Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
The great thing about Nintendo 64 games is that dedicated players are still finding exploits years later. But the true die-hards are discovering glitches that are purely theoretical. In Paper Mario 64, there’s a yellow block which appears to do nothing. Hit it with the hammer, and it still does nothing. Hit it a shit-ton…
Don’t bother spending your weekends scouring toy stores for hard-to-find Star Wars figures. Nothing on the shelves at Toys ‘R’ Us can even begin to compare with Hot Toys’ new First Order Stormtrooper from its Life-Size Masterpiece Series. Standing over six-feet tall it’s easily the most impressive Star Wars figure ever created. It comes with…
During this morning’s Build 2016 Keynote, CEO Satya Nadella laid out his vision for what Microsoft’s future might look like, and artificial intelligence is the name of the game. Nadella broadly referred to the company’s AI plans as “conversations as a platform.” The crown jewel is a new tool called Microsoft Bot Framework, which will…
The ironic thing about living in space is that you spend all of your time crammed into a tiny tin can. So the brave men and women at the International Space Station are probably stoked about what’s headed their way next month: a spare room. https://gizmodo.com/nasas-attaching-an-expandable-space-house-to-the-iss-1767575617 The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is a twelve…
If I created a hierarchy of cyberattack nightmares, I’d slot attacks on hospitals right up there with having my Google search history downloaded and posted publicly. Maybe dying would be less explicitly humiliating, but getting murdered Homeland-style via hacked medical device is a specifically modern anxiety shudder. MIT Technology Review declared 2015 “the year of…
Did you hear? The sort of old, sort of new, but much smaller iPhone is coming out tomorrow! Sometimes people are so excited for phones that they line up for them. Should you be one of them? No. What if I am a HUGE Apple fan? No. But what if I don’t stand in line…
We keep hearing that this is the age of rapid urbanization: By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. But in the United States, the people moving into those cities are largely rich, white, and childless. What’s more, not as many of them are moving as they were a few years…
The government used the All Writs Act in a failed attempt to make Apple write software that would weaken its security to help unlock a seized iPhone. That case was vacated this month, after a dramatic public battle. But the government is still using the All Writs Act to corral tech companies, including Google. The…
Weather can get pretty rough here on Earth, but there’s a rocky exoplanet located about 40 light-years away that features some of the most extreme temperature fluctuations ever seen by astronomers—reaching temperatures so high that lava flows directly on the surface. Dubbed 55 Cancri e, this rocky planet is the equivalent of about eight Earth…
Besides killing a few hours at work, what keeps most people playing Windows Solitaire is the incredibly satisfying finale where all the cards fall and bounce across the bottom of the window when you win. But thanks to developer Ricardo Cabello, you no longer have to win—or even play—to enjoy it. Just visit his Click…
According to a bunch of fancy linguists, people who are more sensitive to written typos and grammatical errors are indeed the kinds of Type A assholes everyone already suspects them to be. The findings came from a new study out of the University of Michigan. Researchers gathered 83 people and had them read emails that…
Want to know whether the drivers of Uber think you’re a complete dirtbag or not? Finding your passenger rating on the ride-hailing app is now a much simpler process. Uber is pushing out an updated customer support system today, and the handiest feature is an automated way to find out your rating. Before, you could…
Vincent Urban filmed this totally bad ass video of Japan that captures so many sides of the country that it makes me want to immediately drop everything and book a ticket to experience what looks like the coolest place on Earth. From the frenetic city streets to the stillness of nature, Japan just does it…
When the DEA bought a spy plane in 2008, it was supposed to be a way to catch and transport dealers in Afghanistan. Instead, it turned into a corroding rust bucket in the desert, and a reminder of how dumb the government can be. The “Global Discovery” program is focused on a single aircraft, an…
A couple of months ago Lego revealed its sprawling Batcave set based on the ‘60s Batman TV series. And as packed full of details as it was, it can’t hold a candle to Dan Glasure’s custom creation that took two months to build and incorporates elements from almost all of the Batman movies, comics, and…
Laser hair removal might be the most requested cosmetic procedure, but how does it work? As Veritasium explains, dark hair contains melanin, a pigment that helps protect us from the sun by absorbing many wavelengths of visible and ultraviolet light. Bursts of high-energy laser light are absorbed much better by these unwanted hairs than by…
IBM and the US government teamed up to develop a new supercomputer for use on national security missions. It makes decisions like a human brain, and uses less power than a hearing aid. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the country’s top scientific research facilities, announced the new mega machine yesterday. The supercomputer uses a…
Keeping the number of power cords dangling off your desk to a minimum usually means settling for a smaller capacity backup drive that draws all the power it needs from a single USB cable. But Seagate’s new Innov8 drive packs 8TB of storage into an external closure that doesn’t need to draw power from an…
Amazon Echo is good for a lot of things, but until recently, remote-starting a car wasn’t one of them. YouTuber jryanishere seems to have gotten Alexa her driver’s license, thanks to a few snippets of code, a Raspberry Pi, and an OBDLink (which is some sort of Bluetooth scanning tool that works with GM’s proprietary…
Are you ready for some Microsoft news because it’s about to be served up in extra-large quantities. Microsoft will be livestreaming its 2016 Build developer conference keynote right here at 11:30am ET/8:30am PT. We’re expecting a lot of big news from the event including Windows 10 updates, Hololens, Xbox apps, and maybe even Windows mobile…
