Amazon-owned home security company Ring is pursuing contracts with police departments that would grant it direct access to real-time emergency dispatch data, Gizmodo has learned. | Continue reading
Netflix collects a lot of data about you. But now, some Android users are finding that it’s also tracking ‘physical activity’ data via their phones. | Continue reading
Believe it or not, contact lenses are still an option for those who wear glasses that accommodate multiple prescriptions, but because of the unique approach they take to remedying vision problems, it can sometimes take over a month to get used to using them. Researchers at the Un … | Continue reading
Simply moving through the physical world in regions with massive, powerful surveillance systems threatens to strip one of their anonymity, and in places with anti-government demonstrations, that threat is disturbingly amplified. But protestors in Hong Kong are countering these gr … | Continue reading
Amazon’s home security company Ring has garnered enormous control over the ways in which its law enforcement partners are allowed to portray its products, going as far as to review and even author statements attributed to police in the press, according to emails and documents obt … | Continue reading
The suggestion that humans will soon set up bustling, long-lasting colonies on Mars is something many of us take for granted. What this lofty vision fails to appreciate, however, are the monumental—if not intractable—challenges awaiting colonists who want to permanently live on M … | Continue reading
Some species of moth can produce ultrasonic emissions that confuse echolocating bats, and they do it by rubbing their sex organs together. | Continue reading
It’s hard not to be envious of Spider-Man’s ability to dodge attacks using his superhuman reflexes when you still drop your toast on the floor some mornings. But a radioactive spider bite might not be the only way to gain superhuman reflexes, because researchers have demonstrated … | Continue reading
We’re getting quite used to our algorithmic overlords. We’ve ceded, for the most part, that complex and invisible rulesets determine who will see our missives, travel pics, and RT dunks. More substantially, millions of workers now toil, essentially, for algorithms, whether via Ub … | Continue reading
Last month, YouTube announced a site-wide change to its hate speech policy, saying it would no longer tolerate videos promoting Nazism, white supremacy, or any other content “alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion” of others … | Continue reading
Two Republicans and one independent were the only holdouts Wednesday as the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Stopping Bad Robocalls Act by a nearly unanimous vote. | Continue reading
Bag End, the home of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, is where The Lord of the Rings Saga begins and ends. It’s there the dwarves come to meet about traveling to the Lonely Mountain and where Samwise Gamgee settled after the Baggins leave Middle-earth. There are few more important p … | Continue reading
After nearly a decade in court, Google has agreed to pay $13 million in a class-action lawsuit alleging its Street View program collected people’s private data over wifi from 2007 to 2010. In addition to the moolah, the settlement—filed Friday in San Francisco—also calls for Goog … | Continue reading
Apple killed a laptop that had a lot more fans than I expected last week. Around the Gizmodo office, my colleagues groaned when news broke that following a refresh of its laptop line, there would no longer be a standard MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar. Apple, in their eyes, was g … | Continue reading
“There’s no way you can take care of that problem on your own... It requires an incredible amount of time, diligence, and almost a sense of paranoia. Which is not what you want to be living with.” | Continue reading
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has officially joined the chorus of people concerned about what FaceApp is really up to. | Continue reading
You might not have heard much about DisplayPort, as the HDMI rival is limited mostly to high-end monitors, dedicated graphics cards, and other premium, professional tech. A new version of DisplayPort is upon us though—the standard’s biggest upgrade yet—and it could be enough to e … | Continue reading
Some members of the United States House are concerned the Pentagon may have unleashed disease-infected ticks that caused the spread of Lyme disease. | Continue reading
President Trump’s attack this Sunday on four first-term congresswomen was widely viewed as one of the most racist he’s ever produced. Not everyone agrees, however. Twitter, whose platform serves as a catapult for Trump’s bigoted attacks on migrants, has ruled internally that Trum … | Continue reading
Billionaire Peter Thiel has called for a federal investigation into Google’s refusal to work with the U.S. military and says that the tech giant’s relationship with the Chinese military is “treasonous,” according to a new report from Axios late Sunday. | Continue reading
Chinese tech firm Huawei is planning on laying off hundreds of U.S. workers after landing on a Commerce Department blacklist that has savaged its ability to do business stateside, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. | Continue reading
Amid growing concern about the vulnerability of the U.S. election system to hackers, Pennsylvania told election officials they had to upgrade their machines last year. But according to a Saturday report in the Associated Press, though some 60 percent of those systems have been up … | Continue reading
Scientists have detected a signal around an exoplanet that might be the signature of a circumplanetary disk—a disk of debris that could one day form into exomoons. | Continue reading
The U.S. Army—which has already been testing robotic squad vehicles like the Multi-Utility Tactical Transport (MUTT) and semi-autonomous targeting systems like the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS)—says it will conduct live-fire testing of a new Robotic Co … | Continue reading
In August of 1953, a British-built Centurion tank drovethrough the brutal desert terrain of South Australia, its destination a parkingspot a few hundred yards from an atomic bomb test. That was just the beginningof this tank's amazing, and perhaps tragic, operational life. | Continue reading
Neuralink, the super-secretive neuroscience company co-founded by Elon Musk to develop “ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers,” has evidently decided to show some of its hand. | Continue reading
Just in case you were holding out any hope that Google didn’t let humans listen to voice recordings from Google Home and Google Assistant, stop doing that. One of the humans that Google hired to review voice recordings recently leaked over a thousand Assistant recordings to a Bel … | Continue reading
Sometime in the three years before he murdered nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylan Roof sat down at his computer and typed “black on White crime” into Google. According to Roof’s online manifesto, something about the deat … | Continue reading
Four Maryland students charged with hate crimes for plastering their school in racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic words and imagery just days before their high school graduation last year were identified by school administrators because their phones had automatically connected … | Continue reading
No, it isn’t just you. Reddit is down. | Continue reading
Robocalls are annoying as hell, and thanks to new techniques like caller ID spoofing that makes phone spam appear like it’s coming from a legitimate number, the problem is only getting worse. | Continue reading
A new round of laptops appeared in the Apple Store this morning, which is bad news if you ask me. Yesterday, there were four distinct models of MacBooks. Now, there are two. Neither of them is particularly impressive. | Continue reading
Instagram is trying to make that much harder to be an asshole on its platform—and even get assholes to consider the error of their ways. | Continue reading
Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak deleted his personal Facebook account last year and is now telling everyone else they should do the same. Woz was stopped by TMZ at Reagan National Airport in D.C. recently and warned that the lack of privacy on the platform isn’t worth it for most p … | Continue reading
Certain platforms might take down your homemade pornography, or censor your conspiracist podcast, but in the U.S. the internet is a fairly open place. As long as what you’re peddling isn’t actively illegal—or as long as you’re not peddling illegal wares too flagrantly—you’re free … | Continue reading
There is growing criticism of Philadelphia officials’ decision to install sonic devices called the Mosquito that constantly emit extremely loud, high-frequency noise from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. every night designed to be audible only to persons aged 13 to 25, according to a Frid … | Continue reading
Scientists in Florida have detected the largest seaweed bloom in the world. Extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the African coast, the unusually large bloom is threatening marine life and coastal regions, with the researchers warning it’s likely a sign of things to come. | Continue reading
UK telecoms aren’t taking warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies that telecommunications gear produced by Chinese tech giant Huawei could pose a security risk incredibly seriously, at least according to a report from the Observer, which reported on Saturday that all four major … | Continue reading
Today I found out that during the height of the Cold War, the US military put such an emphasis on a rapid response to an attack on American soil, that to minimize any foreseeable delay in launching a nuclear missile, for nearly two decades they intentionally set the launch codes … | Continue reading
Anyone who bought ebooks through the Microsoft Store is in for a rude shock in the coming days. The good news? You can get a refund. The bad news? All of your books are going to be deleted this month. | Continue reading
You may have heard of the famous P versus NP problem. If you can prove or disprove its cryptically short equation, you’d be a million dollars richer—and maybe even billions of dollars richer, depending on your scruples. | Continue reading
The European Union is making a major safety push to add fake noises to electric vehicles, but some may sound goofier than others and that’s causing disagreement in the UK. | Continue reading
You probably have not heard of the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), but by its name could likely guess, correctly, that it’s a trade group representing the likes of Walmart, Target, Dollar General, Coca Cola and other world-swallowing corporations, most of which have d … | Continue reading
NASA reached an important stepping stone to a crewed mission to the Moon today, with a successful demonstration of the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort system. | Continue reading
Lake City, Florida paid out a bitcoin ransom worth $460,000 to hackers who disabled the city’s computer systems with sophisticated ransomware last month, hot on the heels of a $600,000 ransom paid out in similar circumstances by Riviera Beach, Florida just weeks later. Now, as fl … | Continue reading
Anyone who bought ebooks through the Microsoft Store is in for a rude shock in the coming days. The good news? You can get a refund. The bad news? All of your books are going to be deleted this month. | Continue reading
If you notice the ads being served to you are eerily similar to stuff you were just browsing online, it’s not all in your head, and it’s the insidious truth of existing online without installing a bunch of browser extensions. But there’s now a tool that, while comically absurd in … | Continue reading
The latest chapter of a largely behind-the-scenes encryption fight unfolded on Wednesday when Trump administration officials held a National Security Council meeting focused on the challenges and benefits of encryption, according to a report in Politico. | Continue reading