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Newly proposed guidelines under consideration by the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit group that maintains Unicode as the international standard for symbols across software platforms, could soon radically change the way we use emojis. Yes, I mean that Unicode may finally update emoji standards to let your favorite symbols face either direction instead of just one…
As privacy barriers have gradually been eroded online, it’s become harder and harder to keep control over what you’re revealing to the websites you visit when you open up a web browser. For many users now, revealing who you are is just an inevitable consequence of being on the web and using apps, but if…
Unless protect yourself, as soon as you open up an internet browser, you begin to leave digital footprints behind you that the sites you visit can use to track your activities and recognize who you are. We’re not talking about some crazy government data mining operation. This is totally legal, above board tracking done by…
What does this video represent to you? Are you the duck, the cat, or the human? What are the peas? Is this the future we wanted? [Boing Boing]
In its 23 years of existence, Yahoo made some really boneheaded deals. But of all of them, the deal to become Mozilla’s default search engine might have been the worst. In that deal, Mozilla retained the right to walk away and still collect hundreds of millions of dollars a year—if Yahoo was acquired by a…
In what’s already been a particularly cruel wildfire season for California, a series of fast-moving blazes have torched more than 65,000 acres since Monday, destroying hundreds of homes and forcing thousands to flee. Alarmingly, winds are expected to pick up in the coming days, making a bad situation potentially worse. The latest California wildfire started…
Thomas Blanchard doesn’t paint like normal artists do. Instead of painstakingly applying colors to a canvas with a brush, he dumps gallons of brightly colored paints into a giant tank filled with oils and other liquids, producing psychedelic waterfalls of color that could never hang in an art gallery. Instead, his colorful experiments are documented…
While Google and Amazon continue to bicker back and forth about which company’s services will be available for what platforms, it seems Apple is finally getting its act together now that Amazon Prime Video is available on the Apple TV. After years of waiting, Prime Video is available now for free. All you have to…
If you’re like most people, you do not like Wall Street or the financial industry, which commanded a large amount of confidence among just 19 percent of Americans in a poll from last year—perhaps because they crashed the national economy nearly a decade ago and the vast majority of the recovery went to the already…
Hey, here’s a question for you. If a random stranger came up to you on the street and started asking you to tell them about who you’d like to be stuck in an elevator with or what your guilty pleasures are, do you think you would: A) Tell them. B) Run for safety. Probably not…
Following a report that detailed numerous sexual harassment and assault allegations against Shervin Pishevar, the venture capitalist is taking a leave of absence from Virgin Hyperloop One and VC firms Sherpa Capital and Silicon Foundry. Pishevar released a statement on Tuesday announcing his departure, saying that it was his own decision. He noted that he…
This is getting ridiculous. Amazon and Google are acting like a couple of teenagers. Breaking up, getting back together, and breaking up again. It all needs to stop, because they’re just making other peoples’ lives miserable. Back in September, Google blocked Amazon’s Echo Show from displaying YouTube because of a then-mysterious violation of its terms…
For years, Microsoft and others have been trying to figure out how to get Windows running on chips other than x86 processors most commonly made by Intel and AMD. The hope is that by broadening the platform to makers of mobile devices, Windows on ARM-based chips will lead to cheaper, more accessible systems than the…
Remember when everyone was screaming for 2016 to just end already? Well, it did. And 2017 managed to be even more horrific. Twitter has essentially verified that fact with its end of the year roundup of the most popular tweets, accounts, and hashtags. Appreciate them now, because next year is just going to be worse.…
For toddlers, playing with toys is not all fun-and-games—it’s an important way for them to learn how the world works. Using a similar methodology, researchers from UC Berkeley have developed a robot that, like a child, learns from scratch and experiments with objects to figure out how to best move them around. And by doing…
When I saw the title for this 1967 US Navy film, “How to Succeed With Brunettes,” I expected that it would be silly and pretty sexist. But what I didn’t expect was that such a simple movie would cost about a quarter of a million dollars to produce. According to the National Archives, the 1967…
As you may have heard, YouTube is growing its content moderation team to 10,000 staffers. Sounds like progress! Of course, the move comes as a response to the ever-expanding gallery of horrors the site has unwittingly played host to over the years—most recently, various forms of child exploitation and predation—but let’s review the actual announcement…
In the Amazon, animals are being illegally captured and held in captivity to lure in tourists that might want to snap a sweet selfie with a sloth or a squirrel monkey. A report published in October by the Nature Conservation detailed the harmful consequences of wildlife ecotourism, pointing out that this practice is not only…
Three years ago, we said the Echo was “the most innovative device Amazon’s made in years.” That’s still true. But you shouldn’t buy one. You shouldn’t buy one for your family. You definitely should not buy one for your friends. In fact, ignore any praise we’ve ever heaped onto smart speakers and voice-controlled assistants. They’re…
Windows has been knocking around in some form or another for a grand total of 32 years now, and in that time it’s amassed a lot of features—not just the newest bells and whistles but long-standing features you might have forgotten about or never even discovered in the first place. Here are 10 really useful…
