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Of all the giant machines you’ll find on a construction site, the steamroller seems like it has the best potential for realizing your destructive childhood fantasies. There’s an endless list of objects you could stick under its rolling steel drum, but obliterating a giant gummy bear somehow stands out as one of the most satisfying.…
In the latest leak of sensitive medical records in the United States, lab test results and other patient files belonging to an estimated 150,000 Americans were unearthed online by security researchers late last month. The records, discovered by researchers at the Kromtech Security Center, had been stored on an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket. According to…
The world has seen mere seconds of Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s porgs, but already they’re a divisive character. Some people love them, others hate them. But no matter where you stand, everybody wants to photoshop them. Yes, this is the internet, so people are going to town on the latest cuddly creature to invade…
The Dow Jones newswire reported some mind-blowing news this morning: Google is acquiring Apple for the relatively paltry price of $9 billion, thanks to an agreement revealed in Steve Jobs’ will. But the news—and the multiple alerts that the newswire blasted out—were bogus. “In a surprise move to anyone who is alive, Google said it’s…
With a top Senate Republican warning that US leadership is edging us toward World War III, it’ll bring no one comfort to learn South Korean authorities believe that hackers working for the government of North Korea managed to steal highly-classified documents that included wartime contingency plans that were drawn up in 2015. https://gizmodo.com/donald-trump-tweets-rex-tillerson-is-wasting-his-time-t-1819036965 Speaking with…
Ikea recently announced that it would be selling more stuff online through third parties, like Amazon. But actually, you’ve been able to buy Ikea products on non-Ikea websites for quite a while. The concept seems appealing, too. Who wouldn’t want to buy cheap Ikea stuff without confronting the Saturday-destroying task of going to the store?…
When it comes to hiring women and underrepresented minorities into engineering positions at Uber, the company’s head of HR Liane Hornsey thinks “it’s going to be bloody hard.” Hornsey isn’t wrong. “We don’t think they’re all going to want to rush to Uber, but we want to build relationships with those people over time,” Hornsey…
Forget the uncanny valley and not-quite-perfect CG humans freaking you out, this title sequence for London’s recent OFFF digital arts festival will make you so uncomfortable you’ll want to burn your laptop. But at the same time the animation is so beautiful you might find yourself watching it two or three times instead. The sequence…
By now, you may have seen the incredible pictures of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope or FAST, an enormous telescope in the Guizhou province of China that just turned on last year. You’ve also probably heard that, yes, many hope it will find signs of alien life. It’s already beginning to make discoveries. China’s…
Modern materials engineering allows us to build what looks like precarious glass skywalks perched thousands of feet off the ground. They’re completely safe, but knowing that doesn’t make them any less terrifying to traverse—especially when the glass skywalk you’re on uses transparent LCD screens to make it look like it’s about to shatter and collapse.…
Windows Phone is dead, but Microsoft isn’t getting out of mobile—in fact it’s redoubling its efforts. With plenty of apps for iOS and Android out now and improving fast, you can recreate much of the feel of a Windows Phone on your existing handset, as long as you can live without those rotating tiles. Here’s…
Just after 11 am on Saturday morning, I became the proud parent of my very first Tamagotchi, freshly hatched from its virtual egg. By yesterday afternoon it was dead; its passing a poignant reminder that the gadgets we adored as kids aren’t always as awesome 20 years later when we’re grownups. To commemorate the 20th…
The new trailer for The Last Jedi dropped last night. And it’s all some Star Wars nerds are talking about. But it’s clear that one character stole the show. That’s right. It’s porg time, baby. Every Star Wars trilogy needs its cuddly comic relief. The Return of the Jedi had the Ewoks, Episodes I-III tried…
The sprawling inquiry into the extent of Russian attempts to purchase ads on the US internet before the 2016 federal elections has expanded to yet another digital giant, with Microsoft confirming that it has launched an internal investigation into whether it sold such advertisements via its Bing search engine. In a statement, a Microsoft spokesman…
On Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promoted the social media giant’s new Facebook Spaces app, which allows users to remotely cast cartoon avatars of themselves walking around locations in the real world, by taking a “magical” tour of Puerto Rico. Specifically, Zuckerberg toured parts of the commonwealth still devastated from Hurricane Maria—which has left the…
Self-driving test vehicles are already on the roads in several states, including California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, but the futuristic world of robot cars on every street hasn’t materialized quite yet. People are still freaked out by the idea of getting in a car that doesn’t have anyone behind the wheel—and so companies in the autonomous…
One sweaty New York City day last month, my friend and I ate snails for lunch and durian for dessert. I don’t know why we did this, but something about how affordable everything is in Chinatown encourages me to make strange decisions. I didn’t dislike the fruit’s taste, which was somehow both sweet like custard…
If the whole Equifax debacle changes anything at all, it should be the public perception of what a responsible disclosure looks like in the wake of a devastating data breach. That’s a lesson that, incredibly, Whole Foods seems determined to ignore. It’s been 12 days since Whole Foods first disclosed that its point-of-sale systems were…
Expanding your library of games on the new SNES Classic is not only possible, it’s trivially easy. Though it may not be entirely legal. Not long after the NES Classic Edition came out, a Russian coder named Cluster built a tool called Hakchi to cram more games into the little emulation box. Given that the…
Two members of Baltimore County Council have introduced a new resolution to tighten public access to body camera footage. The measure, introduced by Republican councilmen Todd Crandell and Wade Kach, comes after dozens of criminal cases were dropped in Baltimore City following the release of camera footage that seemingly uncovered officer misconduct. This summer, public…
