Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
After Michael Flynn set a record for the shortest tenure as the national security advisor, many people were asking what kind of vetting process the Trump administration had used for hiring its people. According to a new report from the Washington Post, the campaign preferred to just Google people and go for it. https://gizmodo.com/this-old-fbi-file-is-a-great-reminder-of-just-how-screw-1794663795 According…
According to pretty much everyone, we’re in the “golden age” of television. But new data shows a huge jump in people who are ready to ditch cable as well as disastrous satisfaction ratings for the industry. Despite investing $300 million in fixing its customer service problems, Comcast managed to sink another six percent in popularity…
Facebook founder and domestic travel enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg pretended to be a politician at his Harvard commencement address on Thursday afternoon. Not many people showed up, probably because it was cold and rainy and generally miserable outside. Not even Facebook can control the weather. The speech sounded like a political one, because it was. The…
The WSJ revealed today that a GOP operative named Aaron Nevins requested and received confidential files stolen from the Democrats by hacker Guccifer 2.0 last year. Nevins, a former aide to Florida State Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, confessed to the Journal that not only did he receive files stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the…
We’ll never know for sure if Mexican politician Javier Zapata intended to use “#hashtagcampaña”—“#campaignhashtag” in English—as an official hashtag for his run for governor, or if it was just dummy text that made it through the printers. But if he wanted to raise his profile, it’s definitely working. Recently, at least one billboard supporting the…
Stock up on your canned beans and galoshes, folks: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook dropped this morning, and for the first time in years, the weather monitoring agency is predicting more hurricanes than average. Hurricane season, which kicks off next week and runs through the end of November, will…
Who doesn’t love a good deal? If you do, it’s time to head on over to your local RadioShack. The iconic retailer is now selling the last of its remaining office supplies as part of a liquidation process brought by a bankruptcy filed in March, and everything must go. RadioShack is peddling pretty much everything…
The Harvard Crimson has either become the victim of an incredibly funny prank, or Facebook is beta-testing its silent speech brain interface on college students. Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg returned to the venerable Ivy League institution he famously dropped out of, revisiting his old dorm room and giving a commencement speech to the graduating…
There’s no drama quite like space drama. And Juno’s flight to Jupiter has been about as dramatic as a sci-fi thriller can get. Last October, Juno’s engine system malfunctioned, causing NASA to delay the orbiter’s planned approach into a 14-day “science orbit.” This February, NASA decided to forego the science orbit engine burn entirely, keeping…
Republican senators are reportedly planning to send President Trump a legally dubious letter asking him to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, a historic accord to combat climate change. Although EPA head Scott Pruitt and others have said they want the US to withdraw, Trump faces intense pressure to stay in, from China’s President Xi,…
Cyber espionage operations and leaks of sensitive government data are a regular occurrence these days. In our eagerness to learn hidden truths it is also imperative that we ask ourselves whether we can trust the accuracy of information offered up by unknown actors whose intentions are obscured. Is this information real, or has it been…
After shutting down their Austin operations over a year ago, Uber and Lyft are finally reentering city limits. The two ride-hailing companies yanked their services from the city after residents voted to require drivers to undergo fingerprint-based background checks last May. At the time, Uber and Lyft said that the requirements were too burdensome and…
“Have you met Jacob?” It’s the first question they ask me, inside a small meeting room, deep in the heart of Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, where keyboard fans from across the Bay Area have braved the rain to show off their boutique builds. Many of them have spent thousands of dollars on their board collections,…
People in New York love to complain about their cockroaches and rats and bedbugs, but deep in the heart of Texas, residents are faced with decidedly larger kinds of pests. Feral hogs have spread far and wide, and Texas has decided enough is enough. That’s right, folks: The state wants you to hunt them from…
In Wuzhen, China, on Thursday, Google’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence beat the world’s best (human) Go player in their second consecutive match, making the computer program the current champion of humanity’s most complex game. AlphaGo has now won two matches against 19-year-old Ke Jie, who has been ranked as the world’s number one Go player and won…
Go on, guess. Did you guess Pokémon GO? FaceApp? Elevate (Brain Training and Games)? No, you didn’t, because you know exactly what it is. It’s Twitter. Of course it’s fucking Twitter. Axios’ Mike Allen reports this morning that Trump currently uses an iPhone equipped only with the public meltdown app. He probably doesn’t have a…
Paparazzi these days will do literally anything for the shot. Even go snorkeling underwater every night for four years. This photo, shared on bioGraphic yesterday, shows a hungry Eurasian beaver swimming with a poplar branch, on her way to feed her pups in western France’s Loire region. Other people have taken photos of wet beavers…
Remember when metal band names were good? Names like RATT and Poison and Mötley Crüe elicited the perfect image: slick, sweaty men licking their guitars while wearing tight leather pants and acid washed jeans, wagging their hair-sprayed manes and rocking out harder than any of us so-called millennials could even imagine. Not anymore. Now we’re…
Yesterday, Pope Francis met with President Trump. And needless to say, the pope didn’t look too happy about it. Maybe it had to do with the fact that Trump previously called the pope “disgraceful” and said ISIS will attack the Vatican, but who knows? The photo was surreal, and sure enough, people have been photoshopping…
As companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com help make genetic testing commonplace, you would think that we would become better at ensuring protections for the privacy of that data. Instead, multiple Congressional actions threaten to erode already-weak protections against genetic discrimination. But it’s not just a dystopian Gattaca future where citizens are discriminated against based on…
