Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in a critical case over data privacy, the outcome of which will likely determine how easily law enforcement can gain access to information stored in tech companies’ overseas data centers. Microsoft will go head-to-head with the Justice Department, arguing that the agency cannot use a warrant…
If you’re in London right now you might want to look out your window. It’s disturbing to say the least. No, not that. That’s just the Duchess of Cambridge dancing with Paddington Bear at Paddington Station to promote the movie Paddington 2. If you look up at the sky, however, you’ll see an orange, apocalyptic hue—and…
Victims of revenge porn—the nonconsensual distribution of explicit images—have a difficult path to navigate to regain their privacy and seek justice. The laws have yet to catch up to the crime, and the average person doesn’t have the means to quickly take down intimate images from the web—they’re often at the mercy of tech giants.…
The recently-released Super Nintendo Classic Edition is a fantastic way to replay 21 of your favorite 16-bit SNES games—but what about all the other classics that Nintendo excluded? If you’ve still got a stack of old Super Nintendo carts at home, the Analogue Super Nt should let you enjoy them on the fancy hi-def TV…
Imagine an animal with the body of a chameleon, the feet and claws of an anteater, the humped back of a camel, and a tail that is both flattened like a beaver’s, but also like that of a scorpion. If you’re thinking this sounds like someone just threw your local zoo into a blender—or that…
Vicky Kalogera, a Northwestern University physicist, took her week of much-needed vacation in Utah this past August. She promised her family she’d stay off of email for a week. It wasn’t a real promise, of course, but she was going to try. She’d arranged the perfect day for August 17. Her husband was going to…
A disgusting factor which separates consuming human flesh from consuming muscle tissue of non-speaking animals is that you can’t separate eating dead humans from eating live humans. In the way that you call a baby cow “veal” or a pig “pork,” human flesh is just human flesh—you wouldn’t think about eating Dave’s “rounds” or his…
A major vulnerability has been discovered in the protocol governing basically all modern wi-fi routers. Here’s what we know so far. If you’ve set up a home wi-fi network, at some point you’ve encountered one or more screens concerning WEP and its successor WPA2. Both are security protocols created by the Wi-Fi Alliance that keep…
As the fall smartphone season starts to wind down, the number two smartphone maker in the world (it’s not Apple anymore) is sending us off with its answer to this year’s batch of iPhones, Pixels, and Galaxies with the Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro. From the outside, The Mate 10’s specs and features…
Police in Dubai may soon have access to functional hoverbikes, according to AutoBlog, which reported that Dubai Police had unveiled the new technology in conjunction with Russian company Hoversurf at the Gulf Information Technology Exposition last week. Per Autoblog, the Scorpion hoverbike is capable of flying approximately 16 feet (five meters) in the air, moving…
Earlier this month, software engineer Christopher Moore discovered that Shenzen, China-based phone manufacturer OnePlus was secretly collecting a trove of data about users without their consent and communicating it to company servers. Moore had routed his OnePlus 2’s internet traffic through security tool OWASP ZAP for a holiday hack challenge, but noticed his device was…
Look: If we’re being honest, fidget spinners are pretty played out at this point. Or at least they are … on Earth. It turns out that fidget spinners remain extremely cool if you have access to a massive spacecraft and a low-gravity environment. NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, who is stationed on the International Space Station,…
Credit-reporting agency Equifax, which has been embroiled in a richly-deserved sea of anger after losing the sensitive personal and financial info of at least 145 million people to hackers, found itself in yet another hole this week after its website began redirecting users to malware. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported the latest problems…
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted on Friday that the company’s minimalist approach to moderation was not working, saying the site is committed to taking a “more aggressive stance in our rules and how to enforce them” in the wake of numerous high-profile public relations nightmares. “We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day,” Dorsey…
In a court hearing today, the Department of Justice dropped its request for the names of an estimated 6,000 people who “liked” a Facebook page about an Inauguration Day protest, the American Civil Liberties Union said. The ACLU challenged several warrants related to protests against President Trump’s inauguration on Friday, one of which included the…
We’re all generating data faster than storage providers can keep up, and that problem is only going to get worse. On Friday, Western Digital announced a potential game changer that promises to expand the limits of traditional HDDs to up to 40TBs using a microwave-based write head, and the company says it will be available…
Facebook is a vast and bewildering operation, working with visible and invisible data streams via opaque algorithms on a scale larger than humans can readily comprehend. Many of us have been baffled, for example, by the social network’s ability to figure out who we know in real life, as reflected by the suggestions that pop…
Data that may have proved critical to investigations into Russia-funded political ads appears to have been tossed by Facebook and Twitter into the proverbial shredder. Both platforms have deleted data that researchers say is crucial to understanding the motives and impact behind social media propaganda that targeted American voters last year. In Twitter’s case, information…
Magic mushrooms are a strange drug. They’re one part illegal music festival enhancer, one part promising treatment that could have important medical applications. That second use continues to look more and more promising. A new study from researchers in the United Kingdom and South Africa monitored the brains of folks trying psilocybin, the magic mushroom…
If you’ve been wondering why you couldn’t order food without leaving Facebook, you’re in luck. Facebook just launched this very feature and it sounds simply awful. Remember when Facebook was just a utility that helped you find your friends’ email addresses? We were such dorks back then. The post announcing this previously tested food ordering…
