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James Dolan, former Marine and co-creator of the whistleblower submission system SecureDrop alongside Aaron Swartz and Wired editor Kevin Poulsen, has died. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, which took over SecureDrop, reports that Dolan, age 36, took his own life. First deployed as StrongBox with The New Yorker, organizations such as the Washington Post,…
LG is known for having some of the best OLED TVs available, so why not make an undulating 90-foot-long canyon of them to walk through? That’s the splashy entrance to the LG booth at CES this year: 256 OLED displays warped to form a long senses-numbing passageway. The videos displayed cycle between glaciers, waterfalls, and…
Every major VR player has made the same promise. A VR headset that would be completely wireless. One that would let you go anywhere without tripping over cords or being tethered to a computer/phone/PS4. Google, which has spent more than a year quietly improving its VR platform, Daydream, is now the first company to cross…
Twitter missed the deadline to answer questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russia’s political influence campaign on its platform, Axios reports. After a November hearing on election interference, Twitter, Facebook, and Google were asked to respond to a list of follow-up questions from the committee. (Those questions are not public at this time, a…
A new Washington Post report highlights the role of technology in China’s frightening and fast-developing surveillance state. The “Sharp Eyes” program, dystopian in both name and execution, is a plan to connect the nation’s many surveillance cameras, in both private and public spaces, to a single network. Ultimately, the Chinese government wants to connect this…
When you’re switching phones after an upgrade or an accident, the job of checking up on your two-factor verification apps can get lost in the hustle of transferring photos, contacts, messages, and all the other stuff that more quickly comes to mind. Without your security codes, though, you might get locked out of your key…
A group of US senators on Tuesday announced that more than 40 lawmakers had joined an effort to overturn the 2017 FCC order killing net neutrality. Democrats are seeking to undo the FCC order using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), passage of which will require a simple majority in the both the House and Senate.…
Dell got CES 2018 started early when it debuted its fully redesigned flagship ultraportable last week. But the XPS 13 isn’t the only new premium system the company is showing off, and in some ways, it might not even be the most exciting, because now for the first time ever, there’s a 2-in-1 version of…
Cheddar is reporting that Facebook will soon release a video-chat device that will sit in your home and scan and recognize the face of anyone who passes by. No one wants this. The device, called Portal, according to Cheddar’s Alex Heath, will be similar in design to the Echo Show that Amazon introduced last year,…
Fundamentally, your body is just a crazy chemistry experiment. You put in food and oxygen, chemical reactions happen, and out comes energy and poop. But how did these reactions first begin? Some scientists think they have an idea. You might remember learning about cellular respiration, the process by which your body turns sugar into energy…
The CES show floor might be filled with hundreds of TVs that put your local electronics store to shame, but the real treasures of the show, the TVs packed with technology we’ll have to wait for years to buy, are hidden in back rooms away from greasy fingers. Except ours, of course, as we had…
You don’t need a scientist to tell you that a good night’s sleep is important to your health. Your body tells you that every time you try to climb out of bed after a late night. So to help maximize what sleep you are able to get, Philips has created a headband that plays special…
Last week, Twitter finally responded to President Trump’s potential violations of the site’s rules, saying blocking a “world leader” from Twitter or removing their tweets “would hide important information people should be able to see and debate.” It was a hands-off response likely prompting many to look up the blast radius of a Taepodong missile.…
Like every major tech company, Microsoft has been pushing out updates to help mitigate the unprecedented vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre. But some Windows users found that the update rendered their PCs unusable, and now Microsoft has paused the update in some cases until it can fix the problem. On Monday, complaints started appearing…
I chuckled when I was first briefed about Razer’s latest concept, Project Linda. It’s a phone dock that turns the Razer Phone into a laptop! That concept has been done before, and it has always been deeply and profoundly stupid. But Razer’s take on the dumb idea has just enough polish, even in this concept…
The founders of MormonLeaks, a transparency organization that has released hundreds of controversial documents related to inner-workings of the Mormon Church, recently launched FaithLeaks, an ambitious and far-reaching project that aims to expose corruption and abuse across other religious organizations. Today, the new group has published dozens of pages of documents related to sexual assault…
Last year I hit that birthday milestone when I’m apparently due to suffer a mid-life crisis and make some irrational purchase decisions. But as much fun as an exotic sports car might be, I don’t want that fiscal responsibility. I will, however, happily shell out $45 for Playmobil’s new Porsche 911 GT3 Cup racer; a…
This might look like a TV. It’s a big 65-inch display capable of HDR and putting out 1000 nits of brightness. It even uses a quantum dot film to achieve DCI-P3 color gamut, which is nerd speak for really good color reproduction that’s usually only found super expensive TVs. But this display is one of…
It doesn’t look special. At a glance, it’s just a Razer gaming mouse sitting on a Razer gaming pad—which means everything is black except for some bright, colorful lights. But then you pick the mouse up and it’s way too light to be wireless. After ten seconds the cursor on screen flickers and the lights…
The biggest trend among smartphones in 2017 was extra-wide 18:9 aspect ratio displays. Samsung and LG got things started back in the spring, and even Apple hopped on the trend earlier this fall with the iPhone X. But if you’re looking for budget handsets with one of those super-tall screens, the best you can do…
