An amateur astronomer in Texas captured a rare sight earlier this week when an apparent meteor slammed into Jupiter’s thick upper atmosphere. | Continue reading
It appears the Trump administration is drafting an executive order that has the potential to radically change how the content posted on social networks are governed, stripping crucial protections from tech companies and inserting much more government oversight. This is being done … | Continue reading
It’s a problem that plagues even the priciest of lenses, manufactured to the most exacting specifications: the center of the frame might be razor-sharp, but the corners and edges always look a little soft. It’s a problem that’s existed for thousands of years with optical devices, … | Continue reading
It’s a problem that plagues even the priciest of lenses, manufactured to the most exacting specifications: the center of the frame might be razor-sharp, but the corners and edges always look a little soft. It’s a problem that’s existed for thousands of years with optical devices, … | Continue reading
Astronomers have spotted a puzzling population of enormous galaxies in the far distance that will be crucial targets for upcoming telescopes. | Continue reading
If you thought the fact that an iPhone was four times as powerful as the on-board computer of the Curiosity Rover was unbelievable, take a look at the meager tech the Apollo Program used to get into space. The computer was so pitiful that the software of the Apollo guidance com … | Continue reading
Following a pair of deadly mass shootings over the weekend, including one at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, a Walmart e-commerce category specialist, Thomas Marshall, posted two memos widely within the company, urging mass action by employees to pressure management to cease the sal … | Continue reading
Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst-turned-whistleblower, may remain behind bars for up to another year and face nearly a half-million dollars in fines over her ongoing refusal to testify before a grand jury about her disclosure of classified information to WikiLe … | Continue reading
It’s been almost eight years since a younger version of myself first reported on the Panono: a camera covered ball that snaps 360-degree photos when tossed in the air. It’s been a bumpy ride for the Panono since then, and even a bumpier one for those who purchased and actually re … | Continue reading
A new online service was launched Thursday morning to keep your browsing habits out of the hands of marketers and help you automatically avoid millions of malicious websites. | Continue reading
More people hospitalized with serious lung problems linked to vaping have been found, Wisconsin health officials reported Friday. Last week, health officials reported eight cases of this strange cluster, all involving teens. The cases now involve teens and young adults. According … | Continue reading
Apple and Google recently revealed that they have temporarily stopped letting contractors listen to recordings from their voice assistants. The announcements come after reports that some of these hired hands heard Siri users doing things like having sex or discussing private medi … | Continue reading
Having to occasionally reboot a sluggish laptop after a few days of use is a minor inconvenience for a $1,000 gadget. But what about a $300 million+ commercial plane? Airlines who haven’t performed a recent software update on certain models of the Airbus A350 are being told they … | Continue reading
“I don’t have time for this,” psychologist Anne Anastasi reportedly said in 1987, before hanging up the phone on a call from Ronald Reagan’s White House. The call, according to Harold Takooshian, a psychology professor at Fordham University, was to inform her that she had won the … | Continue reading
The New York Times published an anti-Google screed by billionaire Peter Thiel last night but failed to mention a fun fact that readers might find relevant: Thiel sits on the board of Facebook, one of Google’s largest competitors. | Continue reading
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