You may think you know your browser pretty well at this stage, but there’s one very powerful feature that doesn’t get a lot of attention, and that you might have overlooked: User profiles. If you’re on Chrome, Edge or Firefox, they can make a real difference to how you get your web browsing done.Read more...
Google’s VP of People Operations Eileen Naughton will be stepping down later this year. Naughton, who has been at the company for 13 years, became the company’s head of human resources back in 2016 and has since overseen the breakdown between management and rank-and-file employees.Read more...
A surgical robot capable of reconnecting vessels with diameters as tiny as 0.3 millimeters has been tested on human patients, and the results are promising.Read more...
Sony announced on Tuesday another feature for its digital cameras that the company hopes will expand their adoption among professional photographers: a software development kit that allows third-party developers to create their own custom tools to remotely control and operate the cameras.
After a months-long battle between several states and the third and fourth-largest U.S. wireless carriers, Judge Marrero from the District Court in Manhattan has finally ruled in favor of T-Mobile’s $26 billion acquisition of Sprint, potentially clearing the last hurdle for the wireless carrier mega-merger.Read more...
It comes as no surprise that the guidance computers aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft were impossibly primitive compared to the pocket computers we all carry around 50 years later. But on his website, an Apple developer analyzed the tech specs even further and found that even something as simple as a modern USB charger…Read more...
by James Whitbrook and Gordon Jackson on io9, shared on (#4Z758)
Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever would not mind donning a bat-mask in the DCEU. Wild rumors about the Parasite spinoff series alleged a Marvel star could join the show. The Creepshow reboot’s second season is getting an updated Creep. Plus, Legends of Tomorrow goes after serial killers and podcast ads, and James Jude…Read more...
The government of Thailand has denied a Dutch-based cruise ship entry to its ports over coronavirus fears, despite the fact that no one on board has any signs of the illness that has killed at least 1,018 people and sickened over 43,000 globally.
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero is set to allow the $26.5 billion T-Mobile and Sprint merger to go forward, clearing the path to merge the nation’s third and fourth-largest wireless carriers into a single behemoth that would rival Verizon and A&T, reports indicated on Monday night.
Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the disastrously failed blood testing/scam startup Theranos, is trying to have charges against her and former company president Ramesh “Sunny†Balwani thrown out on the grounds they’re “too vague†and leave prosecutors too much room to cherry pick evidence, Bloomberg reported on Monday.Read more...
A preventable cancer might be virtually eradicated in the U.S. within the next two decades, according to a new study out Monday. It estimates that cervical cancer could be eliminated by as early as 2038, given current rates of vaccination and pap smear screening. Making sure that 90 percent of women receive screening…Read more...
California has been the legal beachhead of labor’s fight against gig work platforms, and unsurprisingly, Uber, Postmates, and other similar companies have done everything in their power to challenge having to reclassify their contract workforces as employees. But a ruling today in the state’s Central District Court…Read more...
Following similar announcements from companies including LG, Nvidia, and Ericsson, Sony, TCL, and Amazon have just announced today that they too will pull back on their plans to attend Mobile World Congress 2020.Read more...
by Dharna Noor on Earther, shared by Andrew Couts to on (#4Z67Q)
The Trump administration submitted its 2021 budget proposal to Congress on Monday, and folks, it’s great! Just kidding. It’s awful on many fronts, especially when it comes to the climate and environment.
Campaign managers worldwide should have their internet privileges revoked, period, but here’s the latest stunning fiasco: Netanyahu’s political party the Likud exposed the country’s entire voter registry by uploading it to an app, Haaretz has reported. An “anonymous tipper†claimed to have easily accessed personal…Read more...
by Cheryl Eddy on io9, shared by Andrew Couts to Gizm on (#4Z67R)
One of sci-fi’s go-to plots is “disaster in the depths of space,†where a catastrophe endangers the mission and, ultimately, human lives. HBO’s new series Avenue 5 takes that well-worn idea and dunks it into a mix of biting wit, cruise-ship cheese, and unlikable characters you somehow can’t get enough of.Read more...
The intentionally public feud between two powerful and deeply unlikeable men continues—this time over a lucrative government contract which was awarded to Amazon rival Microsoft in October. Who will win, and can it please be neither of them?
by Dharna Noor on Earther, shared by Andrew Couts to on (#4Z611)
Parasite, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, is remarkable. It’s the first film in a language other than English to win the Best Picture award. It features exactly zero white people. It deals explicitly with the cruelties working class people face at the hands of South Korean neoliberalism. It’s equally …Read more...
A telescope in Canada has found a source of mysterious fast radio bursts that repeat every 16 days, according to a new paper. It’s the first regularly repeating fast radio burst known to science.
It’s almost gotten to the point where Apple is as well known for its terrible keyboards as it is for changing the world with personal computers and smartphones. But now that the latest cause to be championed at the Academy Awards is Apple’s hardware failures, maybe we’ll finally get the MacBook keyboards of our dreams.Read more...
by James Whitbrook on io9, shared by Andrew Couts to on (#4Z614)
Last night’s Doctor Who was an existential deep dive into the power of human cooperation, of asshole gods, of mental health, and of the importance of communication on all three of those fronts. Or, rather, it wanted to be. In trying to present a trippy lens into all those ideas, it tripped over a problem that’s…Read more...
by Beth Elderkin on io9, shared by Andrew Couts to Gi on (#4Z616)
Star Trek: Picard is in the midst of its dynamic debut season and fans have noticed a few, well, interesting choices the series has made so far. Showrunner Michael Chabon is breaking down the intent behind the F-bombs, earbuds, and sunglasses, and diving into the history of Star Trek on network television and human…Read more...
If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again are words that Tim Borden apparently lives by, because after an incident thwarted his Guinness World Record attempt back in 2019, this past weekend he finally succeeded in launching the world’s largest aerial firework ever, with a behemoth that weighed in at 2,797…Read more...
Over the last 150 years, the males of certain invasive mongooses have undergone some serious tweaks to their sexual anatomy. New research suggests that the mongooses’ anal pads—which produce a scent that is apparently very alluring to female mongooses—have become comparatively shrunken, while their testicles have…Read more...
When we think about the most dangerous places online, chances are, phrases like the “dark web†might bubble to the top of those conversations. But it turns out that one of the most dastardly domains isn’t full of literal garbage and porn—it’s just... a domain. And now you can buy it for yourself.Read more...
There may never be a more accurate way to sum up the experience of using a smartphone than Kieran Haden’s new iOS game: Quadracade. Players face a random collection of retro-inspired mini-games that on their own are each easy to beat, but here you’re challenged to play four of them at the same time.Read more...
by James Whitbrook on io9, shared by Andrew Couts to on (#4Z5SA)
Birds of Prey’s colorful aesthetic is ripped right out of the world of comics, but the tack the movie takes with its comic book characters treads a fine line between respecting decades worth of stories and, in some cases, bringing new takes to the table. It was an opportunity that, for its stars, meant a chance to…Read more...
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that four members of the Chinese military have been indicted for the 2017 hack of Equifax that compromised the data of at least 145 million people. The theft of social security numbers, addresses, and driver’s license information has been characterized as the largest…Read more...
Even though Samsung managed to do it without actually revealing its name, it seems the smartphone giant just couldn’t help itself from teasing its next foldable phone during the Oscars.Read more...
The technologies that once promised to free us from soul-crushing office jobs have mostly resulted in just the opposite. But Mitsubishi is leveraging one technology in an attempt to make working in a sea of cubicles feel less depressing. It’s developed an LED-lit panel that can simulate natural light coming in from…Read more...
One of the reasons for choosing Android over iOS is the extra customization options you get—you can really dive deep when it comes to tweaking the appearance of Android, pixel-by-pixel, and there are a huge number of apps around to help. Make use of some or all of these to give your Android device a whole new look.Read more...
There’s no shortage of stylish Wear OS watches—it’s literally Fossil’s main reason for existing at this point. The company and its small army of designer brands make up the bulk of Android-friendly smartwatches out there. The problem is, they’re all functionally interchangeable. They run the same software, sport the…Read more...
Social media is awful and whatever pleasures it confers in the form of mildly amusing memes or a fleeting sense of community/belonging are massively outweighed by its well-documented downsides. Their psychic consequences are of interest to its owners only in the sense that, past a certain threshold, people might turn…Read more...
The number of coronavirus cases on a cruise ship currently docked in Yokohama, Japan has dramatically risen by 65, bringing the total number of cases linked to the passenger vessel to 135, according to Japan’s NHK News.Read more...
The Mobile World Congress (MWC), the wireless industry’s premiere event of the year, has lost its first U.S. attendee. Nvidia has announced that it will not attend MWC in Barcelona, Spain due to concerns over coronavirus, making it the fourth exhibitor to withdraw or scale back its participation in the event.Read more...
The coronavirus outbreak has been compared to the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic of 2002-2003 for obvious reasons. Both diseases originated in China, are caused by a similar virus and are believed to have originated in wild animal markets. However, new data released this weekend reveal that…Read more...
by Alyse Stanley on Earther, shared by Alyse Stanley on (#4Z3SE)
Four rare mountain gorillas have died after being struck by lightning in an equal parts peculiar and unfortunate turn of events for an endangered species that only recently topped 1,000 individuals.
Facebook and Twitter declined to take down a modified video posted to President Donald Trump’s accounts on both platforms that creates a questionable mash-up of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s viral speech-ripping moment during the State of the Union address. The dispute with the social networks was made public by Drew…Read more...
by Julie Muncy on io9, shared by Alyse Stanley to Giz on (#4Z3SG)
More shakeups for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the sequel to 2016’s Doctor Strange and one of the most anticipated heralds of a more, well, multiversal Marvel Cinematic Universe.Read more...
The folks behind the largest known hack of user data to date are finally paying up. Yahoo, now owned by Verizon, recently agreed to pay $117.5 million as part of a proposed class action settlement stemming from a series of breaches in the 2010s that affected 3 billion people—basically Yahoo’s then-entire user base.
by Julie Muncy on io9, shared by Alyse Stanley to Giz on (#4Z3PA)
Devs, Alex Garland’s enigmatic new thriller, is releasing pretty soon, and yesterday we got not one but three new teasers, fleshing out the unnerving world of mysterious conspiracies and unjust deaths.Read more...