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President Joe Biden’s pick to be the new comptroller of the currency at the U.S. Treasury Department, Michael S. Barr, used to be an advisor to the controversial cryptocurrency company Ripple, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Ripple in federal court last…
The U.S. National Archives officially launched the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library’s website on Wednesday, the new digital home of the worst presidency in modern U.S. history. But if you’re excited to finally file a bunch of Freedom of Information Act requests about Trump’s criminal undertakings, we have bad news. The vast majority of Trump’s…
Bizarre, ongoing sightings of what appears to be a man flying a jetpack at high altitudes have understandably baffled the public. The sightings, which started last August, have involved multiple commercial airline pilots and have all taken place at incredibly high elevations—up to 6,000 feet in the air. People naturally want to know: is it…
Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder and former chairman of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, has re-emerged from wherever he’s been since late October 2020, when he ceased public appearances amid a government crackdown on tech firms. Per CNN, Ma was present in a video released by Tianmu News, a subsidiary of the official state media apparatus…
Former President Donald Trump’s part in egging on the riotous mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6 has now earned him permanent bans from Twitter, Snapchat, Shopify and, most recently, Twitch. On Wednesday, the live streaming platform for gamers announced that after disabling Trump’s account for two weeks following the violent uprising, it had…
QAnon is not going away. But it’s reeling in abject confusion and despair after Joe Biden took office on Wednesday without Donald Trump leading an army of federal agents and National Guardsmen to storm the inauguration and arrest the entire leadership of the Democratic Party. QAnon managed to successfully unite large swathes of the conspiracy…
Like many Americans, I’m processing some unfamiliar emotions today, but I believe that I’m genuinely thrilled about the new White House website. The site allows visitors to toggle font sizes. It includes an Easter Egg in the HTML with a job posting for coders. And, perhaps most thrillingly, it supports dark mode. A few reasons…
The Department of Homeland Security is being slammed with a new lawsuit after spending just over a year failing to respond to repeated attempts at investigating its long-term data hoovering practices. The suit was filed last week by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)—a tech policy-centric nonprofit based out of Washington DC—over allegations that…
Mere days before Donald Trump’s helicopter shrank into the skies, we got a promising early indication that telecom companies’ hog-wild joyride under Trump’s FCC is coming to an end. Last week, Charter Communications, the company behind Spectrum, withdrew its petition to impose data caps: basically its attempt to restrict customers’ internet usage in order to…
Put those next-generation controllers to good use on your streaming device. Nvidia’s 8.2.2 update rolled out Tuesday, bringing with it welcome support for PS5 and Xbox controllers that the premium streaming device previously lacked despite the consoles having launched months ago. Now, Shield users will be able to use their DualSense or Xbox Series X/S…
After years of repeated rumors and rumblings, the future of LG’s smartphone division has come under speculation again as LG CEO Kwon Bong-Seok reportedly sent a message to staff on Wednesday suggesting that there could be major changes coming soon. After years of losses, while the possibility of LG exiting the phone business or selling…
Unless you grew up in a time after cameraphones arrived, there’s a very good chance your first digital camera was a weird Game Boy accessory. The Game Boy Camera was definitely my first digital snapper, and while its technical capabilities were extremely limited, it still managed to excel at other things, like making photography fun…
Velcro is great when you need to open stuff fast or with ease, but Velcro is not so great when you’re trying to discreetly open your shoulder bag to grab your headphones. Researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands have come up with a new design for Velcro, inspired by mushrooms, that doesn’t shred fabrics and…
Donald Trump’s presidency is taking its last shallow, ragged breaths, with President-elect Joe Biden set to take office today—the best efforts of Trump’s incompetent campaign legal team and the disastrously failed insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 in vain. What’s a Trump supporter to do? If you’re on The Donald, the toxic Trump-worshiping fan…
The latest WhatsApp privacy kerfuffle once again has us wondering whether it’s a good idea to be giving so much of our data to a company with Facebook’s track record. In this guide we’re going to focus on exporting your conversations into a readable format—we won’t cover actually closing down your account. Note that this…
President Donald Trump issued a full pardon for former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski early Wednesday, one of 143 people who received pardons and commutations during Trump’s last 12 hours in office. Levandowski, who helped found Google’s Waymo, was convicted in August of stealing trade secrets from Google and starting his own self-driving car company called…
Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States at noon on Wednesday, finally bringing the Trump era to a close. And if you’re looking for an easy way to watch the inauguration streaming live on YouTube, Facebook, and more, we’ve got you covered. The inauguration starts at 12:00 p.m. ET, 9:00 a.m.…
Roughly a month after being hit with a pretty damning antitrust suit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Google issued its response on Sunday via a public blog post tackling some of the more “misleading” allegations. This is pretty out of character for Google, which has, until now, been pretty private with its response…
Back in 2018, Elon Musk’s The Boring Company released a bunch of limited edition flame-throwing devices as a bizarre promotional gimmick for the tunnel-digging startup. Officially dubbed “Not A Flamethrower” on the company’s own website, the devices could not, as CNN pointed out at the time, “spew flames long distances by igniting flammable liquids,” but…
For anyone hoping a decentralized web is in our immediate future — anyone who has, say, recently observed the measurable ways in which big tech oligarchs play an active role in shaping our democracy, perhaps — there’s good news: On Tuesday, privacy-focused browser Brave released an update that makes it the first to feature peer-to-peer protocol for…
