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Amazon has been playing dirty in the shadows with publishing house Hachette all month, but now it’s openly admitted that it’s playing hardball with the company. https://gizmodo.com/when-amazon-plays-dirty-you-lose-1580596374 Amazon has written a blog post explaining what’s happening with Hachette. Those browsing Amazon will have noticed that Hachette books have suddenly started becoming more expensive, in many…
Data brokers the world over collect and sell information about your online behavior. Now, though, the FTC has plans to try and save you from their data-grabbing ways. https://gizmodo.com/big-data-brokers-they-know-everything-about-you-and-se-5991070 An FTC report issued Tuesday explains how the Commission wants Congress to examine the data broking industry and consider regulating its collection practices. Currently, brokers are…
Sergey Brin had admitted that it was “probably a mistake” that he ever worked on Google+ because, in his own words, he’s “not a very social person” and “kind of a weirdo.” Talking at Re/code’s Code Conference yesterday, Brin explained that the decision to have him work on the company’s social offering was misguided. “It…
Chinese and U.S. digitial policies don’t always see eye-to-eye, but now China’s government agencies, including the People’s Bank of China and the Ministry of Finance, are asking the nation’s banks to remove the IBM servers over security fears. Bloomberg reports that the Chinese government is worried that IBM’s high-end servers could compromises the nation’s financial…
Gee whiz, a self-driving car! Who wouldn’t want one of those? Well, if you look at what it’s trying to achieve, it’s not actually a great idea. Here’s why. Google says it’s made the Self-Driving Car for one major reason: safety. By removing the most incompetent link in the car chain — the human operator…
Rochester, New York is the city where George Eastman founded the company responsible for making photography an everyday part of American life. Although Kodak is still a household name, the digital age has gutted what was once a thriving industry. Traces of the film giant can be seen echoing throughout Rochester in the photography of…
The best thing about having kids is making them like all the things you like and getting them to do things that you wished you did as a kid. Like dress up as a mini Predator. They can be whatever parents want them to be and no matter what, they’ll be impossibly cute. Being a…
Remember kids, just because you have a golden fist, doesn’t mean you can’t rule with an iron one. Watch as a pair of runaways from The Village of the Damned grow up, get pretty, find wealth, and proceed to build an empire for the ages—all within an aircraft hanger. Like the track? It’s off of…
Well isn’t this just adorable? Asian small-clawed otters got their hands on a keyboard at the National Zoo and started pounding away at the keys to make music that actually sounds like a Hitchcock movie soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
Microsoft just demoed an awesome new feature for Skype that will actually let you speak to people in other languages—in real-time—by doing all the translating dirty work for you. Skype Chief Gurdeep Pall teased the new feature at Re/code’s Code Conference, calling up a German-speaking exec to show off the new translation chops. According to…
Did you laugh in movies like The Hangover or Bridesmaids or Anchorman or Old School? I did. A lot, actually. But they’re not nearly as funny as some of Edgar Wright’s movies like Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead and so on. Why? Because they’re visually funny too. Tony Zhou reveals how Wright uses every…
If the possibility of Michael Bay directing a live-action adaptation of Neon Genesis Evangelion fills you with a mixture of confusion, curiosity, and (mostly) dread, you are not alone. The rumor is just that at the moment, but according to the Korean gossip-news site Kdramastars, Bay hinted at a particular series after being asked what…
The Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission just saw something bright in the Andromeda Galaxy. It was either a Gamma-Ray Burst or an Ultraluminous X-Ray Object, but either way it will be the closest event we’ve ever observed. …unless it’s just a known X-ray object, a programming bug, and a thunderstorm.. A portrait of Andromeda by Swift…
I just love when movies are summarized into CineFix’s 8-bit cinema style. It combines the nostalgia of childhood video games with the memory of movies that I should watch more often. This time, it’s Donnie Darko that gets the 8-bit treatment. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of confusion, conversations and rabbits. SPLOID is…
The SoundCloud account known simply as Corruption and self-identified as originating in Funabashi, Japan, continues to post intriguing amalgamations. The tracks mix noise and melody, splatters of disaffection and elements of nostalgia and sentimentality. Whether they’re sketches of works in progress, or parts of an overarching single work, remains unclear. The accompanying text, when there…
On Friday, Dextre and the Canadarm became the first self-repairing robotic system in orbit, swapping a fuzzy video camera from the arm’s elbow to base. Today, Dextre retrieved a shiny new camera and slotted it into place, successfully completing the repair. https://gizmodo.com/a-self-repairing-space-robot-on-the-international-space-1580869685 The first photo taken by the new camera installed on the Canadarm’s elbow,…
How your neighborhood was designed by racists. What it’s like to sit behind the wheel of a car for four hours every day. The evils of alternate-side parking. And the beauty of traveling by antique rail car. All this and more, in this week’s Urban Reads. The racist policies that determined the way your neighborhood…
Today is the 77th anniversary of the Golden Gate and, to celebrate, the Department of Interior posted this stunning image of the fog invading the bridge at sunrise. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
NBC News just published some telling quotes from its much anticipated interview with Edward Snowden. Among other self-aggrandizing things, Snowden said he “was trained as a spy”and is “a technical expert.” Snowden added, “I don’t work with people.” Update: video below. Based on what we know about the NSA whistleblower, these are not false statements.…
The AMC show Mad Men is in its final season, with its mid-season finale (yeah, I don’t know what that means exactly either) airing this past Sunday. The show started with 1960 as its backdrop, and we now see characters in the world of 1969. A lot changed in that decade and, of course, it’s…
