I don't know about you guys but I can't wait to catch Backwanzus, Bing the Bung, and Lil Hack this year at Coachella. I hear they're going to play all their early stuff.

What...? Botnik Studios (previously) trained its neural network on thousands of band names to generate a completely fake Coachella 2018 lineup?

Oh, yeah, I totally knew that. Read the rest

What a haul: 100 handsets in a single backpack, found after festival-goers at Coachella trained the "Find My iPhone" app on their missing gadgets.

Reinaldo De Jesus Henao, 36, was busted after several concert-goers activated the “Find My Phone” feature on their lost smartphones and noticed that the signals led them directly to him. The ordeal was several days in the making and, according to the Indio Police Department, it took an equal effort by authorities and music fans to catch the prolific smartphone bandit.

“I noticed some chatter on social media about phones disappearing on Reddit,” said Indio Police Sergeant Dan Marshall in an interview with Gizmodo. “One of the common threads [among Reddit posters] was that they were all losing their phones at the Sahara tent.”

There's something funny about a crowd of marks so distracted and unware of their surroundings that a thief could work a hundred people before being caught by a computer program.

Photos: Indio Police Department, composited by Gizmodo. Read the rest

Stealing phones at Coachella is nothing new. My daughter had hers stolen a few years ago, and when I mentioned it to someone I ran into at the supermarket, she said her son's phone had been stolen that year as well. And then a stranger who overheard us piped in that her son had also lost his phone to an "Apple picker," as she referred to the thief.

But this year, when a gentleman from New York swept through the festival picking phones from oblivious Coachella goers, a few people turned to Find My iPhone for help. The app led them to 36-year-old Reinaldo De Jesus Henao with a backpack stuffed with phones.

According to NBC San Diego:

The crime spree was discovered when several people noticed their phones were missing and activated the “Find My Phone” feature, police said. Those signals led the victims to Henao.

Security guards detained him and when Indio police arrived they found more than 100 phones in Henao’s backpack, according to police. Some of the phones were returned to the victims that day or the next.

Image by iphonedigital Read the rest

Holo-Tupac performed last night at Coachella; here is a YouTube of very uncertain life expectancy. NSFW language! Oddly, he lacks a shimmering H badge on this forehead, as required by the Jupiter Mining Corporation's bylaws on holographic human resources. [via Super Punch] Read the rest