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If you grew up in the ‘80s watching G.I. Joe and playing with the toys, you undoubtedly remember the Rattler, Cobra’s workhorse fighter plane. The original toy version was powered by imagination, but Adam Woodworth’s upgraded version—which actually flies—is instead powered by servos and ducted fan engines. Instead of trying to get the re-released version…
Before I went curling last month with my partner’s family at the Grand Forks Curling Club in North Dakota, I figured that getting the basics down would be simple enough. Push a heavy rock hard enough to get it to the other side of the ice, and that’s it, right? Wrong. I was in for…
If you’re living your life away from power outlets than at some point you’ll need to invest in an external battery pack. Only not all batteries are the same. Aside from the various ports you might see on one, such as USB Type-A, micro USB or USB Type-C, it’s also critical to consider the kind…
On Tuesday, the British government announced that it plans to release a new AI it claims can detect 94 percent of ISIS propaganda videos with 99.995 percent accuracy. The UK’s Home Office says that platforms can use its AI to scan videos as they’re being uploaded, detecting terrorist content and blocking it from ever appearing…
Bill Gates thinks Silicon Valley isn’t worried enough about government regulation. In a new interview, he warned that big tech companies are being reckless in their support for end-to-end encryption, and he made some cryptic comments about Apple. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual letter on Tuesday, and Bill gave a brief…
2018 has gotten off to a rough start for Huawei, the world’s third largest smartphone maker. Just before the company’s CEO made a keynote speech at CES, AT&T pulled out of a partnership that would have put Huawei’s flagship in the stores of a major US carrier for the first time. A month later, Verizon…
Whoa, hold on there, person about to exchange money for movies or music—do you know how much free stuff is out there on the web, all legally released and available for anyone to listen to or watch? If you want to spend less on your entertainment budget and maybe discover some interesting new stuff at…
Police in West Yorkshire, England are rolling out mobile fingerprint scanners to instantly identify criminal suspects and people “experiencing a medical emergency.” 250 mobile devices are being deployed in West Yorkshire and the British government says the tech will come to 20 police departments across the country by the end of this year. The scanners…
Facebook is reportedly trying to be more than just the landing page for conspiracy theories and election propaganda—it wants you to come for the videos, baby. It’s a play to rival YouTube, but its CEO, Susan Wojcicki, doesn’t seem too threatened. Wojcicki told Recode’s Kara Swisher during its Code Media conference on Monday, according to…
The photos from most smartphones have gotten so good nowadays, they have basically killed the market for point-and-shoot cameras. That said sometimes you need a zoom. For people wanting to push image quality a little higher, there’s still value in a small, compact camera with a (relatively) big sensor and a long reach. That’s exactly…
If you saw that video of a robot skillfully opening a door yesterday, you might think that the robot uprising is just around the corner. But this new video of skiing robots falling on their faces might help you sleep at night. Or at least give you a good laugh. The video comes from the…
Uber has implemented a mandate that its drivers must take at least six hours of time off every time they work at least 12 consecutive hours, the Washington Post reported on Monday, as part of an initiative to crack down on drowsy driving that might result in potentially deadly crashes. The Post reported that within…
Twitter, the social media website best known for ignoring its abuse problem until it metastasized into a full-blown presidency, has as of late been trying to change its image. It’s stripped some far-right and white supremacist users of their verified badges and banned others, as well as rolled out what it says is harsher enforcement…
For quite some time, Verizon has been the go-to major carrier if you wanted to buy an unlocked phone in the US. That’s because Verizon agreed to sell its devices unlocked after winning an auction of wireless spectrum offered by the FCC in 2008. But according to a report from CNET, Verizon’s policy is changing.…
Repeat after me: “The IRS does not initiate contact with taxpayers by email, text messages, or social media channels.” Good. Armed with this knowledge you should be able to quickly spot if you’re about to fall victim to a ransomware attack. Per Bleeping Computer, malicious spam currently circulating via email, purportedly from the “Internet Revenue…
Although clearly a clever artist in his own right, James Nolan Gandy shows that even the artistically-challenged can produce a masterpiece with some clever engineering. But just as impressive as Gandy’s drawing machines is this timelapse of one in action that makes it appear to draw faster than it actually moves. What you’re seeing in…
Facebook is not a privacy company; it’s Big Brother on PCP. It does not want to anonymize and protect you; it wants to drain you of your privacy, sucking up every bit of personal data. You should resist the urge to let it, at every turn. There’s a new menu item in the Facebook app,…
Everyone knows what you post online is never truly gone, but rarely are attempts to scrub something from the web quite this ironic—or infuriating. Last week, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers History Center tweeted out an apology to author Safiya Umoja Noble after one of its historians shared a glaringly insulting criticism of…
The first time we saw Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini robo-dog in action, it used its gripping arm to help load a dishwasher. But after getting a fancy new yellow coat a few months ago, SpotMini has apparently since learned how to open doors, enabling the robot, and its comrades, to escape a life of servitude. https://gizmodo.com/boston-dynamics-made-a-robot-baby-giraffe-that-can-do-y-1782491650…
A new review of face recognition software found that, when identifying gender, the software is most accurate for men with light skin and least accurate for women with dark skin. Joy Buolamwini, an MIT Media Lab researcher and computer scientist, tested three commercial gender classifiers offered as part of face recognition services. As she found,…
