There’s a chance you had never heard of Ring cameras before Amazon bought the company for as much as $1.8 billion last year. It’s possible that Ring still wasn’t on your radar earlier this year, when reports emerged that the home security giant had partnered with scores of police … | Continue reading
The DNA of an exquisitely preserved puppy found in Siberia doesn’t appear to fit the profile of a dog or a wolf, which means the specimen might be something in between. | Continue reading
Just when you thought Alexa wasn’t integrated into enough stuff, Amazon has casually announced a new way to add the artificially intelligent voice assistant to even the cheapest, dumbest things. The new technology is capable of running Alexa with the most basic processors and les … | Continue reading
Since opening in September 2018, Amazon’s massive fulfillment center on New York’s Staten Island has garnered a reputation as grueling and unsafe, even among a logistics network broadly criticized as such. Now, leaked company documents reveal that injury rates at the warehouse, k … | Continue reading
The last vestiges of Nvidia and Apple’s long-term relationship are ending shortly. On Monday Nvidia published the release notes for the next update of its CUDA platform and noted that “CUDA 10.2 (Toolkit and NVIDIA driver) is the last release to support macOS for developing and r … | Continue reading
Google has found itself at the center of considerable backlash once again, this time for placing two employees on administrative leave for uncertain reasons, as well as for contracting famous union-busting firm IRI. At a worker-led rally Friday morning on the company’s San Franci … | Continue reading
Google researchers are figuring out how to study some of the weirdest theorized physics phenomena, like wormholes that link pairs of black holes, using experiments in a lab. | Continue reading
We’ve all been forced to do it: create a password with at least so many characters, so many numbers, so many special characters, and maybe an uppercase letter. Guess what? The guy who invented these standards nearly 15 years ago now admits that they’re basically useless. He is al … | Continue reading
Based on my best estimates, I started using Google Chrome in late 2009, not long after the beta version for OS X came out. It was awesome, fast as hell, and full of neat little tricks that felt new at the time. (Remember when searching from the address bar was a revelation?) I lo … | Continue reading
Disney+ had a rocky launch last week, with technical issues and customer service complaints galore. Now, it looks as though Disney+ has a hacking problem as well. | Continue reading
“Have you met Jacob?” It’s the first question they ask me, inside a small meeting room, deep in the heart of Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, where keyboard fans from across the Bay Area have braved the rain to show off their boutique builds. Many of them have spent thousands of dol … | Continue reading
Microsoft is bringing on former US Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether AnyVision, a facial recognition company it invested in over the summer, violated Microsoft’s ethics guidelines, according to an NBC News report Friday. | Continue reading
Come the end of January, it appears the Cortana app’s getting booted to the Microsoft assistant graveyard. At least poor Clippy will have some company now. | Continue reading
This National Geographic honey badger video, with a hilarious voiceover from "Randall," went viral a few months ago. Seriously, though, why can the honey badger wake up from a cobra bite and be on his merry way? And why can it get stung repeatedly by a swarm of bees and "not gi … | Continue reading
This week, Elon Musk-backed OpenAI released to the public the latest version of their GPT-2 predictive text generator, which is capable of taking a writing prompt and continuing based on 40 gigabytes of data pulled from around eight million websites. This is impressive, next-gene … | Continue reading
Someone going by the handle “antifa-data” uploaded what appears to be the entire SQL database of Iron March—a defunct fascist web forum where the Atomwaffen Division (AWD) terrorist organization reportedly first organized—to the Internet Archive on Wednesday. | Continue reading
Elon Musk-backed non-profit OpenAI, which claimed to have developed a machine learning-powered text generation software so powerful that it couldn’t be ethically released to the public, has... done just that. | Continue reading
Bitdefender–the tireless actuary of the Internet of Things–were able to crack into homeowner’s personal WiFi networks via Amazon’s Ring doorbells, the video-enabled auto-locks that allow homeowners to remotely open the door. And as Bitdefender’s Chief Security Researcher Jay Bala … | Continue reading
On Friday, federal health officials announced a breakthrough in solving the mystery of why people are getting seriously sick from vaping. They detected vitamin E acetate—an oily, synthetic form of the vitamin commonly added to black-market THC vape products—in lung fluid samples … | Continue reading
As the drunken mist clears in the wake of Adam Neumann’s long con that was WeWork, employees are calling for a modicum of sanity. In preparation for thousands of layoffs, which the company has reportedly delayed because it can’t afford severance, the non-unionized group who call … | Continue reading
When New Horizons zipped past Pluto on July 14, 2015, the NASA spacecraft was only able to observe one side of the dwarf planet. Scientists have now reviewed data collected by New Horizons during its approach and as it traveled away, resulting in the most detailed analysis yet of … | Continue reading
Early Thursday morning, people all over the U.S. and Canada began receiving strange text messages that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The texts were from people they knew but they lacked context and appeared to have been sent months ago. And it really freaked some folks out! M … | Continue reading
Scientists analyzing data from a defunct satellite say we should all consider that our universe might be round, rather than flat. The consequences, they explain in a new paper, could be crisis-inducing. | Continue reading
Federal investigators have determined an Uber self-driving car that killed 49-year-old pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona in March 2018 lacked programming to either recognize or respond to the presence of jaywalkers on the road, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. | Continue reading
Speaking in Washington, D.C. earlier today, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger said he’s convinced of AI’s potential to fundamentally alter human consciousness—including changes in our self-perception and to our strategic decision-making. He also slammed AI developers … | Continue reading
In a letter aimed at gutting Facebook’s rationale for allowing misleading and dishonest political ads across its platform, a prominent civil rights organization on Tuesday issued a stern warning to Mark Zuckerberg, outlining a number of federal laws to which, the group claims, F … | Continue reading
The anonymous forum 8Chan—a haven for far-right extremists, conspiracy theorists, and internet filth—came back online today after going dark in August due to its association with several mass shootings. Rebranded as 8kun (“kun” and “chan” are both honorific titles in Japanese for … | Continue reading
We know that we’re all spending too much time glued to our phones, rather than looking at the person we’re talking to, the movie we’re watching, the sunset we’re missing, or the children we’re ignoring, and Google and Apple know it too. Google has pushed out six ‘experimental’ ap … | Continue reading
Using some relatively inexpensive and readily available technology you can find at any well-stocked electronics store, Alaina Gassler, a 14-year-old inventor from West Grove, Pennsylvania, came up with a clever way to eliminate the blind spot created by the thick pillars on the s … | Continue reading
It never came close to realizing its creators’ aspirations of developing a cheap $50 laptop that could introduce kids from all over world—even those in developing nations—to the personal computer. But the OLPC XO-1, the first device released by the One Laptop Per Child organizati … | Continue reading
“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about … | Continue reading
The Untitled Goose Game that became a viral phenomenon right after its launch a month ago has been vulnerable to hacking, according to a report from a security researcher. | Continue reading
Nearly 50 years ago—before Interstellar, A Brief History of Time, and certainly the Event Horizon Telescope—postdoctoral researcher William Unruh was attempting to explain black holes to a crowd at an Oxford University colloquium. There were no reference points with which to comp … | Continue reading
The U.S. Air Force’s top secret spaceplane, the Boeing X-37B, landed in Florida early Sunday after 780 days—over 2 years and one month—in orbit around the Earth. And we still have no idea what it was doing while it was up there. | Continue reading
The customer records of nearly 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud users were discovered by a security researcher this month in an inadvertently exposed database which has now been secured. | Continue reading
With the decade winding down it’s time for us to set our sights on the next one. The 2020s promises to be anything but dull. From the automation revolution and increasingly dangerous AI to geohacking the planet and radical advances in biotechnology, here are the most futuristic d … | Continue reading
Comcast, one of the largest and most reviled internet service providers in the country, has reportedly been lobbying against efforts by companies like Mozilla and Google to switch on or test, respectively, a tool for encrypting your browser history, thereby making it trickier for … | Continue reading
The Pixelbook Go is the cheapest Chromebook Google has made to date. Google’s flagship Chrome OS devices typically start at $1,000, so the $650 price tag on the base-level Pixelbook Go is incredible. Compared to other Google-made Chrome OS devices, the Pixelbook Go is a fantastic … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago, on a sparkling spring morning, we went trawling along Florida’s coastal waterway. But not for fish. | Continue reading
In the 1,006 days since Donald Trump became president, his administration has shown little vigilance when it comes to its own security, and a new internal memo suggests the White House is working to weaken its own cybersecurity safeguards. | Continue reading
Between the mountainous and coastal vistas of Goleta, California, sits an unassuming office on the side of a building next to the freeway. It could belong to any Southern California company; workers sit in gray cubicles beneath fluorescent lights, and there’s a rack to hold emplo … | Continue reading
Staff at Google are wary that the company may be building “an internal surveillance tool” with the purpose of crushing employee dissent, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. | Continue reading
This morning, Google scientists confirmed in a blog post that their quantum computer had needed just 200 seconds to solve a problem that they claim would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. | Continue reading
Lime, the company whose business model is buying thousands of electric scooters and just sort of leaving them there in the hopes people will ride them, is on track to lose $300 million this year. | Continue reading
WeWork, the company that is either a transformative way of life or a dangerously overleveraged real estate company posing as a cultish tech firm, is planning on laying off thousands of employees. | Continue reading
To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA)—the UFO research organization founded by former Blink 182 star Tom DeLonge—has struck a research deal with the U.S. Army filled with eye-popping references to exotic technologies. | Continue reading
Synthetic meat products might come even closer to the texture of slaughtered meats with the help of what are essentially modified cotton candy machines. | Continue reading