Facebook recently launched Midnight Deliveries, a special feature that allows users to send messages that will be delivered as the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve. In a surprising security slip-up, first detailed in a blog post by IT student Jack Jenkins, the company has made the URLs...
Hold off on those midnight messages, for now
Pakistan's government lifted its three-month ban on YouTube yesterday, only to completely reinstate the block just three minutes later, according to The New York Times. The ban was first implemented in mid-September, in response to a highly...
Some express their love for a show or movie by sharing it with others, some draw their favorite characters or write fanfiction, and artist Tim Prince creates intricate sculptures using animal bones. This Facehugger sculpture, titled Parasitoid, is a uniquely beautiful tribute to the Alien franchise made from box turtle, mink, skunk, wild turkey, coyote, and mouse bones. Prince's work includes a...
Popular Twitter-based photo service TwitPic is currently being blocked by Google's malware checker. Upon trying to access TwitPic.com, the service's Twitter page, any Twitter page containing a TwitPic, or any webpage with a TwitPic widget, users are presented with a "Malware Ahead!" warning that urges them to turn back. The site is currently listed as "suspicious" by Google's Safe Browsing tool, even though it also states that suspicious content hasn't been found on the service in the past 90 days. TwitPic responded to the situation on Twitter, saying that it is currently trying to contact Google to remove the malware warning because "it is not true." We've asked Google and TwitPic to provide more information on the cause of the disruption.
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
The Great Wall of Google
Nick Bilton at The New York Times writes that the Federal Aviation Administration's controversial rules prohibiting the use of electronic devices on aircraft have consequences that go far beyond traveler frustration. Bilton writes that "over the last year, flying with phones and other devices has become increasingly dangerous," and that the FAA is partly to blame; he points out a number of...
"I’d rather be hit in the head by an iPad Mini than a 650-page book." Nick Bilton
The Luna Blue Hotel is a small 18-room hotel on Mexico’s Caribbean coast across from the island of Cozumel, known for its friendly service, proximity to the beach, and resident fat tabby cat, Frankie. It is popular and rated highly on travel review sites. According to the ubiquitous online travel agent Expedia, the hotel is in such high demand that it’s booked through the end of 2013. "Luna...
In an email sent today to users, Foursquare has announced that it will begin to show users' full names in search results, and share more check-ins with businesses that were previously only able to see data from the past three hours. Previously, people appeared in search with a first name and last initial in some cases, and the company says it's making the change after receiving complaints from confused users. (Foursquare notes that users are not required to use their real names and can change their names using privacy settings.) The changes will take effect on January 28th, 2013, and the...
The US Senate has voted to approve the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012, which will authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans for counter-terrorism purposes for another five years. The bill extends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008, which granted retroactive immunity for wiretaps and email monitoring under the Bush Administration and created a framework for future warrant-free surveillance as long as one party is located outside the US and terrorism is suspected.
Whistleblowers like former NSA codebreaker William Binney have long since revealed that surveillance programs catch hundreds of...
Michigan is the latest state to pass a bill that prevents employers and schools from requesting login information for social networks. Governor Rick Snyder signed House Bill 5523 on Friday, saying that "potential employees and students should be judged on their skills and abilities, not private online activity." Anyone breaching the new law faces "up to 93 days in jail" as well as a $1,000 fine.
This isn’t the first time an individual state...
"Potential employees and students should be judged on their skills and abilities, not private online activity." Governor Rick Snyder
We all know the feeling. You're sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn't cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly...
In 2011 a group of students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology released an experimental racing game called Nitronic Rush, which went on to win a number of awards. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, the team at Refract Studios — made up of a number of students from the original project...
As we leave our glowing multi-monitor gaming rigs behind on our journey home for the holidays, many of us will be recruited to fix a wide variety of gadgets and technology. It's the burden that we bear as the "technology gurus" of our families,...
Following in the footsteps of a recent Command & Conquer remake, Russian developer Aleksander Guryanov has created a full HTML5/JavaScript port of the 1992 title Dune II, allowing gamers to enjoy classic real-time strategy (RTS) gameplay in most modern browsers. The...
Recently released government documents show that last year's violent breakup of Occupy Wall Street protests followed a coordinated effort between the FBI, DHS, and local police, working in collaboration with the big banks themselves. Despite the FBI’s own admission that Occupy was essentially...
Happy Holidays! Today may be Christmas, but there are plenty of reasons you've gotten a new gadget in the last few weeks. It's Hanukah season, and give-gifts-to-your-co-workers season, and Secret-Santa season — plus it's possible you had the grave misfortune of being born near Christmas, and are thus the recipient of the dreaded "combination gift."
But hey, it worked out, and you're now the proud owner of a...
Twitter, that medium of disposable aphorisms, demands short phrases that can be hard to estimate when you just want to share a quick sentence and a link. But what if you could quickly identify any section that would fit into a single tweet? Paul...
Citing a video industry source, TechCrunch reports that Intel plans to offer its TV service in a limited number of markets after facing difficulty signing deals with content owners. Earlier this year, reports from The Wall Street Journal and Reuters indicated that Intel could enter the content...
A long-lost film directed by Roger Christian, who served as art director for the first Star Wars movie, could soon be made available as a download,...
With their polygonal shapes and simple textures, classic video game characters make ideal subjects for papercraft, the origami-like art of creating 3D models using specially-printed sheets of...
Scott Brodie was feeling stuck. A former producer for Xbox Live Arcade, he left Microsoft in the fall of 2010 to form his own company, Heart Shaped Games. He released his first title, Hero Generations, a year later. "I did everything by myself, the design, art, and code." The game was well received, an IndieCade Finalist, but wasn’t making...
There are 308,450,225 dots on the map you see above. One for every person living in the United States, based on data from the 2010 Census. It doesn't seem plausible when you're looking at the entire country; metropolitan areas seem to be represented by indistinct swaths of black rather than tiny...
Back in November, Finnish startup Jolla publicly unveiled its Sailfish mobile operating system to the world. The OS is based on MeeGo, a platform Nokia created but quickly abandoned in favor of Windows Phone. But with Sailfish, Jolla — which itself employs several ex-Nokia staffers — is intent on carrying on the torch. And though we're still no closer to knowing when we'll see consumer devices running Sailfish on store shelves, Engadget has taken a lengthy look at where things stand today. In an eight-minute walkthrough video, you'll get a closer glimpse at many of Sailfish's unique interface choices that were briefly showcased two...
This is the end, my only friend, the end.
But not the end of the world — not even the end of our daily print publication, 90 Pages on The Verge on College-Ruled Notebook Paper (with a readership of approximately three mothers to staff writers). It's just the end of the year for The Vergecast, the last before we take the 2012 calendars down and put up a 2013 calendar (or, for those who like to recycle, calendars from the years 2002, 1991, 1985, 1974, 1963, 1957, 1946, 1935, 1929, 1918,...
After absorbing a record annual loss in 2009, the Hitachi Corporation underwent a dramatic transformation, and soon swung itself to profitability. In March 2012, the company reported a record $4 billion in net profit, but as the New York Times...
It appears that Facebook has dodged a somewhat serious security mishap that would have allowed hackers to remotely and secretly activate user webcams and post the recorded video to their profiles. According to Bloomberg, a pair of researchers at...
Pinterest and one of its investors have been sued by an individual who is claiming some of the basic ideas behind the site were stolen. As reported by AllThingsD, the suit was filed yesterday on behalf of Theodore F. Schroeder, alleging "misappropriation, unjust enrichment, and breach of fiduciary duty" against both Pinterest itself and one of the startup's investors, Brian S. Cohen. According to the court filing, Schroeder had been working on...
For months, frustrated car owners just couldn't explain it. As the Sun Sentinel explains, parking anywhere in the vicinity of the Hollywood Police Department would render their vehicle's keyless entry system useless. As more and more cars were towed away thanks to the baffling phenomenon, it was discovered that functionality returned once cars were a safe distance away from the police station. Rumors swirled as to what the cause could be, with...
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![Capitol at Night [by Robero Ceballos via Flickr]](http://web.archive.org/web/20121231082618im_/http://cdn2.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/7390497/capitol-at-night_large_large.jpg)
