Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Instagram apparently no longer wants you to see Christmas Day photos on New Year’s Eve. On Thursday, the Facebook-owed service announced that it’s implementing new changes to its algorithm. The changes will prioritize newer posts in your feed, hopefully reducing the number of old posts that appear when you open up the app.

Coinbase, one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, has apparently had a nasty bug lurking in its system that would allow users to collect unlimited ether through a few simple steps. Thanks to a bug report, however, the company avoided disaster. VI Company, a Dutch firm specializing in FinTech, publicly disclosed the vulnerability on its HackerOne account on Wednesday.

56-year-old Dean Stearns, former principal of Vermont’s South Royalton School, is being charged with promoting sexual recordings, voyeurism, and possession of child pornography. Stearns pled not guilty to all charges on Monday. Vermont State Police say they recovered over 200 pictures and video of underaged girls in Stearns’ home that they believe were filmed using hidden cameras embedded in everyday objects around his home. Stearns has been released on a $25,000 bond.

There are some people who might take one look at this photo of Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, and freak the hell out. The Amazon founder is walking with a robotic “dog” called SpotMini—the same robot dog manufactured by Boston Dynamics, which was recently filmed opening doors like a velociraptor out of Jurassic Park. But it’s really nothing to worry about. This is fine. Everything is fine.

Police are searching for the thief, or thieves, who stole a meteorite from the Science Museum of Virginia last week. In most circumstances, a science museum heist to steal celestial space dust would sound like a plot for the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War or even Ocean’s Eight. This is not one of those circumstances: Museum officials in Richmond, Virginia, say the stolen meteorite is worth only about $1,500.

United Airlines had its third dog-related mishap this week, following up on the death of a puppy its flight attendants allegedly insisted be stuffed in an overhead bin and the accidental shipment of another dog to Japan by putting a third dog in the wrong plane. Per the Washington Post, a United flight from Newark, New Jersey, to St. Louis, Missouri, on Thursday was diverted due to the presence of a dog that should have been put onto a different flight to Akron, Ohio.

Scientists have engineered perhaps the whitest natural substance, using the same physics behind one ghostly white Southeast Asian beetle. White and black feel like opposites for a reason. Black-colored things absorb nearly all of the light that strikes their surface, while white things send the light back, scattered equally at all wavelengths. A team of European scientists have essentially created the whitest paper using this physical property.

If you’re shopping for a “garden and kitchen scale with 0.5 gram precision weighing technology,” you might be a drug dealer. And evidently some joker at Home Depot knows this. Buried in the website’s listing for such an item, there are a bunch of pictures that appear to show what appears to be a pile of weed on the scale. Ben Kling, a contributor at Clickhole, spotted the issue today. He asked in a tweet: It’s weed, Ben.

Iranians have been banned from downloading apps from the App Store, Gizmodo has confirmed. The ban was first reported by Bleeping Computer, which spoke to an Iranian security researcher. The researcher, Meysam Firouzi, said since around noon he had only been able to access the App Store using a virtual private network (VPN), which can be used to mask someone’s physical location. Gizmodo verified the ban was in place through an independent test.

Under a plea agreement, a YouTuber who shot her boyfriend in the chest during a filmed stunt last June will serve 90 days in jail. Monalisa Perez, 20, killed her boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz III, 22, in their home in Halstad, Minnesota. After the couple set up two cameras to film the stunt, Ruiz held an encyclopedia to his chest and Perez stood about a foot away and pulled the trigger of a .50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol. Perez called 911 after she fatally shot her boyfriend.