Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Uber is closing in on a pick to replace its former CEO Travis Kalanick, who departed the ride-hailing giant under a storm of allegations he tolerated a widespread culture of sexual harassment and mistreated drivers. Per Recode, the number one finalist is former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, who could be coming before the company’s…
A team of civilian researchers has discovered the wreck of the USS Indianapolis, a US Navy cruiser which Imperial Japanese forces sunk in July 1945 to the loss of nearly three quarters of its crew. According to a statement from the Navy, two Japanese submarine torpedoes struck the ship, sinking it more than 18,000 feet…
Last week’s violent, unhinged white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which culminated in a terror attack which killed Heather Heyer and wounded dozens of others, seems to have left the digital far-right in a sorry state indeed. A “Free Speech Rally” in Boston which days ago was making city officials nervous it could be a…
Microsoft claims Bing, its search engine for people who have just unboxed a new computer and are trying to find out where to download Chrome, is bigger than you think. Stats released by the company this week claim Bing enjoys an astonishing 33 percent market share in the US, which is far higher than the…
Jason Kessler, the organizer of last weekend’s neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville and a former contributor to the Daily Caller, tweeted overnight that the death of Heather Heyer was “payback time.” Response in the white nationalist community was mixed, with some distancing themselves from Kessler, others applauding his tweet, and still others floating various conspiracy theories.…
After a week of silence, Dell CEO Michael Dell has finally addressed the violence in Charlottesville. As CEOs fled Trump’s toxic Manufacturing Council and denounced the president’s racist responses, Dell pledged to stand by the president. Now, the council has been dissolved and at 6 PM on a Friday, Dell has some inspiring words. https://gizmodo.com/the-dude-youre-getting-a-dell-guy-condemns-trumps-excus-1797904043…
Wow, it’s already Friday. Time freakin’ flies, man! We’ve covered a lot of wild stuff in the last few weeks, but one question remains: what’s good? When I say “what’s good,” I don’t mean “what are the things in this world that you would classify as good.” Finding that out could take all day—or even…
Science doesn’t give answers. Instead, it’s a tool that humans have created to make meaningful conclusions from data. So, if someone tells you that science says energy drinks will turn you into a cocaine user, well, science won’t ever do that. A new study practically everyone has been reporting on claims that energy drinks can…
Your DNA is some of the most intimate information out there—encoded in it is information about your health, your personality, your family history. It’s not hard to imagine how such sensitive details could be damaging should they fall into the wrong hands. And yet, the privacy practices of the people and programs handling that information…
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the Pentagon’s cyber warfare unit will be elevated, forming the US military’s tenth unified command. In a statement, he vowed to “strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our Nation’s defense.” The long-awaited shift signals that US military operations in cyberspace are considered no less…
Nature can be brutal as hell. The Circle of Life translates to a horrible place full of awful smells, corpses, murder, and plenty of unreasonably upsetting shit. Looking at pictures of nature, however, is a completely different story. It’s soothing. It’s nice. There’s not as much blood, generally. Anyway, open access journal BMC Ecology released…
Steve Bannon, the chief strategist to Donald Trump, former executive of Breitbart, and idolizer of such figures as Darth Vader and Satan, is expected to be removed from his position at the White House, according to the Drudge Report and New York Times. To briefly eulogize the accomplishments of the alleged self-fellator and wife-beater, Bannon…
It may look like a glorified Ziplock bag, but the artificial womb could one day save the lives of the thousands of babies born every year prematurely. For the second time, researchers announced this week that they have successfully incubated lambs born before reaching full term in an artificial ‘womb.’ In findings published this week…
Grabbing a quick coffee from a fast food joint means it’s up to you to add as much coffee and cream as you need. But future generations may never need to deal with those tiny, easy-to-spill milk cups as scientists from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany have invented capsules that dissolve away…
It was preordained by the fad gods. After cheating death for months, it seems the fidget spinner will finally be sacrificed at the altar of The Phone, its natural foe. A company called Fidgetly has opted to perform the ritual, creating a fidget spinner that doubles as a “360-degree motion game controller.” Called CTRL, the…
In a world where the authorities may be just as likely to try to hack into your phone as a random crook, it’s nice to see that Apple has added a hidden trick that could help keep cops out. A new feature found in the current iOS 11 beta allows users to press the sleep…
The potential of striking gold at a thrift store can be very much dependent on where that store is located. Given NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is just an hour away, a pair of college students in Orlando were lucky enough to find six vintage flight suits buried in a box at a Salvation Army store…
If you’re a professional photographer who assumed that slapping an obtrusive watermark across your work would protect it from being misused online, Google’s got some bad news for you. A team of researchers from the company has found a way to automatically and perfectly erase the watermarks used by popular stock photography organizations. Before this…
Lost for nearly a century and a half, a grainy black and white portrait of John Quincy Adams has reemerged—and it’s now considered the oldest surviving original photograph of a US president in existence. Since the mid-19th century, this photo has been unknowingly stored at the family home of the late Horace Everett, a Vermont…
In the world of smartphones, the Essential Phone has been anxiously anticipated with the reverence we should probably save for Kendrick Lamar albums. Why? Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, is behind the whole thing. After ditching Google in 2014, Rubin ran off to open a bakery (YUM!), but he’s returned to the world of…