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Two hackers responsible for creating the massive Mirai botnet that knocked large swathes of the internet offline last year have pleaded guilty. The pair commandeered hundreds of thousands of connected devices that were used to hurl spam traffic at a Rutgers University server that contained a web portal used by faculty and students. Paras Jha…
Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company Blue Origin performed another test of its New Shepard rocket in West Texas yesterday, this time with an updated, big-windowed crew capsule. On board that capsule? A test dummy dubbed “Mannequin Skywalker.” You know… like Anakin Skywalker? From Star Wars? Get it? Okay. Bezos may be a vampiric oligarch but a…
A San Francisco animal shelter is under fire for using a security robot, dubbed K9, to push out homeless people encamped nearby. America’s disruption capital, San Francisco, has both a crippling housing crisis and an abundance of startups using automated robots for everything from delivering sandwiches to deterring crime. The K9 in question is actually…
I’m calling it. The year 2000 is officially retro. Fight me. Half of you are probably thinking it’s long overdue. While the other half likely still automatically calculate dates by counting backwards from 2000. How long ago was the year 1970? Just 30 years if you use the shorthand I’ve used for so much of…
Every December, Google releases “The Year in Search,” which sheds light on what the world was most interested in during the last spin around the sun. This year, the company added the most popular “how-to” searches to its global list—and in 2017 they are strange and kind of bleak. In a blog post about “the…
People have been using drones to smuggle goods for years. Porn, weapons, drugs—god, so many drugs. The tiny whirring machines have proven discreet little contraband-transport contraptions, but one smuggling operation’s astoundingly successful run just got grounded. From July 2015 through May of this year, a drone gang made at least 49 flights into prisons in…
The cryptocurrency market is still on an astonishing run, and there are some lucky people out there who’ve seen their investments turn into seven-figure rewards. If you’re one of them, tell no one. Hacked online wallets and exchange collapses have been the primary way that cryptocurrency gets stolen. But digital money can still be stolen…
Science isn’t always telescopes and new species. Some research, like the kind that helps forensics experts better understand crime scenes, requires experiments you might find just a little, well, morbid. When a bullet enters a body, blood can travel backward creating a pattern called “backspatter.” Telling the story of these backspatter patterns can be difficult,…
Tidal was supposed to be the one. A streaming service run by artists, for artists, featuring high fidelity audio and a business model that would share more of its revenue with the people that actually made the music. However, based on a report from Norway’s Dagens Næringsliv, Tidal may only have enough funds to last…
Comcast is once again under fire for injecting JavaScript code into websites its customers visit. Last week, user bham3dman took to the Xfinity forum to complain about Comcast inserting hundreds of lines of code into their browsing session. The code surfaced a pop-up telling them to upgrade to a new modem. This is far from the…
Move over Ewoks, there’s a new critter in this galaxy. Star Wars: The Last Jedi marks the debut of porgs, a species of alien birds that chill with Luke Skywalker on Ahch-To as he trains Rey in the ways of the Force. They may be cute, but we can’t help but wonder: How do they…
A good rule of thumb is that if a random website tries to trick you into giving it access to your Twitter account in order for you to watch a video titled “Baby Poops In His Onesie, But Dog’s Response Leaves Millions Of People In Hysterics,” you shouldn’t do it. You absolutely should not do…
President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed legislation officially banning the federal government’s use of software made by Kaspersky Labs, Reuters reports. The ban has been in the works for several months, following a Department of Homeland Security directive to remove Kaspersky products from federal systems. DHS alleged that Kaspersky had suspicious ties with Russian intelligence…
School will soon be a bigger bore for kids in France: Starting next fall, students there will be banned from using cellphones in primary and middle schools, the French government announced today. Bummer.
A new survey of 1,077 registered voters found that the FCC’s plan to rollback net neutrality protections is staggeringly unpopular among Republican voters. The survey, conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation (PPC) and Voice of the People, a nonpartisan polling organization, found that only one in five Republican voters support FCC…
Drone hobbyists have had a whirlwind of a time when it comes to registering their devices. In December of 2015, the FAA required that owners of small devices had to register their vehicles for a small fee. But then, in May of this year, that rule was revoked, and owners could get their five-dollar registration…
With the fate of Thursday’s net neutrality vote resting almost entirely in the hands of the Republican Party, a lone conservative has emerged to oppose FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to gift-wrap the internet for Verizon and Friends this Christmas. Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman, a staunch conservative in nearly every sense, called on the FCC…
Perhaps one of the first things you learned in kindergarten was that you had five senses: sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch. But the actual number is probably way more than that, maybe in the 30s. And there’s a whole lot we don’t know about the senses that we do have. After all, our senses…
In theory, one of the best things about living in 2017 is that we have over a century of recorded entertainment that we can enjoy virtually anytime we like. But in practice, we’re still not there. And it’s all because video streaming services like Netflix only care about signing up new customers who just want…
Alabama’s special election for Jeff Sessions’ vacated Senate seat is underway today, but state courts are still battling over whether or not digital records from the vote should be preserved in case of a recount or a hack. On Monday, a judge ordered local election officials to save digital images of ballots, AL.com reports. However,…
