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If it weren’t really happening, the Republican tax plan would be the plot of some sort of 19th century Boss Tweed parody where everyone is shaped like a flatfish and wearing a monocle. Except, nope, US Congress really does want to, uh, tax tuition waivers on poor grad students. https://gizmodo.com/the-house-gop-tax-bill-is-truly-horrifying-for-science-1820554703 The folks over at Earther…
We’re hitting a sort of news singularity with Bitcoin at this point. The rush to report price changes can’t keep pace with the reality. In 24 short hours, its trading price has gone from around $12,000 to $16,000. Now the biggest question is: How long is it going to be before these investors are putting…
Having come to the realization there may be little hope for renewing the warrantless surveillance program known as Section 702 by the end of the month, Trump administration attorneys now contend there’s a legal basis for continuing the program through next April, despite the widely held assumption it would expire come New Year’s Day. Debate…
You did it. You waited out all the announcements back in the spring during Mobile World Congress and the deluge of new handsets that debuted this fall. But now, after upstarts such as Essential have had a chance to shine and giants like Apple and Samsung are done plying their latest wares, there’s a big…
Chicago is ending an algorithmic child abuse prevention program after the data mining software failed to flag at-risk kids who died while swamping caseworkers with alerts that thousands of other children were at imminent risk of death. As the Chicago Tribune reports, the Rapid Safety Feedback program regularly overestimated the likelihood of abuse in many cases…
A couple days ago at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, the company finally unveiled its next flagship smartphone processor: the Snapdragon 845. But until recently, all we had was a name to talk about. Now that details are trickling out about Qualcomm’s new silicon chip—the one that’s going to power all of 2018’s big Android…
A few months after demonstrating its dominance over the game of Go, DeepMind’s AlphaZero AI has trounced the world’s top-ranked chess engine—and it did so without any prior knowledge of the game and after just four hours of self-training. AlphaZero is now the most dominant chess playing entity on the planet. In a one-on-one tournament…
There are two very important lessons to take away from a recent article in The Journal of Emergency Medicine: 1) Don’t pop zits using a woodworking blade, and 2) Don’t wait seven months to seek medical help if your lower lip starts to resemble a puddle of moldy raspberries. Unfortunately, a 23-year-old construction worker in…
It’s painfully obvious that Instagram wants to watch Snapchat flame out into a pillar of dust. It has copied a number of its features, fine-tuning them and deploying them even better than Snapchat. And it looks like Instagram is back on its bullshit with a new standalone messaging app. The app, Direct, is available now…
As public and political sentiment shifts against the titans of Silicon Valley, the tech world’s tactics in Washington are getting dirty. Google has been facing increased scrutiny lately, and Oracle has been doing its best to fuel the fire. In a new report about its latest attack, Oracle’s political fixer in Washington, Ken Gleuck, threw…
I lose things. Lots and lots of things—my keys (in the couch), my jackets (inside taxis). Once I left my MacBook behind in a Subway restaurant during the Occupy Wall Street protests. I was lucky; the next morning I found it sitting there untouched underneath a chair as the staff served breakfast. I’ll admit it:…
Leading U.S. airlines have all agreed that all your expensive smart luggage is dumb luggage now, CNN reported on Wednesday. Carriers including American, Delta, and Alaska are requiring customers remove lithium-based batteries from the bags and carry them personally before stowing them in their aircraft, citing the risk that the batteries could start a fire…
Uber revealed last month that it paid a hacker $100,000 to keep quiet about the fact that he stole personal data on 57 million users. Now, details about the hacker’s identity are starting to come out—he is a 20-year-old from Florida who lives with his mother and wanted to help pay the bills, Reuters reports.…
For the first time since 2010, the number of homeless people in the US increased this year, according to new estimates from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The main driver of this increase? Lack of affordable housing in metropolitan areas, especially those on the West Coast that have become synonymous with the…
2017 was poised to be one of the most disappointing years in history, filled with a non-stop barrage of depressing developments and defeats. But then, with a last-minute, game-winning buzzer-beater, a company called Hammer revealed a series of replaceable fidget spinner key caps for your keyboard and partially redeemed 2017. If you don’t understand why…
ProtonMail, an email service favored among privacy advocates due to its automatic use of end-to-end encryption, has launched a new product aimed at bringing that same level of privacy to the most popular desktop email clients. The Geneva-based company calls its new app ProtonMail Bridge and is touting its ability to “revolutionize encrypted email” through…
Earlier today, Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann tweeted the above image captioned only with the letters “v2.” Mirroring the logo of the dearly departed mini-video service, the pretzel-y picture seemed to reinforce what Hofmann hinted at last week: Vine might be making a comeback. While fellow co-founders Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov busy (and embarrass) themselves…
Listen to me, no one needs a robovac of any kind. Whether it’s a Roomba, an EcoVac, or a cheap Anker like what I’ve got—they’re nothing more than infant-sized metal-and plastic turds that push small piles of dirt around and scream when they cannot figure out what “rugs” are. They are inefficient, wasteful annoyances that…
Tesla seems to be working out its manufacturing bottleneck issues that were partially responsible for a $619 million loss last quarter. But the company’s solution might be causing a global battery shortage. According to a report from the Korea news outlet ETNews, Panasonic recently gave most of its cache of batteries in Japan to Tesla…
Ashley Madison is perhaps most famous for two things—infidelity and god awful security. In 2015, the website for cheaters was hacked, leaking almost 10 gigabytes of data on the dark web, which included account details, email addresses, and payment information for about 32 million users. And now security researchers have found that the dating site…
