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There’s another Amazon Prime price hike coming, but it will only affect certain people. Monthly Prime members will soon see their fee jump from $11 to $13, though they can still cancel at any time without penalties. Meanwhile, students paying for monthly Prime will see an increase from $5.50 to $6.50. That might not seem…
Astronaut Jeanette Epps, slated to be the first African-American crew member on board the International Space Station, will not be flying in 2018, according to a NASA announcement. Epps was slated to be a flight engineer on board the station in a mission scheduled to launch in May. She will instead assume duties in the…
We’re all fans of new gadgets, whether cutting-edge TVs or flagship smartphones, but you shouldn’t let your lust for shiny hardware overwhelm your common sense—there’s more to every purchase than a product name and a bottom line price. Here are the five mistakes people make that lead to wasted money and terrible buyer’s remorse when…
A shadowy hacking campaign has been operating out of a Beirut building owned by the Lebanese General Directorate of General Security for the last six years, stealing text messages, call logs, and files from journalists, military members, corporations, and other targets in 21 countries, according to a joint report released today by cybersecurity firm Lookout…
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently did not buy a 350-foot yacht as initially claimed by this post. The Hürriyet Daily News, which first reported that Zuckerberg purchased the vessel, deleted its story from its website after a spokesperson repeatedly denied to various media outlets that Zuckerberg had bought the boat. There’s no evidence that he…
A batch of never-before-seen FBI files on late Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes, obtained exclusively by Gizmodo and nonprofit Property of the People, reveals new details about the powerful and controversial media figure who died last year amid multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. A former media consultant to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon…
Contrary to what you might assume after hate-browsing Facebook, it seems the internet may have actually made people less dogmatic about religion. A recent study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion has found evidence that the more we use the internet, the less likely we are to have a specific religious…
Update, 4:00pm: President Trump in a tweet Friday afternoon said that he had signed the FISA bill into law, renewing the Section 702 warrantless surveillance program. In a 65-34 vote on Thursday, the US Senate voted to reauthorize a controversial warrantless surveillance program intended to grant American spy agencies the authority to collect emails and…
It’s been four days since the Sanchi Iranian oil tanker sank in the East China Sea, and officials are carefully monitoring the ensuing spill, which has now spread into four distinct slicks. The toxic spill now encompasses an area 40 square miles in size, threatening local marine wildlife and the coasts of Japan and South…
It’s a sickness. Whether it’s repeatedly checking for new likes on a pic or mindlessly scrolling through your feed, Instagram can be a tremendously addictive app. And just in time to help feed your habit, Instagram has instituted a new “activity status” feature that shows you the last time someone was actively using the service.…
Travis Kalanick groveled on the floor before Uber executives last February, according to a new in-depth report on the company co-founder’s fall. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that the incident happened during a meeting in a San Francisco hotel where executives were hoping to prove to Kalanick that he was hurting the company. The colleagues presented surveys…
A brutal storm crashed into the Dutch coast on Thursday causing gusts of wind up to 90 miles per hour. This might not have been so destructive in a place with some relief, like mountains and hills, but the Netherlands is famously flat. That led to many bad things happening to buildings and people. The…
This morning in a press release, Intel announced that it has “issued firmware updates for 90 percent of Intel CPUs introduced in the past five years.” But it’s possible the flurry of patches is just beginning. These Intel CPU updates patch major vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre, which security researchers say affect most CPUs—including…
New South Wales’ $340,000 investment in drones has apparently paid off in a major way. On Thursday, two teenage boys in Australia struggling offshore were saved thanks to a rescue drone, the BBC reported. Ben Franklin, Parliamentary Secretary for Northern NSW, told the Sydney Morning Herald that “it only took 70 seconds” for the drone—the…
Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has always proudly trumpeted its California roots. But the most American of all tech companies has never been a fan of paying back into the system that facilitated its success. On Wednesday, it announced that now that the US government has sufficiently capitulated on corporate tax rates, it will…
On Thursday, Facebook announced that Kenneth I. Chenault, CEO of American Express, will join its board of directors. In a blog post celebrating the news, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg praised Chenault’s decades-long career with American Express and his expertise in brand building. When Chenault officially joins the board on February 5th, the day after Facebook…
Jonathan Grant Thompson, a 37-year-old YouTuber, has been charged with two counts of possession of an explosive device, KSL reports. The only people who could have seen this coming were any of his nearly nine million subscribers. Thompson (who bills himself as “The King of Random”) is one of the many video creators trafficking in…
It’s not often that science can answer questions with an easy “yes” or “no.” Usually it’s more of an “evidence suggests” or “this correlation proposes” sort of situation, even if the public’s understanding is generally a little less nuanced. So USGS Seismologist Susan Hough found the right question: “Do large (magnitude ≥ 8) global earthquakes…
In a study published Wednesday, a pair of Dartmouth researchers found that a popular risk assessment algorithm was no better at predicting a criminal offender’s likelihood of reoffending than an internet survey of humans with little or no relevant experience. The study compared the crime-predicting powers of an algorithm called COMPAS, already used by multiple…
Last month in an art gallery in Auckland, New Zealand, I stood in front of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s likeness cast in plastic, as a tiny board game figurine raising a shield and arrow in battle with democracy, portrayed as a snarling dragon. Fair elections, depicted as a fierce lion, was coming at him,…
