communist.…
Between the Russia scandal, Robert Mueller’s special investigation, and high-ranking officials seemingly stepping down left and right, the United States government hasn’t exactly presented a united front over the past year. However, based on remarks made at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday, it seems there’s still one thing the government can agree on:…
It’s been in the works for nearly a year and Google’s great ad-pocalypse is now upon us. On Thursday, the Chrome browser will begin to automatically filter out ads that don’t meet certain quality standards. Your browsing experience is about to change a little bit. Here’s what you need to know. In April of last…
If you don’t have the need or the budget to upgrade your smartphone, then the next best thing is buying an upgrade for the phone you’ve already got. Cases, battery packs, and wireless charging pads are the obvious calls, but there are a ton of more exciting upgrades out there for you to spend your…
News outlet BuzzFeed is suing the Democratic National Committee in an effort to get it to disclose more information about how Russian hackers allegedly penetrated its email system in 2016 as part of an effort to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign in favor of Donald Trump, Vanity Fair reported on Tuesday. According to the Vanity Fair…
Google is rolling out a bevy of new open-source Accelerated Mobile Page tools for developers this week, coming in two flavors: AMP for email and AMP Stories. While anyone who reads news online might have already seen AMP articles, these new tools have the potential to shape what people see and do online in Google’s…
Shaq + Magic Leap = “we’re still not giving you any new details.” Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz and NBA Commissioner sat down for a Q&A at Recode’s Code Media Conference on Tuesday night. Anyone hoping to get more information about or demos of the secretive mixed reality device was quickly let down. Abovitz made…
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Independence Day, 1966. The act, he wrote, sprung from a principle that is “essential” to the nation: “A democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the nation will permit.” Only national security, Johnson said,…
Back when a brand-new company called Google was getting its first trickle of angel investment from the likes of Jeff Bezos and others, early netizens could already use a service called G-mail in 1998. Mainly, it was used by fans of a certain obese, lasagna-loving cartoon cat. Well before Google debuted its now-ubiquitous email service…
It doesn’t matter if you have your Facebook profile set to private—you can still be required to hand over your photos and messages during a lawsuit, a New York appeals court ruled today. The seven-judge panel unanimously ruled that a woman who was injured in a horse riding accident and subsequently became a recluse has…
On Monday, Trump administration Budget Director Mick Mulvaney pitched a major revamping of the nation’s food stamp program he called “Blue Apron-type program” food stamp recipients, SNAP recipients, a characterization obediently repeated in headlines run by more than half a dozen news outlets. Here’s the thing: The only thing that makes the plan like Blue…
In a strangely transcendental moment during Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, CEO and quinquagenarian Tim Cook told the company’s investors today that he is “hoping to be alive to see the elimination of money.” At the time, Cook wasn’t expressing a belief in the transience of all material things, but addressing the company’s mobile payment solution,…
If you glue two matches together, you’ll find the sticks won’t be parallel to each other because the match heads at the top are slightly thicker. If you keep on going, and eventually glue 42,000 of them together, you’ll end up with a giant sphere that produces a fantastic chain reaction of fire when you…
On August 3, 2016, seven kilometers above Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, a research plane captured something mysterious: an atmospheric aerosol particle enriched with the kind of uranium used in nuclear fuel and bombs. It’s the first time scientists have detected such a particle just floating along in the atmosphere in 20 years of plane-based observations. Uranium…
The typical patent troll scheme goes like this: buy silly patent; find big company using tech similar to patent; sue big company; get nice payout from big company that doesn’t want to waste time fighting a dumb patent case; repeat. That’s exactly the routine a Boston company called Blackbird Technologies has followed. For several years,…
Facebook really wants you to make it “FB official,” send your loved one a fuck-ton of cascading hearts, communicate in heart-eyes emoji, and keep tabs on your partner’s availability to chat. It’s almost as if Facebook has a fundamental misunderstanding of how people are using its platform. The social network announced on Tuesday that it…
Zoom in close on the center of the picture above, and you can spot something you perhaps never thought you’d be able to see: a single atom. Here is a close-up if, you’re having trouble: This strontium atom is emitting light after being excited by a laser, and it’s the winner of the UK’s Engineering…
