Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Despite what you may have read, Twitter has not rolled out new rules banning porn or pictures of lingerie across its platform. “These Are Twitter’s New Rules For Preventing Abuse And Harassment,” BuzzFeed News reported Friday morning, spurring a shitstorm as its readers perused the fine print. The “adult or sexual products and services” section…
We take for granted the ability to pull out our smartphones and watch almost any video imaginable in hi-def resolutions. But back in 1998, the Nokia 5110 represented the cutting-edge of cellphone technology, and this is what it would’ve been like to watch YouTube and other videos on its terrible screen. The folks at YouTube’s…
On November 3, 1957, a street dog named Laika became the first Earthling to orbit our planet. The Soviet Union had launched many good dogs into outer space before, but Laika became a global sensation because she was the first to enter low Earth orbit. As The New Yorker wrote in its remembrance of the…
Waymo, the self-driving car unit owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is now about a month away from its trade secret trial against Uber, and things are starting to get a little messy. Waymo planned to argue that Uber stole nine of its trade secrets and used them in its own self-driving cars in order…
Unless you’ve done the right thing and moved yourself into a secluded cave for the next four years, after spending each day enduring a constant stream of depressing news on social media, you can probably relate to the animated characters in Ari Weinkle’s short film, Moodles, who collapse into giant piles of limp, relaxed noodles.…
Why do some therapies work wonders on some patients, but seem to have virtually no effect on others? Two fascinating new studies in Science shed light on one potential contributing factor in treatment outcome for cancer patients: The trillions of microrganisms that live in our guts. The makeup of a person’s microbiome, the two studies…
It’s not easy keeping up with all the features in your favorite apps, with dozens of updates pouring down from your app store of choice every week. Just in case you’re not using your apps to their full potential, here are 34 recently introduced tricks and tools that you might not have spotted yet. 1)…
TripAdvisor has deleted multiple reports of rape and sexual assault over the last several years, according to a report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which also highlights the confusing rules and algorithms that determine which reviews are deleted or featured more prominently than others. The expose includes reports from several travelers who claim that TripAdvisor…
We wouldn’t blame you for thinking that Julius Horsthuis spent weeks designing and animating his sci-fi short, Fraktaal, using 3D software. But as the artist reveals, “It so happens that I’m a lazy animator.” So he instead relied on complex mathematical fractal patterns to automatically generate the alien worlds and cities visited in his film.…
New observations show there’s at least one, but possibly three rings, of cold dust around our nearest star, Proxima Centauri. That could indicate the presence of more planets, according to new research. It would be incredible if astronomers could just look at the sky with infinite resolution telescopes and see precisely what’s going on—but they…
Osama bin Laden had a lot of weird stuff on his computer when he was killed by US forces in 2011. The terrorist mastermind had NSFW anime, Hollywood movies, and even a 9-11 truther movie called Loose Change. And yes, that screenshot above from the video game X-Men vs Street Fighter is really from bin…
This year’s worldwide recall of defective EpiPens has put people with severe allergies on alert. And now allergy sufferers have even more reasons to worry. Faulty EpiPens have been cited in the deaths of at least seven Americans so far this year, according to FDA reports that have only been made public this week. Bloomberg…
Tomorrow Apple will lift the veil off its long-awaited, very expensive new iPhone. But earlier today, three reportedly “husky” dudes made off with as many as 313 iPhone X devices. The phones were apparently sitting inside a UPS truck outside of a San Francisco Apple store when they were stolen earlier this afternoon. The iPhone…
The iPhone X costs more than any phone Apple has ever sold, starting at $1,000 a pop. But Apple expects people will buy truckloads of them anyways, according to the company’s earnings release today, and CEO Tim Cook seems to believe you can afford one, too, because if you break a monthly payment plan down,…
This is not a drill. Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, appears to have been momentarily deleted or suspended. The account was offline for a few minutes this afternoon before reappearing, during which time visitors to his account were greeted with an error that states, “That page doesn’t exist.” It’s not clear whether the president’s…
Our Sun is powered by a fundamental phenomenon whereby atoms combine to unleash tremendous amounts of energy. But atoms might not be the only things that participate in this explosive reaction. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider’s LHCb experiment recently discovered a new particle whose constituent parts required lots of energy to bind together. But…
While most of us only take note of the work being done at Unicode when it drops a new set of emojis, the organization is responsible for standardizing the way computers around the world display characters. It’s serious business, and some Unicode researchers have had enough of this stupid emoji shit. https://gizmodo.com/go-download-your-69-new-iphone-emoji-right-now-1820020681 On Thursday, Buzzfeed…
App developers can access more robust data about your face and the expressions you make with iPhone X, raising concerns from privacy advocates who worry that this sensitive facial data will end up in the hands of advertisers. According to its developer agreement, Apple will grant access to face data if the app maker seeks…
This morning, after about five clicks over the course of 10 seconds, I cancelled my Netflix membership. The company had started notifying people of its latest price increase—a two buck bump from $12 to $14 in my case—and I just couldn’t do it any more. In fact, you should ask yourself if you need to…
Two new research papers on object recognition, one from Japanese researchers at Kyushu University and one from experts at MIT, have startling implications for how artificial intelligence “sees” potential threats. Typically, object-recognition works by complex pattern matching: the software measures the pixels in an image and matches that to an internal blueprint of a given…
