Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
On the anniversary of its catastrophic 1985 earthquake, Mexico City has been hit by another powerful seismic event. No reports of casualties have been reported, but videos posted to social media suggest that damage is widespread. The 7.1 magnitude tremor struck at 1:14pm local time, its epicenter located about 76 miles outside of Mexico city…
Twitter has struggled to rein in harassment on its platform for years, but in January, the company pledged to finally get serious about the problem. “We didn’t move fast enough last year; now we’re thinking about progress in days and hours not weeks and months,” Ed Ho, Twitter’s general manager of consumer product and engineering,…
Two months ago, an iceberg half the size of Jamaica tore itself loose from Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf. As it slowly drifts north, this massive berg is exposing an area that’s been covered in ice for the past 120,000 years. An international agreement has now been put in place to protect this emerging area…
iOS 11 is finally available today for your iPhone and iPad, and among the many new features included in the update is Apple’s ARKit framework allowing developers to more easily create augmented reality apps and experiences. Here are some of the best ones you’ll want to try out after updating. https://gizmodo.com/24-things-you-can-do-in-ios-11-that-you-couldnt-before-1803136080 To date, augmented reality…
Apple teased us with the next version of iOS in June, revealing a bunch of new features at WWDC that wouldn’t be ready until today—unless of course you love the thrill of a potentially buggy public beta, which has been available since the end of June. But if you like to play it safe, or…
Let’s say you’re some sort of weird dickhead who wants to hurt people by setting off a homemade explosive, but you don’t exactly know what ingredients you’ll need in order to instill a feeling of lifelong terror in the people you don’t kill outright. Amazon—the place where you buy bulk toilet paper and bed risers—has…
An Amazon server containing roughly a gigabyte’s worth of credentials and configuration files belonging to behemoth media conglomerate Viacom were discovered online and unsecured, according to UpGuard, a California-based “cyber resiliency” firm. A security researcher working for the company discovered the server flapping in the wind last month—without so much as a password between it…
Among the many new features and updates iOS 11 will bring to your iPhone and iPad, there’s one that some users might not actually want. Apple is finally neutering older 32-bit apps, which means that some of your favorite games or productivity tools simply won’t load with iOS 11 installed. https://gizmodo.com/24-things-you-can-do-in-ios-11-that-you-couldnt-before-1803136080 The iPhone 5S, released…
In a highly unusual hacking case, an entire school district in Montana shut down for three days following a data breach of student and faculty records. Investigators say that parents received “extremely graphic threats via text messages” and that hackers sent the school board a ransom note demanding bitcoin payments in exchange for the destruction…
This year, the FBI appears to have for the first time overlooked a reporting obligation established by the US Attorney General’s office, and in doing so, the bureau appears to have greatly lowballed the total number of times it authorized confidential informants to engage in criminal activity last year. As a consequence, the bureau did…
It’s a hostile world out there and your personal data is constantly being targeted from a whole host of angles. While you can’t control the shoddy security practices of major corporations, you can minimize the risk of your private information getting into the wrong hands. Just as you do regular maintenance on your car, or…
A mere two weeks after Hurricane Irma barrelled through the Caribbean, there’s yet another Category 5 hurricane that’s wreaking havoc in the region. After inflicting “widespread devastation” to the island of Dominica last night, Hurricane Maria is now making a beeline towards the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Maria regained its Category 5 status…
On Monday, a team of scientists in Australia announced an exciting breakthrough: For the first time, researchers were able to turn light into sound on a microchip. But—as crazy-sounding new physics applications tend to be—it’s probably going to be a long time before you see one of these chips on a computer you can buy.…
Android smartphones with edge-to-edge screens, like the Samsung S8 or the Essential phone, have found elegant ways to deal with the devices’ forward-facing cameras and sensors. But if you’re an Android user who’d rather have a garish notch up top like the iPhone X, a new app called XOutOf10 will add a screen-blocking bar to…
It’s like clockwork: every month or so, you’ll be scrolling through your Facebook feed and stumble across a video about a new ring or underwear, color-changing straws or color-changing nail polish, or “smart stickers” that claim to help prevent sexual assault. There’s the inevitable swarm of uncritical media coverage that garners hundreds of thousands of views…
It was bound to happen. Amazon storms into the voice-controlled gadget game, just like the tablet game, and eventually, a Fire tablet becomes an Echo. That just happened. Amazon’s new Fire HD 10 tablet is also a hands-free Echo. It’s mostly a tablet, but that Echo bit is interesting. Let’s talk first about the tablet…
You may not know the name Gin D. Wong, but you definitely know his work. He’s responsible for some of the most iconic buildings in Los Angeles, including the Theme Building at the Los Angeles Airport (pictured above), and he even inspired the designers of the legendary 1962 animated TV show The Jetsons. Wong died…
At least two civilians have been injured in a bombing incident during Russia’s war games on Monday. Videos of the incident have been posted to YouTube and appear to show two helicopters firing at a civilian viewing area. Russian media report that the incident is being investigated by the military. The war exercises, called “Zapad-2017″…
Ask someone what their dream house is, and you’ll get a lot of different answers. Perhaps a rustic ranch house out on the plains. Maybe a New York or San Francisco brownstone. It could even be that perfect little cottage with the nice rose garden, or a remote farm in Lincolnshire, where Mrs. Buckley lives…
CNN has learned US authorities wiretapped Paul Manafort, the spin artist for dictators who worked a tumultuous four-and-a-half month term as Donald Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. According to CNN, the FISA court-authorized surveillance continued before and after he worked on the campaign and initially “centered on work done by a group of Washington consulting…
