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A noisy cheer went up from the crowd of hackers clustered around the voting machine tucked into the back corner of a casino conference room—they’d just managed to load Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” onto the WinVote, effectively rickrolling democracy. The hack was easy to execute. Two of the hackers working on the…
It’s cyber deja vu time in Hollywood. HBO just confirmed that hackers broke into their servers and stole an unknown quantity of data. Now, unreleased episodes of Ballers and Room 104 have appeared online as well a script that looks an awful lot like next week’s Game of Thrones episode. This is not a drill.…
When taking high-resolution 3D scans of insects, scientists typically have to kill their test subjects, which isn’t always ideal. By taking advantage of an insect’s ability to survive oxygen-poor conditions, scientists have now used carbon dioxide to keep bugs in a state of suspended animation for upwards of seven hours at a time—and with no…
If you had any doubts about Apple releasing a bezel-free iPhone in September, you can probably throw those out the window. The company just pushed out a version of the HomePod firmware, and not only does the code tell us more about how Apple’s smart speaker will work, it also offers a few clues about…
By this point, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that the world is full of bacteria. But the numbers can still be baffling. Take your body: it probably has 37 trillion cells or so, and maybe the same number of bacterial cells. Now think about your kitchen sponge. I don’t care if you want to…
You’ve probably got enough on your plate without wasting time on phone chores that could be running automatically—like clearing out old photos, muting and unmuting your handset, posting to all of your social media accounts at once, and so on. Here are five automations you can set up quickly and for free as soon as…
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for priceless artifacts from NASA history. First, a moon-dusted sample bag from Apollo 11 was privately auctioned, and now a solid gold moon lander replica that was gifted to Neil Armstrong in 1969 has been stolen from his museum. On Sunday, a NASA investigator worried that the thieves…
It doesn’t take long for a grass fire to turn into a raging inferno that sweeps through entire forests, so a pair of quick-thinking boaters in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, used their jet boat to create a massive rooster tail that helped douse the flames before firefighters arrived on scene. Tasha Hunt and Koyne Watson’s…
A year-long manhunt ended last weekend, when police arrested a gang of five Romanian stunt thieves near a large collection of Van Gogh paintings in the Netherlands. In their hideout, the cops found $590,000 worth of iPhones that the suspects allegedly lifted off the back of a truck—while it was barreling down a highway. Dutch…
William Shatner, perhaps best known as the narrator of the 1963 film Operation Bikini, is at it again. This time he’s taken aim at the snowflakes, misandrists, and social justice warriors (SJWs) that have annoyed him so much on Twitter. Despite his notable work on Operation Bikini, Shatner is also known to a small, cult…
Have you seen that photo of Theresa May and her fellow Tories in front of the Edvard Munch painting, The Scream? It’s going viral on Twitter at the moment. But sadly, it’s completely fake. The photo actually dates back to September 2016 and shows British Prime Minister Theresa May with 27 cabinet members. The photo…
Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is down, but he somehow does not yet consider himself out, according to a Sunday report in the New York Times. Kalanick, who resigned in June amid widespread reports he let a culture of sexual harassment run rampant at the company and lawsuits by angry drivers, has apparently injected himself…
While Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are busy debating whether a malevolent, future AI could dispatch machine-gun toting drones to kill us all, a current-day “revolutionary AI” could get you killed right now. Truffle, previously Mushroom, is an app that claim it can “identify any mushroom instantly with just a pic.” Mushrooms are famously hard…
Russian President Vladimir Putin retaliated against new US sanctions legislation widely expected to be signed by President Donald Trump, announcing on Sunday he would expel or have the US otherwise cut 755 US diplomatic staff. The sanctions in question were designed to punish Russia following US intelligence agencies’ universal conclusion Russian operatives interfered in the…
Love makes people do dumb stuff. But there are practical, easy steps we can take to maintain our privacy during romantic relationships, and changing one simple behavior now could keep us safe later on if the relationship ends badly. While plenty of the tens of thousands of hackers who descend on Las Vegas every year…
Over 22,000 fans were evacuated from the Tomorrowland music festival in Barcelona on Saturday after an unspecified “technical malfunction” caused the stage to burst into a towering inferno straight out of hell. According to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, local authorities suspect a malfunctioning pyrotechnics display was to blame for the massive blaze, which started on…
A lawsuit against two former Air Force psychologists who developed the CIA’s post-September 11, 2001 “enhanced interrogation” torture techniques, James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, appears to be all set to go to trial after the defendants ignored repeated exhortations to settle—including from the judge. Mitchell and Jensen earned $81 million from the CIA between…
It’s no secret that airline travel is more miserable than ever, with increasing lengths of time spent on the tarmac, “family fees,” lines to pass through security growing and growing, and the increasing prospect of being manhandled by said security. If you manage to avoid any of those problems, you’re still virtually guaranteed to be…
Hey, it looks like actions have consequences! The Canadian tech sector is trying to cash in on President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies with a pilot program to slash waiting times for work permits and temporary resident visas from a year to just two weeks, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Canadian program just…
This week, an unverified Twitter account claiming to be “McDonald’s Hong Kong,” a real branch of the global fast-food giant, went mad. The account was apparently created in October 2016, and initially posted just a few tweets that seemed like legitimate promotional material advertising the chain’s offerings of Big Macs and spicy chicken sandwiches. But…
