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According to the Guinness World Records, Germany’s Niels Herbrich flew a rocket-powered remote control plane to a record-breaking speed of 465.544 MPH back in 2018. Three days ago, California’s Spencer Lisenby shattered that record by piloting an RC plane to an astounding speed of 548 MPH, but their plane lacked one important feature: an engine…
Google threatened to block its search engine for all users in Australia if a controversial new profit-sharing proposal from the federal government moves forward, according to testimony Friday by Google’s top executive in the region. Google is upset about a plan by the conservative government—strongly backed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—that would force tech giants…
A federal judge on Thursday refused Parler’s motion for a preliminary injunction to force Amazon to immediately restore web services for the far-right social network. Parler filed a lawsuit against Amazon after it was kicked from the company’s web hosting service, Amazon Web Services, on Jan. 10 for reportedly refusing to remove its users’ hate…
Instacart is reportedly firing nearly 2,000 in-store shoppers, including all of its workers who voted to unionize last February in a historic first for the grocery delivery platform. As spotted by Motherboard, Instacart buried news of the impending layoffs in a blog post on Tuesday outlining broader changes to how the company does business with…
It looks like things might be improving—at least a little—when it comes to closing the digital divide in America. The latest quarterly report from BroadbandNow highlights several small achievements that have closed the internet gap a little bit more, but also reveals the massive amount of work still ahead. As of December, 70% of Americans…
The chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee has asked the FBI to investigate Parler, the largely unmoderated conservative social media hellhole implicated as one of the sites involved in organizing the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol. In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) asked the agency to examine…
The Raspberry Pi is one of the smallest and cheapest mini computers you can buy. It has an HDMI port, USB ports, and runs Ubuntu or other open-source operating systems like a champ. The new Raspberry Pi Pico, on the other hand, is like the CPU of a more complex machine. By itself, it can’t…
Earlier this month, WhatsApp announced some changes to its privacy policy that sent users scrambling to move their mobile social life to a new network. Signal got an influx of richly deserved new users, and Android users bemoaned the fact that they can’t switch to Apple’s iMessage. All of that’s a long way of saying…
In recent years, vertical farming has emerged as a futurist’s solution to the world’s agricultural problems. The growing trend seeks to use controlled environments to boost food production, leveraging indoor labs where temperature, light, and nutrients can be mechanically controlled. Yet while vertical farms have gained in popularity, they are also still very expensive. When…
Facebook has handed the keys locking Donald Trump off its platforms over to its Oversight Board, which will decide whether the former president can once again spew his thoughts on a major social network. The question of whether to restore Trump’s access to Facebook and Instagram, which the company blocked the day after Trump helped…
On Thursday, French authorities finally accomplished the impossible: getting Google to agree to pay news outlets the licensing fees they’ve spent more than half a decade begging for. The decision came following “many months of negotiations” with France’s competition authority after it ordered the tech giant to start negotiating licensing fees with local news publishers…
Twitter restricted the ability of the Chinese Embassy to the U.S. to post tweets after it deemed one of its posts dehumanizing to the Uighur people, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group that the Chinese government has reportedly subjected to dystopian surveillance, detention camps, and forced abortion and sterilization. The tweet in question, posted on Jan.…
One of the longest-running jokes in the smartphone industry is that anytime Oppo puts out a new phone, OnePlus will release something very similar a few months later. But now, the two companies along with Realme are making that kind of cooperation official by merging parts of their research and development. In a statement given…
Otter’s eliminated one more step for actually remembering who said what during Google Meet calls. The company today announced a new Chrome extension for Google Meet to caption and transcribe meetings in real-time, similarly to how it already does for Zoom. Now, Google Meet users can skip the nuisance of having to feed an audio…
If you’ve visited the AMD subreddit, the Linus Tech Tips forums, or elsewhere over the last several months, you might have come across a conspiracy theory that Intel and Nvidia struck a secret deal with one another to keep higher-end GPUs out of AMD Ryzen 4000-series laptops. If you looked at the slate of AMD…
The Apple TV might be shiny, black, and sleek, but it’s also kind of boring. If you’re unimpressed by its design, you can either hide it behind a TV or wrap it in this fun silicone case from Elago that turns the streaming box into a retro console reminiscent of the Super Famicom—minus any fun…
For his almost-final act in office, President Trump issued pardons to more than a hundred people. bBig names like Steve Bannon and Lil Wayne soaked up a lot of the attention. But one of the strangest cases from the pardon list is only getting stranger. Robert Zangrillo, an investor and developer, was one of the…
It’s an open secret that Apple is working on some kind of augmented reality or virtual reality headset. Some, have been so bold as to predict sleek Steve Jobs-style smart glasses as soon as summer 2021. But now Bloomberg is reporting that before we get smart glasses, Apple is attempting a niche VR headset that…
Visit the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, The Netherlands, and you’ll have a chance to see Johannes Vermeer’s painting, ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring,’ from maybe a few feet away—depending on the crowds around the famous piece. Or you can explore this website that provides access to a massive 10-billion-pixel scan of the painting with…
On the one hand, picking a television set is a simple job: Get the most expensive one you can afford from a brand you like. On the other hand, there are so many types of screen technology and associated labels and acronyms that you’d be forgiven for feeling utterly overwhelmed by it all. Here’s your…
