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In a troubling series of tweets with more emotional intensity than an entire season of Homeland, the CIA’s official Twitter account told the story of Lulu, an adorable bomb-sniffing dog who refused to sniff bombs. Lulu, the agency wrote early in the thread, “began to show signs that she wasn’t interested in detecting explosive odors.”…
The first major legislative effort to rein in foreign interference in US elections will kick off Thursday afternoon on Capitol Hill, where Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar will field questions from reporters over a new bill crafted, they said, to “improve transparency of online political ads.” The bill, known as The Honest Ads…
A landmark investigation from Russian news outlet RBC uncovered a Kremlin-sponsored scheme that used Facebook to recruit black activists in the US as part of Russia’s election interference campaign, reportedly paying them to organize Black Lives Matter rallies, self-defense classes and produce content for Russian-owned sites decrying police brutality. Contacted by Buzzfeed News, the activists had…
Last year, Snapchat became a “camera company,” changed its name to Snap, and unveiled its first piece of hardware: camera sunglasses called Spectacles. Today, Snap is evolving yet again. That AR dancing hot dog, the star of its last earnings call, is now officially an $80 halloween costume available on Amazon. Snap’s polyester sausage comes…
Lawmakers attending the Cleveland Republican National Convention where Donald Trump formally clinched the presidential nomination were able to ruminate about what they had done in a luxurious hideaway reportedly funded in part by Microsoft, Comcast, AT&T, Chevron, the Koch family, and Big Pharma. The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) said it obtained bank records that…
There’s a new app that uses machine learning to mine your camera roll for explicit images. The purpose of the app, Nude, is to file these sensitive photos into a for-your-eyes-only folder, and then help you wipe the pics from your camera roll and iCloud. But algorithms are still not very good at picking up…
Remember AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence to defeat a grandmaster at Go? Well, the program just got a major upgrade, and it can now teach itself how to dominate the game without any human intervention. But get this: In a tournament that pitted AI against AI, this juiced-up version, called AlphaGo Zero, defeated the regular…
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of a dystopian future where books have been outlawed and are destroyed by firemen who set them ablaze. But in an ironic twist, Super Terrain, a publisher in France, has created a new edition of Bradbury’s classic that actually requires extreme heat in order to be read. Jo…
“It’s important that Facebook is a place where people with different views can share their ideas,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg following the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. “But when someone tries to silence others or attacks them based on who they are or what they believe, that hurts us all and is unacceptable.” That…
I have not organized my contacts in the Apple Contacts app in nearly a decade. For every meticulously maintained contact (usually people I mail gifts to for the holidays) there are hundreds of other contacts polluting the field. So many it would take me a few days and a lot of wine to finally sort…
Remember the last time you fell asleep on the couch and your TV remote left an imprint on your face? Taking inspiration from that, DBLG, a UK-based ad agency, produced an amusing series of animations by imprinting characters and objects directly onto human skin. It’s an animation style you probably won’t see Disney copying anytime…
Americans will spend roughly $2.7 billion on Halloween candy this year. And an online candy retailer has crunched the numbers to figure out the most popular candy in every state. CandyStore.com has assembled an interactive map showing the best-selling candy across our great, sugar-drenched nation. And some of the picks might surprise you. For instance, who…
The Los Angeles Police Department approved a test program to deploy drones alongside its officers on Tuesday, with the Police Commission voting 3-1 to roll out a year-long “small Unmanned Aerial System” program. Per the L.A. Times, the hotly contested decision allows police in the city to deploy the robots in a variety of conditions,…
On October 11th, President Donald Trump tweeted that if NBC was going to continue being so mean to him, he could simply have his subordinates “challenge their License,” adding that adversarial media was “Bad for country!” In a second tweet, the president claimed that “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses…
In the lead up to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China this month—a major changing of the guard which will see widespread retirements among senior leaders—the country’s censors have been cracking down on everything from an unnerving sex doll-sharing company to even milquetoast criticism of the government in the media. Now,…
Twitter’s downward spiral into a platform where abuse thrives has been well-documented over the years, but harassment on Twitter is in the news again this week because the company suspended actress Rose McGowan after she tweeted about sexual abuse in Hollywood. In response, CEO Jack Dorsey promised to introduce stricter rules against harassment—and it looks…
The most accurate description of the shrieking pageantry we’ve come to know as InfoWars is that it’s a dietary supplement business hiding behind a debased, unreliable, and exhaustingly stupid news network. Unfortunately for its founder Alex Jones, seen above chugging a glass of “Caveman True Paleo Formula,” two of those supplements were recently found to…
Regina Dugan, a tech exec with roots in the government sector as the former director of DARPA, is leaving Facebook and her departure calls into question the status of one of the craziest things Facebook has been working on. Fittingly, Dugan announced the departure in a post on Facebook today. If you’re unfamiliar with Dugan…
A crane left parked in front of a sugar factory for months in Baltimore, Maryland, prevented photographer Paul Frederiksen from getting the exact shot he wanted. He had assumed that using Photoshop to erase the obtrusive crane was all but impossible, until Denyer, a UK-based photographer, performed a photo-editing miracle. The challenge with removing such…
British spy agencies have collected and shared huge databases of personal and social media information on millions of individuals, and effectively circumvented the investigatory body tasked with surveillance oversight, according to documents newly obtained by Privacy International, a London-based consumer advocacy group. In the latest episode of a years-long legal challenge, Privacy International told the…
