Peter Thiel's data-mining company is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens.

A laptop is more than just a video playback machine. I’ve been thinking about aspect ratios. After years of phones, laptops, tablets, and TV screens converging on 16:9 as the “right” display shape — allowing video playback without distracting black bars — smartphones have disturbed the universality recently by moving to even more elongated formats like 18:9, 19:9, or even 19.5:9 in the iPhone X’s case. That’s prompted me to consider where else the default widescreen proportions might be a poor fit, and I’ve realized that laptops are the worst offenders.

Facebook is going to ask all of its users whether they want to be tracked as they use Facebook. The company won’t, it said. Instead, it will ask all of its users to explicitly opt in to having themselves tracked so that they can keep using Facebook, and tell them to limit that collection using its settings if they don't. But the site has warned that it will never be possible to turn off all ad tracking, as it isn't on many websites. People will always have the option to leave entirely, a senior member of staff said.

The most desirable career of the 21st century, with numerous advantages over other fast-growing occupations such as hospice carer and rickshaw driver, is being a billionaire. Prior to the incorporation of US Steel in 1901, the world didn’t have a single billion-dollar company, much less a billion-dollar individual. Today, more people than ever are becoming billionaires – 2,000 and counting have made the great leap upward, according to the “global wealth team” at Forbes. And the US’s hottest billionaire factory is located in the most hyped yet least understood swath of suburban sprawl in the world: Silicon Valley.

But CEO Mitch Lowe has said the company will be profitable by 2019

Famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and Goldman Sachs share a common belief: The next trillion-dollar industry will be in the mining sector—in outer space. As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it: "The first trillionaire there will ever be is the person who exploits the natural resources on asteroids. There's this vast universe of limitless energy and limitless resources. I look at wars fought over access to resources. That could be a thing of the past, once space becomes our backyard."

Little has changed in the way of tactile reading and writing since Louis Braille published his braille system in 1829. But ELIA has big plans.

The Internet Watch Foundation says it is finding more images of child sexual abuse online than ever before, according to its annual report. It found over 78,000 website addresses containing child sexual abuse in 2017, up from more than 57,000 in 2016. The charity actively seeks and removes these images from the net as well as responding to reports it receives from the public. It said it had also processed over 80,000 reports of confirmed abuse.

Cambridge Analytica, the company behind the Facebook data scandal, planned to develop its own cryptocurrency for the purpose of storing and selling personal data. The UK data firm hoped to raise $30 million through the venture, according to various reports, while also offering new ways of exploiting people’s data.   The money would have been raised through a fundraising method known as an initial coin offering (ICO), which has become a popular alternative to early stage venture capital funding over the last year.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has released his latest annual shareholder letter. In the letter, Bezos stressed the importance of having high standards in running a business. By setting high standards, companies are able to live up to "ever-rising customer expectations," he said. "How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There's no single way to do it – it's a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it," Bezos wrote in the letter.

It’s excusable if you didn’t notice it when a scientist named Daniel J. Buehrer, a retired professor from the National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, published a white paper earlier this month proposing a new class of math that could lead to the birth of machine consciousness. Keeping up with all the breakthroughs in the field of AI can be exhausting, we know. Robot consciousness is a touchy subject in artificial intelligence circles. In order to have a discussion around the idea of a computer that can ‘feel’ and ‘think,’ and has it’s own motivations, you first have to find two people who actually agree on the semantics of sentience.

A Florida man accused of flooding consumers with 97 million phone calls touting fake travel deals appeared Wednesday before lawmakers to explain how robocalls work and to say, “I am not the kingpin of robocalling that is alleged.”

For years we've documented how the internet of broken things industry and evangelists have contributed to a global privacy and security shitshow... By Karl Bode. (Apr. 16, 2018)

Best Buy will begin selling more than ten 4K and HD Fire TV Edition televisions models from Insignia, Best Buy’s in-house brand, and Toshiba.

Cary Elwes and Jake Busey have been officially announced as guest stars of the new series of Stranger Things. The two actors will have recurring guest roles in the new series, which will be aired in 2019. Cary, who will be known to most as Dr Lawrence Gordon in the Saw Franchise and Westley in the Princess Bride, will be taking on the role of Mayor Kline. Mayor Kline has been described as ‘handsome, slick, and sleazy, more concerned with his own image than with the people of the small town he governs’.

When used for good, social media can be a very powerful tool for helping others. Recently, a woman named Jenn Slater posted on Facebook about her daughter, Cassidy, and her issues with being bullied at her middle school. It's tough to watch, but important just the same. Cassidy and her mom live in Scranton, Pa., near the home of the Yankees' Triple-A affiliate Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders. Cassidy's mother's post has gained steam since it was shared two weeks ago, racking up a few hundred thousand views ... and, apparently, catching the attention of the Yankees themselves.

Target is selling Google Chromecast for $25 or 30 percent off today.

Thought Cambridge Analytica was creepy? This Israeli surveillance juggernaut is sitting on a massive database of faces taken from Facebook and YouTube, all feeding facial recognition tech for national governments. By Thomas Fox-Brewster.

A new video released by BuzzFeed appears to show former president Barack Obama calling President Donald Trump "a total and complete dips--- " among other outlandish statements — but as with many things online, it's not what it seems.

Everybody hates smartphone notifications. They’re interruptive, distracting, annoying, and increasingly less valuable. The signal-to-noise ratio on your average smartphone’s lock screen is completely out of whack. The solution, of course, is to dive into your phone’s settings and turn as many app notifications off as you can. But it’s a constant struggle: every new app you install wants to get on your lock screen and the little pop-up box is all too easy to just say yes to. Ten-ish years into the smartphone revolution, we’re still coming to grips with which things we should allow to interrupt us.