The Zuckening on Capitol Hill may be over—but fear not, internet of indignation, there are still plenty of things to fill us with fleeting rage. For example, your Yahoo and AOL emails can now be scanned for targeted advertising, thousands of apps on Google play are apparently violating children’s privacy, Uber is getting off easy for a data breach it tried to hide—and, to top it all off, our beer is chock-full of worrying microplastics. It’s enough to make you wish for a simpler time, when the worst thing we had to worry about was... terrifying blue whale-sized water lizards.
Holy Shit, These Triassic Ocean Reptiles Were Big as Hell
Paleontologists working along the UK’s southwest coast have unearthed a 205-million-year-old jawbone that belonged to an absolutely enormous species of ichthyosaur, a very successful group of aquatic reptiles. At approximately 85 feet in length, these monsters were one of the largest animals to have ever appeared on Earth.
How to Find Out If Your Facebook Data Was Stolen by Cambridge Analytica
Roughly 87 million people had their Facebook data stolen by the political research firm Cambridge Analytica. And starting today, Facebook will finally notify the people who had their information scooped up. About 70 million are in the US, while the rest are primarily in the UK, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
How can you find out if your Facebook information was compromised? A notification will appear at the top of your Facebook newsfeed, along with a new button for changing your privacy settings. Even if your information wasn’t swallowed up by Cambridge Analytica, it’s probably a good time to change your settings anyway.
Someone Convince Me That an iPhone Wallet Case Isn’t the Dumbest Idea in the World
Wallet phone cases have always seemed like a total absurdity to me. Am I wrong?
My phone is a very large concentration of value in an easy-to-lose, easy-to-break package that I’m constantly waving around recklessly. The next time you plop your phone down on a bar, which is a dark place buzzing with dizzy people holding containers full of liquid, remember that what you’re really doing is placing $600 to $1,000 in a situation in which it might instantly vaporize.
Now, what if I took that already precious treasure and stuck it in case that substantially increased the accumulation of value in one place by adding my driver’s license, MetroCard, ATM card, and credit card to the package? What if such a case made it possible to combine the pain of losing my phone with the inconvenience of losing my wallet in a brief moment of carelessness? We need not wonder, because that’s exactly what a wallet case does.
The Meteorite Hunters Who Trade in Precious Space Debris
On January 16th, 2018, a bright flash lit up the sky over Michigan, accompanied by a loud boom. Caught on dash cams and home surveillance systems, the meteor briefly turned night to day as it streaked to the ground at almost 36,000 miles per hour, causing a blast waveequivalent to a minor earthquake.
By the next morning, local people were out searching the frozen winter landscape for pieces of fallen material. Then the professionals had arrived—meteorite hunters.
The New Cheap iPad Is All the iPad You Need
It’s rare for Apple to make a reasonably priced product that is also excellent. The AirPods—love ‘em or hate ‘em—are an example of this happening. The new iPad is another. It’s good. It’s not great! But it’s probably all the iPad you need.
Fox News: Either Planet X Will Kill Us All on April 23rd or the Rapture Can Happen Any Time, Take Your Pick
Silly fringe theories about Planet X—an imagined planet typically named Nibiru that is on course to hit or pass by Earth with disastrous consequences—are the kind of thing normally relegated to vanity press-published books or those tabloids you browse in the supermarket checkout aisle. On Wednesday, they made it into Fox News, with the added caveat that maybe some other Biblical catastrophe could surprise us instead.
Here’s How Steven Spielberg and ILM Recreated That Movie for Ready Player One
Whether you loved or hated Ready Player One, odds are you were still amazed by the second challenge—yes, that scene—even if it’s just wondering how the hell director Steven Spielberg pulled off something so impossible. Now we know.
The upcoming Art of Ready Player One book by Gina McIntyre explains it in detail. It’s out on April 17, and we highly recommend it if you’re a fan of the movie or if you’re just curious about how all its many, many, many disparate parts were put together, which is a fascinating process unto itself—but none more fascinating than the second challenge.
Garmin Made a Great Smartwatch for People Who Hate Wearing a Smartwatch
There’s no better example of the war between form and function than smartwatch design. There are boxy, bulging, touchscreen wearables that do almost everything your smartphone can, and there are sleeker analog alternatives that maybe keep track of how many calories you’ve burned. With the latest version of the Vívomove HR, Garmin has tried, and mostly succeeded, in balancing both approaches, creating a smartwatch that hides a respectable list of features behind a traditional analog face.
Feds Praise Backpage Takedown as Sex Workers Fear for Their Lives
Justice Department officials on Monday praised the actions of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies seizing Backpage.com, the popular classifieds website long accused of enabling sex traffickers and profiting off criminalized sex work.
Sex worker rights advocates, meanwhile, say the loss of Backpage and the US government’s other efforts to shutter similar sites is building toward a crisis, forcing innumerable sex workers across the country off the internet and into harm’s way.
Everything You Need to Do on Your Phone Before Taking a Trip
Taking a trip away from home can be good for the body and soul, but it also means you’re going to be without the safety net of your home and office Wi-Fi, and might even involve piggybacking on a different data network and living through a different time zone. Your smartphone can adapt, if you know the right tricks—which we’ll share here.
88,000-Year-Old Middle Finger Found in Saudi Arabia Could Rewrite Human History
It’s just a lone, boney middle finger, but the scientists who found it say it’s the oldest directly dated fossil of our species to ever be found outside of Africa and the Levant, a region that today comprises Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. But the new discovery is not without its critics, who say older evidence of human habitation outside of this region exists elsewhere, and that the finger might not even be human.
All the Hints and Details We Uncovered in the New Solo: A Star Wars Story Trailer
We finally got another look at the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story, and it gave us a much better idea of what we can expect from the movie after that first, cryptic trailer in February. Here’s everything we learned about this early chapter in the life of Han Solo and his friends, both familiar and unfamiliar.
Samsung’s Smartphone That Can’t Connect to the Internet Is Actually a Great Idea
In the mid-‘90s, public use of the internet boomed, and it’s been all downhill ever since. I mean, let’s be honest with ourselves for a second, while the internet can be used to do great things, most people would rather browse cute cat pics or sling hate speech than work on anything productive.
So to help break that addiction, Samsung has created the Galaxy J2 Pro, which is a smartphone that goes out of its way to block mobile data connections. That’s right, this is a smartphone that can’t access the internet.
That Viral Photo of Our Big Lumpy President Is Actually Photoshopped
Have you seen this photo of President Donald Trump bursting out of his jacket? The US president is a large man, but he’s not quite that lumpy. The photo has been photoshopped.