Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket) When seven of the biggest banks in America saw that their customers liked using apps to send instant peer-to-peer payments, they rolled out Zelle through a jointly owned company called Early Warning Services in 2017 and quickly began processing billions in payments annually. By 2021, Zelle was…
Monthly Archives: October 2022
Enlarge (credit: Nathan Stirk / Contributor | Getty Images News) On Wednesday, a jury found former Uber security chief Joe Sullivan guilty of hiding a massive data breach from federal regulators who were already investigating the ride-share company for a different breach. With that verdict, Sullivan has likely become the first executive to be criminally…
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot ) Elon Musk could be the owner of Twitter by sometime next week, but the sides have to resolve a few disagreements first. Musk told Twitter this week he is willing to honor their original deal in an attempt to avoid a court trial he’s likely to lose. But as of…
Santa Claus (David Harbour) steps in to save a family from invading mercenaries in Violent Night. I’m a sucker for what might be termed “anti-holiday” films, whether it’s action classics like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon or foreign fare like Dial Code: Santa Claus, Elves, and Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. We’re getting a new entry in this growing niche…
Enlarge / Overwatch 2 characters offer varied reactions based on whether or not they are now exempt from Blizzard’s “SMS Protect” system. Blizzard has partially walked back a controversial policy that required Overwatch 2 players to confirm a valid mobile phone number to play the game. Now, players “with a connected Battle.net account”—a group Blizzard…
The Table Football set is smaller than a competition foosball table, but it’s still fully functional. The Lego Group has done a ton of intricate, video game-themed Lego sets in the last couple of years, from 2020’s NES-and-TV replica to the love letter to Super Mario 64 to the detailed re-creation of the Atari 2600. But if…
The clever folks at Adafruit tested their Cheekmate chess-cheating prototype by embedding it in a slab of pork butt. The Internet has been abuzz for weeks about a particularly juicy chess cheating controversy that erupted last month. The reigning chess world champion, Magnus Carlsen, lost in the third round to a 19-year-old upstart, Hans Niemann,…
Enlarge / The Crew-5 mission launches from Kennedy Space Center on October 5, 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann) Four days before Thanksgiving in 2002, space shuttle Endeavour lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Among the seven crew members to the International Space Station was one Russian cosmonaut, Nikolai M. Budarin, making his third spaceflight. By…
Enlarge (credit: Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach) This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is a little unusual in that it recognizes three things: a conceptual approach to building complicated molecules, a chemical reaction that exemplifies that concept, and an application of the concept to biological systems. As a result, it’s a three-person award, with…
Enlarge / Is knowing how to build a molecule like this out of simple materials really needed for someone to practice medicine? (credit: Theasis) Over the weekend, news broke that a well-regarded professor who taught chemistry at New York University had been fired after students complained about their grades, his teaching, and the support they…