For more than 18 months, US diplomats have come down with similar illnesses that include mild brain damage and hearing loss after they claim to have heard unusual sounds. The incidents began in Cuba but reports have now spread to other countries. As authorities have ramped up eff … | Continue reading
The Orlando Police Department announced today it has ended its pilot of Amazon’s Rekognition face recognition software. Last month, the ACLU released hundreds of pages of documents from the Orlando Police Department and Oregon’s Washington County Sheriff’s Office detailing their … | Continue reading
News of the next generation of consoles has slowly trickled out over the last couple of weeks. None of the news gives us a clear view of either Sony or Microsoft’s consoles—instead we’ve only gotten teases of each. And those teases have had wildly different focuses. On one hand, … | Continue reading
“If I gave two fucks - two fucks about streaming numbers, would have put Lemonade up on Spotify,” Beyoncé proclaims on “NICE” from her joint album with Jay-Z which they dropped exclusively on Tidal over the weekend. Unfortunately for those emotionally or monetarily invested in th … | Continue reading
Reporters are regularly being denied access to America’s concentration camps along the U.S.-Mexico border. And on the rare occasion when they’re allowed in, journalists aren’t permitted to take photos or record video. But some reporters are taking a new approach to the Trump regi … | Continue reading
Following employee protests at Google and Microsoft over government contracts, workers at Amazon are circulating an internal letter to CEO Jeff Bezos, asking him to stop selling the company’s Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement and to boot the data-mining f … | Continue reading
Days after Microsoft came under intense scrutiny for working with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a report from NBC News revealed that a number of major tech firms have been raking in millions of dollars from the government agency that has, under the advisement of the … | Continue reading
More than five dozen Github contributors on Thursday signed a letter threatening to abandon the website unless Microsoft canceled its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract. | Continue reading
The EU has voted to adopt Article 13 and Article 11, bad copyright legislation that threatens the internet as we know it. | Continue reading
Instagram’s YouTube era apparently starts now. Today it officially announced IGTV, a new home for up to hour-long videos that will live on Instagram’s explore page and in a separate, standalone app. | Continue reading
For 15 years, Erez Benari’s struggle with his type 2 diabetes had been a losing one. A software engineer at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington, Benari had stuck to a restrictive diet that kept him off most carbs, along with regular insulin shots. But still, his high blood sugar lev … | Continue reading
Agents from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are routinely rounding up people suspected of being undocumented, often separating them from their children, and detaining them in what are essentially internment camps—all without due process. A new animated series wan … | Continue reading
Current prosthetic limbs aren’t yet capable of transmitting complex sensations like texture or pain to the user, but a recent breakthrough by scientists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in which a synthetic layer of skin on an artificial hand transmitted feelings of pain dire … | Continue reading
In April, the day before taxes were due, the IRS’ online filing system failed, just as procrastinators were settling into the annual TurboTax panic. How did this happen, especially before the most important tax day of the year? And why does this keep happening to government websi … | Continue reading
Microsoft employees are putting pressure on their management to cancel a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of a backlash against the agency’s policy of separating children from their families at the U.S. border. | Continue reading
Aside from the new dark mode UI in Mojave, one of the most useful additions to the next version of macOS is Stacks, a feature that automatically sorts and arranges all the files on your desktop into tidy little groups. | Continue reading
For 15 years, Erez Benari’s struggle with his type 2 diabetes had been a losing one. A software engineer at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington, Benari had stuck to a restrictive diet that kept him off most carbs, along with regular insulin shots. But still, his high blood sugar lev … | Continue reading
It’s been over six weeks since lava fissures began erupting on Hawaii’s Big Island, and there’s still no end in sight. New videos taken by the US Geological Survey reveal the dramatic extent to which the encroaching lava has reshaped the surrounding landscape, turning once gorgeo … | Continue reading
Earlier today, President Donald Trump said he’ll be directing the Pentagon to create the US Space Force, which would become the sixth independent branch of the US military. The move is meant to help the US keep pace with its rivals, but experts question the need for an entirely n … | Continue reading
Tensions are high within Microsoft, as new scrutiny is given to a partnership between the company’s Azure Government cloud computing arm and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to several Microsoft employees who spoke to Gizmodo on the condition of anonymity … | Continue reading
California’s two net neutrality bills are poised to become one, offering the state’s 40 million residents comprehensive protection against internet service provider trying to shakedown businesses and subscribers in the wake of the FCC repeal. | Continue reading
According to one actor involved in the Star Wars franchise, there is a lot going on. | Continue reading
The Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement this week with a notorious scammer who worked with telemarketers to pose as large technology firms and offer fake tech support services to the elderly. | Continue reading
Cambridge Analytica, the shady political consulting firm best known for obtaining a whole heap of personal information from Facebook users without their consent, might be dead and gone. But some of its former employees are reportedly hard at work on the re-election campaign of Pr … | Continue reading
There are eight planets in our Solar System (sorry Pluto), but collectively, these planets host over 175 moons, one or two of which may even harbor life. Indeed, our galaxy, based on what we observe here, could be bursting with exomoons, a significant number of which may be capab … | Continue reading
Foxconn, the giant Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that works with everyone from Apple to Amazon, now has a North American headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin after purchasing a large office building in the city, according to the Associated Press. | Continue reading
Puffer fish, or fugu, is well-known for being a dish that stands a good chance of killing the person it's served to. But people still eat it — partly because some people like living life on the edge, but mostly because all people like getting high. Find out how the puffer fis … | Continue reading
For the past month or so, inboxes the world over have been awash with emails about updated privacy policies and new permissions required by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You probably haven’t been reading those emails, and that’s bad news for emai … | Continue reading
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has abruptly halted its $100 million study meant to examine whether moderate drinking can be good for your heart. The decision, announced Friday, comes in the wake of a report commissioned by the federal agency that reaffirmed allegations f … | Continue reading
House Democrats are working to keep a flame to Facebook’s feet ahead of the company’s anticipated responses to lingering concerns over the handling of user data, as well its ongoing efforts to weed out foreign-bought political ads targeting American voters. | Continue reading
Consumer DNA testing is going to the dogs. A Canadian testing company has been accused of sending back supposedly human ancestry results on a faux sample that actually came from a chihuahua named Snoopy, CBC News reported Wednesday. Remarkably, it’s the second company reported to … | Continue reading
Even though there’s only one Amazon Go location so far, it seems the existence of Amazon’s cashier-less, checkout-free convenience store has left some of the company’s biggest competitors wondering how they, too, can get in on futuristic retail. | Continue reading
Elon Musk’s underground transportation business, The Boring Company, has won a bid to create an underground high-speed rail line from downtown Chicago to O’Hare International Airport. The company beat out at least four other developers for the project, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Eman … | Continue reading
Once again European lawmakers are set to vote on a bill that promises to change the internet as we know it. Experts say a misguided update to copyright laws poses a serious danger to how we share news, upload fair use content, make memes, and build startups. Now, some of the pion … | Continue reading
At the beating heart of Amazon’s unstoppable ecommerce expansion is a very basic promise: jobs. | Continue reading
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought po … | Continue reading
Before most cables ran underground, all electrical, telephone and telegraph wires were suspended from high poles, creating strange and crowded streetscapes. Here are some typical views of late-19th century Boston, New York, Stockholm, and other wire-filled cities. | Continue reading
Elizabeth Holmes lost everything—and nearly $900 million of other people’s money—when her bunk blood-testing startup Theranos went into full meltdown, resulting in the layoff of nearly all staff and civil charges of “massive” fraud for Holmes and former company president Ramesh “ … | Continue reading
Last year, Canada introduced a new lottery system used to extend permanent-resident status to the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens. The process was designed to randomly select applicants in order to make the process fairer than the old first-come, first-served system … | Continue reading
Apple has been steadily positioning itself as the anti-Facebook for a while now, and between verbal jabs aimed at the social media giant and privacy-focused product decisions, the patient goodwill campaign seems to be working. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t going to save us, and now’ … | Continue reading
Quantum computing has made it to the United States Congress. If this field of quantum information is the new space race, the US doesn’t want to fall behind. | Continue reading
Apple has been steadily positioning itself as the anti-Facebook for a while now, and between verbal jabs aimed at the social media giant and privacy-focused product decisions, the patient goodwill campaign seems to be working. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t going to save us, and now’ … | Continue reading
I’m sorry, but Instagram may start looking a lot more like YouTube in the future. | Continue reading
Google will not seek to renew its artificial intelligence contract with the Department of Defense after it expires next year, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene told employees last week. But despite the revelation that the contract has an end date, the pushback against it continues—wi … | Continue reading
One week after suffering a hack that took its website and services offline, events ticketing company Ticketfly revealed Thursday just how bad the data breach was, and it certainly doesn’t look great. According to the company, the personal information of 27 million users—including … | Continue reading