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How online crooks use "work from home" patsies to launder goods and forward...
Brian Krebs continues his excellent investigative series on the inner workings of online ripoffs, today with a deep look at underground freight-forwarders, so-called "Drops for stuff." These services...
View ArticleIkea tries cardboard pallets
Ikea has announced a new cardboard shipping pallet, which uses fiendishly clever folding to give a loading capacity of 1,650 lbs: "As Ikea uses some 10 million pallets a year, if the experiment is a...
View ArticleAmazon recruits 5000 UK cornershops to act as delivery depots
Amazon UK has recruited 5,000 cornershops to act as pickup depots for people who order goods online. The Amazon shipments will be delivered to convenient shops with late opening hours for customer...
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The secret history of shipping pallets
Tom Vanderbilt's "The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy," in Slate is an absolutely fascinating look at the role that pallets play in the modern world, starting with their origin in...
View ArticleThe heaviest item to qualify for free Amazon Prime shipping weighs 1,672 lbs
MarketWatch wanted to know how many 1,000+lb items in Amazon's database qualified for free Prime shipping. A lot, it turns out, including a 1,672 lb gun-safe (via Consumerist)
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Boxes sealed with ATHEIST tape lost by USPS 10X more often than controls
Atheist Shoes ("a cadre of shoemakers and artists in Berlin who hand-make ridiculously comfortable, Bauhaus-inspired shoes for people who don't believe in god(s)") noticed that a disproportionate...
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HOWTO move an immensely delicate 50'-wide circular electromagnet
Fermilab just got a new Awesome Magnet, a 50'-wide jobbie that can't be tilted by more than a few degrees without suffering irreparable harm. It's in New York, though, and Fermilab is outside of...
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Container ship breaks in half, sinks, burns
Here's a gallery of photos showing an enormous container ship breaking in two at the middle, and then the stern section sinking. The bow of the ship -- the Mitsui O.S.K. Lines's MOL Comfort -- was...
View ArticleAmazon Prime Air: drone-based 30 minute delivery
Jeff Bezos took to 60 Minutes to announce Prime Air, a drone-based 30-minute delivery system for densely populated areas that comes with its own video design-fiction illustrating how it might work....
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How the standard, high-quality disaster-relief tarpaulin came to be
Tarpaulins are critical supplies for disaster relief and humanitarian aid, serving as cover, shelter, carpet and all-round utility infielder. (more…)
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Pirates hacked shipping company, cherry-picking targets based on cargo
An unnamed shipping company had its unpatched content management system hacked by sea-pirates, who then sorted the ships at sea by the value of their cargo to help prioritize attacks to maximize the...
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Luxury overnight bus with sleeper cabins shuttles between LA and San Francisco
Sleepbus is a startup that's "disrupting long distance transport" -- it's a bus. (more…)
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Uber loves competition, when it's the one doing the competing
Uber terminated access to its API for Urbanhail, a startup that compared pricing and availability among ride-hailing apps and taxi companies, after chastising the company's founders for violating its...
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18% of the world's cargo ships are sitting idle
In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, international shipping sank to record lows -- but container ship companies kept on building, turning out some of the biggest ships the seas have ever seen. (more…)
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UK gives OK to Amazon for drone delivery exploration
Amazon.com says it has entered into a partnership with the British government to get the nation's aviation authority approval for deliveries via small drones. (more…)
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Disney wants to build an "aerial tramway" between the Disney World parks
Disney's "skybuckets" are fondly remembered as the best place in the themepark to do some sneaky kissin', but they were also a magnet for antisocial behavior, from smoking weed to spitting on people...
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Truck-driving is a modern form of indentured slavery
USA Today undertook a year-long investigation into southern California truckers, so-called "independent contractors" who form a critical link from America's busiest port to the rest of the country,...
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Small town Uber driver quits, launches a one-driver rival
Suzanne Ashe was the only Uber driver in Haines, Alaska, and the app wouldn't let her stay logged in and available because the rides came so infrequently. (more…)
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A common satellite comms package for ships and oil rigs has a backdoor that...
An audit of Inmarsat's AmosConnect 8 (originally sold by Stratos Global, now an Inmarsat division) reveals that the ship-to-satellite internet product has a deliberate hidden backdoor -- and an...
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Rail barons and the new gilded age: one-percenters travel in style by...
The Wall Street Journal profiles rich "train buffs" who buy vintage Gilded Age railcars and refurbish them, then pay to have them hitched to Amtrak trains and pulled between their city houses and...
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