Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | stockcam) The Supreme Court today ruled in favor of a cheerleader and against the Pennsylvania high school that suspended her from the junior varsity team for a “vulgar” Snapchat post. Brandi Levy was 14 in 2017 when she used Snapchat to express her frustration after failing to make the Mahanoy […]
Enlarge / John McAfee on his yacht off the coast of Cuba in 2019. (credit: Adalberto ROQUE / AFP / Getty) John McAfee—the antivirus tycoon whose eccentric, larger-than-life, and often illegal antics on yachts and in tropical rain forests came to define him in later years—took his own life in a Spanish prison cell while […]
Enlarge / Website seizure notice that appears on presstv.com. On Tuesday, the US government said it seized 33 websites run by a branch of the Iranian government that spread disinformation in the US before the 2020 presidential election. The US also seized three websites that it said were operated by an Iraqi terrorist organization. Yesterday’s […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto ) The European Commission today said it has begun investigating Google for “possible anticompetitive conduct” in the market for online advertising technology. The EC announcement said the formal antitrust investigation will “assess whether Google has violated EU competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services in […]
Enlarge (credit: 53 Studios | Getty Images) For cybercriminals looking to launder illicit gains, bitcoin has long been the payment method of choice. But another cryptocurrency is coming to the fore, promising to help make dirty money disappear without a trace. While bitcoin leaves a visible trail of transactions on its underlying blockchain, the niche […]
Enlarge (credit: Grace Cary / Getty Images) Some Texas residents who opted into programs that remotely raise thermostat temperatures during heat waves regretted that decision last week. Power companies in multiple states offer promotions to enroll users into services that let the companies remotely adjust smart thermostats’ temperatures by a few degrees when energy demand […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) In July 2020, OpenAI launched GPT-3, an artificial intelligence language model that quickly stoked excitement about computers writing poetry, news articles, and programming code. Just as quickly, it was shown to sometimes be foulmouthed and toxic. OpenAI said it was working on fixes, but the company recently discovered GPT-3 was being […]
Enlarge / A Pornhub logo at the company’s booth during the 2018 AVN Adult Expo on January 25, 2018, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Getty Images | Gabe Ginsberg ) Pornhub was sued yesterday by 34 women alleging that the site hosted videos without their consent and profited from other nonconsensual content involving rape, child […]
Enlarge (credit: Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images) When Ring wanted to boost sales of it surveillance cameras and burnish its self-styled image as a crime-fighting company, it embarked on a brand-ambassador marketing campaign that would be familiar to many startups. But rather than chase down the Instagram influencers or beat bloggers, the company instead wooed […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Since the dawn of the iPhone, many of the smarts in smartphones have come from elsewhere: the corporate computers known as the cloud. Mobile apps sent user data cloudward for useful tasks like transcribing speech or suggesting message replies. Now Apple and Google say smartphones are smart enough to do some […]