Gizmodo

Horror movies have long mined their frights from real-life fears, tucking social commentary into fantastical tales of slashers, body-snatchers, and other metaphorical ghouls. The past decade has seen the genre hold a mirror up to the world, with powerful results. Here are five notable horror trends since 2009.

Amnesty International has compiled a 60-page inventory of cases illustrating how we arrived here in the Google-Facebook surveillance hellscape. It doesn’t tell us much more than we already know, but it pounds and pounds on the message that we’re kneeling before the overlords Mark and Sundar and surrendering our data,…Read more...

For nearly 20 years, the Toyota Prius has been the car associated with environmentalism. Maybe it’s getting overshadowed a bit by pure EVs, but the image it projects is still very clear. If you gave even the slightest shit about the environmental impact of the car you drove, you get a Prius. And this lent an image of…Read more...

Following months of growing internal tension between workers and executives within Google, the tech juggernaut has hired a consulting firm known for fighting union activity, according to a report from the New York Times.Read more...

Everything about digital political ads, from their truthfulness to even their design, has been a hot-button issue for the past few months. Facebook and Twitter have already weighed in with their stances, and now Google has also announced that it will restrict how political groups can target audiences starting early…Read more...

Apple has pulled its Samuel L. Jackson-starring film The Banker a day before it was set to premiere at a Los Angeles film festival, reportedly over allegations of sexual abuse by the son of a man on whose life the film was based.

Castle Rock’s second season, which is building an origin story for Stephen King villain Annie Wilkes, took a detour this week to fill in some history on the town of Castle Rock itself and Jerusalem’s Lot next door—and to underline one of its most towering themes: The past sure has trouble staying in the past, doesn’t…Read more...

The Mk1 Starship prototype is officially done following an explosive incident at SpaceX’s Boca Chica test site on Wednesday afternoon.Read more...

Unfortunately, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS or “forever” chemicals, are not a household name—but they really ought to be. And perhaps this dangerous class of toxic chemicals will get a little more notoriety after the film Dark Waters hits select theatres Friday. Earther saw the film…Read more...

The stupendously long and expensive con of WeWork, a real estate subleaser disguised as a workplace technology ecosystem, came crashing down months ago. Of course, the company’s workers are the ones now paying the price.

It wasn’t an official campaign event, but it might as well have been. When Donald Trump flew in Air Force One to Austin, Texas, on Wednesday, the president got a tour of the small factory that’s assembling Apple’s Mac Pro computers. This is the same factory that’s been churning out that older Mac Pro models since…Read more...

Complex arrays of microphones are often used by law enforcement and the military to help quickly pinpoint where the sound of gunfire originates. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found that videos captured by smartphones can be just as useful for determining the location of a shooter.Read more...

Climate change is rapidly bending everything, including our language.Read more...

Doctor Who is starting to reveal guest stars for this coming season. James Wan could be getting busier than he already is. Plus updates from Riverdale, Into the Dark, and more. Spoilers up, up, and away!

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President Donald Trump went on a bizarre rant at the White House yesterday, selectively quoting from Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s damning testimony about Trump’s crimes. Countless people have pointed out that Trump’s handwritten notes from the rant looked like lyrics to a song, inspiring some people on Twitter to put…Read more...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had an undisclosed meeting with Donald Trump at the White House in October, not long after Facebook quietly eased its policies to let politicians lie in ads and as intense pressure was building on the company to roll that change back, NBC News reported on Wednesday.

The lyrics for beloved Christmas song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” very clearly affirm that “scary ghost stories” are just as much a part of the holiday season as “mistletoeing.” And if FX’s spin on the oft-adapted Dickens classic wants to lean into its horror elements, we are all for it.

In July 2017, former South Carolina governor and the Trump administration’s former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley used a government system for unclassified information to discuss North Korean rocket launches because she forgot her password to the secure one, the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday.

A glaring lack of right-to-repair protections touches just about everyone, from consumers to farmers and independent repair shops. But a new op-ed explains how this form of corporate greed even impacts the United States military.Read more...

The past few weeks of bush fires have created a nightmare in Australia. Smoke has clogged the Sydney skyline, and state governments have issued terrifying warnings essentially urging residents to flee or risk death.

Archaeologists in Ecuador have uncovered evidence of a previously undocumented funeral ritual, in which the heads of recently deceased infants were adorned with the skulls of other children. Scientists can only speculate as to the reasons why.

After years of calling PopSockets ugly eyesores, I get the appeal now. Earlier this year I upgraded to an iPhone XS Max and my Big Phone was a smidge too large for my hands. I grumbled, but it was surprisingly useful. Then when I lost my wallet on a business trip, I even upgraded to a PopWallet+. Readers, it changed…Read more...

Scientists have completed the first ever placebo-controlled investigation of the effects of the hallucinogen DMT on resting brain activity, according to a new study.

Mozilla’s privacy report on gadgets has returned just ahead of the holidays to remind us that many high-demand devices and smart-tech gizmos are far, far creepier than they let on. And wouldn’t you know it, many of the most popular devices on the market are getting dogged.Read more...

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Whether Bitcoin, an immaterial resource derived from hype and blind faith, will vanish into thin air is uncertain, but it will leave behind a dark cloud of carbon pollution. Cryptocurrency mining facilities use so much energy that the government of Abkhazia cut power to 15 mining centers last year. A Norway…Read more...

Citing the potential for sensitive footage “detailing the lives of millions of Americans” to fall into the hands of hackers and foreign spies, a group of a U.S. lawmakers are demanding to know more about how Ring, Amazon’s home security company, is protecting its customers’ data.

I rarely use an external monitor with my laptop for the simple fact that I don’t want to get used to all the extra screen space which isn’t available when I travel with my computer. My ideal solution to this problem would be exactly what Matt from YouTube’s DIY Perks channel has created: a laptop with an extra screen…Read more...

An international team of astronomers has detected a pair of gamma-ray bursts with energies more powerful than anything ever seen before. GRBs are the strongest explosions known in the cosmos, but these latest observations suggests we’ve significantly underestimated their true potential.Read more...

News on endangered species is often not good. It comes with the territory. But every now and then there are success stories of species starting to crawl back from the brink. New findings raise cautious hopes for one of the world’s rarest and most critically endangered reptiles.Read more...

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A year and a half after Uber announced it was “getting serious about safety” as a response to the horrific deluge of reports about drivers committing murders and sexual assaults, the ride-share giant is planning a program that will record audio of rides in the U.S.Read more...

Xinhua News, China’s largest state-run news agency, is currently buying ads on Facebook that feature a video of Bill Gates talking about China. The video ad is a fascinating example of the ways in which the Chinese government is using Facebook, which is banned in mainland China, to spread propaganda online while…Read more...

Even if you’re diligent about app permissions, sometimes you just can’t predict how or when a bad actor will abuse them. This time around, a team of security researchers found a terrifying flaw with the Android camera apps that could let malicious apps completely take control over a phone’s camera to spy on users…Read more...

You’re addicted to The Mandalorian, and you’re looking forward to all those Marvel shows on the way. But your Disney+ subscription doesn’t only contain must-see TV and nostalgia-burnished Oscar winners! The studio dug deep to fill up its new streaming service, and it shook loose some wonderful weirdness.Read more...

The findings of a new study involving gunshot survivors are unlikely to surprise you—but they aren’t any less depressing. It suggests that many survivors are left physically and mentally devastated by their experience, even years later.Read more...

In June, Google made an enticing offer for its new streaming service, Stadia—anyone who pre-ordered the Founder’s Edition would be able to lock in the usernames of their choice before anyone else could. Now, however, some people who pre-ordered the service say they haven’t even gotten in. Instead, they still find…Read more...

Astronomers at a Chilean observatory were rudely interrupted earlier this week when a SpaceX satellite train consisting of 60 Starlink satellites drifted overhead, in what scientists are apparently going to have to accept as the new normal.Read more...

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At the start of this decade, the federal government called out consumer DNA testing as a burgeoning scam industry. Little did we know how it would explode in popularity.

Looking back at 2009, it was one of the most consequential years in climate and not in a good way.Read more...

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The government of Iran shut off the internet for virtually everyone in the country on Saturday as protests over fuel prices turned violent. The internet in Iran has now been inaccessible to the general population of 81 million for almost four days, and it’s not clear when the government will turn it back on.

Fossil fuels are the root cause of climate change. So it would stand to reason that we should rapidly wind down production of them to avert a catastrophe.Read more...

The Indiana Supreme Court seemed dubious that a suspected Warrick County drug dealer who removed a hidden police tracker from his car should really be charged with theft, Ars Technica reported on Tuesday.Read more...

The Indian government has asserted sweeping powers to “intercept, monitor, or decrypt” any information that is “generated, transmitted, received, or stored” on any computer network in the country, per TechCrunch, and for purposes as vague as national security or safeguarding “public order.”

We here at io9 love Funko Pops. We write about them. We buy them. We’ve talked about them being decimated. We’ve even made a pilgrimage to Funko Headquarters in Everett, Washington to visit the flagship store. That place is incredibly epic, as it should be, but it doesn’t come close to touching the toy company’s new…Read more...

Kirk and Spock may be coming back to the big screen and from a very exciting filmmaker too.Read more...

The path to the million-member-strong league on Reddit’s r/conspiracy is paved with politics, toxicity, and tech culture, a sprawling study has found. From an eight-year sample ranging from 2007 to 2015, a team of Australian researchers compared 15,370 r/conspiracy posters to an equal number of users who’d started out…Read more...