OpenAI's Text Generator Is More Funny Than Dangerous

Elon Musk-backed non-profit OpenAI, which claimed to have developed a machine learning-powered text generation software so powerful that it couldn’t be ethically released to the public, has... done just that. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Vulnerability in Ring Doorbells Left the Door Open for Hackers to Open the Door

Bitdefender–the tireless actuary of the Internet of Things–were able to crack into homeowner’s personal WiFi networks via Amazon’s Ring doorbells, the video-enabled auto-locks that allow homeowners to remotely open the door. And as Bitdefender’s Chief Security Researcher Jay Bala … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

We Now Have Direct Evidence That Vitamin E Is Behind Vaping Illness Outbreak

On Friday, federal health officials announced a breakthrough in solving the mystery of why people are getting seriously sick from vaping. They detected vitamin E acetate—an oily, synthetic form of the vitamin commonly added to black-market THC vape products—in lung fluid samples … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Ahead of layoffs, WeWorkers demand compensation for lost equity

As the drunken mist clears in the wake of Adam Neumann’s long con that was WeWork, employees are calling for a modicum of sanity. In preparation for thousands of layoffs, which the company has reportedly delayed because it can’t afford severance, the non-unionized group who call … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Fresh Look at New Horizons Data Shows Plutos Far Side in Unprecedented Detail

When New Horizons zipped past Pluto on July 14, 2015, the NASA spacecraft was only able to observe one side of the dwarf planet. Scientists have now reviewed data collected by New Horizons during its approach and as it traveled away, resulting in the most detailed analysis yet of … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Why Are People Suddenly Getting Mysterious Text Messages?

Early Thursday morning, people all over the U.S. and Canada began receiving strange text messages that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The texts were from people they knew but they lacked context and appeared to have been sent months ago. And it really freaked some folks out! M … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

The Universe May Be Round

Scientists analyzing data from a defunct satellite say we should all consider that our universe might be round, rather than flat. The consequences, they explain in a new paper, could be crisis-inducing. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

NTSB: Uber Self-Driving Car in Crash Saw Victim; Wasn't Programmed to Handle

Federal investigators have determined an Uber self-driving car that killed 49-year-old pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona in March 2018 lacked programming to either recognize or respond to the presence of jaywalkers on the road, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Henry Kissinger Warns That AI Will Fundamentally Alter Human Consciousness

Speaking in Washington, D.C. earlier today, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger said he’s convinced of AI’s potential to fundamentally alter human consciousness—including changes in our self-perception and to our strategic decision-making. He also slammed AI developers … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Top Civil Rights Lawyers Warn Mark Zuckerberg of Potential Criminal Liability

In a letter aimed at gutting Facebook’s rationale for allowing misleading and dishonest political ads across its platform, a prominent civil rights organization on Tuesday issued a stern warning to Mark Zuckerberg, outlining a number of federal laws to which, the group claims, F … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

8Chan Returns as 8kun

The anonymous forum 8Chan—a haven for far-right extremists, conspiracy theorists, and internet filth—came back online today after going dark in August due to its association with several mass shootings. Rebranded as 8kun (“kun” and “chan” are both honorific titles in Japanese for … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Google's New Anti-Smartphone Apps, Ranked

We know that we’re all spending too much time glued to our phones, rather than looking at the person we’re talking to, the movie we’re watching, the sunset we’re missing, or the children we’re ignoring, and Google and Apple know it too. Google has pushed out six ‘experimental’ ap … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

14-Year-Old Genius Alaina Gassler Solves Car Blind Spots

Using some relatively inexpensive and readily available technology you can find at any well-stocked electronics store, Alaina Gassler, a 14-year-old inventor from West Grove, Pennsylvania, came up with a clever way to eliminate the blind spot created by the thick pillars on the s … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

I Miss the OLPC, a Little Laptop That Dreamed Bigger Than It Could Deliver

It never came close to realizing its creators’ aspirations of developing a cheap $50 laptop that could introduce kids from all over world—even those in developing nations—to the personal computer. But the OLPC XO-1, the first device released by the One Laptop Per Child organizati … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

How to rig a clinical trial (or: why most nutrition findings are bunk)

“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about … | Continue reading


@io9.gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Untitled Goose Game Vulnerability Allows Hackers to Sow Chaos

The Untitled Goose Game that became a viral phenomenon right after its launch a month ago has been vulnerable to hacking, according to a report from a security researcher. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

How to make a black hole in the lab

Nearly 50 years ago—before Interstellar, A Brief History of Time, and certainly the Event Horizon Telescope—postdoctoral researcher William Unruh was attempting to explain black holes to a crowd at an Oxford University colloquium. There were no reference points with which to comp … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Top Secret Spaceplane Lands in Florida After Spending Over 2 Years in Orbit

The U.S. Air Force’s top secret spaceplane, the Boeing X-37B, landed in Florida early Sunday after 780 days—over 2 years and one month—in orbit around the Earth. And we still have no idea what it was doing while it was up there. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

7.5M Adobe Accounts Exposed by Security Blunder

The customer records of nearly 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud users were discovered by a security researcher this month in an inadvertently exposed database which has now been secured. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

The Most Futuristic Developments We Can Expect in the Next 10 Years

With the decade winding down it’s time for us to set our sights on the next one. The 2020s promises to be anything but dull. From the automation revolution and increasingly dangerous AI to geohacking the planet and radical advances in biotechnology, here are the most futuristic d … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Comcast Slides Reveal It's Lobbying Against Plans to Encrypt Browser Data:Report

Comcast, one of the largest and most reviled internet service providers in the country, has reportedly been lobbying against efforts by companies like Mozilla and Google to switch on or test, respectively, a tool for encrypting your browser history, thereby making it trickier for … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Google's Pixelbook Go Is Weird, but Holy Crap That Battery Life

The Pixelbook Go is the cheapest Chromebook Google has made to date. Google’s flagship Chrome OS devices typically start at $1,000, so the $650 price tag on the base-level Pixelbook Go is incredible. Compared to other Google-made Chrome OS devices, the Pixelbook Go is a fantastic … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Any Half-Decent Hacker Could Break into Mar-a-Lago. We Tested It

Two weeks ago, on a sparkling spring morning, we went trawling along Florida’s coastal waterway. But not for fish. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Internal Cybersecurity Memo: White House Is Bound to Get Hacked

In the 1,006 days since Donald Trump became president, his administration has shown little vigilance when it comes to its own security, and a new internal memo suggests the White House is working to weaken its own cybersecurity safeguards. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

First Look at 'Sycamore,' Google's Quantum Computer

Between the mountainous and coastal vistas of Goleta, California, sits an unassuming office on the side of a building next to the freeway. It could belong to any Southern California company; workers sit in gray cubicles beneath fluorescent lights, and there’s a rack to hold emplo … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Google Staff Suspect Internal Software Is Designed to Suppress Employee Dissent

Staff at Google are wary that the company may be building “an internal surveillance tool” with the purpose of crushing employee dissent, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Google Confirms Achieving Quantum Supremacy

This morning, Google scientists confirmed in a blog post that their quantum computer had needed just 200 seconds to solve a problem that they claim would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

You Lost How Much on Scooters?

Lime, the company whose business model is buying thousands of electric scooters and just sort of leaving them there in the hopes people will ride them, is on track to lose $300 million this year. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

WeWork Delaying Mass Layoffs Because It Can't Afford Severance

WeWork, the company that is either a transformative way of life or a dangerously overleveraged real estate company posing as a cultish tech firm, is planning on laying off thousands of employees. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

The Army Just Contracted with Tom DeLonge's UFO Group to Study 'Alien Alloys'

To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA)—the UFO research organization founded by former Blink 182 star Tom DeLonge—has struck a research deal with the U.S. Army filled with eye-popping references to exotic technologies. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Could Protein Spun Like Cotton Candy Make Lab-Grown Steak Possible?

Synthetic meat products might come even closer to the texture of slaughtered meats with the help of what are essentially modified cotton candy machines. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Elon Musk Smoking Joe Rogan's Weed Somehow Ended Up Costing Taxpayers $5M

Last year, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk went on YouTube host Joe Rogan’s show and smoked some weed. That was unfortunate, because SpaceX happens to be a U.S. military contractor with security clearances, and the U.S. government does not like marijuana—and in this instance, it d … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

How That Giant Homemade Modular Synth Wound Up at MIT

Like electronic music pioneers Robert Moog and Don Buchla, who came before him, Joseph Paradiso seemed destined to become a synth wizard. As a child, he was fascinated with music; soldering his own creations and experimenting with tape looping. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

The Pixelbook Go Is a Smaller Cheaper Google-Made Chromebook

We’ve seen plenty of leaks of Google’s latest Pixelbook, but the company finally showed off the actual thing today, a reasonably small Chromebook with a reasonably small price tag for a Google-made product. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Everything Google Announced Today

In a somewhat unconventional spectacle that included a fireside chat about the company’s environmental initiatives and photographer Annie Leibovitz dropping by to talk about smartphones, Google’s Pixel 4 event in New York today included few surprises, and at times, even fewer det … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Voyager probes work together to measure shockwave from sun

The Voyagers 1 and 2 spacecraft measured the Sun sending a pulse like a “tsunami” into the interstellar medium, according to a new paper. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

ABC News Broadcasts Fake Syria Bombing Video That's from KY Military Show

ABC News aired a video on Sunday that host Tom Llamas said depicted a Turkish attack in northern Syria against Kurdish civilians. Turkey is indeed pushing into Syria and slaughtering Kurds along the way, but the video ABC News played last night is from a military gun demonstratio … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

There’s an Automation Crisis Underway, It's Just Mostly Invisible

What actually happens to workers when a company deploys automation? The common assumption seems to be that the employee simply disappears wholesale, replaced one-for-one with an AI interface or an array of mechanized arms. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Huh, Bill Gates sure hung out with Jeffrey Epstein a lot more than he admitted

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates had a much closer relationship with late financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein than Gates has previously stated, the New York Times reported on Saturday, including multiple visits to Epstein’s now-infamous New York townhouse. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Da Vinci Bridge

Some 500 years after his death, researchers are still discovering just how talented and brilliant Leonardo da Vinci was. Architects and civil engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a 3D printer to create a replica of a bridge da Vinci designed, but never buil … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

150k Americans Have Rare DNA Fluke, Study of 23andMe Data Finds

A supposedly rare genetic quirk might be more common than we think, according to new research out Thursday. The study, based largely on 23andMe data, suggests that one in every 2,000 people are born with two copies of a gene from only a single parent, often with no serious health … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Boeing 737 Max Will Return in January, American Airlines Says

American Airlines said on Wednesday that it expects its fleet of Boeing 737 Max jets to return to passenger service later than expected on Jan. 16, 2020, after the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation sign off on revisions intended to remedy flaws that … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Physicists Create Lab System That Looks Like an Axion

Scientists have discovered a phenomenon that looks a whole lot like a dark matter particle in a laboratory system, according to new research. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Senators Warn Visa, Others Against Associating with Facebook's Cryptocurrency

As anxieties mount over Facebook’s plan to launch a cryptocurrency called Libra, Capitol Hill lawmakers are facing increasing pressure to intercede. This week, that intervention has taken the form of ominous letters by Democratic members of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Won't Someone Please Think of Microsoft?

Late last night, an email leaked to advocacy group Fight For The Future detailed how Github—the code repository Microsoft bought last year for $7.5 billion—would be renewing its contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the forefront of carrying out th … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Apple's Rumored AR Glasses Could Arrive in Early 2020, Analyst Report Claims

Following hints about a potential Apple AR headset found in iOS 13 earlier this fall, a new report from a well respected Apple analyst suggests that Apple’s AR glasses could arrive as early as the first half of 2020. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Essential Debuts Project Gem Phone with Elongated Design

Here’s something to raise your eyebrows. Essential, the company founded in 2015 by disgraced former Google exec Andy Rubin, released images of its Project Gem smartphone on Tuesday—and it basically looks like a phone chopped down the middle. | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago

Nicotine in E-Cigarette Vapor Linked to Lung Cancer in Mice

A new study out Monday is yet more evidence that vaping isn’t the completely safe alternative to smoking it was once thought to be. The researchers claim to have found evidence, in mice, that e-cigarette vapor is capable of causing certain kinds of cancer. But there’s still a lon … | Continue reading


@gizmodo.com | 5 years ago