Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Five women who have worked at Amazon filed suit against the company in various U.S. district courts on Wednesday, each with distinct allegations of discrimination and retaliation they say they experienced during their time at the company. According to Recode, which first reported the news, the women span in age from their early 20s to…
Google is going all in with Matter, the new smart home standard the company has backed alongside Amazon, Apple, and other gadget makers, starting with its Nest devices. Nest devices that already have Google’s Thread technology built in, including Nest Wifi, Nest Hub Max and the second-gen Nest Hub, will act as Matter connection points,…
If you’re fed up with apps and websites using shitty psychological tactics—aka dark patterns—to coerce you into clicking, then good news: there’s finally a way to put them on blast. Consumer Reports teamed up with a cavalcade of researchers and policy wonks to roll out the Dark Patterns Tip Line on Tuesday, a project that…
Nina is a 9-year-old doggie from South Carolina who we adopted last March. She is also a runner. One evening, a week into her time with us, she wandered off for two days, freaking us out quite a bit. She darted away again about a month ago. Thankfully a passerby picked her up and took…
Meet “Bizarro.” It’s a new banking trojan currently sweeping through Europe and large parts of South America, attempting to pilfer consumer financial information and mobile crypto wallets as it goes. If you haven’t had the pleasure of encountering one before, banking trojans are a special kind of malware used by cybercriminals to steal banking credentials…
Apple’s always expressed a commitment to accessibility, but today it announced a plethora of upcoming features that could make a huge difference in how people with disabilities can interact with technology. A big thing to note is that these features aren’t limited to a single device or disability. There are features designed for people with…
After years of neglect and incremental updates, yesterday Google dropped its most meaningful wearables announcement since it rebranded from Android Wear to Wear OS in 2018. Going forward, Wear OS will take the best parts of Samsung’s Tizen OS and Google-owned Fitbit to create a new unified platform for wearables. It’s a massive shift with…
The international uproar over WhatsApp’s new privacy policy got a jolt of energy this week, with a new letter reportedly from Indian authorities telling the company to walk back its changes to the platform—or else. TechCrunch was first to get its hands on a leaked letter it claims was sent to WhatsApp by India’s Ministry…
The easiest way to get kids interested in robots is to show them Star Wars, but that’s admittedly a limited experience. The next best thing might be Sphero’s new kid-friendly robot called indi which can be programmed using simple colored tiles dropped on the floor, or a mobile app as kids further develop their programming…
No, Google has not resurrected Google Reader, but it is working on a feature in Chrome that lets you follow multiple RSS feeds. Chrome users will soon see a “follow” button pop up that will add the website to an RSS repository. Every new tab in Chrome will then open up a “reader” of sorts…
Following rumblings earlier this year that HBO was planning to launch a cheaper ad-supported tier of HBO Max, HBO has officially announced HBO Max with Ads. Starting at $10 a month and going live the first week of June, HBO Max with Ads comes cost $5 less than the full ad-free tier of HBO Max…
The cryptocurrency market has taken a major dive, as it does. Now a band of traders has decided to form the people’s coin, appropriately named StopElon, to Stop Elon Musk from wielding intractable control over the market with his tweets. Much like China. And Mark Cuban. And volatile economies. And major financial institutions. And hedge funds.…
Today at its 5G Summit, Qualcomm announced the new Snapdragon 778G 5G chip to help bolster its portfolio of mobile processors for the second half of 2021. Labeled by Qualcomm as a new “high-tier” chip, the Snapdragon 778G looks to slot in between Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 888 processor and less expensive Snapdragon chips like the…
More news from Canada, nation of paradoxes, which printed the wrong leaf on its currency and where a mayor’s approval rating can rise after a world-famous crack scandal. This week’s mystery from the north: Justin Trudeau has been photographed masquerading as a Macbook user. Why, Canada? As one can see from an image on the…
Have you ever wanted to guard nuclear weapons as they crisscross the United States? Well, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has a job opening for precisely that. And it’s a great reminder that U.S. roads carry some pretty interesting cargo, even if it’s all kept very hush-hush. The job posting from NNSA,…
Law enforcement officials are still banned from using Amazon’s facial recognition technology “until further notice,” the company said on Wednesday, a decision that effectively extends a yearlong moratorium that had been set to expire on June 1. Known as Rekognition, the program in question has been widely criticized over the years for its dubious efficacy…
Android is used on 3 billion smartphones worldwide, but most of the cameras on Android phones don’t accurately capture people of color. This is why Google announced it’s striving to develop a “more accurate and inclusive camera” for its next batch of smartphones. Toward the end of the Google I/O 2021 opening keynote, Sameer Samat,…
We’re officially entering the second week in a row of fighting between Israel and Palestine, which means we probably haven’t seen the last of the hundreds of deaths and countless injuries inflicted on Gaza residents thus far. If you’re looking for a way to donate to the victims, then a quick word of advice: maybe…
New research into the ransomware gang who attacked the Colonial Pipeline shows just how much money they were able to extort during a short-lived crime spree: about $90 million in approximately seven months. DarkSide, which recently announced it was closing down its operations and going underground (at least for now), was operational for less than…
Yikes Everything you’ve never heard of could kill you. It is statistically unlikely that you will die by space crystal or poltergeist, but how do you know that you won’t? TikTok has every single detail about catastrophes looming beyond the event horizon, threatening to wipe you off the face of the Earth unless you eat…
