The saga of Pablo Escobar-branded folding phones continues. When the Pablo Escobar Fold 1 and Fold 2 launched, every phone nerd could tell that these phones were blatant, suspiciously priced rebrands of other foldable smartphones. Namely, the Royole FlexPai and the Samsung Galaxy … | Continue reading
Imprisoned activist and former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning attempted suicide on Wednesday in the Alexandria, Virginia, jail where she’s been held for a year following her refusal to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. | Continue reading
At least 20 ad-blocking and virtual private network (VPN) apps owned by analytics firm Sensor Tower may have been secretly spying on users’ phones, according to a BuzzFeed News investigation on Monday. | Continue reading
Gig employers Uber and Lyft appear to have caved to public pressure to pay workers with SARS-CoV-2 who don’t have the luxury of paid sick leave—thanks solely to their predatory employee classifications of drivers as independent contractors. | Continue reading
Machines like blenders, washing machines, and even your car used reduction drives made of multiple gears to increase the torque or decrease the speed of rotation coming from a motor. Taking that idea to its extreme, Daniel De Bruin built a machine with 100 connected gears that tu … | Continue reading
You’d be forgiven for assuming that this video was the work of a talented animator, a visual effects artist, or an illusionist. But the only magic at play here is magnets and a magnificent execution of miniaturized robotics. This is a real Rubik’s Cube that can completely solve i … | Continue reading
Marvel overlord Kevin Feige and his two heralds imbued with the Power Cinematic—the Russo Brothers—all made guest appearances on this week’s episode of The Simpsons with a special message befitting the company that gobbled up 20th Century Fox in its quest for global domination: “ … | Continue reading
Following decisions to cancel event appearances and restrict travel, Amazon also appears to have put in-person job interviews on hold indefinitely, according to screenshots shared with Gizmodo. | Continue reading
The Senate unanimously voted Thursday to grant rural telecom carriers a cool $1 billion in funding to help them ditch and replace any existing equipment from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE. Its official name is the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act, but ma … | Continue reading
A face recognition app used by thousands of law enforcement agencies, which has drawn considerable scrutiny in past weeks due to its creator’s dubious data collection efforts, contains code hinting at a range of unreported potential features, based on a version of the app discov … | Continue reading
Ten dollars a month will buy you some decent things, even in this economy. Or you can flush it down the shiny new toilet that is Seamless+. | Continue reading
With the abysmal state of healthcare in this country, it shouldn’t be surprising that tech companies—specifically those in the app space—have swooped in left and right to solve the ills that the federal government can’t or won’t. Want to monitor your blood pressure? There’s an ap … | Continue reading
Streaming giant Twitch.tv issued 24-hour bans to some of its biggest left-wing podcasters on Tuesday night, including Chapo Trap House, radio host David Pakman, and Mychal “Trihex” Jefferson, citing Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests over streams of the Democratic … | Continue reading
Apple rules over its brand image with an iron fist—and that extends to the silver screen. In a Vanity Fair interview, Knives Out and The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson revealed that Apple won’t let villains and bad guys use iPhones onscreen. An interesting tidbit, but one that h … | Continue reading
All of my childhood memories involving Etch a Sketch end the same way. I’d fiddle with the knobs and then after a few minutes, shake it in frustration, erasing all evidence of my hideous “art.” The ionic toy is marking its 60th anniversary this year with a few limited edition lau … | Continue reading
Nintendo is known for its excellent customer service, but now and then the company will go above and beyond the call of duty for special cases. When technicians couldn’t fix a 95-year-old Japan woman’s dead Game Boy, the company replaced it with a brand new one, leading us to won … | Continue reading
Canadian authorities are investigating shady face recognition company Clearview AI on the grounds that its scraping of billions of photos from the web might violate privacy laws, Reuters reported on Friday. | Continue reading
In an effort to undo decades of building design and urban planning that’s made spaces inaccessible to those with mobility challenges, 62-year old Rita Ebel is spending part of her golden years building wheelchair ramps out of colorful Lego bricks in an effort to improve the small … | Continue reading
The devices we use every day are increasingly voice-controlled or internet-connected, even if they probably shouldn’t be. If you’re also one of those folks that’s morbidly curious about which of these devices are hiding behind bullshit privacy policies to collect reams of data on … | Continue reading
The advent of the personal computer wasn’t just about making these powerful machines available to everyone, it was also about making them accessible and usable, even for those lacking a computer science degree. Larry Tesler, who passed away on Monday, might not be a household nam … | Continue reading
Deepfake technology continues to weird me out. It seems just a matter of time until it changes how we experience visual media. These just look so damn persuasive, and I have to imagine they’re only going to get better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it. | Continue reading
Authorities in Puerto Rico announced that the island's government had been a victim of a million dollar online scam. It started when a hacker got into a government employee's email account. The hacker proceeded to ask for money from various agencies. | Continue reading
Robo Revenge is a new service offered by DoNotPay, a robot lawyer app. The service helps individuals sue their robocallers for up to $3,000 per call using an automated process. People on the Do Not Call Registry are entitled to this payout under U.S. law. | Continue reading
Aside from pockets of overt racism, one of the more weirdly unpleasant corners of Twitter comes from its “promoted” content. What ostensibly started as a tool for big-name brands to drive the “reach” and “impact” of whatever message they might be promoting, it’s since devolved in … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that the U.S. trails behind plenty of other countries when it comes to data protection legislation. Today, Senator Kristen Gillibrand has published a bill proposal that would create an independent Data Protection Agency that would act as a regulator tasked with pro … | Continue reading
In a quote in Politico’s new technology-focused publication, Protocol, Xbox Chief Phil Spencer said something seemingly earth-shattering for any gamer: It isn’t Nintendo or Sony that Microsoft views as primary competitors in the gaming space, but Amazon and Google. That sounds de … | Continue reading
By prodding a tiny brain region linked to consciousness, scientists caused anesthetized monkeys to suddenly become awake and alert. This fascinating result is providing new clues about the brain and how it produces conscious awareness—insights that could potentially lead to thera … | Continue reading
There are lots of valid reasons to be worried about how deep learning techniques could potentially be used to manipulate footage for nefarious reasons. But as Denis Shiryaev demonstrates by upscaling some old black and white film footage from 1896, those AI-powered tools can also … | Continue reading
When most of us think of how the concept of “data” has been skewered by the press, we’re probably thinking about an app’s location data tipping off our home address, or apps like Grindr tipping advertisers off about our sexuality. What’s less scrutinized, both by the public and b … | Continue reading
Top Trump ally and consistent encryption scaremonger Senator Lindsey Graham is working on a bill that could coerce tech companies to stop providing end-to-end encryption by threatening them with massive legal liability, The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive T … | Continue reading
Google has announced it’s launching an “experimental social video sharing app” called Tangi for short, 60-second tutorials. | Continue reading
A newly proposed House authorization bill would push back NASA’s deadline to land humans on the Moon to 2028 instead of 2024, while also calling for a crewed landing on Mars in 2033. Reactions to this proposal have been mixed, with NASA’s chief Jim Bridenstine unhappy about the w … | Continue reading
The workers of Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s on-demand micro-task platform, say they have encountered mutilated bodies, graphic videos of botched surgeries, and what appeared to be child pornography. They say they have been asked to transcribe Social Security numbers and other perso … | Continue reading
Since Google morphed into a new company called Alphabet last year, there’s been an apparent bloodbath for the tech giant’s popular (and costly) “moonshot” projects. These longer-term, riskier ventures are suddenly being held to account for the amount of money they were losing. Th … | Continue reading
In a stark reminder that you rarely actually own anything you buy digitally, Electronic Arts’ iOS Tetris games will not only be disappearing from the App Store on April 21, but the games themselves will no longer be playable on iPhones and iPads—even if you paid for them. | Continue reading
I ordered it on eBay. When the four-ounce envelope arrived from New York three days later, it looked innocuous enough. It contained a finger-sized black plastic box, a small black antenna to screw onto that box, and two glass fuses. It was designed to fit into a car’s 12-volt e … | Continue reading
Facebook said a "technical issue" was to blame for translating Chinese President Xi Jinping's name as "Mr Shithole" on its platform. The "Mr Shithole" references appeared in Burmese to English translations during Xi's visit to Myanmar. | Continue reading
Journalist firebrand Glenn Greenwald has been charged with cybercrimes by federal prosecutors in Brazil, according to a new report from the New York Times. Greenwald recently helped expose corruption in the Brazilian government through a series of stories at the Intercept that in … | Continue reading
Planned obsolescence is the bane of consumer electronics. On that front, Sonos has stood out as one of the few tech companies that build longer-lasting products. In fact, the company is keen to point out that 92 percent of all the products it has ever shipped are still in use tod … | Continue reading
As many reasons as there are for loving my smartphone, there are just as many reasons I hate it, but they all boil down to how dependent I am on this device that devours my attention. I’m bombarded by annoying notifications, and then when the phone dies because I’ve been futzing … | Continue reading
European researchers are working on a system that can churn out breathable oxygen from simulated samples of moon dust. | Continue reading
I don’t know if there is a single holy grail for keyboard nerds. Every nerd is different. But some switches, the IBM Beam Spring, are so beloved that even the most curmudgeonly keyboard fan thinks of them wistfully. “It’s the ultimate clicky switch as far as I’m concerned,” one m … | Continue reading
You enter a cave. At the end of a dark corridor, you encounter a pair of sealed chambers. Inside each chamber is an all-knowing wizard. The prophecy says that with these oracles’ help, you can learn the answers to unanswerable problems. But there’s a catch: The oracles don’t alwa … | Continue reading
Democratic candidate for president and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign cybersecurity official has resigned, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. | Continue reading
Spectrum customers who are also users of the company’s home security service are about a month away from being left with a pile of useless equipment that in many cases cost them hundreds of dollars. | Continue reading
Motherboard on Thursday revealed that a “secretive” U.S. government vendor whose surveillance products are not publicly advertised has been marketing hidden cameras disguised as seemingly ordinary objects—vacuum cleaners, tree stumps, and tombstones—to the Federal Bureau of Inves … | Continue reading
Microsoft had “no security measures” on a program that had humans transcribe user voice recordings from its Skype video calling service and Cortana assistant, the Guardian reported on Friday, even when those workers were located in China. | Continue reading