A group of U.S. lawmakers on Monday raised concerns about the proposed sale of the .org top-level domain to a private equity firm by the organization created to manage it, a deal that has drawn significant scrutiny from digital rights groups and nonprofits since it was first ann … | Continue reading
It’s time to look ahead to the coming year and all things that will be happening in space exploration. With new missions to Mars, a probe returning to Earth with samples taken from an asteroid, and even more batches of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites going into orbit, it’s going … | Continue reading
A Chinese hacking group believed to operate on behalf of the Beijing government has learned how to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) in attacks on government and industry targets, ZDNet reported on Monday. | Continue reading
Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island tortoises, died in 2012. George’s story is the perfect extinction story. It features a charismatic character with a recognizable face, an obvious villain, and the tireless efforts of naturalists. | Continue reading
In a warehouse in Chatsworth, California, rows upon rows of giant wooden crates are stacked forty feet high, in a scene somewhat reminiscent of the secret U.S. military installation shown at the end of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead of Biblical artifacts, though, … | Continue reading
With everything from cars, to trucks, to even airplanes going electric, the demand for batteries is going to continue to skyrocket in the coming years—but the availability of the materials currently used to make them is limited. So scientists at IBM Research have developed a new … | Continue reading
Tom Cruise is supposed to be an ally. This megawealthy superstar is supposed to, at the very least, understand how movies and television are viewed and support us nerds who want everything in widescreen with a perfectly calibrated rec.709 picture and zero motion smoothing. Why ha … | Continue reading
I remember my first phone call from the FBI clearly. It was mid-May 2015. I was sitting in my dreary Midtown cubicle, chugging iced coffee and trying to hold out for the end of the day as a lowly junior reporter. My eyelids were drooping when my wrist buzzed. Someone was calling … | Continue reading
Email cleanup service Unroll.me has settled with the Federal Trade Commission and must delete information it gathered from some consumers after it was revealed the firm was mining and selling data from users’ inboxes, the agency announced on Tuesday. | Continue reading
Short-term apartment rental site Airbnb has banned over 60 users of Iron March, the defunct white supremacist web forum that recently had its entire SQL database leaked to the internet, the company told Gizmodo. | Continue reading
The Federal Trade Commission is considering asking the courts to put a halt to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to merge the technical backends of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram on antitrust grounds, the Wall Street Journal reports. | Continue reading
A new nationwide 3-digit emergency line is intended to make the process of seeking help easier for those who need it. | Continue reading
The Federal Aviation Administration was well aware of the fatal hazards with the Boeing 737 MAX before the March 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash and allowed the planes to continue carrying passengers, a report shows. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the FAA had estimated that thro … | Continue reading
Billionaire tech icon Elon Musk turned a lot of heads in Malibu, California on Saturday night when he showed up to a swanky restaurant in his new Tesla Cybertruck. But Musk’s night on the town included at least one embarrassing hiccup. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX hit a traffi … | Continue reading
In the 1900s, a millionaire who could, at best, be considered eccentric, declared war on gravity. He wrote tracts with titles like, "Gravity: Our Enemy Number One," and founded an institute to roll back the power of this deadly force. | Continue reading
It took a federal jury in Los Angeles less than an hour to throw out a $190 million defamation case against Elon Musk. Calling someone a “pedo guy” to an audience of millions of Twitter followers isn’t an accusation, the jury decided, because words are tricky little devils that c … | Continue reading
Artists on Twitter say that their work is regularly stolen by armies of bots that generate t-shirts from popular designs—and they’ve got the receipts to prove it. | Continue reading
Lego becomes more and more enjoyable as your collection grows, until the point when your morass of plastic bricks becomes so overwhelming that it’s impossible to find the piece you’re looking for. At that point, you need to develop a sorting system, or do what Daniel West did, an … | Continue reading
Craigslist has long been a staple of the internet since it first launched in 1995—but surprisingly, it hasn’t had an official app in the decade or so since the smartphone era began. Well, that’s all changed. You can now find the official, free app for iOS. | Continue reading
We credit much of the success of Star Trek to the vision of Gene Roddenberry, crafting a hopeful future for the heroes of his TV series to boldly go about in. But so much of what we love about the original Trek, its heart and its cleverness, is down to the work of writer and scri … | Continue reading
The idea of making a sequel to one of the biggest animated films of all time somehow seems more than just “obvious.” “Essential” is likely a better word. And yet, the filmmakers behind Frozen and the upcoming Frozen II say making a sequel wasn’t their first instinct and the road … | Continue reading
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