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The first inkling I had that something was very wrong on Wednesday was when my wife said, “Oh shit, is this real?” as we were en route to Trader Joe’s after spending a few hours on the cold, sun-drenched beaches of Long Island for a winter walk on our last day of a vacation. A…
So far, 21st-century tech hasn’t quite lived up to all that sci-fi tropes promised. But while everyone may not have flying cars or their own holodeck yet, you can now bet on drone races from your phone in certain states, and I think that’s pretty dang futuristic. The Drone Racing League announced a deal with…
Banning, it seems, is in this week. Google and Apple have kicked out social media app Parler from their app stores; Reddit has banned r/donaldtrump, the unofficial subreddit dedicated to President Donald Trump; and Twitter has banned the president himself, as well as other high-profile supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory. YouTube decided toadd to…
Online platforms are hastily cutting ties with President Donald Trump and his ilk after years of milquetoast responses to the hateful and violent rhetoric fomenting under their watch, and all it took was a deadly insurgency at the nation’s capital. However, Mozilla says deplatforming doesn’t go far enough and has called for investigations and increased…
Updated: 1/9/2021, 8:24 p.m. ET: Apple has finally pulled the trigger! On Saturday Apple followed Google’s lead and purged Parler’s app from its app store. The social network’s sales pitch of being “the world’s premier free speech platform” has turned it into a breeding ground for deplatformed conservatives who reportedly used Parler among other sites…
Across Twitter on Friday, open-source advocates and academics alike poured one out following the suspension of Sci-Hub, a site that lets researchers bypass the costly paywalls for more than 70 million papers from across the globe. If you haven’t heard of Sci-Hub, here’s what you need to know: Back in 2011, a computer programmer named…
Rest in piss, @realDonaldTrump: Twitter has permanently suspended the president after he incited a riot at the Capitol this week. “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them—specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter—we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk…
Twitter removed the accounts of a number of high-profile supporters of the Qanon conspiracy theory this Friday after their alleged role in spurring on the violent, pro-Trump insurgency at the U.S. Capitol building Thursday. Among the purged were former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who not only has shown a willingness to Tweet out…
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, two of the nation’s largest defenders of digital privacy, are asking the Supreme Court to stop criminal prosecutors from forcing people to unlock their own cellphones, under the argument that the U.S. Constitution’s protection against self-incrimination applies equally to passwords. While the debate is hardly…
We can add one more name to the growing list of co-conspirators, sycophants, ladder climbers, and lawmakers who are hoping for a last-minute pardon from President Trump. An official with the Department of Justice announced on Friday that Derrick Evans, a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, will face criminal charges for his…
Amid a hardening consensus that conspiracy theories emboldened this week’s Capitol Building rioters—many adorned with “Q” garments, waving Q flags, screaming about election fraud—Reddit is quietly weeding out spreaders of election-related conspiracies. As the Daily Dot first reported, Reddit admins on Thursday permanently suspended the account for r/conspiracy’s head moderator, axolotl_peyotl. He recently posted about…
Elon Musk’s march towards either overseeing one of the biggest stock market bubble pops in recent history or being the guy who opens a solar-powered portal to Hell on Mars continues unabated: Tesla is now one of the country’s top five companies by market cap. Per CNBC, on Friday morning Tesla overtook Facebook to become…
Two people who left their last jobs amid brewing scandals have teamed up to rehabilitate the image of a company surely going through its worst days ever. Former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs, unceremoniously fired by President Trumpfollowing the November elections, has founded a new company with Alex Stamos, the former head…
On Friday, UK’s antitrust authority announced a new investigation into Google’s plan to end support for third party cookies in Chrome. The probe, it explained, is meant to determine whether the change “could cause advertising spend to become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem,” potentially choking out competing companies that are—for the most part—already gasping…
Everyone seems desperate to strap a pair of smart glasses to their faces (or at least tech companies seem desperate to sell us on this solution), but the closest we’ve got to that right now are the $200 Bose Frames or the $250 Amazon Echo frames. The problem is they only deliver audio. That’s a…
Quibi’s content is officially heading to Roku. It feels like either a month or roughly 100 years since we found out that the short-lived streaming experiment from Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman crashed and burned roughly six short months after its rocky launch. But Quibi had managed to churn out a significant amount of original…
On Friday, Dominion released the Kraken on former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell. For months, Powell has made numerous conspiratorial allegations against the voting machine manufacturer—in public and in court. Now, Dominion is accusing Powell of defamation and seeking $1.3 billion in damages. The lawsuit was filed on Friday morning in the U.S. District Court…
Now that Amazon has largely integrated Whole Foods into its online shopping options, the online shopping giant is looking to pare down some of its more redundant offerings by shutting down its Prime Pantry delivery service. Launched back in 2014, Prime Pantry was created to help people purchase non-perishable groceries or cleaning supplies in bulk…
Hyundai may have just shot itself in the foot. Late yesterday, the company hinted that Apple had come knocking to discuss the possibility of working together to develop a self-driving electric car. And then, Hyundai backpedaled. The news, initially reported by the Korea Economic Daily, cited a Hyundai Motors official as saying multiple global automakers—including…
CES typically isn’t a big show for smartphones, but that hasn’t stopped Motorola from giving the entire Moto G lineup a big refresh to start the year, along with a new version of Motorola’s most affordable 5G phone. With the arrival of the new Moto G family and the new Moto One 5G Ace, Motorola…
