Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Here’s the thing about ATMs: The machines are designed to take a pretty severe beating and still leave the box of cash out of a would-be thief’s reach. A Maryland man recently learned this lesson the hard way when he stole a backhoe, drove it five miles, and then attempted to excavate some cash out…
President Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director on May 9th. Ever since, the American people have been wondering what Comey knows about the Trump regime and its possible collusion with Russia. Today we finally get some answers. And thankfully there are a lot of ways to watch online. Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence…
Apple is making changes to the way apps get information about users’ location and photos, giving users more control over what data they share and when they share it. These are the changes that are coming in iOS 11: all apps that use location data will be required to offer an “only when using” option,…
In an impressive bit of cyber-sleuthing, security researchers have discovered that a nasty piece of malware was being tested by a Russian-speaking hacker group and it was using the comment section of Britney Spears’s Instagram as a way to call home. Turla is a hacking group that specializes in using malware for the purposes of…
Tim Cook once scolded Travis Kalanick about Uber’s practice of tracking users even after they deleted the app from their iPhones. But in its newest operating system, iOS 11, Apple is rolling out a feature that will allow the same type of tracking—but with fewer privacy implications. Apple’s new feature is called DeviceCheck and, if developers…
“Uber is going through a big transformation right now, and it has to start at the top,” Huffington Post founder member Arianna Huffington told CNBC. The change it needs is for founder and CEO Travis Kalanick to step away, briefly occupy a space reserved for nursing mothers, and reflect on himself for a little while.…
Wonder Woman had some great moments. Seeing a woman smash a soldier into mush with her shield, toss a tank over people’s heads, and commit willful acts of beautifully violent misandry was nice. But lurking below the shining feminist bastion of fists and charm lurks a very, very big problem. Wonder Woman uses an Android…
This has been a huge year for finding specimens in amber, from bird wings to dinosaur feathers to this ugly-ass bug. But this new finding might be the best one yet: a nearly complete 99-million-year-old baby bird. Scientists found the specimen in Myanmar, where others have purchased or found plenty of other incredible amber samples…
There are two time-honored truths about wine: all of it is good—even at its worst—and, when it comes to appreciating wine, nobody knows what the fuck they’re talking about. The latter truth reveals itself time and again, especially in studies about wine consumption. On that point, a team of scientists at the University of Adelaide…
James Comey, the former head of the FBI, will be testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday about his interactions with President Donald Trump. Ahead of that hearing, the committee has released his opening statement, which is full of saucy little details of illicit one-on-one conversations and flaunted protocol. The whole thing reads like…
After an Uber driver raped a customer in India, an Uber executive obtained the victim’s medical records and shared them with the company’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, and its senior vice president, Emil Michael. The executives then questioned the medical record and suggested that it was a sabotage attempt by a competitor, Recode reports. Eric Alexander,…
Despite all the headway that science has made in understanding autism in recent years, knowing which children will one day develop autism is still almost impossible to predict. Children diagnosed with autism appear to behave normally until around two, and until then there is often no indication that anything is wrong. But by scanning the…
In the first half of a public hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, the nation’s top intelligence officials refused to address allegations that President Donald Trump had asked them to publicly downplay the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. Wednesday’s hearing was slated to discuss Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence…
Earlier this week Apple showed off iOS 11, the next iteration of the iPhone and iPad operating system that’s coming later this Fall, but lengthy as its WWDC keynote was, there was nowhere near enough time to mention all of the neat features coming down the iOS pipe. We’ve got the beta up and running—here…
Last night, Apple premiered its first attempt at an original TV show, Planet of the Apps, a Shark Tank meets American Idol unscripted series where app developers appeal to a panel of celebrity judges for outside funding. The first episode is currently available for free on Apple Music. It is also very bad. In fact,…
The remains of five early Homo sapiens have been unearthed at a site in northwest Africa. At around 300,000 years old, the fossils are a whopping 100,000 years older than the previous record, pushing back the origin of our species by a significant margin. And because the fossils were uncovered in Morocco—far from the supposed…
If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that everything is cooler in slow motion, and bigger is always better. So if you’re going to the trouble of making a monstrous water balloon measuring six feet across, you better make sure you get some awesome high-speed footage when the whole thing goes kaboom. Using a…
There’s something about dinosaurs that makes them strangely endearing, despite murdering humans in an umpteen number of films, having big teeth, and being related to one of the meanest types of living animal, birds. So lots of people (us, mainly) got excited about evidence showing that Tyrannosaurus rex might look more like an angry, feathered…
Over the last several months, SpaceX has been seriously diversifying its clientele: in May, it flew a spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). On Tuesday, the U.S. Air Force announced that in August, it’ll be launching a reusable X-37B mini-space shuttle on board a Falcon 9 rocket. While some of the details are…
Have you ever been to the back room of an Apple Store? That’s a trick question, because the back room at the Apple Store is a mythical place, filled with elves, warlocks, and a magical machine that fixes iPhone screens. At least, it was until this week. Apple just revealed that it’s going to start…
