Mission planners for the lunar Gateway project have decided how the lunar outpost should orbit the Moon—and it’s actually quite brilliant.Read more...
Slack is resetting roughly 100,000 user passwords for accounts that were active in 2015. The company has only recently learned that an old security breach from four years ago was perhaps worse than previously thought.
by Cheryl Eddy on io9, shared by Andrew Couts to Gizm on (#4KE9Z)
Pennywise hath risen, and it’s time for the Losers’ Club to reassemble in Derry and take him down for good. We got a first glimpse at Andy Muschietti’s It Chapter Two back in May, but this brand-new trailer gives us a much better look at the troubled grown-up versions of the kid characters from the first film—and, of…Read more...
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 earn the technology a place in more…Read more...
Prior to the first Moon landing, scientists had good reason to believe the lunar surface was covered in a fine layer of dust. While this might not sound like a big deal, it presented a host of concerns to the Apollo mission planners.
If you’ve been bragging to your friends about the excellent deal you scored during Amazon’s Prime Day stunt, don’t. There’s little chance you did as well as many members of the Slickdeals forum did. Thanks to an error on Amazon’s website, several of them were able to score some very expensive photography gear…Read more...
Flying is objectively horrible. We let the magic of heavier-than-air transport cloud the fact that we pay hundreds of dollars to be squeezed into spaces too small for comfort so we can be treated like shit and spew greenhouse gas into the sky. Unless we’re rich or flying across the world, we usually don’t even get a…Read more...
by James Whitbrook and Gordon Jackson on io9, shared on (#4KDVP)
Kevin Smith teases not one, not two, but a trio of Batmen actors in the Jay & Silent Bob reboot. Quentin Tarantino promises his Star Trek film is basically Pulp Fiction with phasers. Snoopy is heading to space for Apple TV+. Plus, Arrow and Supergirl promote some regulars, behind the scenes on the bonkers Cats movie,…Read more...
Donald Trump held another neo-fascist rally yesterday in North Carolina, where the crowd chanted things like “treason,†“traitor,†and “send her back,†while the president talked about Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Online dictionary searches in the U.S. from last night show…Read more...
Google has yanked several apps from its Play Store after cybersecurity firm Avast identified them as “all likely designed by a Russian developer to allow people to stalk employees, romantic partners, or kids,†CNET reported on Wednesday.
The European Union is planning an antitrust investigation into e-commerce giant Amazon over its treatment of third-party merchants that rely on the company’s marketplace to sell goods, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
by Beth Elderkin on io9, shared by Tom McKay to Gizmo on (#4KCXB)
For the past few years, the CW has been on a hot streak. The network is producing some of the best comic book shows on television and has branched out beyond the DC universe with Riverdale, Charmed, and others. Its latest venture into hard sci-fi, Pandora, accomplishes something the CW hasn’t done in years: It’s made…Read more...
Netflix, our collective trash heap of mostly unwatched or unwanted content, would like you to know that despite a tidal wave of speculation that it’s not going to start serving you up ads. The stock market darling is suddenly losing subscribers and executives appear to be a little touchy about it. Halfway through its …Read more...
by Germain Lussier on io9, shared by Tom McKay to Giz on (#4KD18)
The men primarily responsible for Game of Thrones won’t be attending San Diego Comic-Con after all. David Benioff and DB Weiss have pulled out of the show just two days before they were scheduled to appear in front of a crowd of thousands.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced this week that it has elected to declare the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo a “public health emergency of international concern,†a decision that comes nearly a year after the outbreak was first declared and after the infection of thousands of people.Read more...
A comprehensive robocall-fighting piece of legislation—that would help stop the robocall scourge and prevent American consumers from paying for blocking tools—is finally slated for a U.S. House of Representatives voteRead more...
On Tuesday, the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to ban the use of facial recognition technology by the city, including its police force. It’s the third ban of the tech by a U.S. city since May.
The fact that no one has died from being struck by dark matter is enough proof to rule out certain ideas about the mysterious stuff, according to one new theory paper.Read more...
You can’t spend hours combing through archives of breached data to see if your login credentials were leaked, so Mozilla’s rebranded in-browser password manager, Lockwise, will soon notify users if their saved usernames or passwords were exposed in a data breach, and recommend that they change them.
People who prefer using menstrual cups during their period can be reassured by a new study out this week. It suggests the products are cost-effective and environmentally friendly compared to tampons and pads, while still being safe and able to provide roughly the same level of protection against leakage. But there…Read more...
Like approximately 126 million other people, I willingly plunge my brain into the sewer that is Twitter every morning, expecting varying levels of awfulness until I surface around 6 or 7 pm from a platform that’s unwilling or unable to improve its user experience in any meaningful way. Call it an occupational hazard.
As our lives are increasingly lived online, what seems like an innocuous (or even silly) digital act can end up having serious privacy consequences. It’s a bleak reality that many are confronting once again thanks to a face-morphing app that ages the photos of users—who probably don’t know they have signed away the…Read more...
by Brian Kahn on Earther, shared by Maddie Stone to G on (#4KC5S)
We’ve reached the “what if we just make it snow a lot to save Antarctic’s ice sheets†phase of our time on Earth. Good job, everyone.Read more...
Choppy video taken by a camera next to Buzz Aldrin’s window is the only visual record we have of the first Moon landing. Using archival data and new high-res images, a team from NASA has recreated the Apollo 11 landing, showing Neil Armstrong’s perspective for the very first time.
Facebook’s new digital currency, Libra, has the potential to be worse than the September 11th attacks. At least that’s what Democratic Congressman Dril (sorry, Congressman Brad Sherman) of California said today at a House Committee on Financial Services Hearing in Washington, D.C.
There was a time in our not-too-distant past when the idea of a personally piloted object that spits fire would seem totally batshit insane—in fact, it still seems batshit insane. But makeshift flame-throwing drones have been around for a minute, and now, you can purchase one of your very own.Read more...
Fifty years ago this week, humankind landed on the Moon for the first time. It was one of the most impressive technological feats ever pulled off, filled with peril and uncertainty. Given that, it’s fair to wonder just what exactly NASA scientists were worried could have happened to the astronauts during and after…Read more...
by Matt Novak on Paleofuture, shared by Andrew Couts on (#4KBW0)
Nuclear weapons can wipe out an entire city in the blink of an eye, but what about all the good they can do? That was the pitch from this 1965 comic strip that extolled the virtues of nuclear bombs to build everything from highways to a “second Panama canal.â€
Just last week, Nintendo finally announced the Switch Lite—a cheaper and more portable version of the classic Switch but without the original’s TV docking support. However, it seems the Switch Lite wasn’t the only hardware upgrade Nintendo had planned, because now Nintendo has announced a new model for the standard…Read more...
by Brian Kahn on Earther, shared by Maddie Stone to G on (#4KBW1)
The only thing worse than the hottest time of summer is a heat wave on top of the hottest time of summer. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what the eastern U.S. is to deal with.
July 17 is World Emoji Day, a fake but harmless holiday created by the founder of Emojipedia. To celebrate this year, Ford slyly revealed that it has succeeded in surreptitiously creating the pickup emoji. The company hired a marketing firm and a technology agency to pitch the Unicode Consortium of the pickup truck…Read more...
by Yessenia Funes on Earther, shared by Maddie Stone on (#4KBHS)
Construction preparation for what is supposed to be one of the world’s biggest and most powerful telescopes was set to begin Monday in Hawaii, but opponents aren’t making it easy.Read more...
by James Whitbrook and Gordon Jackson on io9, shared on (#4KBDE)
Zack Snyder’s upcoming Netflix zombie film sets its cast. Guillermo del Toro debunks a wild Disney rumor. Quentin Tarantino ponders if his R-Rated Star Trek film should really be his final project. Plus, a new look at the Batman: Hush animated adaptation, and the return of Rocko’s Modern Life. To me, my spoilers!
On Tuesday evening in San Francisco, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk finally shed some light on what Neuralink, his company that has raised $158 million to develop “ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers,†has been up to since its launch in 2017.
On Tuesday, Google vice president of public policy Karan Bhatia told members of the Senate Judiciary that the company’s Project Dragonfly—a search engine for the Chinese market that was widely reported to involve huge concessions to state censors and protested by its own staff—has been “terminated†and employees…Read more...
by Sophie Weiner on Splinter, shared by Tom McKay to on (#4KAGM)
CNN, a nominally respectable cable news network, invited an honest-to-god neo-Nazi on air today to represent those who think racism is good, actually, as part of a discussion about the president’s most recent racist meltdown. This is truly baffling, and it gets even worse when you see the actual segment.
by James Whitbrook on io9, shared by Tom McKay to Giz on (#4KAJT)
This honestly might be the best thing to come out of Solo: A Star Wars Story, given the movie managed to kill off most of the other good things about it.Read more...
by James Whitbrook on io9, shared by Tom McKay to Giz on (#4KAN2)
Move over, Doctor—there’s a new pilot at the TARDIS console room controls, and a lifetime’s temping in Chiswick has prepared her to be the universe’s greatest defender.
With Apple poised to further expand its services to better compete with its streaming rivals—whether or not its offerings will be any good—it was probably only a matter of time before we learned that the company has its eye on podcasts as well. The question is, will they be any good?