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Net neutrality protections have not yet been repealed, but it seems that ISPs are already taking their sheep costumes off to reveal the wolves beneath. In a move that will make everyone say, “of course they did,” it seems that Comcast deleted its pledge to protect the open internet the day after the FCC announced…
Brett Vanderbrook was driving for Uber last week when he got a call from an unfamiliar number. He let it go to voicemail and when he listened to it later, he got a shock: It was a recorded message telling him to stop making “negative and derogatory posts about President Trump.” “It was kind of…
Facebook announced Wednesday that it would temporarily stop letting advertisers exclude users from seeing their ads based on race and ethnic group. The highly controversial (and legally dubious) practice was first uncovered during an investigation by Pro Publica in 2016. Though Facebook said it would end the practice when it came to ads for housing,…
Traveling during the holidays is already a nightmare, but for people flying American Airlines during the last two weeks in December, things may have just gotten a whole lot worse. That’s because according to the Allied Pilots Association union, a glitch in the system American Airlines uses to schedule time off for pilots was erroneously…
On December 14th, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote to replace current rules enforcing net neutrality. Nothing short of an extinction-level event will prevent it. But before abandoning all hope, know that while the battle for net neutrality at the FCC may have been lost, the war isn’t even close to a conclusion. In…
Uber has confirmed that data for about 2.7 million customers in the United Kingdom was stolen in the 2016 breach that affected at least 57 million people worldwide. Reports revealed last week that Uber tried to keep the hack secret for more than a year, and even paid the hackers $100,000 to delete the information…
The drama surrounding an explosive letter written by former Uber employee Richard Jacobs keeps heating up, with Uber executives testifying in court today to try to undermine it. The letter claimed Uber’s Marketplace Analytics team used the encrypted, ephemeral chat app Wickr and worked on secret servers and devices that couldn’t be traced back to Uber…
Everybody knows that computers were huge and unwieldy in the middle of the 20th century. But a lot of the tech terminology that we take for granted today had to be invented at some point. Such is the case with the term “desktop computer,” which emerged long before “personal computers” became commonplace in American homes.…
Apple just released a patch that fixes a recently revealed security vulnerability in macOS High Sierra. This is the bug that let anyone gain admin access to Mac accounts without typing in a password. It’s a bad one. Good news is that Apple is making it very easy to update your software and squash the…
There’s a nebulous concept that’s floating around the public conscious, called quantum advantage or quantum supremacy. One of these days, someone is going to boldly declare that they’ve created a quantum computer that can solve some complex problem that a regular computer can’t. That said, quantum supremacy probably won’t be a single event. More likely…
Almost 20 years after it was first introduced by Tiger Electronics, Furby has somehow found a way to remain on toy store shelves to this day, mostly by learning new tricks along the way. But Zach Levine’s Furby is extra special, because he hacked its guts with Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant, finally giving the bug-eyed…
In his time as president, we’ve come to expect the daily parade of horrors Donald Trump spews into the world through Twitter. And yet he still managed to shock the nation this morning by spreading a disturbing video that depicts teenagers being thrown from a roof and beaten, one of three clips to appear on…
On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court began hearings on a case that has the potential to be the most important privacy decision in recent memory. At its heart, it’s about the government’s right to use cellphone data to track a person’s past locations without a warrant. More broadly, it’s about updating the way we think…
Snapchat, the photo-sharing app the olds can’t seem to figure out, is getting a facelift this week in a do-or-die attempt to win over new users. Snap, the social app’s parent company, said this redesign was coming earlier this month. And today we get see their vision of an “easier to use” Snapchat. The new…
Andy Rubin, the cofounder of Android, left Google in 2014 to launch a startup incubator in what was seemingly an amicable departure. “I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next,” Google co-founder Larry Page said in a statement following the announcement of Rubin’s exit. But according to the Information, an investigation into…
You can try as hard as you want, but you’ll never be as cool an uncle as ex-NASA JPL engineer Mark Rober. Using elaborate experiments, he makes learning about science even more entertaining than Bill Nye did, and his latest invention is a sand-filled hot tub that somehow still behaves like water you can swim…
Facebook appears to be preparing to launch a new kind of captcha which asks users to prove their identities by uploading photos of their faces, Wired reported on Tuesday. At least some users reported encountering a prompt asking them to “upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face,” accompanied by a guarantee that…
It’s been hard to ignore the ominous game of nuclear chicken currently ongoing between the totalitarian government of North Korea, which successfully tested an upgraded intercontinental ballistic missile on Wednesday morning local time, and the U.S., which is currently led by a belligerent lightweight with an extremely limited understanding of nuclear strategy. That goes double…
A new study by France’s Exodus Privacy and the Yale University Privacy lab has concluded that over three out of four of apps available on Google’s Play Store contain third-party tracking plugins, the Guardian reported on Tuesday. Apps sucking up personal information included some of the most popular ones on the platform, “including Tinder, Spotify,…
A host of DNA samples “strongly suggest” that yetis are, in fact, local Himalayan bears. Watch out, bigfoot. An international team of researchers took a look at bear and supposed yeti DNA samples to better pinpoint the origin of the mythological creature. The researcher’s results imply that yetis were hardly paranormal or even strange, but…
