But fear not, BBQ-ers! The Atlantic Wire's resident cicada expert is here to help! Cicadas and humans alike can celebrate this long weekend in peace, together, at the cicada-cue. Like so.
After hearing a lot about the "flat" new look of iOS 7 that may or may not be revealed next month, there's finally been some light shed on details of what the latest iPhone design basics might look like — and, well, things start off pretty much in the dark.
The Israeli mobile GPS startup Waze has another mega-suitor in Silicon Valley, with Google reportedly joining the bidding war and topping the $1 billion offer rumored to be coming from Facebook. What is it, really, about this mapping app that's drawing acquisition prices as high as — if not higher than — Instagram and Tumblr?
Doesn't Ashton Kutcher know what happens to people who complain about how terrible Twitter has gotten since the good old days? They get shamed with the following adage: Twitter is what you make it, bro.
In an attempt to move beyond standard promoted tweets, Twitter is trying so hard to legitimize its business model that, well, you're about to find out just how much Twitter really knows about where you shop. And the main privacy model "doesn't actually provide protection," a leading online privacy firm tells The Atlantic Wire.
Shazam, the song-identifying app whose logo keeps making its way onto TVs for second-screen expansion, has expanded its smart-listening deeper into your life with a new automatic tagging feature that basically turns your iPhone or iPad into a personal little wiretap.
After taking a little break from the classic Mac-vs- PC wars to punch a little lower (at Samsung), Microsoft has decided to return to its old rivalry, hoping to revive slow Surface tablet sales with a little anti-Apple advertising.
Twitter has added two-step verification to increase its security after all the recent hacks into high profile media accounts, but you should go sign up for it right this minute — because everyone's vulnerable to password attacks these days, even if the new cellphone hiccup seems cumbersome.
While it houses a lot of cooky ideas that never see the light of day, the "top-secret" innovation hub birthed Google Glass and Google's driverless cars. So as outlandish as some of the following ideas may sound, they're all in the works or they suddenly aren't, per Businessweek's new cover story — yes, even the balloons — and, hey, maybe they'll come true, too.
As much masochistic fun as it may be to follow the cicada sex invasion via Twitter's ever popular Vine app, the brave backyard directors chronicling the East Coast's ongoing insect phenomenon don't seem to be enjoying the process too much — many of them are just resorting to violence against the little guys, who die almost instantly upon their return to earth anyway.
Despite all the glowing reviews of the HTC One, it's still not beating Samsung's Galaxy S IV in the high-end, non-iPhone smartphone market, and HTC is currently falling apart — at least in part because of "disastrous" sales that wiped the HTC First (aka the Facebook phone) on its way out of the market.
It's time we took some advice from George Gershwin and stopped bickering over the right and wrong way to say words: Let's call the whole thing off on this GIF pronunciation battle.
Every single one of Tumblr's 178 employees will get money from the $1.1 billion Yahoo deal, which means that if the site hadn't let go of its three editorial team members last month, they too would have received $371,000 — each.
The U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had some tough questions for Tim Cook, CEO of computer giant Apple which stands accused of tax avoidance to the tune of billions of dollars. Questions like: "Why the hell do I have to keep updating my apps on my iPhone all the time and why you don't fix that?"
Kids, listen up: don't start dropping out of high school just because the Tumblr CEO David Karp, who just sold his Internet company to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, had neither a high school nor a college degree.
The typical gadget review these days can run thousands of words and cover hundreds of features before telling you what you really want to know: is this thing any good? The Atlantic Wire will cut to the chase after spending a week with a device and give you just the bottom line.
The cicadas haven't even reached their mating season climax and already the visual evidence of their East Coast presence is alarming.
All this crying over how much this Yahoo acquisition will ruin Tumblr is a predictable part of the cycle of tech company acquisitions these days — no matter how smart or dumb the buy — and says nothing about how the impending marriage will do.
The new editor of The Hairpin treats mix-tapes like books and commutes by Instapaper.
Harmless scientific marvel though it may be, the summer of bug love has arrived — perhaps entering your backyard or urban escape as soon as this weekend — and it's pretty gross. For those of you with a fear of flying insects, it's downright terrifying. Here's a handy guide for East Coast entomophobes, with the help of the Internet's ultimate cicada expert.
Ahead of a public hearing Friday pitting upstart mobile food vendors against sedentary street vendors and old-school sidewalk restaurants, George Farrell — a Washington Times "community" member — settled on a reason to take sides: "propane tanks inside food trucks could easily become explosive devices" and "may pose a terrorism threat."
Three and a half months after Twitter's stop-motion inauspicious foray into pseudo-video began, Vine has officially made it in the Internet world, thanks to a pitch-perfect (if kinda creepy) meme built on a meme god of Internet yore (as in, like, last year).
For the cord-cutters and cable-company haters out there eagerly awaiting the next era of television, in which you no longer have to pay your provider for a bundled package of junk you never watch, YouTube officially launched 14 of its rumored pay-to-subscribe channels on Friday. It's not top-shelf, but it's a start. Just ask Washington.
The iPhone game of the moment is so addictive that it's impossible to even talk about how addictive it is to play the color-coded connect-the-dots game without stopping to play another round — or 25.
The first two months of Google Glass testimonials resulted in lame sports videos and bad photos taken with the wearable machine, but a new first-person video that surfaced last night finally gives the face computer-less masses a look at what you actually see from behind the glass.
A judge may have thrown out class-action status for the lawsuit against Hearst for using unpaid interns at its magazines, but the disgruntled former coffee-fetchers will continue the fight.
Facebook's in "advanced talks" to buy Waze, an Israeli mapping start-up, for somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion, according to multiple sources at Calcalist and TechCrunch, making it the social media company's biggest acquisition to date.
Google Glass has itself a marketing problem: the glasses might be as cool as some Glassheads say, but the rest of us non-early adopters are stuck with boring first-person videos and banal pictures of the world's foremost face computer, without any of the cool face-computer functionality.
The Onion has released a detailed account of how it believes the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into its extremely popular Twitter account the other day, providing a rare glimpse at the simple yet devious spear-phishing emails that can crack major media outlets — and probably you.
It's never a good sign when a cellphone company lowers the price of a cellphone so soon after its release, which makes the new, very low $0.99 price of HTC's so-called Facebook phone so very foreboding.
It's still relatively unclear whether the Assad regime broke the Syrian Internet — even if nobody else, even "terrorists," really could — but after a 19-and-a-half-hour near complete shutdown across Syria, service started coming back today, according to multiple analytics firms.
Google may or may not introduce a new design for Google Maps at a conference next week, when the company will publicly discuss about "the future of Google Maps." But people are definitely complaining about the rumored design getting passed around the web today. Here's how.
Did the Assad regime just shut down Syrian online access again? For several hours on Thursday — beginning around 3 p.m. Eastern time, or 10 p.m. in Damascus — Internet traffic in the warring country ground to an almost complete halt, just like it did in November when the government blacked out web usage to stymy opposition maneuvers.
The masters of the heartwarming, love-your-children promotional video at Google are tugging at the heartstrings of the American family once again with a new Mother's Day spot called "Here's to the Moms" — and they mean all moms.
So far Google Glass is illegal exactly nowhere, despite an over-the-top front-page story in today's New York Times that suggests Google is already facing a bunch of legal pushback over its face computer of the future. What will Google do about all this?
Brian Lam, founder of gadget review site The Wirecutter, on his pared down media diet. "I try not to open Twitter too often. Some editors, I don't know how they're getting any work done."
The very horny and very loud insects haven't arrived in full force for the Mid-Atlantic cicada sex invasion quite yet, but when they do, they will come with a huge body-count advantage over people, outnumbering us 600-to-1, or maybe even 20,000-to-1.
The popular tech writer was already straddling the blogger/investor line as both a TechCrunch writer and a partner at CrunchFund, the VC fund started by fellow blogger-without-morals Michael Arrington. The more surprising part of today's news, then, is that Siegler would deign to work for Google Ventures after writing so unabashedly in favor of Apple all these years.
Of all the various etiquette guides to emerge with prescriptions for the inaugural class of Glassholes, there has been one recurring piece of advice that probably won't please Google: The most polite thing a Google Glass owner can do is not wear Google Glass at all.
In this definitive telling of the history of Instagram we get CEO Kevin Systrom's reasoning for ultimately choosing Facebook's $1 billion offer over Twitter's $520 million—and it has less to do with money than you might think.
Google Glass, that doomed-at-early-adoption device about which we learned so much this week, will not become a tough seell to the masses because of a bunch of white male dorks trying out the face computer of the future. It's the design itself — in form, and the function inspired by something that, well, makes everyone who puts on a pair look so frickin' weird.
The late Beastie Boy Adam Yauch (a.k.a MCA) has received the "ultimate honor for a kid from New York City" with a Brooklyn Heights park named after him as of Friday afternoon.
After years of maintaining that BlackBerry was the only smartphone smart enough for the Department of Defense security blanket, the Pentagon has finally approved the Samsung Galaxy S IV, and sources say Apple's iPhone is expected to follow some time later this month. Here's how they got good enough.
Now that Instagram has introduced a "Photos of You" section for tagged snapshots just like its parent company Facebook, you can forget the beautiful images of pro photographers and amateurs turned pro — your square cellphone art is about to degrade into filtered party pics.
Despite the many fears of cyber-stalking to arise from the soft launch of its digital seeing eye, Google has made it pretty difficult to take photos and videos of unwitting people with Google Glass — except for one developer who's already built a workaround privacy nightmare.
People of the Acela corridor: The time to prepare for four to six weeks of the little six-legged sexual power saws is over. People of America: The invasion is here. Prepare your backyards — and your ears.
We have some good news for irritated Facebook phone users. In the coming weeks Facebook plans to add controls to let users hide all those pesky mobile ads if they so desire, a Facebook spokesperson told The Atlantic Wire this afternoon.
Just when we were getting excited about a standalone streaming service from HBO — like HBO Go, except without paying for a cable subscription — HBO now says it was just kidding and won't cut that cord... ever.
The most ravenously picked apart teenage digital trail in the history of American terrorism got picked apart again Wednesday afternoon: If you unravel the criminal complaint against Tsarnaev's fellow 19-year-old friend, you'll find an instantly historic LOL. But LOL has lost its historical significance, and everybody needs to calm down with their investigative linguistics.
The latest design for Apple's mobile operating system might not be ready in time for the World Wide Developer's Conference this June, but when it comes it will look a lot different than the current iPhone software—the look of which hasn't much changed since its debut in 2007.
Beyond aesthetics, professional Glass reviewers and amateur experimenters alike have reported some flaws — bad battery life, a bad fit, vulnerability to hackers, and beyond — that might make future buyers reconsider the $1,500 investment when the glasses of the future are available to the masses.
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