Bad news: I've been missing in action this week, as I've been stuck in bed heavily doped up and suffering with two things — the recurrence of an old back injury, and the flu. The flu is letting up, but the back injury this time has left behind some damage, which will require ongoing treatment and physical therapy.
What happens to your Facebook profile when you die has long been an important, if controversial, issue. Now, the social network will let you designate a 'legacy contact' to take care of your profile when you die.
A few weeks ago, a couple friends and I were about to watch a surprisingly bad scifi movie in my crowded apartment. One of them asked if we could dim the lights, and started to head to the switch. "No, no, I've got it," I said, reaching into my pocket. "He's reaching for his phone!" said the friend. This was the…
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A specter is haunting Reddit: The specter of SJWs.
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Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him…
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WalletHub is a social network where people can share information about credit cards and personal finance. The company has a logo that features the letter W, in white, on a green background. Not so fast, says Major League Baseball. In a classic jocks-versus-nerds standoff, the baseball guys claim that the WalletHub…
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Fortune just did a big story on gizmo-maker Jawbone, reporting that the company last summer was sued by Flextronics for not paying its bills. We're hearing rumors that Flextronics might not be the only company having trouble collecting from Jawbone, and that Jawbone, which is 16 years old and still losing money, might…
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Valleywag is fascinated with Uber. A few weeks ago, with the goal of better understanding who uses the the car-service app, Valleywag editor Dan Lyons asked readers to send in their Uber Scores alongside some demographic information.
You may have seen the Jon Stewart bit about the measles outbreak, where he teed off on Tracy Skytt, a Marin County mom presented as a goofy liberal California anti-vaxxer. What you may not know is that Stewart and his producers edited out part of the original CNN clip — the part where CNN reported that Skytt's…
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Today, a jury found Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht guilty of seven charges related to his alleged role in running the deep-web bazaar for drugs and other contraband. Ulbricht admitted in court to creating the site, but insisted that he sold it to another operator and left the business before the FBI arrested him in…
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Kevin Bollaert ruined the lives of many, many women, and he did it on purpose—the 28-year-old San Diego man ran a website that published stolen, naked photos and then charged victims to take them down. This week, he was found guilty of 27 felony charges.
Remember when Twitter was the magical service that played a role in the Arab Spring and was going to make the world a better place? Increasingly it is becoming a platform where demented people hurl abuse and bully each other — it's Troll City, packed with idiots, full of sound and fury, but signifying less and less.
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Apple has a long and tortured history when it comes to the development of its own TV offering. But now, it seems Apple may be trying once more to build its own small-screen provision.
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This video praising the virtues of HTC smartphones features an actual rapper, alongside someone who is not an actual rapper. See if you can tell which one is which. My theory is that Samsung, Apple, and Motorola all kicked in to make this video, because watching this makes it impossible for you to own an HTC device…
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Uber and Mothers Against Drunk Driving last week put out a report suggesting Uber helped reduced drunk-driving accidents. However, the claim gets a little wobbly when you take a closer look at the numbers, as ProPublica just did. Now MADD is backing away from the assertion, claiming the relationship is "purely…
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Sometimes in this world, you want to make someone as wildly uncomfortable as humanly possible. That's why Facebook's here.
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There's a big measles outbreak happening right now, thanks to anti-vaxxers like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey and the people who listen to them. But Hollywood isn't the only place where people fall for junk science. There are anti-vaxxers in Silicon Valley, too. One of them is NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, who in 2011 was…
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Remember how Eric Schmidt spent years sitting on the Apple board, quietly learning everything about the iPhone — and then, presto, Google suddenly came out with Android and it looked a whole lot like the iPhone operating system and Steve Jobs went nuts on Schmidt for being such a sneaky, backstabbing son of a bitch?
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Game developer Brianna Wu has been stalked, tormented, and harassed by GamerGate—the amorphous reactionary movement centered around video game journalism—for months now. But it's never been as frightening as it was this weekend—when she watched a terrifying video made by a deranged fanatic who claims he crashed his…
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Any working parent will tell you that finding decent child care is a nightmare. But one tech company seems to have come up with a cool idea: Just have the CEO's admin double as a nanny! A friendly tipster (and, I guess, job seeker) sent me a link to this incredible job opportunity posted by Skymosity in San Rafael,…
