Enlarge Business isn't good at a Chicago tech company that was outed last month for its practice of buying social media data and re-selling it to police. Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that Geofeedia had been given access to data by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which…

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images It’s a well-documented fact that geese are surprisingly unstable jerks who will not hesitate to hurt you physically , possibly with the help of their monstrous serrated tongues . A goose is the kind of animal you’d want to avoid in a dark alley, at a house party, or…

“Eloquent. Extraordinary. Timeless. Paradigm-shifting. Classic. Half a century after it first appeared, Leonard Read’s ‘I, Pencil’ still evokes such adjectives of praise. Rightfully so, for this little essay opens eyes and minds among people of all ages. Many first-time readers never see the world…

If you are interested in how a computer works at the hardware grass-roots level, past all the hardware and software abstractions intended to make them easier to use, you can sometimes find yourself frustrated in your investigations. Desktop and laptop computers are black boxes both physically and…

alTek’s audio codec chips that allows a program to switch an ou

Posted on November 22nd, 2016 by Caption: Birth years of people in China who contracted H7N9 avian flu from 1997-2015 (left); birth years of people in Cambodia, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam who contracted H5N1 avian flu from 1997-2015 (right). Source: Adapted from Science. 2016 Nov…

A few years ago, Microsoft launched a Office 365 campaign with the slogan of #GetItDone. The basic premise was fitting more work into more places of your life. Well, not so much just fitting as shoving, cramming, and crunching it into every damn nook and cranny of your existence. Like, why shouldn’t…

Inspiring Young Writers With Minecraft

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has dropped out of the R3 CEV LLC blockchain group. The investment bank was one of nine original members of R3, founded in 2014 to explore the use of the distributed database technology in Wall Street infrastructure. The technology, best known for underpinning the system…

JOHANNESBURG: By the end of 2016, almost half of the world's population will be using the internet as mobile networks grow and prices fall, but their numbers will remain concentrated in the developed world, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday. In the world's developed countries about 80 percent…

Lorraine Chow Nov. 21, 2016 02:36PM EST Dead and dying trees on forest lands in California, August 2016. USFS Region 5 Flickr California's six years of drought has left 102 million dead trees across 7.7 million acres of forest in its wake, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) announced following an aerial…

Buoyed by Donald Trump’s election victory, white supremacists who gathered at a conference Saturday called on him to implement a 50-year moratorium on “non-European immigration.” Richard Spencer, a leading white nationalist who heads the supremacist National Policy Institute and claims to have…

The intensity of FRB 150807 at different radio frequencies or colors -- red corresponds to lower frequencies and blue to higher frequencies. The x-axis is time. The fine structure in the burst is the scintillation or twinkling--the rays interfere constructively and destructively differently at…

Twitter and Facebook have restricted access to users' data for Geofeedia, a data analytics firm, over privacy concerns. Geofeedia/Screenshot by NPR There's a difference between posting something online, and thinking that that information is going to end up in a huge database that the police are…

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters . We are pleased that after…

On September 4, a group of young activists planned to attend a demonstration against Interim President Michel Temer in the city center of São Paulo. They never made it. Their group had been infiltrated by an Army Captain Willian Pina Botelho—via Tinder. Surveillance and infiltration are not new…

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada will speed up plans to virtually eliminate traditional coal-fired electricity by 2030, the government said on Monday, a stance contrasting sharply with that of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has pledged to revive the sector. Canada’s Liberal government ran on a…

Since January 2016 (and maybe before), there's been talk that Microsoft was working on bringing x86 emulation to ARM processors . Sources of mine are now saying that this capability is coming to Windows 10, though not until "Redstone 3" in the Fall of 2017. Here's why this matters: Microsoft…

Microsoft has turned on a new set of Windows Tips that inform Chrome and Firefox users on Windows 10 that Edge is a “safer” browser. We reached out to Microsoft to find out how long this latest recommendation has been active. “This wave of Windows Tips for Windows 10 users began in early November,”…

Update 11/22/2016: Apparently, the post you are reading right now might be in your Google Analytics as referral traffic. Please note that neither this article, nor The Next Web, is partaking of any shady analytics practices. If you don’t watch where you’re going on the internet, you might be headed…

A votive offering of two hands. Wellcome Images/CC BY 4.0 Perhaps the most impressive thing about the anatomical votives of Central Italy are the sheer numbers in which they were found. One site contained 1,654 votive feet, made of terracotta. Another had more than 400 terracotta wombs. At Ponte di…

Riot.im Nov 21, 2016 Today is a big day in the Riot world, finally releasing the very first cross-platform implementation of Matrix’s end-to-end encryption ! End-to-end encryption gives users true privacy, preventing anyone else from eavesdropping on conversations — even the very communications…

Law enforcement officials in North Dakota have deployed tear gas and water hoses against hundreds of activists protesting against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Protesters also reported being hit with rubber bullets and percussion grenades on a bridge just north of the encampments established by…

Apple Inc. has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers, another move to try to sharpen the company’s focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year,…

The New York Fed’s second quarter numbers are out for 2016 and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture for student loan debt. Officially, the nation owes $1.26 trillion in student loan debt. Realistically, we are probably over the $1.3 trillion mark when taking into account the fact that the Fall semester…

I’m going to take you guys back to a time when I was doing some client work. I was at the time working on becoming a somebody in the WP Dev community. I attached myself to a really awesome designer George Wiscombe , and started working on a theme he designed called Handgloves. I began by widgetizing…

As first reported by Motherboard , the Internal Revenue Service is seeking the personal data of all U.S. Coinbase users who transacted between 2013 and 2015. In a statement, a Coinbase spokesman said the exchange site was “very concerned with the indiscriminate breadth of the government’s request.”…

The story of a 14-year-old girl who won a landmark legal battle to be preserved cryogenically has many people wondering how such technology actually works - for many of us, it seems like something straight out of science fiction. But sci-fi has a long history of becoming science fact, as outlandish…

Cancer patients Zahara Heckscher and Hannah Lyon engage in civil disobedience at the headquarters of the industry group PhRMA in Washington, D.C., on February 4. Photo courtesy of Public Citizen. Amid the fallout from Donald Trump’s election is the end of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. After six…

N azhat Shaheen has twice endured the loss of her first son. The first time she lost him, he was a newborn. Soon after she gave birth in her native Pakistan, her in-laws took her son, Naseem, during a contentious divorce from her husband. Her own parents then sent her to the United States, to begin…

President Obama indicated on Friday that he won’t pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for “the traitor Edward Snowden” to be executed . Pompeo has supported nearly unfettered…

Last week, a federal judge ordered the state of Michigan and the city of Flint to begin delivering bottled water to all residents’ homes to ensure that everyone has access to safe drinking water. Now the state is fighting back. Flint residents still can’t drink water straight from their taps after…

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 – The U.S. Army plans to issue a new rule to improve consultations with Indian tribes for permitting decisions, a move that could delay the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, according to a notice posted Thursday on a White House website. The Army Corps of Engineers plans…

Not an actual photo. Seriously. ESA In 2013, the European Space Agency launched the Gaia astronomical observatory. Its mission: Map the positions and motions of a billion stars in our galaxy. Yes, a billion . The first data release was pretty cool, and some of the early release images were lovely as…

Paul John Higgins June 25, 2012, was a terrible day for Jermaine Robinson. Overall, life was good—the 21-year-old Washington Park resident had been studying music management at Columbia College and was a few weeks into a job working as a janitor at a nearby Boys & Girls Club. But his 13-year-old…

Getty Images Since April, four people have died while in custody at the Milwaukee County Jail. Two of them were 38 years old. One was 29. And one was a newborn baby . Now, the mother of that baby is demanding that the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office pay $8.5 million dollars, claiming that jail…

Hatewatch Between Wednesday, November 9, the day after the presidential election, and the morning of Monday, November 14, the Southern Poverty Law Center collected 437 reports of hateful intimidation and harassment. The following reports were collected through news reports, social media, and direct…

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has reportedly been offered the role of national security adviser in Donald Trump’s White House, began receiving classified national security briefings last summer while he was also running a private consulting firm that offered “all-source intelligence support”…