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The Washington state government has suffered a large data breach involving unemployment claims, potentially exposing data on more than 1.6 million people, officials admitted Monday. The data appears to have been compromised through Accellion, a third-party vendor that was contracting with the state auditor’s office. In mid-December, the company suffered a cyberattack via a zero-day…
Dog owners, I’m looking at you. If you’re a frequent walker—somebody who primarily commutes this way but possibly also someone who spends a good amount of time outdoors with a four-legged friend—you might be familiar with the extremely specific problem of having to figure out what the heck to do with your portable water or…
E-book revenues are up by 15.2% from 2019, hitting $1 billion last year, according to a report by the Association of American Publishers. December figures should reach at least $100 million if the organization’s estimates are correct. “Print book sales tracked for the year by NPD BookScan rose 8.2 percent in 2020 despite—and in some…
The first Amazon One palm readers are officially hitting more retail stores in the Seattle area. The readers, announced last summer, are completely touchless and instead read the lines on the palm of your hand to identify you for checkout. Amazon lets customers use the readers instead of QR codes to check customers out at…
The European Union wants the $15.8 billion in back taxes it says Apple owes and is appealing a July 2020 court ruling that let the tech giant off scot-free, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Last year, EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager lost a major case demanding Apple pay nearly $16 billion in taxes on income it…
One of our biggest gripes with Apple’s new Fitness+ service when it launched was that it didn’t support AirPlay, which means you couldn’t stream workouts from your iPhone, for instance, to your (non-Apple) TV. It was a baffling choice, because Apple Watch and iPhone owners without an Apple TV were forced to stream workouts on…
Popular Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is suing the Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury, and both agencies’ top officials, after having been deemed a security threat by the U.S. government and cut off from American investments. Last November, then-President Donald Trump passed Executive Order 13959, which essentially sought to “defund” companies with alleged ties to…
The exhausting saga of Apple vs. Facebook continues. With Apple gearing up to release a privacy tool intended to allow users to limit the data collected about them across apps and websites—a policy with which the company has specifically targeted Facebook—the social media giant announced Monday it’ll be introducing a prompt of its own to, as…
Last week, Facebook finally announced it would stop recommending so-called “civic” (see: political) Groups to users in the wake of the violent siege on the U.S. capitol. But according to a new Wall Street Journal report, this decision only came well after data scientists within the company had raised the alarm that Groups had become…
In a massive shift for Ford’s in-car infotainment systems, the car maker announced today that it will be partnering with Google to bring a new Android-powered OS to millions of Ford cars in 2023. In addition to the six-year agreement to run Android in its cars, Ford has also designated the Google Cloud as its…
Although I hated the “keyboarding” class I took in high school, I’ll admit it did put me on the path to being an effective touch typist today. If you still employ the inefficient hunt-and-peck typing technique and want to break those bad habits, you can apparently build a negative reinforcement keyboard that physically shocks your…
As police struggled futilely to fend off a wave of rioters outside the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, Joel Valdez, an aide to Congressman Matt Gaetz, made his way to the rooftop of his boss’s office building across the street on Independence Ave. Surveying the mob as it surrounded the complex, he captured a…
While Apple is still working on its big two-year transition to homegrown Apple chips, even in these early days software developers are already porting their apps over, with Nvidia having just added support for M1 Macs to its GeForce Now game streaming client. Last spring, Nvidia rolled out support for GeForce Now on iPhones and…
As soon as the GameStop short squeeze unfolded, making millionaires of youthful pirates staging a raid on Wall Street, a cabal of billionaires and institutions have been grappling with the more important question, which is: Yeah, but where do I fit in? At least one person asked how soon he can write the book that…
Bending down to put on and lace up a pair of sneakers is a simple action that many of us take for granted. For those with mobility and movement challenges, Nike has created its first hands-free sneaker called the GO FlyEase that also happens to arrive in the middle of a pandemic when minimizing touch…
Some not-so-great legal news for Apple. For starters, a judge has concluded that Apple CEO Tim Cook should sit for a seven-hour deposition in the upcoming case against Epic Games. Second, Apple’s attempt to subpoena Samsung in the case has also been denied. Womp womp. According to court documents, Epic Games wanted to depose Cook…
It was time to die. My 2014 iMac, outfitted with a 3TB drive and maxed out RAM, was a dream machine. For years, I fired it up and got to work, transcoding video, recording podcasts, and writing books. It was almost too much machine. It had a massive, beautiful screen—one of the first Retina models,…
Apple’s watchOS platform doesn’t have quite as many customization options as other smartwatches, such as those built on Google’s Wear OS, do. But there are numerous ways to make your Apple Watch your own, beyond picking your watch color, size, and strap. Here are the top features to know and how to use them. The…
It used to be a joke, but it’s not so funny anymore. Google is threatening to block searches in Australia if the country implements a compulsory profit-sharing deal that would force tech giants like Google and Facebook to pay media companies for their content. But Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, isn’t sweating it. Morrison suggested…
It’s no secret that New York City, like many other places in the U.S., has been having a hard time with covid-19 vaccine distribution. One of the problems is its messy online sign-up website, which some city officials have denounced as “complex, burdensome, and buggy.” Officials said that this would create an obstacle for many…
