Tech News

Plane Passenger Spots Mystery Drone Over Brooklyn (Updated: The FBI Has No Idea What It Is)

The classic Twilight Zone episode takes a 21st century turn—yesterday a man aboard an Alitalia flight preparing to land at JFK spied something disturbing outside his window: what appeared to be an unmanned vehicle in the sky. Update: The FBI is hunting for the drone and its operator. The sighting was confirmed by the plane’s…

Would You Pay For Ad-Free YouTube?

Reports from both Fortune and The Guardian indicate that Google is planning to start a subscription music service like Spotify soon. But the craziest little nugget buried in the reports: YouTube might be getting an ad-free option. Imagine no more Vevo ads. Hello, holy grail. Fortune seems convinced that YouTube—and not the Google Music storage…

Could the Ancient Romans Have Built a Digital Computer?

The Romans were undoubtedly master engineers. They were experts at civil engineering, building roads, improving sanitation, inventing Roman concrete, and constructing aqueducts that adhere to tolerances impressive even by today’s standards. Perhaps the best evidence of their aptitude is the fact that many of those structures still stand today, almost 2000 years later. They even…

A Memo Board Alarm Clock for Your Late-Night Inspiration

At first glance it’s easy to dismiss this memo board alarm clock as being just another piece of technocrappery from Brando. But how often do you wake in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea you don’t want to forget? When you’re half asleep the last thing you want to do is fumble…

Everpix’s Image Analysis Will Find All of Your Cat Photos Automatically (Eventually)

Everpix is an online photo storage system that’s trying very hard to be the Flickr that everybody wants. Its latest crack is at this is an “Explore” feature which uses image analysis to sort all of the photos in your collection into content categories like, “animals”, “city”, and “nature”. It works decently, and it’ll only…

Bluetooth Gramophone: The Ideal Way to Stream Your Vintage Albums

Sure, vinyl has that warm fuzzy feeling that digital recordings just seem to be lacking. But filling a smartphone with hundreds of MP3s of classic albums is a lot easier than filling your basement with hundreds of records packed in crates. So if you’ve still got a soft spot for the vintage sound of a…

Report: The Next iPhone Is Coming in August

iMore is reporting that Apple will release its next-gen iPhone in August. Obviously, the device will be stronger, better, faster, and so on, but the real takeaway is the timing. For years, iPhone releases were as predictable as the tides, coming every June. But the iPhone 4S came in October, the iPhone 5 in September,…

Best Buy’s Deal of the Day Ad Uses (GASP!) a Jailbroken iPad (Updated)

Can you spot anything amiss in today’s Best Buy Deal of the Day page? Anything out of the ordinary? Look a little closer. Still don’t see it? Here’s a better look: That’s right! Hiding out among all the boring lazy stock iOS apps is Cydia. Good ol’ Cydia, app haven to jailbroken miscreants the world…

Amazingly, This Lamp Isn’t Made By Google

This lamp looks like it’s come straight outta the offices of Google. But in fact it was created by the famous Italian designer Alessandro Mendini—and we think it’s beautiful. Called Amuleto—see what he did there?—it’s made from a series of circles which represent the Sun, Moon and Earth respectively. The halo at the top of…

This Warship Radar Can Detect a Tennis Ball From 15 Miles

And not just a tennis ball from 15 miles away, but a tennis ball 15 miles away and moving at three times the speed of sound. That’s the sort of sensitivity the radar operators on the UK’s HMS Iron Duke will have the chance to work with when it returns to service next year. The…

Got a new BlackBerry? There’s now an unofficial port of Instagram for BB10! (We can’t vouch for quality or security…).

Report: Twitter Is an Awful Predictor of Public Opinion

A new survey by Pew Research Center reveals that relying on Twitter to gauge public opinion might not be too smart: the reaction on Twitter to big national and political news seems to differ wildly from that measured by surveys. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Twitter reactions generally tend to be more liberal than the national average. Tracing…

Everything You Ever Need to Know About the Periodic Table

The Periodic Table is one of the most iconic—and useful!—pieces of data organization to ever exist. Here’s everything you need to know about it, from its history to how to use it, in just 11 minutes. First published by Dmitri Mendeleev way back in 1869, the table is just as useful today as it was…

Jailed Cyber Criminal Joins Prison’s Computer Class, Hacks Its Network

When one of Britain’s biggest cyber criminals was jailed in 2011, officials thought they’d be safe from his internet attacks. But then he managed to sneak into a prison computer class and hack the jail’s network. Nicholas Webber, pictured above, was jailed for five years in 2011 for running a large-scale internet crime site, called…

The iPhone Was Almost Called Telepod, Mobi or Tripod

During a talk at the University of Arizona’s Department of Marketing, Apple’s former head of advertising, Ken Segall, let slip about some of the alternative names seriously considered at Cupertino before the launch of the iPhone. They’re surprisingly bad. Fortunately, 9to5mac was at the talk, and has published Segall’s justifications for some of the names.…

Canadian Android users can now make VoiP calls via the Facebook Messenger app. No word, sadly, on when it’ll head south.

Rumor: Google Is Working on Same-Day Amazon Prime Killer

TechCrunch claims that Google is “stealthily preparing” to launch a new same-day-shipping Amazon Prime competitor called Google Shopping Express. Sources have told TechCrunch that the service would cost $59 a year—undercutting Amazon’s annual Prime subscription by $10—and allow customers to receive same-day deliveries from bricks-and-mortar stores. The sources don’t expand on which those stores might…

How Much Would Wikipedia Weigh?

The geniuses behind Vsauce scientifically answered a few questions, as only they can, about whether it makes sense to eat yourself if you’re ever suffering from starvation, how does hair know when to stop growing, what eye floaters are, how much would Wikipedia weigh and more. As always, you’ll walk away thinking you learned more…

Nikon Coolpix A: This Is How You Cram a DSLR Sensor Into a Point-and-Shoot

Regular people love everything about big DSLRs except for the “big”. Here’s Nikon’s first crack at taking the sensor from DX format DSLRs and smushing it into a point-and-shoot. Meet the Nikon Coolpix A. How do you get an APS-C senor into a point-and-shoot camera? You compromise on the lens. In the case of the…

A Man Dressed As Batman Brought a Suspect into Custody

Unlike the fat fake Batman who always gets arrested, this vigilante is actually good at his job. Police in the UK say that a man dressed as Batman recently handed over a wanted man to police. After the suspect was in custody, the Batman disappeared. https://gizmodo.com/that-chubby-guy-dressed-as-batman-got-arrested-again-5949478 The Trafalgar House Police Station said: “Last week we…