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Beset by an amazing degree of technical incompetence and enough leaks to sink Atlantis, President Donald Trump’s administration is now mulling a White House-wide ban on the use of personal cell phones, Bloomberg reported. According to the Bloomberg report, some anonymous administration officials described the ban as primarily motivated by “cybersecurity concerns,” since the personal…
The Pokémon GO phenomenon has mostly faded, but the destruction left in its wake could be far larger than anyone imagined. Two professors from Purdue University have attempted to get an idea of the game’s effect on traffic accidents by studying data from one county in Indiana. The results don’t reflect well on Pikachu and…
Uber is now facing tough questions from Congress over a data breach last year that affected as many as 57 million user and driver accounts. It was revealed last week that the ride-hailing company paid $100,000 to hackers who accessed the user data in exchange for their silence. The incident, which occurred more than a…
The Voyager 1 spacecraft might be the most famous time capsule in history, soaring through space as a testament to humanity’s achievements. We don’t know if intelligent life will ever find the craft or its contents, launched in 1977 to explore the planets before sailing indefinitely beyond our solar system. But at least humans here…
For Americans, the Social Security number (SSN) has long been considered one of the most private pieces of personally identifiable information. With it, you can unlock an infinite number of doors; behind each is a bank account, a trove of medical records, your cellphone call history, and a bevy of other intimate details about your…
A new surveillance video from Birmingham, England shows two hackers exploiting keyless technology to steal a sleeping man’s Mercedes—in less time than it takes to order something off Seamless. Released by the West Midlands Police Department on Monday, authorities believe it to be the first footage of thieves attacking a car using relay boxes, devices that…
Facebook is expanding its artificial intelligence-based suicide prevention efforts. The company said today that it has plans to eventually monitor and respond to suicidal intent on Facebook “worldwide,” excluding the European Union. Today, Facebook’s vice president of product management Guy Rosen published a blog about the company’s efforts to detect and report users who express…
While most people in the United States still aren’t familiar with Tencent, the Chinese digital media and telecom conglomerate has quickly become one of the biggest players on the internet. Just last week, Tencent’s market cap valuation of $530 billion propelled it past Facebook and into the fifth spot among the largest corporations in the…
After 11 years, Tumblr’s founder and public face David Karp announced his resignation from the company in a staff email this afternoon. The once booming platform which attracted artists, bloggers, and fandom communities in droves was purchased by in May of 2013 Yahoo for the obscene figure of $1 billion under Marissa Meyer’s leadership, but…
No one’s pretending that life in the middle ages didn’t suck. There was the plague, unceasing catapult attacks, and beheading after beheading. But watching Evan Snider painstakingly make a chainmail shirt by hand once again reminds us to be extra thankful to live in this century. In addition to ten days of preparation and planning,…
Did you see that video of the town crier announcing the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle? Yes, the happy couple are really going to have a royal wedding. But that “town crier” is just a random guy dressed in goofy clothes and has nothing to do with Buckingham Palace. The self-appointed town crier,…
On Sunday, one man decided to take to the skies with a consumer drone to spread his manifesto over two NFL stadiums in California. He probably would’ve been better off just posting on Reddit. The San Francisco 49ers were entering the second quarter of their face-off against the Seattle Seahawks at Levi’s Stadium in Santa…
Filmmaker Jan van Ijken’s documentary, The Art of Flying, captures the hypnotic movements of hundreds of thousands of starlings flying in massive flocks that appear to be completely random and chaotic, but miraculously, not a single mid-air collision ever occurs. Murmurations, as these starling flocks are also known, are especially intriguing to researchers as there…
As Russian hackers affiliated with the Fancy Bear cyber-spying unit were attempting to break into the Gmail accounts of “scores of U.S. officials” in recent years, the FBI failed to notify almost any of them that they were being targeted, the Associated Press reported on Sunday. Per the AP, in interviews with 80 Fancy Bear…
Authorities evacuated tens of thousands of people from 224 points on the Indonesian island of Bali this weekend after the eruption of Mount Agung, which spewed gigantic clouds of potentially life-threatening ash into the atmosphere, CNN reported. Up to 7,000 air passengers are stranded on the island at the main Bali airport of Ngurah Rai,…
The Bitcoin bubble continues to stretch to even more grotesque proportions, clearing a value of at least $9,143 per bitcoin and attaining a market cap of $152 billion on Sunday, TechCrunch reported. The strong gains more or less put Bitcoin on a path to clear a value of $10,000 by the end of calendar year…
2017’s unending parade of major companies and web destinations suffering through major breaches of user information has not slowed down. Image-sharing site Imgur revealed it had been hacked several years ago this week, with the details of approximately 1.7 million accounts lost in 2014 to hackers who have not been identified. Per ZDNet, this hack…
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, Washington Post owner, and Blue Origin founder, had a pretty good Thanksgiving this year per Bloomberg, which estimated this week that Black Friday sales on Amazon had put him over the $100 billion personal wealth mark. According to Bloomberg, Adobe Analytics data show online purchases were 18.4 percent higher than last…
61-year-old stuntman and amateur Flat Earth theory researcher “Mad” Mike Hughes, who planned to launch himself some 1,800 feet up at 500 miles per hour in an untested homemade steam-powered rocket over the Mojave Desert ghost town of Amboy, California on Saturday in some sort of gambit to prove the Earth is flat (spoilers: it’s not),…
Even with all the screen issues, weird buzzing noises, and unbalanced speaker performance on Google’s Pixel 2, there’s an even bigger issue that’s been bugging me. The problem isn’t restricted to just that single device—and in fact, it actually crept up about six months ago when Samsung released the Galaxy S8. I’m talking about Samsung’s…
