Category Archives: Blog

Google is about to close a loophole that many companies used to track how people were browsing their website in Chrome.

According to 9to5Google, Google is aware of a trick that web developers have been exploiting which enables them to detect if a user is visiting a website in Chrome’s Incognito mode. This loophole allows websites to block visitors from accessing the site’s content, forcing them to switch out of Incognito mode if they want to view the page. 

The workaround is fairly simple. Chrome disables the FileSystem API, which stores application files, when Incognito mode is being used. Websites looking to block private browsing in Chrome can just check for this API when a browser loads the page. Read more…

More about Google, Chrome, Incognito Mode, Tech, and Big Tech Companies

The thought of getting caught on a hot mic and broadcast nationwide without your knowledge is a pretty terrifying one. 

Especially if what you get caught saying is a pretty blatant — and accurate — statement about national politics, and you also happen to drop the f-bomb. 

That’s exactly what happened to one unlucky individual who got caught making some rather blunt remarks during a live BBC broadcast. During a televised press conference – where seven members of the UK political party Labour resigned in protest over the leadership of party Leader Jeremy Corbyn – a BBC microphone picked up a voice saying, among other things, “we’re actually fucked.” Read more…

More about Bbc, Labour Party, Hot Mic, Culture, and Web Culture

You may want to just slow your roll for minute with this whole foldable phone thing. 

While electronics giants such as Samsung are reportedly charging ahead to release smartphones that bend as early as this year, at least one major player in the space is taking this opportunity to sit back and see how it all plays out. That would be LG, whose head of mobile Brian Kwon told reporters that the company has decided now is not the right time for LG to release a phone that bends.   

“We have reviewed releasing the foldable smartphone when launching 5G smartphone but decided not to produce it,” Kwon is quoted by the Korean Times as saying on Feb. 15.  Read more…

More about Smartphones, Lg, Foldable Phones, Bendable Phones, and Tech

John Mulaney is bringing his brand of dry, self-effacing humor back to Saturday Night Live.

The gifted comic, who is himself a former SNL writer, last hosted the show in April 2018. He was and is only the third former writer who wasn’t also a cast member to get the hosting gig (after Conan O’Brien and Larry David, so pretty good company).

Now he’s set to return on March 2, as was confirmed when he tweeted out the show’s typical host announcement image from his own Twitter account. Thomas Rhett will be the night’s musical guest.

More about Entertainment, Tv, Saturday Night Live, John Mulaney, and Entertainment

There are objects in our lives that will forever be tied to childhood: a favorite toy, for example, or the first chapter book that you read and truly connected with. 

For most of us, these items are forever lost — long ago consigned to the dustbin of Goodwill. Not so for Professor John Pfaff, who on Feb. 16 shared with the world a discovery that blasted him straight to his personal past: a working 30-year-old Apple IIe computer. 

“Oh. My. God,” he tweeted. “An Apple IIe. Sat in my parents’ attic for years. Decades. And it works.”

More about Apple, Tech, and Consumer Tech

Fossil hunters in Korea discovered long-dead spiders preserved in rock. And to the delight of scientists, the arachnids’ eyes are still reflective — some 110 million years after the creatures died. 

It’s rare for insects and arachnids — which are far more brittle than shelled sea creatures — to become fossilized in rocks. But for reasons still unknown, a couple of these spiders did fossilize, and the unique shape of their eye structures continue to reflect light — even in their petrified form. 

The reflective eye structure is called a tapetum, and it’s often used by creatures who hunt in the dark.  Read more…

More about Science, Spiders, Glow, Palaeontology, and Science

Vice President Mike Pence isn’t a complicated man. 

He likes Chili’s, using his personal AOL account for official government business, and gay conversion therapy. And so, when he addressed attendees at the Middle East conference in Poland on Feb. 14, it’s clear he believed that same down-home flavor that’s treated him so well in Trump Country would garner rounds of applause from his European audience. 

That, dear reader, is where he went wrong.

Speaking about the widely supported Iran nuclear deal, Pence told those in attendance that it was time to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. and withdraw. The response, or rather lack thereof, from the crowd appeared to shock the veep.  Read more…

More about Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Culture, and Politics

I started playing Anthem at the end of the week, just as the game came online for early access players on PC. And like a lot of other people, I discovered quickly that the load times are brutal.

Anthem is widely perceived as publisher Electronic Arts’ response to the success of Destiny. Both games are online-only outer space shooters that depend heavily on a sticky sense of progression and “live” in-game events to keep players invested.

But where Destiny launched in 2014 and has benefited enormously from a long timeline of updates and improvements, Anthem is fresh out of the gate. Stumbles are unavoidable. But this is a big one: within a few hours, it became clear to me that Anthem‘s two-to-three minute loading delays would eventually render the game unplayable. Read more…

More about Tech, Entertainment, Gaming, Bioware, and Anthem

To the awe even the NBA’s elite All-Stars, guard Hamidou Diallo leaped over 7-foot-1-inch Shaquille O’Neal to win the 2019 dunk contest. 

For emphasis, the Oklahoma City Thunder rookie then hung from the rim by his elbow joint before revealing a Superman shirt hidden beneath his jersey.

Shaq, who once dominated the NBA will his 7’1″, 325-pound frame, had his head slightly bowed, but Diallo still made his point and cleared the Hall of Famer’s head with some room to spare.

Highlights from the 2019 dunking event can be viewed below, though Diallo’s slam starts at the 1:35 mark. Read more…

More about Entertainment, Sports, Nba, Shaq, and Shaquille O Neal

When a star is born, a chaotic light show ensues. 

NASA’s long-lived Hubble Space Telescope captured vivid bright clumps moving through the cosmos at some 1,000 light years from Earth. The space agency called these objects clear “smoking gun” evidence of a newly formed star — as new stars blast colossal amounts of energy-rich matter into space, known as plasma. 

Seen as the vivid blue, ephemeral clumps in the top center of the new image below, these are telltale signs of an energy-rich gas, or plasma, colliding with a huge collection of dust and gas in deep space.

As NASA says, these blue masses are transient creations in the cosmos, as “they disappear into nothingness within a few tens of thousands of years.” Read more…

More about Space, Nasa, Science, Hubble Space Telescope, and Nebula