It’s 2020, and millions of Americans—now bound to their homes—still don’t have reliable internet access. In a pandemic, that’s a public health crisis. | Continue reading
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has seen a recent surge in demand for its boards due to the covid-19 pandemic. Part of that demand comes from people experimenting with the cheap computers with newfound time to kill at home, but the foundation is reserving some of its Pi Zero inventor … | Continue reading
Seismometers around the world are recording the decreased seismic activity resulting from people staying home amid covid-19 social distancing orders. | Continue reading
Star Trek. It’s one of the most quintessential pieces of science-fiction television around. And there’s a whole damn lot of it, even if you cut it down to the current eight different shows in the franchise (there’s even more on the way!). Want to start, but need a little guidance … | Continue reading
Chiropractors in Canada and elsewhere are being told to stop advertising their services as a treatment for covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus. | Continue reading
For those unaware, Zoom officially has a porn problem. The multibillion-dollar video messaging mainstay among employees at Johnson & Johnson and the Department of Homeland Security—not to mention a household name among currently house-bound citizens across the country—has bee … | Continue reading
Space is hard. We now have another reminder of this sad fact, as a prototype of SpaceX’s next-gen rocket collapsed in on itself during tests this morning, in what is now the third incident of its kind for the Starship program. | Continue reading
Human evolution was messy, with multiple human species living and interbreeding at the same time, in a convoluted process that eventually led to us. Such is the emerging narrative in anthropology, and it’s a theory now bolstered by three fascinating new studies released today. | Continue reading
Like other countries, COVID-19 rocked both Russia and its neighbors, with recent numbers pointing to a collective 4,375 residents across the post-Soviet states being infected by the virus. And while some of these territories are seemingly less than worried about the pandemic, Rus … | Continue reading
Instacart workers are preparing to strike next week in response to the company’s lack of protections for employees who are risking their health and safety to perform their jobs amid the global coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 1,200 people in the U.S. alone. | Continue reading
A 17-year-old boy in Los Angeles County who became the first teen believed to have died from complications with covid-19 in the U.S. was denied treatment at an urgent care clinic because he didn’t have health insurance, according to R. Rex Parris, the mayor of Lancaster, Californ … | Continue reading
A 17-year-old boy in Los Angeles County who became the first teen believed to have died from complications with covid-19 in the U.S. was denied treatment at an urgent care clinic because he didn’t have health insurance, according to R. Rex Parris, the mayor of Lancaster, Californ … | Continue reading
Yesterday AMD issued a statement regarding IP stolen in December 2019, but details of what was stolen or who stole it was scarce. Now AMD has filed multiple Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notices against GitHub to get its GPU source code removed from the websit … | Continue reading
In the time of social distancing, online gaming with friends seems like a no-brainer to stay sane and pass the time. Except if you’ve tried lately, it seems like every major service has been petering in and out. | Continue reading
Japanese conglomerate SoftBank is trying to backpedal from part of its bailout of tanking coworking space firm WeWork, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission investigations into the latter company’s busines … | Continue reading
As technology marches ever forwards, there are companies who will want to make sure advertising can keep up. That's why Sony filed a patent for next-gen ads that let you skip through them, but only if you yell a brand name at your TV. | Continue reading
Today is World Day Against Cyber Censorship. Launched by Reporters Without Borders in 2008, its goal is to raise awareness of how various governments around the world are censoring free speech online, whether it’s by blocking keywords on social media, removing individual articles … | Continue reading
For its first official collaboration with Nintendo, Lego could’ve just rolled out another series of collectible minifigures featuring beloved video game characters and fans would have been very happy. Instead, the toymaker is introducing a new way to play with its iconic bricks, … | Continue reading
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