Not too long ago, we here at Giz Asks contemplated what might happen if the entire internet shut down at once. One imaginative stumbling block, in playing out the implications of that scenario, was how something like that could happen in the first place. And so—without advocating … | Continue reading
Starting next Tuesday, Nevada residents may choose to opt-out of having their personal information resold by online businesses. A privacy bill, signed into law this May, requires website operators to respond to requests from consumers and halt the sale of their personal informati … | Continue reading
Dark mode is everywhere. Apple’s newly released iOS 13? Dark mode. Android 10? Dark mode. Windows 10, macOS Mojave, Chrome, Firefox, Gmail, and Slack—blessed, healing dark mode. It’s the must-have feature for the dim days of 2019, its spread eliciting a collective gasp of ecstasy … | Continue reading
Some of the most distant rocks in our solar system act in a way that suggests there’s some massive object out there we haven’t been able to see. A planet? Maybe. But why not a small black hole? | Continue reading
One of the largest and coolest collections of Soviet computers in the world resides in an apartment complex in Mariupol, Ukraine. Dmitriy Cherepanov started Club 8-bit with a small collection of computers built when the Soviet bloc was crafting its own personal computers. | Continue reading
A serious flaw in Google Keystone, which controls Chrome updates, is capable of doing major damage to macOS file systems on some computers and has been linked to data corruption that struck Hollywood video editors and others on Monday evening, Variety reported. | Continue reading
A California-based security company on Wednesday revealed its researchers had discovered more than 1.7 terabytes of proprietary telecommunications data left publicly online, including hardware specifications for a lawful surveillance device used throughout the Russian Federation. | Continue reading
After debuting just shy of two years ago, Boston Dynamics has finally made its Spot robotic dog available for sale, but don’t expect to find a great Black Friday deal on this bot at Best Buy come Thanksgiving. The company hasn’t made them available to the average consumer just ye … | Continue reading
NASA’s Mars InSight lander has observed mysterious nighttime pulses that can last as long as two hours, according to a conference proceeding. | Continue reading
Electric motors guzzle electricity, which can be especially hard on a rechargeable battery. The power cells used in electric vehicles, like Teslas, have an expected lifespan of around 300,000 to 500,000 miles, but a team of battery researchers believes it has come up with a recip … | Continue reading
Mere days before Microsoft workers are set to walk out of their jobs and publicly call on their employer to reduce carbon emissions and sever its ties with fossil fuel companies, the tech giant has announced a major partnership with two of the biggest corporations in the oil indu … | Continue reading
Two individuals were arrested this week in connection with a fraud scheme that manipulated thousands of victims into paying for invented tech services that they didn’t need. | Continue reading
On Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he was committing the world’s largest online retailer to meeting the terms of what he christened “The Climate Pledge.” Broadly outlined, signing the pledge, which Bezos hopes others will do as well, commits a company to meeting th … | Continue reading
A Google researcher’s paper claiming to have achieved quantum supremacy, a major early milestone in the field of quantum computing, appeared on a NASA website this week before being removed, the Financial Times reports. | Continue reading
A Google researcher’s paper claiming to have achieved quantum supremacy, a major early milestone in the field of quantum computing, appeared on a NASA website this week before being removed, the Financial Times reports. | Continue reading
It turns out WeWork’s dicey wifi problem is exactly as bad as suspected. | Continue reading
A Facebook employee died on Thursday at the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters around 11:30am local time. | Continue reading
Apple’s FaceID authentication system started moving smartphone users away from relying on fingerprints to secure their mobile devices, which are arguably less secure. But researchers think they’ve come up with an even better biometric tool for protecting a device that uses a part … | Continue reading
Just on the heels of finding three cubed numbers that sum to 42, scientists have passed another important milestone by finding three enormous cubes that sum to 3. | Continue reading
A group of indigenous people in Bolivia are famous for their healthy hearts, but a new study shows that they are experiencing higher rates of obesity after the introduction of processed cooking oils to their diet. | Continue reading
блядь! An explosion at Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology (Vector) resulted in a fire, glass blown out throughout the building, and one worker suffering third degree burns on Monday, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Vector is one of the on … | Continue reading
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. Because literally, that’s what they’re doing, they’re rebooting Battlestar Galactica again. | Continue reading
Adapting videos to various screens has been a challenge ever since movies shot for wide theater screens were first broadcast on square TVs. We’ve now got devices like tablets and smartphones added to the mix, so Adobe has created an AI-powered plugin that can automatically prep a … | Continue reading
An experimental trial to reduce the number of mosquitoes in a Brazilian town by releasing genetically modified mosquitoes has not gone as planned. Traces of the mutated insects have been detected in the natural population of mosquitoes, which was never supposed to happen. | Continue reading
Richard Stallman is leader of the free software movement and father of GNU. Naturally, he's in demand as a speaker. And so NATURALLY he has a completely ride-the-orangutan insane tour rider. | Continue reading
The prestigious multidisciplinary MIT Media Lab built a “personal food computer” that worked so poorly that demos had to be faked Theranos-style, per a weekend report in Business Insider. Word of the project’s troubles comes as the Media Lab’s attempts to cover up its extensive f … | Continue reading
Israel was allegedly behind the Stingray spy devices discovered around Washington, D.C. in 2017, according to an explosive new report from Politico, which notes that they were primarily intended to spy on President Donald Trump and his associates. The Israeli government denies th … | Continue reading
Superbolts, the strongest lightning bolts, occur at surprising times and in surprising places, a new study has found. | Continue reading
Star Wars, at its core, is a very silly franchise. A delightfully silly one, more often than not, fascinated with minutiae and over-explanation in few ways other sagas would be. But one of my favorite, most enduring silly facts about it is the galaxy far, far away’s fascination w … | Continue reading
The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up the government’s existing program of demanding people entering the country hand over the details of their presence on social media, CNN reported on Friday. | Continue reading
Next year’s interns at Microsoft have a high bar to beat because 2019's class made a whole damn musical over the summer. | Continue reading
On Tuesday, the automation-focused meme candidate Andrew Yang tweeted, “Fast food may be first.” He was commenting on a new CNBC report that reported annual employee turnover rates of 100 percent at the Panera Bread chain—a figure that is low for the fast food industry, which can … | Continue reading
A large monitoring station used to gather important scientific data in the Baltic Sea has mysteriously vanished. | Continue reading
Your mouthwash could have a bizarre effect on how exercise affects your body, a new study this week suggests. The study found that swigging mouthwash can prevent exercise from lowering your blood pressure as it normally does. Strange as that sounds, the results highlight just how … | Continue reading
A series of genetic variants can influence handedness, according to a new paper. | Continue reading
Things could not have been much worse for Uber in the summer of 2017. | Continue reading
Thanks to PC gaming, fancy mice with high DPI sensors and tactile mechanical keyboards have become a lot more popular. Yet when it comes to productivity, Logitech’s MX-series mice are pretty much unmatched, and with the new MX Master 3, Logitech has propelled its flagship mouse i … | Continue reading
Amazon is “quietly testing scanners that can identify an individual human hand as a way to ring up a store purchase” with the aim of rolling it out at retail locations, specifically its subsidiary Whole Foods, per a Tuesday report in the New York Post. | Continue reading
The CEO of an energy firm based in the UK thought he was following his boss’s urgent orders in March when he transferred funds to a third-party. But the request actually came from the AI-assisted voice of a fraudster. | Continue reading
Facebook says it’s giving the ax to one face-scanning tool and introducing a wider rollout for another—this time by giving users a heads up about it first. | Continue reading
Saying goodbye to the warm summer months is a little easier when it also means the war against mosquito bites is coming to an end. They’re not just an itchy annoyance, however, mosquitoes can spread dangerous diseases and viruses, but researchers at Brown University might have co … | Continue reading
In the aftermath of yet another mass shooting in America, loved ones grieve, gun control advocates call for common-sense reforms, and politicians suggest new “solutions” that won’t do anything about guns. These proposals frequently focus on mental health, but a new plan before th … | Continue reading
Starting around 3:45pm Eastern, the account of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sent out approximately 20 out-of-character tweets, which included the apparent names of a hacking crew, as well as racial slurs. | Continue reading
Amazon’s home security company Ring tracked how its users responded to law enforcement requests for surveillance footage captured by Ring devices, and it provided overviews of that data to police departments upon request. | Continue reading
Following an Apple notice that a “limited number” of 15-inch MacBook Pros may have faulty batteries that could potentially create a fire safety risk, multiple airlines have barred transporting Apple laptops in their checked luggage—in some cases, regardless of whether they fall u … | Continue reading
Amazon’s home security company Ring is opening up about just how many police departments it’s partnered with across the country. Today the company published a map showing hundreds of departments with which it’s inked deals. | Continue reading
A man who has insisted he is the man behind the pseudonymous identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of bitcoin, has been ordered to pay half of his cryptocurrency bounty to a man believed to be his former colleague. | Continue reading
With a statewide marijuana decriminalization ordinance set to take effect at the start of 2020, Cook County, Illinois is slated to automatically clear “tens of thousands of cannabis convictions” with the assistance of an algorithm, the Chicago Tribune reported on Wednesday. Cook … | Continue reading