Reddit appears to have answered the question of how long a meme will take to die out: two months and four days. That’s how long what started as an April Fool’s Day post ran for and how long it took the online community to tire of pressing a virtual button. Back in April a new […]
Search for “Google” on Google and you’d expect to get Google. But an Egyptian air conditioning engineer found himself number one for that very search, having unintentionally found a killer search engine optimization trick. The unexpected result only affected searches on Google’s Egyptian site (google.com.eg) but appeared even for users of Incognito mode, meaning the […]
Ten years ago in May, YouTube launched in beta. From the silly to the profound, from the personal to the political, we’re celebrating a decade of your creativity and self-expression. And, we’re doing it from A to Z. With over 75 references and 18 filmmaking styles, we’ve tried to capture some of the richness and […]
Google says security questions on accounts are “neither secure nor reliable enough” to use in cases of forgotten passwords. It’s urging other firms to follow its lead by making such questions solely a last resort. In a paper presented this week at a World Wide Web conference in Italy, five Google researchers detailed their study […]
Reddit has announced new policies to crack down on harassment. It’s not given specific details of the consequences, but it has prompted heated debate among users who believe unrestricted speech should be paramount. The site says it has based its decision on a survey of 15,000 users, as well as changes in the nature of […]
Google has suspended a tool that let users edit a version of Google Maps, following a series of high-profile prank edits. The company says it can’t keep up with the number of manual reviews needed. Map Maker has been running since 2008 and is effectively a separate, wiki-like version of the main map service. The […]
Twitter has announced three changes designed to restrict the effects of abusive messages. It’s clear the company is trying to find a difficult balance between free speech and combating harassment. The first change is about policy rather than process. Until now, Twitter only considered it a violation when people made “direct, specific threats of violence […]
A computer that automatically bought illegal drugs online has been released from custody by Swiss law enforcement officials. The computer ran an automated bot called ‘Random Darknet Shopper’ as part of an art project. The artists behind the project had programmed the bot to search for illicit materials on darknet sites. That’s a loosely defined […]
Dominic Wilcox is a man quite unlike any other. A genius who thinks so far outside the box he can no longer tell you the shape of on. Wilcox invents things that cause people to look at him, and question their own version of reality for a minute. Some people are born with brains that […]
Sort of speaks for itself, for those who did not get the see the lovely blood moon this past weekend, here is a version of it in real time, shot by N.A.S.A. Still pretty dang cool. Did seem like it was in an awful hurry for an eclipse, though. [Via Laughing Squid]