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Facebook vows to be transparent, and yet the Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that the company is hiding all the ways that it blocks access in the United States, on behalf of law enforcement. Yesterday EFF released “Who Has Your Back?”, its annual report card on how high tech companies respond to government requests for user…
Following up on the Tatooine Mini-build playset announced back in April, Lego has just revealed—via Complex UK—a similarly tiny follow-up set featuring Yoda, Luke Skywalker, and his downed X-wing in the swamps of Dagobah. The 177-piece set will be a San Diego Comic-Con exclusive, but to actually purchase the $40 set Lego and Star Wars…
YouTube doesn’t want to give you a reason to turn on CNN. The Google-owned video hosting site is trying to legitimize eyewitness accounts of breaking news by launching YouTube Newswire, a special feed for footage it verifies as accurate. Video uploaded from people on the scene can provide crucial context, but these services can also…
I love time capsules. I’ve been researching them for nearly a decade. But even I know that time capsules are generally pretty boring. Which is why I found this recent headline about the re-sealing of the 1795 Paul Revere capsule in Boston so funny: Time Capsule Mania!!! Can you believe it? That is honestly a…
Some of the world’s most important independent record labels are calling bullshit on Apple Music. With good reason! As Apple Music’s launch looms in the distance, many of the most influential independent record labels haven’t signed on to the streaming subscription service because Apple’s terms are an absolute screw job to anyone who hopes to…
Biometrics are everywhere. Fingerprint scanners are a standard feature in the newest smartphones, DNA testing is common, and facial recognition is getting more and more terrifyingly reliable. But there are many biometric applications still lurking on the fringe, and some of them get really, really personal. These are the three most embarrassing ways biometrics can…
Twitter has a secret. The microblogging service will soon release a “major new feature” called Project Lightning that will bring human-curated content based on live events to one user-friendly place. BuzzFeed’s Mat Honan recently got a sneak peek, and you know what? Project Lightning is kinda like Snapchat. At a very basic level, Project Lightning…
Holy. Crap. This is just madness. Watch as British pilots Paul Bonhomme and Steve Jones fly through an airplane hangar in two different airplanes while zipping through the air at 185mph. That’s right, two planes flying side-by-side, separated by only a few feet, flew straight through a building. I mean, damn. It’s an amazing display…
Nose jobs. Tummy tucks. Botox. Breast implants. Fad diets. Historically, most of the pressure to look a particular way to be considered beautiful and sexy has been put on women. But according to an article by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore at Aeon, men are starting to feel the heat, as well. From the article: Images of this…
In recent years bookends have become just as much a statement about who you are as the graphic novels or books they’re supporting on a shelf. And if you happen to identify with Lego more than superheroes, ThinkGeek’s designed a pair of studded bookends that can be customized with your own plastic brick creations. Available…
This week was a good seven days of apps, including yet another piece of software from Facebook but also some must-download apps across all OSes. Strangely, the theme this week was all about sharing, whether sharing photos with friends or documents across devices or videos with the rest of the world. After all, sharing is…
Man, that’s got to flatten out some brain cells. Slow motion footage from a Turkish TV program The Glory of Nature found on Reddit shows a woodpecker repeatedly drilling its beak into a tree. You can see the head of the bird jiggle and the shock of the hit reverberate throughout its entire body. But…
Starting this weekend in Japan, people can buy a talking, person-shaped robot that reads your body language and gets sad when you turn off the lights. You may remember Pepper, the four-foot-tall, 60-pound, talking, dancing, joke-telling robot that guesses users’ moods and keeps them company. Pepper, whose software is open source, can be outfitted with…
When you look for shapes in the clouds, you’ll often find things you see every day: Dogs, people, cars. It turns out that artificial “brains” do the same thing. Google calls this phenomenon “Inceptionism,” and it’s a shocking look into how advanced artificial neural networks really are. In a post yesterday on its blog, Google’s…
It’s been rumored for a while that Lego’s upcoming Minifigures Series 14 would exclusively feature monsters and other spooky characters. And now, courtesy of French Lego blog Hoth Bricks, we have our first official look at at least four of those new Minifigs including Frankenstein, a witch, a person in a skeleton costume, and a…
If you live in New York City, you most likely don’t have access to Verizon’s very 21st-century fiber optic internet service, FiOS. And you should be because Verizon told the city in a contract that it would deliver fiber to every household by 2014. As of today 75-percent of New York City is still without…
John Heisz is an absolute master at repurposing old things into awesome and beautiful knives and tools. Here he is carving a meat cleaver from an old circular saw blade. The blade on blade cutting action is spectacular, the sanding of the knife is always fun to see and the making of the handle is…
It’s one of the more terrifying scenes in Spielberg’s thriller that made us all afraid to go in the water, and now kids can re-enact Quint’s death scene from Jaws whenever they want with this new playset from Funko. The set is part of the company’s ReAction line, which features collectibles that hearken back to…
If you’re wanting to earn some extra dollars and cents from your adventures in photography then there are many ways to go about it online: A growing number of sites can hawk your pictures around and give you a slice of the cut if your work gets picked up. Here are some of your options…
None of us would be alive today without plants, and if humans want to survive beyond Earth long-term, we’ll need to bring our leafy greens with us. Eventually, astronauts are going to have to become space farmers. There’s an obvious argument for growing plants in space: unless we want to pack enough shrink-wrapped protein bars…
