This Week in Tech

The Rise of Netflix Competitors Has Pushed Consumers Back Toward Piracy – This Week in Tech – 10/07/2018

The Rise of Netflix Competitors Has Pushed Consumers Back Toward Piracy

A new study shows that after years of declines, BitTorrent usage and piracy is on the rise again. The culprit: an increase in exclusivity deals that force subscribers to hunt and peck among a myriad of streaming services to actually find the content they’re looking for…


Police Drone Finds Girl, 16, Who Called 999 to Report Rape

A teenage girl who did not know where she was and called 999 to report that a man had raped her was found after police deployed a drone equipped with a thermal imaging camera. The 16-year-old called emergency services in the early hours of Saturday to say she was on land somewhere in Boston, Lincolnshire, with her attacker…


Apple’s New Proprietary Software Locks Will Kill Independent Repair on New MacBook Pros

Apple has introduced software locks that will effectively prevent independent and third-party repair on 2018 MacBook Pro computers, according to internal Apple documents obtained by Motherboard. The new system will render the computer “inoperative” unless a proprietary Apple “system configuration” software is run after parts of the system are replaced…


California Law Bans Bots From Pretending to Be Human

Are you talking to a real person online or a bot? In California, bots will need to identify themselves thanks to a new bill just signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown…


Tesla Model 3 Achieves Lowest Probability of Injury of Any Vehicle Ever Tested by NHTSA

NHTSA has released its probability of injury stats for the Tesla Model 3 and it achieved the lowest probabilities of any vehicle ever tested by the agency – arguably making the electric car the safest based on the standard…


Chinese Spy Chips Are Found in Hardware Used by Apple, Amazon, Bloomberg Says; Apple, AWS Say No Way

Data center equipment run by Amazon Web Services and Apple may have been subject to surveillance from the Chinese government via a tiny microchip inserted during the equipment manufacturing process, according to a Bloomberg BusinessWeek report on Thursday. The claims in the report have been strongly disputed by the technology giants…


Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham Outlines the Scale of Everyone’s Favorite Archive

AUSTIN, Texas—As much as subscription services want you to believe it, not everything can be found on Amazon or Netflix. Want to read Brett Kavanaugh buddy Mark Judge’s old book, for instance (or their now infamous yearbook even)? Curious to watch a bunch of vintage smoking ads? How about perusing the largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist literature in the world? There’s one place to turn today, and it’s not Google or any pirate sites you may or may not frequent…