Need to send a message to a friend 50 miles away? Today, you’ve got plenty of options—whether it’s SMS, email, tweet, Facebook message, Zoom video chat, or the old-fashioned telephone. But back in the 1930s, the choices were much more limited. You could use the phone or write a l … | Continue reading
The Megaphone acquisition clarifies how to think about Spotify overall: It’s quickly becoming an advertising behemoth—less the Netflix of audio and much more akin to Facebook or Google for your ears. | Continue reading
After receiving 85 reports of doorbells catching fire, Ring has issued a recall of some second-generation Ring doorbells (the one with the blue ring) for igniting and causing "minor property damage." | Continue reading
A ritual I have become accustomed to at the end of a long day is collapsing on the couch, booting up my Apple TV, and launching my various streaming services one after the other looking for something to watch. It’s much like opening the fridge when you know there’s nothing new in … | Continue reading
Good news for WhatsApp users who might want to keep their chat history a bit less permanent: the company announced a new “disappearing messages feature,” which will start rolling out to its more than one billion iOS and Android customers worldwide starting today. | Continue reading
A pro-Trump Facebook group urged its members to “be a presence” at a Detroit ballot-counting site. | Continue reading
On Monday, Spotify announced a new initiative that offers artists the chance to pay their way into automated recommendations. | Continue reading
Ahead of the launch of the new Xbox and Playstation Nvidia finally shows off its next generation of graphics cards, the Radeon 6000 series, and they seem incredible. | Continue reading
Police across the United States are scrambling to secure funding for new cellphone-tracking equipment after the maker of the controversial “Stingray” device quietly announced last year it would no longer sell equipment directly to local law enforcement. | Continue reading
Master Replicas Group, the company behind a working reproduction of HAL-9000, has declared bankruptcy. Which means HAL probably won't ship any time soon. | Continue reading
Police across the United States are scrambling to secure funding for new cellphone-tracking equipment after the maker of the controversial “Stingray” device quietly announced last year it would no longer sell equipment directly to local law enforcement. | Continue reading
In 1965 Texas Instruments set out to build a device to showcase its new integrated circuits, and the first handheld calculator was created. Now one of a handful of prototypes is up for auction. | Continue reading
Astronomers have catalogued more than 3,000 exoplanets using a fairly basic detection technique known as the transit method. What if aliens are using the same technique to spy on us? | Continue reading
Amazon is being hit with a class-action suit alleging that the tech giant’s severs are storing biometric voice data from countless callers, in contravention of an Illinois privacy law. | Continue reading
Impossible is trying to do for cow's milk what it did for beef. | Continue reading
An oversized depiction of a cat has been discovered on a hill at the famous Nazca Lines site in Peru. The artwork dates back some 2,000 years and measures over 120 feet across. | Continue reading
With CEO Mark Zuckerberg's blessing, Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of left-leaning news sites in an attempt to dispel claims that the platform had an anti-conservative bias. | Continue reading
New research from the Center for Democracy and Technology aims to help security researchers decide what level of risk is acceptable for them and their work. | Continue reading
Bytebase, a new app by two Columbia University software engineers, promises to let you store your snippets, thoughts, and notes in a way that is instantly searchable and automatically organized. | Continue reading
After years of customer complaints, Apple is finally releasing a genuinely small iPhone again, and without major sacrifices on features. | Continue reading
Cruise ships reportedly can cost anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion to build and typically have a lifespan of 40 years. Due to the pandemic, the cruise industry has come to a screeching halt, and the ships are being sold for scraps. | Continue reading
Cows are quite possibly the most important domesticated animal in human history, providing vast quantities of meat, dairy products, leather, and let's not forget manure for fertilizer. And yet DNA analysis reveals ancient humans almost didn't succeed in domesticating cows … | Continue reading
Scientists say this one weird trick will make a cat like you, or at least not be so repulsed by you. | Continue reading
The internet is broken and the ISPs bear a big brunt of the blame. But don’t worry, Cory Doctorow has a great plan to fix the problem. This is System Reboot. | Continue reading
If, for whatever reason, you’re debating whether to get a “smart” male chastity device, perhaps reconsider. What can be connected to the internet can be hacked—and that includes dick prisons and other teledildonic gadgets. | Continue reading
These are, absolutely, very bleak times, but in a sense we should cherish them: we’re living through maybe the last stretch of history before employers start mandating microchips en masse. You’re going to miss living in fear of contracting a deadly virus, once HR brings out the s … | Continue reading
Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is th … | Continue reading
Apple’s new iOS 14 has brought iPhone users a trove of wonders. But one cannot have wonders without some bugs. So if you recently noticed that your iPhone seems to suffer massive battery drain after upgrading to iOS 14, we want you to know it’s not just you. And rest assured, the … | Continue reading
If you happen to be one of the few people who still use Google’s Daydream VR platform, I’m sorry to tell you that it’s officially dead. (If you didn’t know Daydream was a thing, that’s totally OK. I forgot it was, too.) Spotted by Android Authority, Google recently issued a servi … | Continue reading
When I was 13, I had my first kiss, got engaged twice, performed a wedding ceremony, telepathically communicated with crystal amulets, and sang songs to cast spells. It was a mystical era in Wehnimer’s Landing, the main town in a game called GemStone III. | Continue reading
Earth will soon welcome a temporary mini-moon, but this newly detected object, an apparent asteroid, might actually be of unnatural origin—a booster rocket dating back to the 1960s. | Continue reading
It’s probably not the biggest security issue that Microsoft is dealing with right now but the software giant probably isn’t happy about it either way: This week, a torrent appeared online that contained the apparent source code for Windows XP, the extremely outdated Microsoft ope … | Continue reading
A joint project between students in the Industrial Design course at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, and the Catholic Educational Institution in Bonn is bringing (sort of) high tech to the Catholic Mass. | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I found myself in need of a repair for a borked camera lens on my iPhone 11. I do everything in my power to essentially encase my Apple products in bubble wrap, but a nearly imperceptible fracture in one lens had greatly impacted the functionality of my phone’s c … | Continue reading
In the small town of Grosse Tête, Louisiana, a Bengal-Siberian hybrid tiger named Tony lived 17 wearisome years confined to a chain-linked, concrete-slabbed cage. His bloodline hailed from halfway across the planet, where tigers prowled as apex predators in the depths of Rajastha … | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg fucking loves Facebook. He thinks it’s great. Were someone to tell him it sucked—using phrases like “surveillance capitalism,” “passive radicalization,” “kind of a boring place”—he would probably disagree with them, maybe even strongly. For that reason, and many o … | Continue reading
What happens when you have a copy of Crysis: Remastered and Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 graphics card in your possession? You see if the RTX 3080 can run it, naturally. One of my hopes for Crysis: Remastered was that it would be just as punishing on PCs today as it was when originally … | Continue reading
Facebook employees have recently been wondering if perhaps Facebook—which lets politicians lie in ads, festers with extremist movements like QAnon, and by design amplifies authoritarian propaganda, misinformation, and hate speech—is actually the bad guy. | Continue reading
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, sales of vinyl records surpassed compact discs for the first time since the ‘80s. What’s more surprising is that people are still actually buying CDs, and if you’re one of the loyal few who refuses to let the medium die, … | Continue reading
At least eight people who have refused to wear masks during the coronavirus pandemic have been forced to dig graves for people who died from covid-19 in the province of East Java, Indonesia, according to a report from the Jakarta Post. | Continue reading
QAnon, the internet brainvirus that’s set untold masses searching for Satanic pedovores and howling “do your reeeeseaaaaarch” in every known comment section has afflicted the wellness community. | Continue reading
Bluetooth technology has amassed its fair share of diehard stans over the years, despite some pretty gnarly bugs that open devices up to a bevy of bad actors. Now, the organization behind the namesake technology has put out a statement about the latest threat facing those of us w … | Continue reading
One day in the perhaps not-so-distant future, you’ll be able to interact with your tablet, phone, or computer using a regular ole sheet of notebook paper. | Continue reading
If Mark Zuckerberg’s concerned citizen act has convinced you that Facebook’s trying really, really hard, or that the company is too big to possibly moderate hate on its platform, read this resignation letter from software engineer Ashok Chandwaney. After five and a half years at … | Continue reading
After showing a teaser video earlier this week, LG confirmed on Saturday that its upcoming smartphone with a swiveling second screen will be called the LG Wing. And while I can appreciate that they’re trying to change up the form factor in an increasingly crowded market of flippi … | Continue reading
The mayor of Lafayette, Louisiana has filed a lawsuit against a 28-year-old comedian who created three fake events on Facebook that claimed “antifa” was coming to the town. Police responded to one of the fake events in late August with at least 30 squad cars and heavily armed off … | Continue reading
You know that clip of Steve Carell from The Office where he’s shouting “No, God! No, God, please no! No! No! Nooooooooo!” That’s how I feel about Amazon’s announcement that it’s adding a new service to Alexa for landlords. It’s called Alexa for Residential that, according to Amaz … | Continue reading
A new study using lasers suggests that face shields and masks outfitted with an exhaust valve aren’t particularly great at protecting others from tiny respiratory droplets containing contagious germs like the coronavirus that causes covid-19. These aerosols can spill through and … | Continue reading