It's no secret that some messaging apps are favored by authoritarians, but one app may be explicitly designed with spying in mind. Unnamed US officials speaking to the New York Times say that the chat app ToTok is believed to be a surveillance tool for the United Arab Emirates. According to a classified intelligence report,…

Starliner didn't dock with the International Space Station as planned, but it still collected ample amounts of data across the flight, including Rosie's insights as to how humans would fare during a trip. The team likely collected about 85 to 90 percent of what they were looking for, Boeing's Jim Chilton said during a post-touchdown…

A social messaging app called ToTok has been surging in popularity around the world in recent weeks. If you happen to be one of the hundreds of thousands of users who downloaded it you should delete the app from your phone immediately.United States intelligence officials, speaking to the New York Times Sunday, warned that ToTok…

Hear the phrase “gay culture” and you’ll likely think of gay male culture, and the elements of it that’ve been normalized and celebrated. That’s been the way of things for decades now. From Brokeback Mountain's Oscar wins to Queer Eye, gay male culture has historically been given a louder and prouder platform than any other…

Ends of eras can be bittersweet. Back at the opening of 2010s, there was much optimism about new transportation technology—how it might, say, make it easier to abandon personal cars in favor of “sharing economy” solutions. This week, the Daimler- and BMW-owned service Share Now announced it would depart from the US, the latest sign…

There may only be nine days left in the year, but man, 2019 really is doing everything it can to cram a lot into its sunset. Like what? Well, a new Star Wars movie hit theaters and disappointed critics, Scotland asked for independence from the UK again, and Wakanda was finally removed from the US’s…

Kenneth Libbrecht is that rare person who, in the middle of winter, gleefully leaves Southern California for a place like Fairbanks, Alaska, where wintertime temperatures rarely rise above freezing. There, he dons a parka and sits in a field with a camera and a piece of foam board, waiting for snow.Specifically, he seeks the sparkliest,…

The only thing I dislike about the Beats Solo Pro—the company’s new noise-canceling on-ear headphones—is how they require a lightning cable to charge.That’s a big deal, not because this Android user keeps forgetting the proprietary cable, but because it’s a critique that would have been buried in most other Beats reviews I’ve ever written.Early Beats…

At first, you didn’t even need a pickax. The earliest prospectors of the California gold rush ventured into the Sierra foothills as solo travelers, sloshing through streams in search of nuggets dislodged by the current. That, at least, is the prevailing image: The individual renegade who headed west to strike it rich by his own…

Nik Milanovic Contributor Nik Milanovic is a fintech and financial inclusion enthusiast, with a decade of work across mobile payments, online lending, credit and microfinance. More posts by this contributor…