Gizmodo

If the writers had had their way.Read more...

Dozens of contract journalists at Microsoft’s MSN and Microsoft News organizations are being phased out in favor of artificial intelligence, according to multiple reports this week.

It’s been a little over a year since the last episode of Game of Thrones aired, giving us a lot of time to reflect on whether or not we were satisfied with how things ended up. This is true for the actors who brought those characters to life, too. And for Kit Harrington, at least, it turned out okay.Read more...

This is a really long finale, said the joker to the thief. At roughly 141 minutes, the three-parter that ended Battlestar Galactica way back in 2009 wasn’t a short ending by any stretch of the imagination. But the original cut, which clocked in at around four hours, was even more extensive. The only problem was, it…Read more...

Lucifer, Fox’s formerly orphaned Satanriffic procedural and now Netflix’s beloved child, is one step closer to yet another season renewal.Read more...

Update, 4:31 p.m. ET: After canceling a planned launch earlier this week due to bad weather, SpaceX successfully launched NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley into orbit on the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft Saturday.

It’s like clockwork. Seasons change. Fads come and go. And, once every 17 years, millions of cicadas emerge from the ground to scream. And scream. And scream.Read more...

Facebook will not remove an incendiary post from President Donald Trump essentially calling for authorities to enter Minneapolis and open fire on Americans protesting police brutality there, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Friday. Earlier in the day, Twitter flagged identical posts on both the official White House…Read more...

Like everything else in 2020, the fourth prototype of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket has gone up in flames. It’s the latest in a series of spectacular explosions to plague the company’s Starship program.

Less than three years after its debut, Amazon has banished its style-centric Echo Look device to the Goodwill pile. The company stopped selling actual units back in December 2019, but the company said this week it would be officially dropping support for the device in July. According to CNET (and first spotted by …Read more...

Like most industries largely run on automation, the tech that underlies digital advertising is far from perfect, which is why—despite the best efforts of industry bigwigs—sometimes the pipes powering the industry don’t go where they’re supposed to. Sometimes, they’re funneling a brand’s name (and that sweet brand…Read more...

Just when pandemic scams have peaked to the point that it’s reasonable to incinerate all mail, the government is sending economic impact payments in unmarked envelopes with a very shady return address.

The Gallery has finally gotten to the Baby.Read more...

In Uber’s apparent Hail Mary bid to buy Grubhub as a measure meant to help its beleaguered business, talks have reportedly stalled over Grubhub’s demand for a breakup fee should the deal fall through.

A murdered teen is resurrected as a revenge-driven alien who picks off the gang members who killed him in a series of deadly car races. That’s the basic plot of The Wraith, the 1986 film written and directed by Mike Marvin. I had an odd affinity for it growing up but hadn’t watched from the beginning in several…Read more...

The world’s collective forests have become shorter and younger overall in the past 50 years, according to a study published in the journal Science on Friday. This means that forests have less capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere and are less hospitable to the many species that rely on them for shelter. Oh,…Read more...

Uber has a new way of shipping humans for the relatively low hourly rate of just 50 bucks.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has flown a Predator drone above ongoing protests against police brutality in Minneapolis, according to flight logs.

For the past year or so, Facebook has mandated that certain page owners and political ad-spenders on the platform verify their identities as a way to curb interference in the coming election. Now, these checks are being extended to certain people’s profiles, too. According to a post made on the company’s blog…Read more...

When the dinosaur-snuffing asteroid hit Earth some 66 million years ago, it produced a subterranean pool of magma roughly nine times larger than the current caldera at Yellowstone National Park, according to new research.

I don’t know about you, but I’m over workout earbuds that only come in dark, boring colors. The options usually range from black to grey—occasionally navy, if you’re feeling spicy. Apple-owned Beats is now giving those of us who want more color a few more shades to choose from in its Powerbeats Pro lineup, making some…Read more...

Disney has produced dozens of animated musicals over the decades, with hundreds of songs in their repertoire. It might be hard to quantify the best songs Disney has ever made (although the answers can probably be found on The Little Mermaid soundtrack), but we can give an opinion on which songs are best from each film.Read more...

In the past few days, an alarming headline has made the rounds: “Half of Fox News viewers think Bill Gates is using pandemic to microchip them, survey suggests.” This idea is nonsense, of course, but coronavirus conspiracy theories have spread almost like the virus itself across the meticulously calibrated algorithmic…Read more...

Parts of the U.S. are starting to open up again, but with covid-19 continuing to plague communities throughout the country, it’s still important to maintain proper social distancing where needed when out in public. To help make staying six feet away from others easier to visualize, Google made a simple augmented…Read more...

Scientists have discovered a potentially new species of the adorable “dumbo” octopus in a very unique place. At more than 4 miles (6,957 meters) under the Indian Ocean, the newly discovered octo was found at the deepest depths of any cephalopod has been observed. The discovery—published in the journal Marine Biology…Read more...

A band of thieving monkeys attacked a lab researcher in India and made off with blood test samples taken from covid-19 patients.

Streaming is more important than ever. As huge numbers of people stay home during the global pandemic, many have turned to the plethora of services for a much-needed escape. At the start of each month, most streaming services do a little shuffle, adding new movies and taking some off, and we’re here to help with your…Read more...

HBO Max’s odd and decidedly messy release this week just got a little stranger. Despite promising a number of popular titles that the company said would be available immediately in a press release last week, those titles were nowhere to be found as of Wednesday. And now, it appears the company has yanked the memo from…Read more...

The Greek government announced today that it will open up to international tourists from 29 different countries on June 15, according to the English-language Greek news outlet Ekathimerini. People from countries with high infection rates for the coronavirus, including the U.S., UK, Sweden, Spain, and Brazil, will not…Read more...

There are a million flavors of shithead on this bountiful planet, but far and away one of the most unforgivable are the subset of rat bastards who engage in the practice of “tip-baiting” gig workers. As of today, a handful of lawmakers are demanding Instacart stop allowing the practice, and are asking the FTC to get…Read more...

Big tech companies haven’t been immune to the economic challenges of the global pandemic, but those hardships haven’t been borne equally. A New York Times report reveals that while Google has recently added some perks for full-time staff to make working from home easier, it’s also rescinded job offers for “several…Read more...

Poor Phillipa Georgiou. We didn’t get to spend all that much time with Michelle Yeoh’s noble captain of the Shenzhou in Star Trek: Discovery before she got a Klingon knife to the chest, but her performance lived on as she got to take on Georgiou’s cartoonishly villainous Mirror Universe self. But as fun as that is,…Read more...

Here’s our roundup of the latest developments and research into covid-19, including more evidence of racial disparities during the pandemic, the possible higher risks from for-profit nursing homes, and Brazil’s worsening disaster.Read more...

The White House taunted Twitter on Friday by reposting Donald Trump’s tweet calling for the outright extrajudicial slaughter of Americans protesting police brutality in Minneapolis, which the social media site on Friday hid behind a label for “glorifying violence.” Twitter has now responded by doing exactly the same…Read more...

Sonic the Hedgehog will live to run another day. Paul Feig is getting into fairytales and the creators behind the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie discuss crit-ical thinking. Plus updates from The Umbrella Academy, a tiny new look at Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, and more. TGIF, spoilers!Read more...

Not every app on your phone has to be a jack-of-all-trades hub that covers everything from smart home devices to text messaging. Sometimes apps can just do one simple job and do it very well to earn a place on your home screen. These are some of our current favorites.

If you happened to find yourself in 17th-century Naples, you were in for a rough time. The Plague of 1656 was in full swing and would claim an estimated 300,000 lives in Naples alone. If you were one of the unlucky souls to come down with the buboes and high fever symptomatic of the disease, a visit from the plague…Read more...

Let’s be honest: There’s nothing exciting about basic tablets anymore. I don’t mean those fancy (and pricey!) convertible tablets like the iPad Pro, which can double as a slate and a laptop. I’m talking about the kind of tablet that lives in your living room (probably on a coffee table) that you use to surf the web…Read more...

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CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his camera crew were arrested Friday morning by Minnesota state police live on television in the aftermath of a protest over the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of local police.

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President Donald Trump sent out a tweet overnight encouraging violence against protesters in Minneapolis who are demanding justice for the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man whose life was taken by a white police officer, as captured on video by a bystander. Twitter has placed a warning on Trump’s tweet,…Read more...

Souls: Much like content, Twitter harvests them, they’re monetizeable, and closely associated with hell.Read more...

The facial recognition org Clearview AI—which you might know as the firm that secretly harvested the photos of millions of people from their social media profiles before pawning said photos to law enforcement—is officially facing a lawsuit from the Illinois-based branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, per a …Read more...

On Thursday, Donald Trump escalated his inane, frothing, and mostly one-sided feud with Twitter and other social media companies he has accused of silencing right-wing voices online to a dangerous, legally questionable new level.

As HBO pivots to whatever it’s trying to achieve with its messy new streaming service Max, Apple. appears to be shopping for content and talent to help make it a standout giant in quality streaming—a new HBO Now if you will. You know since AT&T seems intent on killing the real one.Read more...

Scientists have spent three decades trying to locate half of all the “normal” matter that’s supposed to exist in the universe. A new paper is claiming to have finally found this missing stuff, in a discovery made possible by measuring incoming fast radio bursts.

A substantial portion of the world’s population deals with chronic and mysterious digestive issues, the results of a large global survey indicate. More than a third of people said they recently had symptoms of a functional gastrointestinal disorder, the research found, with “functional” meaning that their symptoms had…Read more...

It shouldn’t have taken a global pandemic and subsequent quarantine to inspire a way to easily watch the same show at the same time with our friends and family remotely, but it did. Hulu is now the first major streaming service to offer a group chat feature on its platform so you can watch the same show at the same…Read more...

Two months ago, as the novel coronavirus pandemic flared, nurse Francis Gualta was called to help in England’s intensive care units. Except he’d never operated a ventilator before. He’d never had to wear full personal protective equipment. Now, after weeks of helping patients the best he can, and seeing some die,…Read more...