Elon Musk’s underground transportation business, The Boring Company, has won a bid to create an underground high-speed rail line from downtown Chicago to O’Hare International Airport. The company beat out at least four other developers for the project, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Eman … | Continue reading
Once again European lawmakers are set to vote on a bill that promises to change the internet as we know it. Experts say a misguided update to copyright laws poses a serious danger to how we share news, upload fair use content, make memes, and build startups. Now, some of the pion … | Continue reading
At the beating heart of Amazon’s unstoppable ecommerce expansion is a very basic promise: jobs. | Continue reading
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought po … | Continue reading
Before most cables ran underground, all electrical, telephone and telegraph wires were suspended from high poles, creating strange and crowded streetscapes. Here are some typical views of late-19th century Boston, New York, Stockholm, and other wire-filled cities. | Continue reading
Elizabeth Holmes lost everything—and nearly $900 million of other people’s money—when her bunk blood-testing startup Theranos went into full meltdown, resulting in the layoff of nearly all staff and civil charges of “massive” fraud for Holmes and former company president Ramesh “ … | Continue reading
Last year, Canada introduced a new lottery system used to extend permanent-resident status to the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens. The process was designed to randomly select applicants in order to make the process fairer than the old first-come, first-served system … | Continue reading
Apple has been steadily positioning itself as the anti-Facebook for a while now, and between verbal jabs aimed at the social media giant and privacy-focused product decisions, the patient goodwill campaign seems to be working. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t going to save us, and now’ … | Continue reading
Quantum computing has made it to the United States Congress. If this field of quantum information is the new space race, the US doesn’t want to fall behind. | Continue reading
Apple has been steadily positioning itself as the anti-Facebook for a while now, and between verbal jabs aimed at the social media giant and privacy-focused product decisions, the patient goodwill campaign seems to be working. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t going to save us, and now’ … | Continue reading
I’m sorry, but Instagram may start looking a lot more like YouTube in the future. | Continue reading
Google will not seek to renew its artificial intelligence contract with the Department of Defense after it expires next year, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene told employees last week. But despite the revelation that the contract has an end date, the pushback against it continues—wi … | Continue reading
One week after suffering a hack that took its website and services offline, events ticketing company Ticketfly revealed Thursday just how bad the data breach was, and it certainly doesn’t look great. According to the company, the personal information of 27 million users—including … | Continue reading
Federal prosecutors charged security researcher Marcus Hutchins—better known by his online handle MalwareTech—with four new charges accusing him of creating and promoting malware used to steal financial information. Hutchins, recognized as the person responsible for stopping the … | Continue reading
Valve, the company behind the Steam platform that has achieved a near-monopoly on PC game sales, issued a blog post on Wednesday clarifying its content policies after it removed a mass shooting-themed game titled Active Shooter from its store in late May. According to Valve’s Eri … | Continue reading
Researchers from Case Western Reserve University have synthesized an artificial human prion, a scientific first that could eventually lead to treatments for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other deadly brain-wasting disorders. | Continue reading
Almost as soon as Intel had announced its new 28-core beast, AMD took the stage at Computex and revealed the latest update to its Threadripper CPU, and it has more cores—32 cores to be exact. That’s more cores than you’ll ever need to do your tweets and fill out your spreadsheets … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that camera sales are down, thanks mostly to the convenience and capabilities of smartphone shooters. Who wants to carry another device just to take pictures? That’s the question camera makers are currently facing, but with the Rx100 Mark VI, Sony has a solid answ … | Continue reading
As it wrestled with accusations about a fake cyberattack last spring, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) purposely misled several news organizations, choosing to feed journalists false information, while at the same time discouraging them from challenging the agency’s of … | Continue reading
The Department of Homeland Security announced a public bid for third party companies to build a “media influence database” capable of tracking more than 290,000 news sources across the globe. First spotted by Bloomberg Law, the public bid would also track journalists and bloggers … | Continue reading
Microsoft is officially buying Github, the internet’s largest source code repository, for a cool $7.5 billion in stock, with Microsoft VP Nat Friedman assuming the role of GitHub’s CEO. The acquisition isn’t without its detractors, who say they are already ditching GitHub and loo … | Continue reading
Twitter knockoff Gab became one of the premiere destinations for members of the extremist “alt-right” banned or just looking to branch out from other social media sites like Twitter. Now, it’s devolving into a sludgy mess of paranoia and conspiracy theories. | Continue reading
California has announced a new pilot program that will allow self-driving cars to start moving normal customers around, a first for the state. Among the California Public Utilities Commission’s many stipulations, transportation companies providing autonomous rides must offer the … | Continue reading
Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires. | Continue reading
After several delays and a whole lot of confusion, Atari’s retro console/set-top box thing is available for pre-order. We finally have more details on what this thing can do and apparently more people are hyped up about it than we expected. On Wednesday afternoon, Indiegogo was s … | Continue reading
After several delays and a whole lot of confusion, Atari’s retro console/set-top box thing is available for pre-order. We finally have more details on what this thing can do and apparently more people are hyped up about it than we expected. On Wednesday afternoon, Indiegogo was s … | Continue reading
A Tesla sedan running in its autopilot mode crashed into a parked police car in Laguna Beach, California on Tuesday, per the Associated Press, resulting in “minor injuries” to the driver. The officer in charge of the cruiser at the time of the crash was not inside the vehicle and … | Continue reading
There’s an eerie and incredibly rare phenomenon witnessed by few that has long puzzled scientists: ball lightning. These flashes, which typically appear in the evenings during thunderstorms and look like small, bright spheres, have gone mostly unexplained aside from some theories … | Continue reading
Using a new technique, astronomers have documented one of the heaviest neutron stars known to science. It’s an important discovery for astronomers, but the newly recorded object is also providing an unprecedented opportunity to conduct particle physics research from a distance. | Continue reading
When Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of members of the European Parliament on Tuesday, he insisted that Facebook was ready for Friday, the day when the European Unions’s strict new data privacy law went into effect. But users in Europe have already filed complaints against Fac … | Continue reading
Our individual walking styles, much like snowflakes, are unique. With this in mind, computer scientists have developed a powerful new footstep-recognition system using AI, and it could theoretically replace retinal scanners and fingerprinting at security checkpoints, including a … | Continue reading
With electric vehicles rapidly becoming more viable for long distance trips, enthusiasts like to push the limits of what their cars can do on a single charge. Two men in Denver set out to break the record distance in a Model 3 this weekend and after 32 hours, they were victorious … | Continue reading
Ad-blocking tool Ghostery suffered from a pretty impressive, self-inflicted screwup Friday when the privacy-minded company accidentally CCed hundreds of its users in an email, revealing their addresses to all recipients. | Continue reading
If you want to send something deep, deep into space, it’s impractical to load it up with lots of heavy propellant. Scientists with their eyes on long-distance space travel have contemplated thrusters that wouldn’t need any propellant at all. The EmDrive, a copper cone that would … | Continue reading
For more than a week, PGP developers have been rapidly working to patch critical flaws in the legacy encryption protocol used for sending and receiving secure emails that’s widely relied upon by lawyers, journalists, dissidents, and human rights advocates, many of whom operate at … | Continue reading
A group of shareholders and several Google employees are teaming up to back a proposal that would tie executive compensation to the company’s ability to meet certain diversity goals. But Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is opposing the proposal, saying that linking executive pa … | Continue reading
Instapaper has informed its European users that it will temporarily cut off their access to the platform starting today. The reason? This Pinterest-owned service needs more than the two years it had to comply with the European Union’s new batch of privacy rules that go into effec … | Continue reading
On Wednesday, Apple announced a new privacy website to help users better navigate just how much of their data is collected by the company, but so far, the feature is only available in Europe. | Continue reading
That’s one small hole for a probe, but one giant leap for NASA. This past weekend, the space agency jerry-rigged Curiosity’s malfunctioning drill, allowing the rover to bore into Martian rock for the first time in over a year. | Continue reading
Following critical coverage of his electric car company, Tesla, Elon Musk has been on a Twitter tear against the media, threatening to build a service that would allow the general public to rank the trustworthiness and “core truth” of stories, journalists, publications, and edito … | Continue reading
For years, the FBI has claimed it needs a backdoor for encrypted devices because too much evidence is being lost in our brave new world. At the end of 2017, law enforcement began a new push, claiming there were 7,800 devices waiting to be cracked. Now it says there was a programm … | Continue reading
An Antares rocket launched from Virginia before sunrise this morning and is on its way to the International Space Station. Its 7,400 pounds of cargo include an experiment that will chill atoms to just about absolute zero—colder than the vacuum of space itself. | Continue reading
The Supreme Court, as you may have read, gave its opinion today on Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis and, in a 5-4 split, decided to uphold forced arbitration agreements that preclude employees from pursuing class-action lawsuits against their bosses in court. Neil Gorsuch penned the m … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, the media got very excited about Trump.dating, a site for the pro-Donald set that promised to “make dating great again.” Much of the media coverage was critical: The site only allowed users to conduct heterosexual searches; the male-half of the couple originall … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, the media got very excited about Trump.dating, a site for the pro-Donald set that promised to “make dating great again.” Much of the media coverage was critical: The site only allowed users to conduct heterosexual searches; the male-half of the couple originall … | Continue reading
Privacy and anti-monopoly advocacy groups launched the Freedom from Facebook campaign on Monday, demanding that the Federal Trade Commission force the social media giant to break up into four separate companies. Sensing a moment of weakness, activists hope to establish stronger p … | Continue reading
Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show. | Continue reading
At Google I/O earlier this month, CEO Sundar Pichai showcased an experimental Google Assistant feature called Duplex which can make routine phone calls on your behalf. In one striking demo, the digital assistant called a hair salon and scheduled an appointment with an employee … | Continue reading