Watch out for scams popping up in your email inbox this tax season. IBM says it’s recently detected a wave of tax-themed phishing messages targeting both professional and personal email addresses. Read more…

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The Yeehaw Agenda remains strong!

Lil Nas X, who recently collaborated with Billy Ray Cyrus for a sick remix of “Old Town Road,” sat down with Genius Verified to explain the backstory and lyrics behind his viral hit. 

“I started to think about it,” Lil Nas X said, referring to when Billboard took the remix off its weekly Hot Country Songs chart. “Listening to other songs that’s actually on that chart, it’s like, wait a minute. Something’s not right.” 

Lil Nas X explained that he worked on the song while living with his sister, and he was inspired by the “runaway loner cowboy” lyrics. 

“I wanted to be more of a triumphant kind of story,” he told Genius. “The horse would be like, not having much, and Old Town Road would be that path to success. You know, you’re taking that horse to Old Town Road.”  Read more…

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The first thing you want to do when you pull a USB drive off someone allegedly lying their way into presidential hangout Mar-a-Lago is plug it in your computer. Oh, wait, maybe don’t do that?

A woman by the name of Yujing Zhang was arrested on March 30 attempting to bluff her way into Donald Trump’s private Florida club. In addition to two Chinese passports, the New York Times reported that she carried with her four cell phones, a hard drive, and a USB drive infected with malware. And, according to the Miami Herald, U.S. government officials straight up plugged that bad boy into a computer — a bit of news that generated some serious double takes in the infosec community.  Read more…

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Why weigh down a self-driving car with a lot of sensors, HD maps, and equipment when you don’t have to?

That’s the philosophy of British startup Wayve. It claims it only needs a camera, GPS tracker, and a powerful computer to be able to drive anywhere autonomously. 

But experts who specialize in sensing technologies like light-based LiDAR and radar say the idea mostly comes across as preposterous — or the very least, short-sighted. 

Most self-driving cars decide how to drive down a street as it happens — picking up information about debris in the way, pedestrians on the sidewalk, the sun starting to set in the distance. Wayve doesn’t try to interpret that much data since it can’t really pick up much from its cameras. Instead it relies on training data already plugged into the system and information from past driving experiences, along with any “reinforcement” data, which is any information about the street from the human driver.  Read more…

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Donald Trump’s main policy initiative involves building a pointless wall across miles of empty desert. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that one local chapter of his administration has proposed doing the same at the annual arts and culture gathering known as Burning Man.

The Nevada branch of the Bureau of Land Management, which administers the Black Rock desert where Burning Man has been held since 1990, released in March a wildly unusual proposal calling for major changes to the event’s permit. 

These include making the nonprofit Burning Man Project pay for a private security force, as well as constructing a 10-mile, 19,000,000-pound concrete barrier around the weeklong event. Read more…

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The Dunder Mifflin crew has made it to the Billboard charts, thanks to 17-year-old singer, Billie Eilish.

For those who have yet to hear Eilish’s recently released debut LP, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, a track titled “my strange addiction” samples audio straight from the NBC comedy.

Specifically, the song references Michael Scott’s action movie, Threat Level Midnight, which fans will recall tells the story of Michael Scarn, a secret agent portrayed by Scott himself.

One scene in the amateur film focuses on a dance craze called “The Scarn,” and Eilish used related dialogue from Scott (Steve Carell), Jim Halpert (John Krasinski), Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling), and Ryan Howard (B.J. Novak) in her new jam. Read more…

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FAFSA has everyone scouring their social media accounts. 

If you’ve attended college, you’ve probably had to fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or a FAFSA, which is basically a set of documents asking the government for funds to help out with tuition. Because you need to “prove” your need for financial aid, “I’m telling FAFSA” became a meme to respond to people flexing on Instagram and Twitter. 

When high schooler @worldwideliz_ tweeted an insanely well-produced prom video, showing off her crew’s luxury car and elaborate dresses, another Twitter user joked that FAFSA was watching.  Read more…

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Warm weather and the spring season are giving us a seriously inspiring vibe — getting those tax returns back helps, too.

Whether you’re moving homes, starting a new job, or simply have a fire under your ass to get your act together, there are a few purchases you can make to up your productivity levels. 

SEE ALSO: Best cheap laptops: 10 options for under $500

One of those must-haves is a new laptop. If you’re in the market for something that’s not a MacBook, you may find your companion at Lenovo’s tax refund sale: Through April 17, you can save up to 51% on ThinkPad laptops, desktops, and other PCs that are marked down as low as $255.55.  Read more…

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Twitter knows it has a spam problem. 

The social media platform famous for Russian bots and harassment announced on April 8 that it has finally had it up to *here* with spammers and is going to take a small step to partially rectify the situation. That’s right, as of now you can only follow 400 accounts per day.  

“Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow,” Tweeted the Twitter Safety account. “Who does that? Spammers. So we’re changing the number of accounts you can follow each day from 1,000 to 400.”

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I’m no math whiz, but I know a calculator when I see one. 

Twitter users have started drawing a cute little calculator out of numbers and dashes, and there’s a small chunk of space for several words. It’s the perfect place to express your hot take, so of course it’s become a meme.

The tweets begin with “According to my calculations” and then feature the calculator, usually bearing some sort of juicy quip.

Let’s take a look and see how they all add up. 

1. Is hating Disney a personality trait?

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