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Donald Trump is still president and he’s still nominating vile people to lead the agencies that they personally want to destroy. The latest nominee in this horror show is Dana Baiocco, an attorney who built a career defending companies with unsafe products, to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC). Baiocco will have her confirmation…
On a recent trip to Berlin, Alex Lomas’ acquaintance posed him a challenge: Can you find a Bluetooth-enabled butt plug in the wild, and can you turn it on without its owner’s help? Lomas, a penetration tester with the British cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners, pulled out his phone, consulted the detection app LightBlue, and…
Don’t you hate when you’re just trying to make breakfast and your toaster burns the words “Satan lives” into your bread? June O’Brien, who appeared on the Today Show in May of 1984, wanted the world to believe. And even if you’re a skeptic, it’s hard to disagree with the fact that not only is…
It doesn’t matter what seat you choose on an airplane, your view will never be as breathtaking as what the pilots get to see during your flight. But sometimes the high-altitude scenery is so stunning that pilots feel obliged to share it with the world, like this descent into Queenstown Airport in New Zealand. If…
Google Docs users have been hit with a nasty surprise today as they try to edit documents—they’re getting locked out of their drafts and receiving a message warning them that their documents violate Google’s terms of service. The abuse policy for Docs and other Google Drive services forbids users from publishing a range of content,…
Look, I don’t really care about Apple’s upcoming HomePod because even though it might sound fantastic, I’m not convinced I need to drop $350 on yet another smart speaker. Even so, I appreciate a job well done, no matter how small, and the person or people responsible for the status sounds for the HomePod have…
The new iPhone X has some pretty incredible features, like the Face ID biometric lock that lets me open the phone with a look, and the huge display that takes up the majority of the front of the phone. It also has animoji, a new iMessage app that uses the Face ID sensor module to…
A recent survey shows why corporate password policies are doing very little to stop employees from mishandling their passwords. It also finds most employees favor biometric security and that Apple’s new Face ID feature is widely trusted—even though almost no one has actually used it yet. A new report by Israeli security firm Secret Double…
I can’t even hop a curb on my bike without feeling like a Hollywood stuntperson risking their life for a shot, so watching biker Antoine Bizet careen down a mountain in the deserts of Utah leaves me sweaty, short of breath, and happy to be safely perched in my office chair. Instead of slowly and…
As many as 200 workers were killed after a tunnel collapsed at North Korea’s underground nuclear test site, according to unconfirmed reports by Japanese broadcaster TV Asahi. The accident is presumed to have happened in early September following the country’s most recent test of a hydrogen bomb, which may have compromised the geological strength of the…
Three of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies will speak to three different congressional subcommittees on Tuesday and Wednesday to finally get to the bottom of, well, a lot of issues. Top priority is to discuss Russia’s use of online ads and social media to influence the 2016 US election. Here’s how you can watch it…
After a couple of false starts, the FBI claims that the remaining JFK assassination files that were scheduled to be released last week will finally be made public. But historians and researchers still might be somewhat disappointed. After further vetting by intelligence agencies, the FBI says that some sensitive names in the files will be…
The iPhone X’s Face ID camera module has received a bit more press than Apple might’ve intended. The facial recognition security tech was the whiz-bang feature that caught everybody’s eye during the Tim Cook and friends keynote—and later it was repeatedly fingered as the culprit behind the long-rumored iPhone X shortages and delays. So what’s…
Waymo, the self-driving car group born out of Google’s secretive moonshot unit and recently spun out as its own company, has made a bunch of self-driving cars—around 100 of its current Chrysler iteration, with another 500 in the works, not to mention probably lots more than that in the future. Yesterday, Waymo let a gaggle…
Since mid-2016, Apple’s iPhone Photos app has used metadata analysis and image-recognition technology to sort users’ photos automatically and tag them for easy extraction. The categories include everything from various animals to inanimate objects like furniture—but as Twitter user @ellieeewbu noted on Monday, it also includes the archaic term “brassiere.” In a limited straw poll,…
The scale of Russian efforts to fuel discord and resentment among US voters during the 2016 election was far greater than previously disclosed, according to multiple reports surfacing on the eve of congressional testimony by top tech companies. Facebook alone now believes that roughly 126 million Americans on its platform may have been exposed to…
Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai is aiming to impose new caps on funding for Lifeline, a program to assist impoverished people living in the U.S. afford phone, cellular and internet access. The Lifeline program imposes small fees on phone bills to pay for $9.25/month subsidies towards low-income Americans’ telecoms bills (the payments are made…
A much-anticipated merger between T-Mobile and Sprint has been considered by analysts to be all but inevitable for the past few months. But reports that Sprint’s parent company, SoftBank, is getting cold feet sent both telecoms’ stock prices plummeting on Monday. It’s beginning to look like the deal that was as good as done is…
Jack Ma, the eccentric CEO of online marketplace Alibaba, has a well-documented flair for the theatrical. Now the South China Morning Post—a newspaper owned by Ma—reports their boss will assume a starring role in the upcoming short movie Gong Shou Dao. The film’s known credits, other than Ma himself, include action movie legends like Donny…
What happens when a precancerous growth turns from a benign cluster of abnormal cells to a full-blown disease? Researchers are turning to genome sequencing in an effort to find out. This month, the National Cancer Institute funded a three-year pilot project that aims to develop a “pre-cancer genome atlas” for lung, breast, prostate and pancreatic…
