Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
In a string of attacks, several of Los Angeles’ most elite private schools have had their servers hacked in recent weeks, leaving confidential teacher information and parent contact details exposed. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the attacks follow an apparent pattern, with the hacker or group of hackers in each case sending out email blasts…
For anyone who feels like they’ve been held hostage by iCloud’s 5GB of free storage or just wants to try out a different photo storage app, this week Apple launched a new service designed to make it way easier to transfer photos and videos stored in iCloud over to Google Photos. As reported by MacRumors…
Shocker: Despite conservatives’ endless kvetching about the supposed liberal bias of Silicon Valley technocrats, one of the easiest ways to go viral on Facebook is spouting extreme, far-right rhetoric, according to a new study by New York University’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project. In results released Wednesday, researchers with the project analyzed various types of posts…
If you were planning to fly to Japan to attend the Olympics, love the optimism! But most likely, your plans have been spoiled because we are, in fact, still in a global pandemic. While the final ruling has not yet been announced, the paper Mainichi reported today that a source close to the Japanese government…
It’s an unfortunate truth that snake oil salesmen lurk behind every corner of the internet, waiting for the next conspiracy or wellness fad so they can swoop in with cure-all wares and rob people of their hard-earned cash. It’s also true that people generally fear the unknown—and new technology slots neatly into that category. So…
Alleged domestic terrorist haven/free speech network Parler has bowed out of its antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. For a blessed moment it seemed we might get a break from conservative bitching and moaning about unfairness. No such luck. In January, following the storming of the capitol, major tech companies rushed to cut ties with the short-lived…
Today, AMD officially revealed the newest member of its Radeon 6000-series family: the RX 6700 XT. Situated just below the RX 6800, AMD said this is an ideal graphics card for anyone with a high refresh rate, 1440p monitor who wants to play games on max settings. And yes, Smart Access Memory is enabled, too,…
Apple’s Find My app has long been a handy way of keeping track of your iPhone, MacBook, and other Apple devices, but in the most recent iOS 1.5 beta, Apple looks to be expanding item-tracking to a wider range of non-Apple products. First spotted by MacRumors, in the third beta for iOS 14.5, Apple has…
In July 1697, Jacques Sennacques of Lille, France, scribbled off a missive to his merchant cousin, Pierre le Pers, in The Hague. The subject of discussion was a death certificate for their relative, a topic which the cousins had discussed previously but le Pers had neglected to follow up on. The letter was the Renaissance…
There are 3D-printing pens that let prolific doodlers turn their drawings into three-dimensional sculptures, but all users are really left with is a piece of art. Polaroid’s taking 3D-printing pens one step further by replacing extruded plastic with melted candy so that when your masterpiece is complete, you can eat it. The Polaroid CandyPlay 3D…
Will people actually be staying in space hotels by 2027? That’s the promise of Orbital Assembly and Voyager Station, space startups that got a lot of headlines this week. But there are plenty of skeptics that space hotels could become a reality for Americans who are still waiting on universal healthcare. The people behind Orbital…
Just a few months after rolling out what can probably be called the first privacy-preserving news reader, the folks at Brave are taking a stab at creating their own search engine to complement their namesake browser. Brave Search, which the company announced on Wednesday, is poised to become the “privacy-preserving alternative” to, say, Google search,…
Even if you’ve been using Google Chrome since it first rolled out back in 2008, the browser is capable of some tricks you may have not discovered yet. Google adds new features on a regular basis, while older features get lost and forgotten about if you’re not using them every day. Here are 12 things…
In the latest in a string of security-related headaches for Microsoft, the company warned customers Tuesday that state sponsored hackers from China have been exploiting flaws in one of its widely used email products, Exchange, in order to target American companies for data theft. In several recently published blog posts, the company listed four newly…
After acquiring the delivery startup Postmates for $2.65 billion last year, Uber Technologies announced on Tuesday that plans to spin the company’s robotics division out into a separate company: Serve Robotics. The new company’s name is a nod to the black and yellow Serve delivery robot developed by Postmates X, the startup’s original robotics division. The…
Facebook’s so-called “Supreme Court” is reportedly interested in seeking company’s permission to review the machine-learning models used to determine which Facebooks posts are given the most prominence in users’ feeds. Alan Rusbridger, former editor of Britain’s Guardian newspaper and one of 20 people Facebook handpicked to sit on its Oversight Board, said on Tuesday that,…
Amazon has quietly edited its app icon, possibly because users noticed that it resembled a smiling, err, uh… we’ll go with Charlie Chaplin, but we don’t really mean Charlie Chaplin. Amazon updated the logo of its iOS mobile app in January to look like a smiling Prime delivery box as seen above, complete with the…
When we think of drones, we imagine massive, quadrotor machines that buzz around like manic seagulls. But what if your drown was small enough to accidentally swallow? That’s what MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built: a set of tiny drones with elastic actuators that power insect-like wings. The entire package weighs 665 mg…
Glitch, the software company behind Trello and Stack Overflow, now has a collective bargaining agreement with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The news is extraordinary, not just because they claim to be the first software workers to have secured a collective bargaining agreement, but because the lead-up to ratification has been so quiet: no…
Today at Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference, the tech giant revealed a bold glimpse at the future of digital collaboration with Mesh, a new mixed reality experience set to shape how people work and socialize online. Powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and designed to run on a range of devices, including Microsoft’s Hololens headsets, traditional…