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US tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook which do business in the European Union have long … avoided paying billions in taxes on their European operations through, uh, creative use of tax laws. That all might come to an end soon, if a group of member countries led by France is able to…
Surprise! The Golden Master build of iOS 11 leaked online Friday night, with users spreading links to the software on Reddit. It’s full of details about the upcoming line of products being teased for the company’s September 12th event, including that Apple appears poised to skip releasing a 7S line entirely and move directly to…
Accurate information can be the difference between life and death during a hurricane. So FEMA has launched a new webpage in an effort to debunk rumors that people might be hearing about Hurricane Irma as the historic storm barrels down on the US mainland. Natural disasters breed a lot of misinformation. Sometimes it’s fake photos…
Equifax, the credit reporting agency which admitted on Thursday it had lost massive amounts of information for 143 million Americans including social security numbers, is not making it easy to understand what the people it screwed over should do. On Friday, Equifax began directing customers to its Trusted ID premier service, saying it would provide…
We knew it wouldn’t be long before Congress demanded action in response to the Equifax data breach—particularly since several of its members are among the 143 million Americans who are pissed about having their Social Security numbers and other personal data exposed. Equifax announced the breach yesterday, and so far the company’s behavior has been…
Virginia’s Board of Elections voted unanimously to decertify all of the state’s touchscreen voting machines, which are considered by cybersecurity experts to be vulnerable to manipulation by hackers. The race is now on to replace the machines, which are used in 22 counties, before Virginia’s elections in November. Industry experts and and the state’s elections…
In April, the US Department of Labor accused Google of gender pay discrimination. The tech behemoth denied the allegations, and when the DoL requested historical salary records from the company, Google argued that the endeavor was too expensive. Lucky for Google, good samaritans at the company have led efforts to compile the wage data. The…
Hollywood is struggling through a particularly rough financial patch at the moment, and it’s throwing blame in every direction. Its favorite target over the last ten years has been technological disruption. Netflix, home theaters, and MoviePass have all been cited as box office grim reapers. The latest target, Rotten Tomatoes, is the dumbest excuse yet.…
Summer is coming to an end, and you may be thinking fondly back to times spent lounging on a beach, soft white sand flowing between your fingers and toes as you napped under the Sun. Well, forget relaxing and start worrying, baby! Researchers writing in the journal Science this week are warning us about yet…
Around the turn of the 20th century, American entrepreneur Clark Stanley sold an allegedly healing “rattlesnake oil” out of his stage coach. Stanley marketed his product as a Western interpretation of some ideas he supposedly gathered from Eastern medicine, claiming the product could cure a whole host of illnesses. The problem was, a federal investigation…
Like a slow moving stalker in a horror movie, Hurricane Irma is now less than 400 miles from Miami and making steady progress. The exceptionally-powerful storm has triggered a mass exodus from Florida, what may wind up being one of the largest evacuations in US history. Irma, now downgraded to a still-very-powerful Category 4 storm…
Are you a boat driver who drives boats in the ocean? Then do I have bad news for you, boathead. And that bad news is lightning. Not so fun driving boats now, boaty! Anyway, it is slowly becoming clear that the world is falling apart, so I’m finding it increasingly difficult to take anything less…
The clever software that stabilizes bumpy video and turns it into smooth as silk footage works by tracking various targets in a clip so it can calculate the camera’s erratic movements. Here’s what happens when you instead tell it to stabilize footage by tracking just a single male nipple. Jake Alewel recently shared this video…
On Thursday, Google made a confusing announcement that could easily scare the crap out of 800 million people: Google Drive’s going away—but actually, no, it’s not. However, there are a few things you should know about the changes that are coming. First and foremost, the Google cloud service known as Drive is going to be…
You’d be forgiven for thinking RSS died off with the passing of Google Reader, but our old friend Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) still has a role to play on the web of 2017. It’s faster, more efficient, and you won’t have to worry as much about accidentally leaking your news reading habit…
RED, the makers of super high quality cameras that probably cost more than your car, has been working on an equally ambitious phone with some of the most far out tech any company has ever tried to put on a handset. Yesterday CEO Jim Jannard took to the RED camera forums to give more details…
Less than a week into the new job and Uber’s new CEO faces yet another federal investigation into the company. Sounds like hell. It is. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched a probe into secret software Uber used between 2014 and 2016 that was internally referred to as “Hell,” the Wall Street Journal reported.…
The complexities of rare and extraordinary natural phenomena, like powerful earthquakes, come with mysteries not fully understood. One that seems to get quite a bit of attention from scientists and skeptics alike is earthquake lights, flashes or other glowing phenomena that occur before or during a quake. Videos (real or not) have already surfaced documenting…
Privacy experts have sounded alarms on face recognition for years. Originally, there were concerns that walking into airports and in public parks meant you were scanned and matched to secret criminal databases. Those fears have since evolved, and now face recognition is a bedrock of predictive technology. Soon, your chances of becoming a terrorist or…
The strongest earthquake to hit Mexico in a century has struck off the nation’s West Coast, shaking buildings for hundreds of miles and triggering tsunami warnings. At least 16 people have been killed, but officials are expecting the death toll to rise. As the US Geological Survey reports, the quake struck at 11:40 pm local…
