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Товарищи, Terrible news. Project Gizmodnik, our brilliant plan to secretly infiltrate the U.S. tech media for the glorification of Matushka Rossiya’s Great Leader Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and/or the destruction of global capitalism*, has been compromised by American “super spy” Eric Garland. Fellow deep cover Russian operatives, you may remember Garland as the self-declared…
A helpless, flailing Google is unable to stop people from running off with hundreds of the free bicycles available at its Mountain View, California headquarters a week, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Google maintains approximately 1,100 “Gbikes” for employee use on its massive campus there, but locals and employees alike have apparently decided…
Videos shot on smartphones have a very specific, very low-rent aesthetic. A whole host of stabilizers are available on the market that try to improve that aesthetic—eradicating the shaky cam look so you can actually see whatever the smartphone’s camera is looking at. DJI even has one! The original Osmo Mobile was a pricey handheld…
Famed Linux developer Linus Torvalds has some pretty harsh words for Intel on the fiasco over Meltdown and Spectre, the massive security flaws in modern processors that predominantly affect Intel products. Meltdown and Spectre exploit an architectural flaw with the way processors handle speculative execution, a technique that most modern CPUs use to increase speed.…
Rumors Facebook is always secretly recording you have long refused to die, but it turns out Amazon may be the first tech giant to achieve the age-old dream of a total advertising Panopticon. On Friday, Amazon released the new Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit, which is intended to help developers integrate the company’s personal smart assistant…
One of four accused criminals who posed as gay men on Grindr to set up home invasions was sentenced this week to 15 years on hate crime and other charges including kidnapping, carjacking, and use of firearms in the commission of a crime, the Tyler Morning Telegraph reported. 21-year-old Frisco, Texas man Nigel Garrett pleaded…
With its price dropping, sky-high transaction fees, growing traction among competitors, and regulatory agencies taking action in several countries, Bitcoin is starved for good news. Today marked another blow against dominant cryptocurrency: China is working to rid itself of bitcoin mining companies. Bloomberg reports: Chinese authorities outlined proposals this week to discourage bitcoin mining —…
Old-timey pirates are typically portrayed as stupid, unrefined thugs whose only interests involved plundering captured ships and forcing enemies to walk the plank. The recent discovery of legible text on paper pulled from the cannon of Blackbeard’s flagship paints a strikingly different picture of these misunderstood sailors. Work by conservationists from North Carolina’s Department of…
Earlier today, Twitter published a five paragraph answer to the loudly, repeatedly-shouted question: “Why won’t you ban Donald Trump, a man who has actively used your platform to threaten nuclear annihilation against an entire country?” Here it is in its entirety: There’s been a lot of discussion about political figures and world leaders on Twitter,…
The aim of soft robotics is to create machines that move more like humans—robots that can, say, sensitively grasp delicate objects without crushing them. Engineers have recently created an artificial muscle that can mimic the way that the human body’s muscles contract and expand. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder used stretchy materials…
Phone searches conducted by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) drastically increased last year, the agency announced on Friday, with agents conducting 30,200 searches of phones and other devices during the 2017 fiscal year—a 58.5 percent increase from the prior year. More than 80 percent of the devices searched belonged to foreigners or US permanent residents, the…
The University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) does serious research on preventing the end of the world. For its latest project, the Centre wanted to highlight the risk that unrestrained artificial intelligence poses to civilization. To do that, it’s released a free mod that turns the video game Civilization V…
Journalist Michael Wolff released a book today with some explosive claims about the Trump regime. Fire and Fury contains stories that seem almost too incredible to be real. And in the case of one excerpt you may have seen on social media, it’s indeed too good to be true. Twitter user PixelatedBoat is an Australian…
Government requests for data from Amazon Web Services spiked in the first half of 2017, with Amazon receiving 1,936 requests from the US law enforcement entities. During the latter half of 2016, Amazon received 1,583 requests. Amazon’s latest biannual transparency report shows that the company received 1,618 subpoenas, 229 search warrants, and 89 other orders…
A trade group representing more than 40 of the country’s biggest tech companies announced on Friday plans to intervene in a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its 2017 order dismantling net neutrality protections for American consumers. The announcement by the Internet Association (IA) came less than a day after the FCC published…
Beginning over two weeks ago, reports have trickled in on Reddit community “r/btc”—the de facto hub for supporters of bitcoin rival bitcoin cash (BCH)—of accounts being compromised by a new and worrying attack vector. What may have read to skeptics as infighting between two contentious factions was confirmed today as a genuine and novel hack…
GoPro is reportedly laying off 200 to 300 employees this week, according to TechCrunch, gutting the division that produced its ill-conceived Karma drone. The company reportedly announced the layoffs on Thursday but affected employees, most of which allegedly came from GoPro’s aerial division, will be paid through February 16th, sources told TechCrunch. The former employees…
It’s the year 2018. And while we have some very cool tech that we take for granted, we’re still waiting on quite a few things that we were promised. But what did the people of yesteryear imagine 2018 would be like? People of 20th century had a lot of ideas about what the year 2018…
Using a computer powered by an off-the-shelf Intel Core i5-6600 processor, a FedEx employee from Tennessee has discovered the largest prime number known to humanity. At 23,249,425 digits long, it’s nearly a million digits longer than the previous record holder. For those of you who failed or have long forgotten grade 3 math class, a…
Our Milky Way galaxy isn’t alone in this corner of space—it’s orbited by a few smaller dwarf galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud. Inside that cloud is 30 Doradus (or the Tarantula Nebula), a “starburst” where stars are formed at a much higher rate than the surrounding area. And 30 Doradus has too many massive…
