We’re proud to introduce the immediate release of our newest utility for Windows users: the NeoSmart Technologies Embedded Product Key Tool. Designed for users of Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10, our embedded product key tool will retrieve and display the Windows setup product key embedded in…

Two of the biggest porn sites in the world have been blocked by Russia's media regulator, a decision which has apparently prompted uproar on the country's social media. Weirder yet, Roskomnadzor, the body that enacted the bans (whose name translated into English is the Federal Service for…

Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, inspects New Shepard’s West Texas launch facility before the rocket’s maiden voyage. (Photo courtesy of Blue Origin) It’s become increasingly clear that Jeffrey P. Bezos, who in the last several months has been talking much more openly about his once…

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation.…

Over the next month, we’re celebrating technology and innovation in a new series called Bright Sparks. As part of the series, we’re bringing back some of our favourite articles about the people and ideas that are changing the world with technology. Alex Tew isn’t really known for following the…

Whenever anti-piracy groups decide to take action against large file-sharing platforms, they do so on the basis of achieving crushing punishments for their operators. Only severe punishments can stop hardcore pirates, they argue. In France, a similar situation has been playing out. Back in June 2015…

By now, most of us know better than to take “reality” TV at face value. But Alan Kaufman, a Newton entrepreneur who pitched his hands-free “Nubrella” on ABC’s “Shark Tank” back in 2010, claims in a lawsuit that the show’s producers didn’t just fudge a few inconsequential details for the sake of…

An autistic man suspected of hacking into US government computer systems is to be extradited from Britain to face trial, a court has ruled. Lauri Love, 31, who has Asperger's syndrome, is accused of hacking into the FBI, the US central bank and the country's missile defence agency. Mr Love, from…

Two years after buying the wildly popular video game, Microsoft is using Minecraft to vie for kids’ brain space and schools’ dollars. Follow-Up Friday is our attempt to put the news into context. Once a week, we’ll call out a recent headline, provide an update, and explain why it matters. M inecraft…

Physics Light particles normally do not “feel” each other because there is no interaction acting between them. Researchers at ETH have now succeeded in manipulating photons inside a semiconductor material in such a way as to make them repel each other nevertheless. Two light beams crossing each…

China has launched a second experimental space station, as it looks to have a crewed outpost by 2022. The Tiangong 2 blasted off just after 22:00 local time on Thursday from the Gobi desert. Next month, two astronauts will go to the station to conduct research. Beijing has made space exploration a…

Alabama, Georgia declare state of emergency after pipeline spill

Shutterstock FRACKVILLE, Pennsylvania — Arthur Johnson has spent the past 37 of his 64 years alive in solitary confinement. Over a span of four decades, he’s been shuttled from one correctional institution to another—often without notice, like a protagonist in a Kafka novel. Until very recently, his…

Eliminating disparities in cancer care requires more than just expanding Medicaid coverage, say cancer epidemiologists who found that patients with private insurance seemed to have a survival advantage. Thomas Barwick/Getty Images Privately insured people with cancer were diagnosed earlier and lived…

Day One The morning of our departure I woke in the dark, Rachel and the baby breathing softly beside me. An oval of light worked its way over the knotty pine of the Adak ’s stateroom, cast by the sodium floodlights of a herring seiner passing in the channel. Lying there I could see my upcoming trip…

The European Space Agency released the first data it is using to create the largest and most precise 3D map of the Milky Way. WSJ's Monika Auger reports. Photo: ESA/Gaia/DPAC Subscribe to the WSJ channel here: http://bit.ly/14Q81Xy More from the Wall Street Journal: Visit WSJ.com: http://www.wsj.com…

Sen. Ron Wyden will go to the Senate floor Thursday to try and force a debate on a court rule that allows for widespread government hacking. Rob Kim / Getty Images SAN FRANCISCO — A last-ditch effort to stop a rule change in the federal court system that would vastly increase the ability of the…

After a controversial sting operation conducted by the FBI, in which agents impersonated the Associated Press to plant malware on a suspect's computer, the agency says it has instituted new rules for when it can use the undercover practice. The news came in a report from the Department of Justice…

Police in Florida and other states are building up private DNA databases, in part by collecting voluntary samples from people not charged with — or even suspected of — any particular crime.

Ohio Republicans Formally Made It Harder for a Million People to Vote

Elizabeth Warren Asks Newly-Chatty FBI Director to Explain Why DOJ Didn’t Prosecute Banksters

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is marking the eighth anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy with a new push to investigate—and potentially jail—more than two dozen individuals and corporations who were referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution in 2011 by the…

Danielle* didn't expect her workday to begin with her male coworkers publicly joking about rape. Danielle is an engineer at Apple — and like many of the women in the company, she works on a male-dominated team. On a Tuesday morning in July, when men on her team began to joke that an office intruder…

By Modern newspapers are overflowing with charts. The New York Times , Washington Post and Wall Street Journa l dedicate immense resources to making graphics for both their print and online editions. But it was not always so. The New York Times was first published in 1851 . From nearly the beginning…

Many people may not realise the beer in their pint glass contains a product made from fish. Now the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) is calling on brewers to investigate alternatives for their drinks. But why is fish put in beer anyway? Ask somebody to list the classic ingredients of beer and the…

From Comedy Central/Photofest. On South Park, nothing is off limits. Foul language, gleefully rendered scatological humor, biting social commentary, Kanye West coming out as a gay fish—it’s all pretty much par for the course. Over the past 19 years, Comedy Central’s animated juggernaut has proven to…

A LinkNYC kiosk. Homeless people and panhandlers have been among the most avid users.Photograph: CityBridge The web-browsing feature of New York City’s new sidewalk Wi-Fi kiosks will be disabled after critics complained that homeless people were monopolizing them and using them to watch porn,…

The head of the FBI on Wednesday defended putting a piece of tape over his personal laptop's webcam, claiming the security step was a common sense one that most should take. “There’s some sensible things you should be doing, and that’s one of them,” Director James Comey said during a conference at…

The field of behavioral finance was validated when the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was awarded to psychologist Daniel Kahneman and experimental economist Vernon Smith. As much as people like to assume absolute rationality and objectivity (as does the Modern Portfolio Theory ), actual…

Sep 1 -- A SpaceX spacecraft involved in Facebook's efforts to beam internet to sub-Saharan Africa exploded at Florida's Cape Canaveral on Thursday. Here is raw video of the explosion, courtesy of USLaunchReport.com. (Source: Bloomberg)

Andrea Jackson, counselor and parent at Osborn MST, with student Jamarria Hall, Mark Rosenbaum, director of Public Counsel, and Michael Kelley, partner at Sidley Austin LLPPhotograph: Public Counsel J amarria Hall can’t stomach walking into his high school on Detroit’s east side some days. The…

The sugar industry has a long history of skewing nutrition science, a new report suggests. By combing through archival documents from the 1950s and 1960s, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), report that the sugar industry sponsored research that turned attention away…

Illustration by Vasava On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins…

Harris Corp.’s Stingray surveillance device has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in law enforcement for more than 15 years. The company and its police clients across the United States have fought to keep information about the mobile phone-monitoring boxes from the public against which…

Comment Google isn’t just interested in tracking you , or even very interested. Google tracks you with the defiant zeal of an obsessive stalker. What’s curious is that the American state seems almost as keen on the unfettered collection and use of location data as Google itself. Phones incorporated…

“DRUGS have been marketed at such extraordinarily high prices that many people will simply not be able to afford them,” wrote a top cancer doctor in a scathing editorial in the Washington Post . That was in 2004. More than a decade later, the cost of drugs in America is still soaring—the most recent…