Internet

I'm writing this before Thanksgiving, which I used to hate and now don't -- largely because I no longer spend the day arguing with family. I've been listening to a lot of friends and relatives dread this year's event because of political discussions that are likely to occur. I have no doubt that bot...

GADGET DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

Gadget Ogling: Big Bendy Screens, Chatterbox Robots, and TV in the Cloud

A little more than four months after moving to a new apartment, I'm at long last about to start setting up my office. Goodbye, Ikea dining table. Hello, fancy new desk. When I actually have my new setup, I'd like to have a monitor at long last to complement my laptop. AOC's latest is under serious c...

Hackers have stolen information of more than 400 million users of Friend Finder Networks, which runs several adult dating and pornography websites, LeakedSource reported earlier this week. This is Friend Finders' second breach in two years. Last year, hackers accessed 4 million accounts, exposing in...

Twitter on Tuesday suspended the account of Richard Spencer, one of the leading voices of the alt-right movement. It also expanded the use of several existing tools and changed policies to make it easier for users to fight back against abuse and harassment. Twitter suspended the accounts of Spencer,...

Sites that repeatedly violate Google's safe browsing policies will be classified as repeat offenders, the company said. A small number of websites take corrective actions after Google displays alerts on their landing pages warning visitors that they're harmful. However, they typically revert to viol...

Facebook and Google have amended their internal policies regarding advertising on fake news posts in response to pressure from users and a growing controversy within the company. There are mounting concerns that the presidential election may have been influenced by unvetted fake news stories trendin...

In the past, heightened rhetoric and propaganda were the tools of choice for those looking to convince an electorate to vote them into office, and conspiracy theories were their bane. This election season has seen the rise of a new form of persuasion, one that's unique to the Information Age. For mo...

The folks who brought Vine into the world last month introduced a new video broadcasting app called "Hype." Available for free from Intermedia Labs in Apple's iTunes App Store, Hype not only allows users to broadcast live to the Internet, but also lets followers interact with their broadcasts in rea...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Bot Armies Boost Candidates’ Popularity on Twitter

Internet bots have many useful online purposes, but they have a dark side, too, as three researchers demonstrated in their analysis of Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Bots are used to automate functions on the Net. For example, if you be...

One of the most volatile conspiracy theories in recent times ended with a whimper last month, when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made the terse statement, "President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period." Though birthers may be with us always, it seems that many have t...

Watching TV shows often requires the suspension of disbelief -- that is, a willingness to press pause on one's critical faculties in order to believe the unbelievable. Realism often must be secondary to story, in other words. This very often is necessary when computers are used to advance plot lines...

The American Civil Liberties Union recently uncovered evidence that led Twitter, Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary to stop sharing data with Geofeedia, a firm accused of improperly collecting social media data on protest groups, and sharing that information with numerous law enforcement agencies...

If filmmaker Michael Bay -- known for the Transformers and other over-the-top films -- were to decide to make a World War I movie, and if he chose to rely on comic books as his research materials, the result would be very much like Electronic Arts' newly released video game Battlefield 1. This lates...

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