Category Archives: Blog

Any publicity may not, in fact, be good publicity.

Stationary bike manufacturer Peloton found that out the hard way on Dec. 9 when its signature bike was featured rather tragically in the premiere of HBO’s Sex and the City revival. Mr. Big, it seems, pedaled his heart out — and now Peloton finds itself, well, backpedaling.

That’s right, the character played by actor Chris Noth (and major spoiler alert here) dies in the first episode of And Just Like That… That he dies of a heart attack after a particularly vigorous Peloton class is perhaps an unpleasant discovery for the public relations team at Peloton — and the company quickly took pains to insist that it wasn’t the bike’s fault.

“Mr. Big lived what many would call an extravagant lifestyle — including cocktails, cigars, and big steaks — and was at serious risk as he had a previous cardiac event in Season 6,” Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, a cardiologist and member of Peloton’s health and wellness advisory council, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “These lifestyle choices and perhaps even his family history, which often is a significant factor, were the likely cause of his death.”

That’s right, Peloton felt compelled to trot out an actual doctor to comment on a television character’s fictional death. What’s more, that doctor wants the world to know that it should be thanking the bike.

“Riding his Peloton Bike may have even helped delay his cardiac event,” Dr. Steinbaum observed.

Which, sure, maybe. But fans weren’t buying it.

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Peloton promises its bikes will give riders an “immersive cardio experience,” but we can’t imagine Mr. Big’s heart attack was what it had in mind.

Hi from Mars! Wish you were here!

These new views of Mars captured by NASA’s Perseverance wouldn’t be out of place on a postcard. Space watchers who have grown accustomed to close-ups of rover tracks and laser-zapped Mars rocks get a much more expansive look at the Red Planet in these new images.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

All of the images were captured by the right and left “Navcams” (navigation cameras), which also serve the purpose of helping the autonomous Perseverance find its way around. There’s nothing in particular of note in the newly captured images, beyond them being visuals from a planet that no human has ever visited (no big deal).

Perseverance completed its seven-month journey to Mars back in February, with a dramatic descent to the surface on Feb. 18 that made it NASA’s fifth rover to arrive there. This one came with an extra-special package in the form of Ingenuity, a remote-operated mini-copter. Perseverance initially spent some time monitoring Ingenuity’s spate of flight tests, but the rover’s actual mission — what it’s doing now — is to hunt for signs of past life and gather samples for future study back on Earth.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA intends for Perseverance to stay on top of its primary mission for at least one Martian year, or 687 days. That means it’s expected to be running, and beaming back data, until at least Jan. 2023. The rover regularly sends back batches of Mars looks, which NASA’s team diligently uploads to an image gallery dedicated to its findings.

Trump really misses Twitter but Twitter really doesn’t miss him.

In July, former-President Donald Trump announced a class action lawsuit against Big Tech companies – namely Facebook, Google, and Twitter – and its CEOs for, the suit alleges, violating the First Amendment when these outlets banned him from their platform following the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (Months later, Trump also filed another lawsuit against Twitter in an attempt to get his account back.)

While the lawsuit was being propped up by Trump as a fundraising effort, the tech companies are obviously taking it seriously.

Twitter is now asking a federal judge to toss the case, as reported by Bloomberg. The social media company says Trump doesn’t understand the First Amendment or free speech, and that Twitter’s rights are what’s actually being threatened here.

According to a federal court filing, Twitter and its former CEO Jack Dorsey argue “that Twitter is a private actor that is not constrained by the federal constitution.” As such, Twitter can make decisions as to what content is allowed to be posted on its site. In fact, the company says that Trump “agreed to abide by Twitte’s rules, and yet proceeded to repeatedly violate those rules.”

Twitter’s filing again lays out why Twitter banned Trump too, saying how the former president repeatedly tweeted false information about the 2020 vote, violating the company’s policies. Trump continued to threaten the peaceful transfer of power, forcing the company to take further action by booting him from the platform.

“The government cannot force the private operator of an online platform, such as Twitter, to disseminate speech with which the operator disagrees,” argues Twitter in its filing.

It’s been just over 11 months since supporters of former-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building in Washington DC in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. In the days following the event, multiple online platforms suspended or outright banned Trump.

Since then, Trump has tried to carve out his own space online. He started and quickly ended a little-trafficked blog. And, most recently, he announced a new social media platform of his own, TRUTH Social. While TRUTH has yet to officially launch, its already had its own issues, such as licensing issues and trolls, who defaced the unreleased version of the platform.

The car of the future may be born of a retrograde past.

An employee at Tesla’s Fremont factory is suing the company, alleging ongoing sexual harassment from a manager that went unchecked for months — even after she reported it. The details in the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in California’s Alameda County Superior Court and reported by Business Insider, are pretty screwed up and paint an awful picture of working conditions at the plant.

Specifically, Erica Cloud, an assembly line worker, claims that her manager would repeatedly propose marriage, “hug and massage” her, tell her about his supposedly large penis, and call her “‘blackenese.” According to the suit, Tesla’s HR department took months to do anything about her complaints, and when it did finally respond, it did so in all the wrong ways.

That’s right, Cloud says that HR essentially took it out on her — by sending her home randomly, and causing her to lose wages.

We reached out to Tesla for comment on the lawsuit and Cloud’s claims, but received no immediate response. Tesla disbanded its press team in 2020.

This, notably, is not the first sexual harassment lawsuit against Tesla. In 2017, Tesla made waves when it fired an engineer who alleged sexual harassment and pay discrimination.

“It is impossible to trust anyone after they have behaved in such a manner and therefore continued employment is also impossible,” a Tesla spokesperson said of the engineer, AJ Vandermeyden, at the time.

More recently, in Nov. 2021, Tesla’s Fremont factory was the subject of yet another lawsuit.

“Tesla’s factory floor more resembles a crude, archaic construction site or frat house than a cutting-edge company in the heart of the progressive San Francisco Bay Area,” reads the lawsuit, reported by Business Insider.

And, of course, there’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk himself. As recently as October, Musk made a series of sexist statements to his approximately 66 million Twitter followers (he has since deleted some of the offending tweets).

It seems, if the lawsuits are to be believed, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The latest Twitter meme “we used to be a proper country” pokes fun of conservative language and ideals while also fulfilling our need for nostalgia.

“We used to be a proper country” repurposes typical conservative language to reminisce about iconic pop culture moments and collective memories such as the combination Pizza Hut Taco Bell and the original Four Loko recipe. This type of rhetoric is often used in reference to more heteronormative and patriotic moments in American history by conservative media or politicians.

Think President Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” The phrase sounds like something a right-wing commentator would say in response to Harry Styles wearing a dress or implementation of gender neutral bathrooms. By memeing the phrase, Twitter users are showing how ridiculous that type of argument is at its core. The phrase is also allowing Twitter to do one of the internet’s favorite pastimes: get nostalgic about all the best and wackiest moments from the past.

The meme is simple, the words “we used to be a proper country” followed by a photo or series of photos that encapsulates some memorable era.

So, what do you think of when you hear “we used to be a proper country?” Is it 2014 Tumblr or Disney Channel’s peak? Chances are it’s been memed.

Here are a few of our favorites.

1. Say it louder for the people in the back

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2. Disney Channel hasn’t been right since

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3. Take me back

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4. An iconic era of television

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5. Make Taco Bell bisexual again

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6. RIP flavored Juul pods

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7. Best. Website. Ever.

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8.Immaculate vibes

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9. An elite playground

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Keanu Reeves knows an agent of oppression when he sees one.

The star of The Matrix trilogy and upcoming sequel, Resurrections, made that clear in a recent interview with The Verge, which touched on technology topics du jour like NFTs and the metaverse. And when it comes to the latter, Reeves has a very specific take: keep Facebook out of it.

“Can we just not have metaverse be like invented by Facebook,” he told interviewer Alex Heath.

Facebook, of course, is very much trying to do just that — recently rebranding itself as Meta and doubling down on its version of the metaverse.

Reeves, for his part, isn’t having it. “I’m just like, come on man,” he added.

Oh, and Reeves has some thoughts about NFTs as well. Discussing the $50 Matrix NFTs from Warner Bros., Heath asked Reeves what he thinks about digital scarcity and items that “can’t be copied.”

“That are easily reproduced,” Reeves interrupted, before bursting out laughing — perhaps in reference to the ability to right-click save the images associated with NFTs.

On the flip side, Reeve’s admitted to owning some unspecified cryptocurrency. “I have a little HODL,” he joked.

Reeves, in other words, is not against decentralized technologies like crypto in general or the metaverse specifically — as long as Facebook stays out of it.

It’s the end of an era.

Amazon has announced that it will be shutting down Alexa.

No, Amazon isn’t shuttering the popular voice assistant found in its home technology products such Echo Dot. The ecommerce giant is closing down Alexa.com, an online service that the vast majority of Amazon customers are likely unaware even existed.

However, for old school internet users, Alexa.com has long been a staple of the world wide web.

Alexa Internet, Inc. was originally founded in 1996 and later acquired by Amazon in 1999 for a quarter of a billion dollars in stock.

A screenshot of the top websites in April 2009.
Credit: Screenshot/WayBackMachine

The company provided web traffic analysis services based on data it pulled from users who installed Alexa’s toolbar for their internet browser. Alexa later swapped out the toolbar for browser extensions and a combination of other methods to determine websites’ traffic stats.

However, Alexa’s most popular feature was its Global Rank, which listed the most popular websites around the world based on their traffic stats. Alexa’s Global Rank was commonly used by media outlets when citing how popular a website had become.

A screenshot of today’s top wesbites according to Alexa.com
Credit: Screenshot/Amazon

“Twenty-five years ago, we founded Alexa Internet. After two decades of helping you find, reach, and convert your digital audience, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Alexa.com on May 1, 2022,” reads Amazon’s end of service notice posted on the Alexa.com website. “Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more.”

While Amazon says it will shut down the service in May 2022, the website has already seemingly shuttered for non-subscribers. All of its free features, such as Global Rank, have mostly been removed from the website. Only a login page for paying users to access their data remains, along with the top 50 rank of websites.

It seemed a bit odd, especially in recent years, that Amazon had an extremely popular consumer product named Alexa, one that can be found in millions of households, and they owned the Alexa.com domain name. Yet, they continued to use the URL for its very niche web traffic product.

While Amazon hasn’t announced any plans for Alexa.com, it would not be surprising if they began using it for the virtual assistant.

New footage of the Jetson ONE shows the drone and its pilot ripping through the woods in what appears to be a nod to the chase scene in Return of the Jedi.

Forbes just discovered that not all recognition is welcome.

The publication behind the annual 30 Under 30 list, which Forbes calls “the definitive list of young people changing the world,” is itself receiving notoriety after one of its awardees discovered the site exposed a decade’s worth of private data. Jane Manchun Wong, a 2022 30 Under 30 honoree and security researcher recognized for (among other things) her ability to undercover hidden features in apps, said that the Forbes list exposed the emails and birthdates of all awardees — both past and present.

“I discovered a personal data exposure in Forbes 30 Under 30 Directory while looking for my entry, including ~4000 emails and ~7000 birthdates of the honorees over the past 10 years,” she wrote on Friday.

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Wong explained over Twitter DM that she discovered the exposure on Dec. 2, and notified Forbes immediately. She said Forbes never directly responded to her disclosure.

“I didn’t get any response from Forbes in regards to the write up of this data exposure,” she wrote. “Nor did I frequently check when it got solved. But as of today, when I checked on the directory webpage, the data exposure has been resolved.”

We reached out to Forbes to confirm Wong’s statements, both about the exposure itself and the fact that Forbes failed to respond to her disclosure of it.

“Forbes was alerted that there was some information rendered deep in the JavaScript,” replied a spokesperson. “When we were notified, we took immediate action and quickly corrected the problem. To the best of our knowledge, the data was not accessed by anyone else.”

That the Forbes list is, by definition, a collection of notable people — past honorees include Miley Cyrus and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, for example — makes this type of incident even more problematic. Exposed personal emails, along with birthdays, opens people up to targeted phishing campaigns.

“The personal data was publicly accessible before they fixed it,” Wong explained over DM. “So people other than myself could’ve accessed it. I hope no one with bad faith intent had accessed it though.”

If anyone less responsible than Wong did indeed access that data, then 30 Under 30 honorees may soon be on the receiving end of more than just accolades.

UPDATE: Dec. 10, 2021, 12:38 p.m. PST The story was updated to include comment from a Forbes spokesperson.

Tech reporter Jennimai Nguyen put the iPhone 13 Mini and iPhone 13 Pro’s camera abilities to the test. Here’s what she learned.