Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Necessity breeds innovation, and during this pandemic that has resulted in some unique ways to curb the spread of Covid-19. Door handles in well-trafficked locations are notoriously dirty and a hot spot for viruses, so a Swiss company called Tweaq has created what it’s calling the “world’s first smart self-disinfecting door handle.” One solution that’s…
Technology gets faster, cheaper, and more capacious year after year, but every once in a while it still manages to catch you by surprise. It wasn’t too long ago that 4TB of storage required a RAID enclosure claiming a corner of your desk, but Crucial’s new X6 4TB portable SSD packs that much storage into…
The photos and videos you’ve captured are probably the most important files on your phone, which is why Apple, Google and other storage service providers want to give you ways to get these pictures and movies up into the cloud as quickly as possible. As convenient as that cloud storage is, it usually comes with…
Did you see the headlines this week promising that AeroMobil would be making flying cars available for purchase in 2023? That’s just two years from now, if you can believe it. The company’s latest video even ends with the optimistic words, “coming 2023.” But can they pull it off? Let’s just say we’ve been hearing…
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, the old maxim goes, and apparently, that advice counts double if you’re Facebook, a company that has at this point tried a cartoonish number of times to install a high-capacity internet conduit between California and Hong Kong only to be continually thwarted by the U.S. government.…
Parler, the social media network for people furious that Lola Bunny’s animated boobs are too small now, won’t be returning to iOS anytime soon. The social network, which caters to conservatives, Trump supporters, and various other right-wing cranks and bigots, branded itself as a censorship-free site that would only remove illegal posts and liberal trolls.…
This strange little device may look unassuming—after all, it’s a nod to William Gibson’s famous cybernetic dolphin, Jones. But Flipper Zero, a pocket-sized, dolphin-themed hacking tool, can actually open NFD-based locks, hack access points, and even send keyboard commands to unsuspecting laptops and PCs. The Flipper Zero is an Arduino-compatible board that features an NFT…
What is a cross between Twitter and YouTube and is also a newspaper and TV show and radio broadcast? Space? Time? The concept of time? An alchemical process by which vibrating particles moved by a passing sound wave are transmuted into sheets of paper and back into the air? A social phenomenon, like a zeitgeist…
The Senate might just finally do away with Daylight Saving Time (DST) clock shifts, ridding America of the twice-a-year impositions on everyone’s sanity and standardizing time at the moment after the clock jumps forward on March 14 this year. Of course, similar proposals have regularly flamed out over the years, so take that with a…
EPSN+ is officially joining the Hulu platform. Subscribers to the Disney bundle have been able to cut costs on getting Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ at a discounted rate for a minute. Now, Hulu has introduced an option for subscribers to pay $6 per month to get an ESPN+ add-on through Hulu itself. Customers who pay…
The inventor of the cassette tape, Lou Ottens, has passed away, according to De Telegraaf. He was 94 years old. Ottens started working at Philips in 1952, where he eventually came up with the idea of the cassette tape after becoming head of the company’s new product development department in 1960. Fed up with the…
The latest wave of gaming phone launches has begun. Last week, Nubia announced the absolutely ridiculous Red Magic 6, and now Asus has arrived with a slightly different take—one that’s a bit more sophisticated while still packing massive specs. The first thing you’ll notice on the ROG Phone 5 (Asus skipped 4 to avoid bad luck)…
After a showdown with the Australian government over an effort to pay publishers their due, it looks like Google and Facebook might have to gear up for the same battle in the United States. Lawmakers are moving forward on a piece of dormant legislation that would enable news organizations to negotiate with Big Tech over how…
In the latest leg of Epic Games’ case against the tech giants, the Fortnite developer is taking Google to court—in Australia this time around. The full case that Epic filed with Australia’s Federal Courts earlier this week accuses Google of holding a “near-monopoly” over the app distribution and payments in the Android market by imposing…
Today, the online children’s gaming platform Roblox is dumping 199 million shares of mammon onto the market through its direct listing, which likely means a Black Friday-level mob and hours of free content for CNBC’s Squawk Box on a yet-unprofitable company. Nothing new there, but it’s also an almost psychedelic amalgam of 2021 intergenerational imaginations:…
Researchers at Jilin University in Changchun, China, have come up with a method for making transparent displays that look as good as the screens on our mobile devices, with color reproduction and contrast levels that could soon have us permanently ditching smartphones and tablets for smart glasses. Transparent displays are far from a new idea.…
It’s no secret Nikon has been struggling, but that isn’t stopping the company from pulling out all the stops for the upcoming Z9, which has now been officially announced to arrive sometime before the end of 2021. Positioned above the Z6 II and Z7 II, the Z9 will be Nikon’s new flagship full-frame mirrorless camera…
There’s a certain charm to the old-school mechanical flipboard displays that were most commonly used to display arrival and departure times at airports and train stations for decades. There’s a good reason they weren’t used for much else, however, as this attempt to play Tetris on one of the displays demonstrates. Flipboard displays (also called…
Peloton’s limited social features are expanding—sort of. The company is bringing back a feature called Sessions, though only in its iOS app. The original iteration of the Sessions feature let you join an on-demand class in sessions that started every five minutes, allowing smaller groups to work out together. It was essentially a scaled-down version…
A look at how to export your usernames and passwords from some of the most well-known password managers
