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Project Veritas, the shadowy yet wildly incompetent far-right group that stages sting operations to film and release hoax exposés on liberals, enlisted a British spy to help run an operation intended to discredit the FBI and suspected enemies within Donald Trump’s administration, the New York Times reported on Thursday. The Ouroboros of an operation, which…
After the California Highway Patrol alerted locals of a man who seemed to be riding from the backseat of his Tesla Model 3 while the car’s autopilot barreled down the highway, the CHP caught the man responsible on Tuesday, booking him into a local jail and towing his car from the scene. A day later,…
Republicans! They just love their live-action role-playing, don’t they folks. They’re still questing to find the magic law that will stop the nefarious Silicon Valley leftists and antifa journalists from censoring the land of Real America. The latest proposal? Forcing fact-checkers to register with the state. The Detroit News reports that Michigan state Representative Matt…
Because being bombarded with roadside signage while taking a leisurely Sunday drive isn’t enough, Ford has patented a new system that uses a vehicle’s cameras to detect billboards and then pull them up on a car’s infotainment display as inescapable in-vehicle advertisements. Billboards are an effective way to subliminally make a driver hungry for an…
Imagine sprucing up your laptop the same way you would swap out the components inside a desktop PC case. That’s part of the premise behind the Framework laptop, made by a startup that wants to make it easier to diagnose and repair your stuff. Preorders are now open for Framework’s first batch of modular laptops,…
Last month, Roku announced it was officially rebranding its Quibi content collection as Roku Originals. Buckle up, because those series are officially set to hit the platform next week. Roku said today that its wisely rebranded “originals” will premiere May 20 in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. This year, more than 75 titles and a…
About a week ago, Colonial Pipeline paid the ransomware group DarkSide approximately $5 million in exchange for a data decryption key that didn’t really decrypt that much data. An investigation from Bloomberg found that, despite earlier reports suggesting the company had no intention of paying the cybercriminals, Colonial actually did just that “within hours of the…
A Japanese fashion magnate, who has booked an all-civilian SpaceX flight ‘round the moon for 2023, has now announced that he’s also making an earlier trip this December to the International Space Station. On Thursday, billionaire Yusaku Maezawa tweeted: “Going to the ISS before the Moon 🚀.” Sounds perhaps slightly more action-packed than the 2023…
For a company that’s staring down three separate antitrust cases from several dozen states and the Department of Justice, Google sure seems pretty comfortable issuing update after update that is nothing less than despotic. The latest example comes courtesy of a Google Docs tweak that on one hand makes the program speedier and smoother, but…
Early Wednesday morning, a would-be gas heist-master in Griffin, Georgia bungled a gasoline theft after drilling holes in a U-Haul truck’s tank and spilling up to 45 gallons of gas everywhere. Much of the eastern United States has gone full Mad Max over a brief gas shortage, and yet, the Griffin police department has vanquished…
When I first heard the rumors that Samsung might ditch its proprietary Tizen OS for wearables in favor of Google’s Wear OS, I was flummoxed. Tizen is snappy and free of the many problems plaguing Google’s wearables softeware. In fact, I’d say Tizen has played a large role in making Samsung’s smartwatches the best option…
It’s been over five years and the second-generation Apple Magic Mouse still needs to be awkwardly flipped on its back like a turtle to be recharged with a lightning cable—rendering it unusable in the process. A better approach is what Lenovo has done with its new Go mouse, letting it rest atop a wireless charging…
They haven’t all been home runs, but Motorola is known for taking chances. The company has repeatedly shown it’s not afraid to bet on new technology, from the recently phased-out Moto Mods back to the first wafer-thin Razr feature phones. Now, Motorola is trying its hand at remote wireless charging for smartphones by partnering up…
Apple employees circulated a petition on Wednesday to express concern over a new hire and his apparently problematic views on women and people of color. In the petition — which is available to read in full over at The Verge — employees object to the hiring of former Facebook product manager and Chaos Monkeys author…
After being teased at CES earlier this year, TCL has officially announced pricing and availability for its monster 80-inch-plus displays. You know, for those of us who want our screens to effectively take up an entire wall in our homes. TCL’s so-called XL Collection for 85-inch displays and above is its first for frankly outrageously…
Surely there are easier ways to pad your following on Instagram than trespassing on high school grounds while disguised as a teenager. That apparently did not occur to a 28-year-old Florida woman who was arrested after infiltrating a school in Miami-Dade County for the Gram on Monday. Really? That was your plan? Really? The grown-ass…
Sen. Ron Wyden, historically a leading proponent of heightened cybersecurity governance in both public and private spheres, called for congressional action Wednesday around all private firms operating in critical infrastructure sectors, saying the recent network breach at one of the largest U.S. pipelines paints a dismal picture of the nation’s susceptibility to attack. The cyber…
Large swathes of the East Coast are running out of the precious refined corpse juice used to fuel most of the nation’s vehicles, five days after ransomware knocked out most of the 5,500-mile Colonial Pipeline system—the biggest gasoline pipeline in the country, connecting Gulf Coast refineries to cities as far north as New York. Due…
If you’re hooked on Alexa and want a more capable smart display, Amazon just announced a refresh to the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 5, with better cameras than their predecessors. There’s also an update to the Echo Show 5 Kids Edition, which includes access to Amazon’s kid-friendly content. The Echo Show 8 and Echo…
The Irish Parliament today held a hearing on Facebook’s treatment of subcontracted content moderators—the thousands of people up to their eyeballs in toxic waste in the company basement. Moderators have repeatedly reported over the years that their contract companies hurl them into traumatizing work with little coaching or mental health support, in a system designed…
