So, Wordle is having a moment, huh? If you haven’t played the daily word game, you must. You get six tries to guess a five-letter word. Each guess tells you if you have a letter in the right place, a correct letter in the wrong place, or a wrong letter. Each guess is supposed to get you closer, except for the time the word was “knoll” and everyone on the internet lost their collective minds. But I digress. The worst part about Wordle (which is itself perfection) is that you
In the early days of the pandemic, there were some clear corporate winners. We all devoured episodes of Tiger King, while singing the praises of Netflix. We hopped on our Peloton bikes, wondering why we ever went to the gym. We used DoorDash to bring us our groceries and takeout. Zoom meetings kept us productive (and were used nearly as often for virtual get-togethers and happy hours with friends and family). And we spent those long hours in isolation deep diving through Etsy and Shopify to find
Hackers made up for some lost time last year. After seeing the number of data breaches decline in 2020, the Identity Theft Resource Center’s 16th Annual Data Breach Report says the number of security compromises was up more than 68% in 2021. That tops the all-time high by a shocking 23%. All told, there were 1,862 breaches last year, says the ITRC, 356 more than in 2017, the previous busiest year on record. “Many of the cyberattacks committed were highly sophisticated and complex,
Amazon sent a jolt through the tech world in 2014 by announcing it was buying Twitch, the 3-year-old streaming platform that was becoming popular with gamers, for nearly $1 billion. At that time, Silicon Valley-based New Enterprise Associates (NEA) had grown to be one of the largest venture capital firms in the world on the back of investments in companies like Uber, BuzzFeed, Groupon, Coursera, 23andMe, and Cloudflare. Looking for the firm’s next big thing, NEA partners Rick Yang and Jon
From cell phone cameras to microchips, life on Earth abounds with NASA technology. Since the Apollo era, NASA technology has found extended life in more terrestrial applications—to such extent that the space agency set up its Technology Transfer Program (T2) in 1976 to streamline getting its patent offerings to the public. Chances are that players in next month’s Super Bowl trained on machines derived from microgravity exercise treadmills used by astronauts on the International Spa
Shares of Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, tumbled to a new low Monday after the company was downgraded by another group of investment analysts—Wedbush’s this time. They cut shares from an “outperform” rating to a “neutral” rating, fixing a $36 target price on stocks and writing that “we see risks to Snap’s revenue growth targets stemming from IDFA headwinds, difficult comps from stellar growth in 2020-21, and increasing competition fr
While there’s no shortage of apps and extensions that can stop websites from snooping on you, StartPage’s new Chrome and Firefox extension is still worth a look. Once installed, the extension blocks third-party trackers and cookies from following you around the web. It also assigns a score to the current website—on a scale of one to five—based on how invasive it is. You can click on the extension’s icon to see the details for a given site, but otherwise the Sta
Like every seasoned tech writer, I have an embarrassing assortment of old iPhones and Android devices collecting dust around the house. Almost all are worth next to nothing by now, but the least-old ones of the bunch are prime candidates to be given second lives as . . . drumroll please . . . free wireless security cameras! Think about it: Cellphones have decent cameras. They connect to the internet. They can work for hours without being plugged in. Real cameras cost money. It’s a techno-
The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center has long focused on honoring the memory of people murdered during the Holocaust and preserving the stories of those who survived. Now a new pair of short virtual reality films telling the stories of two survivors will enable visitors to hear those stories while experiencing immersive visuals that help explain their experiences. One film, entitled A Promise Kept, tells the story of the late Frieda “Fritzie” Fritzshall, who was impri
Ever get annoyed by the intolerable reading experience on certain websites? By activating your browser’s reader mode, you can make web pages more reader-friendly by hiding ads, menus, pop-ups, and other distractions. Some web browsers even let you switch to reader mode automatically on specific websites. Here’s how: Safari: Long-press the “aA” icon in the address bar to activate reader mode. To load this mode by default on the current website, tap the icon again, then