Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
On Wednesday, former President Obama spoke to newly engaged Prince Harry about the chaotic new social media climate and the problem of policing fake news and hateful speech online. And, as a Kenyan-born secret Muslim crypto-anarchist, he certainly knows a lot about combatting fake news. A pillar of President Trump’s radical deregulation crusade has been…
Experts on nuclear confrontation say that a nuclear war is a very real possibility here in the 21st century. The US and North Korea are just one misstep away from nuclear destruction. But that hasn’t stopped New York City officials from beginning to take down outdated nuclear fallout shelter signs posted at public schools. And…
One of the only major complaints about the Nintendo Switch is that games are too big to fit on its cartridges and its internal memory is too small to handle the overflow. Now, a plan to address that issue by manufacturing larger 64 GB game cartridges has been delayed until 2019, running the risk of…
The irony of working with cheap, dull knives in the kitchen is that you’re more likely to accidentally cut yourself than if you had razor-sharp blades to slice and dice with. But if you’re as skilled at sharpening knives as YouTube’s Kiwami Japan is, you can turn a dollar store blade into a tool for…
Compiling the best and worst gadgets list this year I took note of a very sad fact: Google was on both lists. In its second year thoroughly devoted to the hardware game, Google managed to create earbuds so bad that storing them in their charging case requires a video explanation, and a laptop so fantastic…
Authorities say a couple in California incorporated some cutting-edge tech into their drug dealing operation—only to discover that a whirring machine in the sky may not be more discreet than a person walking down the street. Last week, 39-year-old Benjamin Baldassarre and 31-year-old Ashley Carroll were arrested in Riverside, California for allegedly selling illegal drugs…
As a kid, I remember building elaborate Hot Wheels tracks with ramps that went as high as the ceiling in our living room. But the folks behind the YouTube channel 5MadMovieMakers have one-upped eight-year-old me by starting their gigantic Hot Wheels track from a second-story window. The filmmakers must have sourced their Hot Wheels track…
A week hardly passed this year without a major data breach to remind us of how precarious the state of security was throughout 2017. And while I’d love to report otherwise, you’d be hard pressed right now to find anyone in the know who thinks things are looking up. For starters, the personal information of…
Biometric data belonging to millions of Americans may or may not be at risk—it is frankly unclear—based on a BuzzFeed report published Tuesday. At least two experts are concerned anyway, according to the site. The full story, well-sourced and exhaustively reported, details how code developed by a Russian company found its way into fingerprint-recognition software…
HQ Trivia, the alarmingly popular trivia app which increasingly threatens to take over our reality, has been iOS-only since its mid-October launch. The result has been that 12 times a week, iPhone owners have been swarmed by everyone else trying to get a slice of that sweet, addictive trivia. The good news: Soon all those…
The latest nasty security scourge plaguing the internet is cryptojacking. By running hidden code on a seemingly ordinary webpage, hackers and disreputable webmasters can highjack your CPU’s processing power in order to mine cryptocurrency, line their own pockets, and kill your performance. Opera is now the first web browser with a built-in tool to fight…
Terrifying Russian-appointed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov—known internationally for his republic’s alleged concentration camps for gay men—had his Facebook and Instagram accounts taken down this weekend, and his buddies in the Kremlin are asking some questions. Per The Guardian, Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor is demanding an explanation for why Kadyrov’s accounts were removed, though the answer…
You probably remember those tantalizing tech predictions from the 1990s. The world wide web was going to become a paradise for access to information and civil discourse. The internet would allow people of different cultures to come together and learn from each other. The information superhighway was supposed to make our lives so much easier.…
Japanese scientists are hard at work trying to create the only kind of robot that matters in this hopeless hellworld: one capable of pulling off an inspirational training montage, glistening robo-muscles and all. Their latest efforts have been detailed in a paper published in Science Robotics earlier this month, complete with videos that show off…
This weekend, a security consultant detailed what he believed were serious vulnerabilities in Uber’s software—and his disbelief that the company’s bug bounty program refused to pay him for his research. Unfortunately, it’s a story without heroes. The researcher, Gregory Perry, made his displeasure with Uber known in a Medium post (“How I Got Paid $0…
If there was any doubt that what Elon Musk called a “Nuclear alien UFO from North Korea” was actually just one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets flying over California, remember that this photographer knew it was coming and had time to position several cameras to catch a stunning timelapse of the event. The New York…
A few weeks ago, I tested almost every one of Apple’s wired charging solutions to find out which one was best. Job done, right? Well not quite, because this year’s crop of iPhone’s are Apple’s first handsets to have built-in wireless charging too! Then, to make things even more confusing, Apple’s most recent software update…
According to The Japan Times, the organizers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics plan to use expansive face recognition software at the games, scanning and tracking the faces of hundreds of thousands of athletes, journalists, and officials. Sources close to Olympic officials told the newspaper that the technology won’t be used on spectators. The sources said…
In 2010, the Library of Congress started archiving every single public tweet that was published on Twitter. It even retroactively acquired all tweets dating back to 2006. But the Library of Congress will stop archiving every tweet on December 31, 2017. Why is it stopping? Because tweets are trash now. The Library of Congress issued…
The State of North Carolina is suing a pharmaceutical manufacturer for allegedly bribing doctors and defrauding insurers in order to sell more of its powerful fentanyl spray, fanning the flames of the opioid crisis that has millions addicted and is shortening lifespans. Last Thursday, Reuters reported, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein filed a lawsuit…
