Gizmodo

As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration continues to blast e-cigarette manufacturers—and Juul in particular—for a steep spike in youth vaping, the company has in recent months launched a number of initiatives to keep its products out of the hands of minors.Read more...

It’s here: we finally have our first look at Star Wars: Episode IX, or rather, The Rise of Skywalker. It’s a teaser that is, unsurprisingly, full of mystery, one with more questions than it has answers. But that didn’t stop us combing over the footage for what few clues we could find.Read more...

“Consumer protection” isn’t a phrase you’ll find on the resume of a person who devises dishonest, meaningless soundbites like, “Net neutrality is about government takeover of the internet.” But most Washington lawmakers don’t really care what a soundbite means or whether it’s they’re true. It just needs to be catchy,…Read more...

If you’re one of the folks who for some reason still plays HQ Trivia, you may have been wondering where “quiz daddy” Scott Rogowsky’s been these past few weeks. Well, the short answer is simply this: He’s been replaced.Read more...

A comprehensive analysis of thousands of fossils collected during the Great Depression in Texas has revealed a remarkable diversity of ancient wildlife. With elephant-like gomphotheres, rhinos, antelopes, and camels, the Lone Star State was once a very Serengeti-like place.

A telecommunications company, free Wi-Fi service, police departments, and local councils in the UK have developed and deployed a new system that aims to identify suspicious behavior on free Wi-Fi kiosks in the nation and then automatically block related calls.Read more...

Less than two weeks after the gravitational wave detectors turned back on, they’ve already seen evidence of two pairs of colliding black holes.Read more...

That low, rumbling, squelching sound you’re sensing at the edge of your hearing is nothing to be alarmed by; it’s just the collective peoples of the internet simultaneously excitement-soiling their pants because a new trailer for the next Star Wars movie has been released. As is required by the Jalopnik by-laws, I…Read more...

The man at the center of the bizarre GoFundMe campaign conspiracy, which grifted $400,000 out of armchair Good Samaritans, was sentenced on Friday to five years of probation.Read more...

A museum dedicated to conserving nature and Brazil’s far right wing president intent on opening the Amazon rainforest to mining, logging, and fossil fuel exploration while kicking indigenous groups off their land may seem like odd bedfellows. And yet New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is slated to…Read more...

Facebook—a company that is equally known for surveilling an enormous swath of people, and for accidentally exposing their data in one way or another—shipped “tens of thousands” of its Oculus Touch controllers with some fun hidden messages written inside them, like “Big Brother is Watching.” Haha. It’s a joke. About…Read more...

An intriguing new discovery in Peru shows ritually sacrificed guinea pigs were decorated with colorful earrings and necklaces by 16th-century Incas—a finding that comes as a complete surprise to archaeologists.

Amazon shareholders will vote in May on a proposal to ban the sale of facial recognition technology to governments after beating an attempt by Amazon itself to quash the proposal before it got to a vote.

MoviePass thrived and nearly died by the $10 per month unlimited movie-viewing plan it introduced in 2017, and it’s not out of the woods yet. But the radical pricing plan that brought the company national recognition and millions of subscribers, then infamy and customer fury, was only supposed to be a temporary deal,…Read more...

Rebecca Sheppard is a 28-year-old senior product manager at Amazon. She’s been working for the Seattle tech giant for two and a half years. It’s a good job, in a field she likes. But this month, along with a couple dozen other employees, she has risked that stability to help to launch what the New York Times has…Read more...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has decided not to declare a global health emergency in response to the Ebola outbreak that’s currently taking place in Africa, despite large numbers of people dying every day.Read more...

It’s been three weeks since Apple announced News+, an ambitious service that offers hundreds of magazines and a handful of newspaper subscriptions for $10 a month. This is the first of two major new paid services Apple plans to launch this year, as part of a major effort to revitalize its business in the face of…Read more...

On Monday, a group of Amazon employees began circulating an open letter that calls on CEO Jeff Bezos and the board of directors to adopt a companywide plan to address climate change. By Wednesday, over 3,500 Amazoners had signed on. By Friday, that number had surpassed 6,000—meaning a number equivalent to about 1/10th…Read more...

Mesh routers are so hot right now, and Linksys’ take on the concept is about $50 off its usual price for a 3-pack today.

Weather is weird. There’s been polluted black snow, a snow-covered Sahara, and now snow with a hint of dust.Read more...

Someone who really, really loves his soccer team found out the hard way that QR codes are dumb and copyright infringement has no mercy.

Remember when a few years ago, Facebook forced us all to download the standalone Messenger app to chat with friends? It appears it’s now backtracking on that and looking to roll chats back into the main Facebook app.Read more...

Apps like VNC or Window’s Remote Desktop Connection have long been an invaluable tool for kids tasked with remotely solving their parents’ computer woes. But Skype might soon be the new secret weapon when it comes to helping baby boomer’s figure out how to use their new-fangled smartphones, as it’s soon rolling out a…Read more...

As you might have heard, Microsoft is rebuilding Edge from the ground up, this time using the Chromium code that also underpins Google Chrome. Essentially it’s a switch to a different browser rendering engine—but what exactly is such an engine? And how does it affect your browsing experience? We’ll guide you through…Read more...

Peter Safran offers an update on where the other spinoff from The Conjuring universe is at. Get a look at the new Charlie’s Angels. Arrow’s penultimate season has wrapped. Plus, set pictures from Birds of Prey, and a new look at Star Trek: Discovery’s explosive season finale. May the spoilers be with you, always!

Tesla’s long-awaited $35,000 Model 3 seemed like a great step forward for the company in terms of making electric vehicles more accessible and affordable. And now it’s not quite as accessible, all of a sudden. Tesla announced in a blog post that it is no longer offering the $35,000 base model online, like every other…Read more...

Police in Ecuador have arrested Swedish programmer and digital privacy activist Ola Bini for allegedly trying to destabilize the Ecuadorian government by “collaborating” with WikiLeaks. Bini was arrested at Quito Airport in Ecuador on his way to Japan.

Twitter’s month-old prototype app twttr—its testing ground for platform tweaks—is exploring some significant changes to tweet engagement.

After an entire season of build up, this is it. Star Trek: Discovery has come crashing into its endgame and the battle against Control is ready to begin. But before that, we have to go through what might be the ultimate realization of the show’s strengths and weaknesses: getting away with a lot of contrivance through…Read more...

Joining the increasingly crowded streaming space, the Walt Disney Company on Thursday delivered more details about its anticipated service Disney+. And if there was any question that this product would directly compete with Netflix, there certainly isn’t now.Read more...

The Mandalorian, Disney and Lucasfilm’s first live-action Star Wars television series, will be leading the charge as part of the first offerings available on Disney+.Read more...

Tokyo law enforcement suspect a 16-year-old boy traded online uranium and processed it into uranium ore, also known as yellowcake. But rather than trying to facilitate the creation of nuclear weapons, he may have just been really into chemistry.Read more...

The head of the House subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism is on a quest to find out precisely how much money YouTube, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter are spending each to combat extremism across their myriad platforms. Since representatives of the companies seemed unequipped to answer that question…Read more...

Uber, the money-losing ridehailing platform which by its own admission in its S-1 filing claims it has “incurred significant losses since inception” and “may not achieve profitability,” has overcome a lot on the road to today’s initial public offering. It’s entire business model however—which involves cost-cutting by…Read more...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new report on autism spectrum disorder (ASD), released Thursday, offers little good news. It estimates that about one in every 59 children nationwide has the complex developmental disorder, a figure that seems unchanged from its previous estimate a year ago. But, for a…Read more...

The Beresheet probe crash-landed on the Moon earlier today, dashing Israel’s hopes of becoming only the fourth country to land a functioning probe on the lunar surface.

Over the years, tech companies have found a convenient scapegoat for some of their most egregious mistakes in a voiceless part of their operations—their algorithms. But a bill introduced on Wednesday seeks to effectively prevent these automated systems from being an acceptable excuse for bias, unintended or not.

Yesterday, Sony announced PlayStation Network name changes were officially ready for primetime. While a lot of people might have crappy user names they want to get rid of, they might not be sure what to replace them with. Fortunately, PlayStation provides suggestions. Most are terrible. Some are secretly amazing.Read more...

The next time you’re peering deep inside one of your camera lenses and discover a tiny speck of dust, don’t complain. After 15 months in rotation, the folks at Lensrentals had a Canon 70-200mm f2.8 IS II lens return from a rental with a full-grown (but dead) fly trapped between a pair of lens elements inside. It’s not…Read more...

Sea turtles are famous for returning to the exact spot they were born to lay their eggs. That’s exactly what this green sea turtle tried to do on Tuesday, only to find her beachy home had been turned into a runway.

Last year, various media outlets fumbled their reporting of genuinely interesting research from NASA, one that hoped to start figuring out what happens to our bodies if we live in space for long periods of time. The study was a meticulous comparison of then 50-year-old astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year aboard…Read more...

After Westeros, Jorah Mormont is heading to Gotham City.

Update 4:03 p.m. ET: Unfortunately, the SpaceIL team lost contact with the Beresheet probe. Details here.Read more...

Everyone always looks to California for climate action, but don’t sleep on the Midwest. On Thursday, Minnesota legislators introduced a sweeping new bill modeled after Alexandrio Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.Read more...

Charges announced by the Justice Department on Thursday against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange provide fresh insight into why federal prosecutors sought to question whistleblower Chelsea Manning last month before a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Facebook has again taken minimal action to hinder a coordinated inauthentic behavior from deceptive actors targeting a specific demographic of people.Read more...

Considering how Thanos dog-walked the Avengers in Infinity War and wiped out half of the universe, the few heroes left who’re gunning for the Mad Titan in Avengers: Endgame are going to need the plan to end all plans if they want to succeed. In the latest Endgame spot, Steve Rogers is doing what he does best: rallying…Read more...

When the Wi-Fi Alliance released its next-generation WPA3 wifi security protocol last January, it was touted as being nigh impossible to crack. That made it a serious upgrade over WPA2, the current protocol used by modern wifi networks—including the one you’re probably reading this on. Except, researchers on Wednesday …Read more...

Apple is renowned for its ability to amass thousands of talented engineers, millions of users, and billions in cash-on-hand. While nowhere near prolific in this particular growth sector, it’s also gotten pretty good at attracting anti-trust complaints.Read more...

Last night, Bloomberg published an alarming report about the “thousands” of Amazon workers paid to listen to Alexa recordings captured in customers’ homes and offices. But users of the company’s digital assistant shouldn’t be too shocked. After all, CEO Jeff Bezos has been trying to tell us for years.