Category Archives: Blog

Well, apparently Twitter does have a line when it comes to unhinged hate speech.

The company suspended accounts associated with the Proud Boys ahead of the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Washington, D.C., this weekend. The move was originally reported by BuzzFeed News. 

Started by VICE co-founder Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys are very thinly veiled white nationalists in Fred Perry polo shirts. Former member Jason Kessler organized the first Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which counter-protester Heather Heyer was murdered. He was “expelled” from the group only after the ensuing controversy.  Read more…

More about Twitter, White Supremacy, White Nationalist, White Nationalism, and Infowars

Donald Trump Jr. was caught red-handed for a terrible Photoshop job, but this time it wasn’t because he airbrushed his pores into oblivion. 

In a now-deleted Instagram post, Don Jr. shared a CNN report comparing Trump’s approval ratings with statistics from Obama’s presidency. 

“Amazing,” Trump Jr. captioned it. “I guess there is a magic wand to make things happen and @realdonaldtrump seems to have it.”

Except, @realdonaldtrump doesn’t seem to “have it” because the screenshot is a poorly edited graphic that makes the current president’s approval say 50 percent instead of the actual 40 percent. In other words, Trump Jr. has (ironically) participated in spreading fake news. Read more…

More about Twitter Reactions, Donald Trump Jr., Trump Administration, Culture, and Web Culture

Who would have thought that, in the end, it would be the humble voicemail that would do us all in?

Your Google, Microsoft, Apple, WhatsApp, and even Signal accounts all have an Achilles’ heel — the same one, in fact. And it turns out that if you’re not careful, a hacker could use that weakness to take over your online identity. 

Or so claims self-described “security geek” Martin Vigo. Speaking to an enthusiastic collection of hackers and security researchers at the annual DEF CON convention in Las Vegas, Vigo explained how he managed to reset passwords for a wide-ranging set of online accounts by taking advantage of the weakest link in the security chain: your voicemail. Read more…

More about Hackers, Def Con, Voicemail, 2fa, and Tech

Wikileaks just got served with a tweet.

On Friday, the law firm representing the Democratic National Committee served Wikileaks with a single tweet, linking to a number of legal documents related to its lawsuit against the organization founded by Julian Assange.

Cohen Milstein, the firm representing the DNC, set up the Twitter account @ProcessServiceC just this August, and fired off that single tweet — the account’s first and only posting so far — at Wikileaks today, effectively serving them with the lawsuit. Read more…

More about Twitter, Wikileaks, Lawsuit, Dnc, and Tech

Chen San-yuan, also known as “Uncle Pokemon,” is a 70-year-old grandfather in Taiwan who equipped his bike with 11 phones to play Pokemon Go. He also rides around with a bag of batteries that allows him to play for up to 20 hours in a row. Read more…

More about Phone, Pokemon, Grandparents, Pokemon Go, and Culture

After weeks of struggling to answer questions about whether or not Alex Jones and InfoWars should be allowed to remain on Facebook, the company caught some onlookers by surprise when it announced early Monday morning that it had “unpublished” pages belonging to Alex Jones and InfoWars.

Nothing had changed in terms of the content posted by the accounts run by Jones and InfoWars. Facebook had previously removed some posts from the accounts, but additional “strikes” hadn’t been publicly reported. 

In a blog post, Facebook said the decision was a result of a review of “more content from the same Pages,” that prompted the action. But what really changed Zuckerberg’s mind on the issue was apparently a separate decision by an entirely different company: Apple. Read more…

More about Facebook, Apple, Mark Zuckerberg, Infowars, and Alex Jones

Would you eat this murder pie?

Andrew Fuller is a cake sculptor, horror fan, and “believer that every day is Halloween.” He recently made an especially terrifying pie inspired by serial killer Ed Gein, who was infamous making clothing and furniture out of human skin and bones. Also known as the “Butcher of Plainfield,” Gein had exhumed bodies from local graveyards and murdered two women for his macabre DIY crafting.

“I am relatively new to the world of cake, but those who know me know that my goal is to creep people out,” Fuller said over Facebook Messenger. Read more…

More about Halloween, Cake, Horror, Culture, and Web Culture

The home release of Avengers: Infinity War includes a gag reel and this little sneak peek is enough to get us enticed.

The clip makes it very clear that the people on set of this movie were having a lot of fun. You’ve got flubbed lines, fans that are blowing people’s hair in their faces, Chris Hemsworth jumping poorly, and Benedict Wong just having a good time.

Avengers: Infinity War comes out on Blu-ray Aug. 14. Read more…

More about Movies, Marvel, Avengers Infinity War, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

It’s 10 a.m. at Caesar’s Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas, and the conference room is packed. 

Scores of hackers, cybersecurity professionals, and press have gathered at the DEF CON hacker conference to hear straight from the horse’s mouth just how bad things are when it comes to securing our elections. And, as Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for the office of cybersecurity and communications Jeanette Manfra explained, it’s bad. 

“I yearn for the days when we were just worried about the electric grid going down,” she told the crowd. Read more…

More about Hackers, Elections, Def Con, Dhs, and Tech

Each year, a swathe of new emoji are released into the world, and next year’s batch features more diversity than ever.

The Unicode Consortium, the organisation in charge of selecting what emoji gets to sit on your phone’s keyboard, has released its draft candidates for 2019.

There’s a shift toward diversity among these emoji hopefuls, with potentials including a person who is deaf, an ear with a hearing aid, a sari, a service dog, a motorised and manual wheelchair, and a Hindu temple. 

Also proposed were 55 combinations of gender and skin colour for couples holding hands. This will be achieved with a new emoji called “standing person,” and putting these two together will mean they will merge. Read more…

More about Tech, Emoji, Culture, Unicode Consortium, and Unicode