Gizmodo

Silicon Valley app gets hype, money, attention and then gets exposed for privacy violations packaged as killer features. It’s a movie we’ve seen before, this time played at rapid speed.

Well, well, well. It appears Apple has finally addressed those pesky rumors that the company’s executives are meddling in the script writing of its streaming platform offerings. And listen up gang, some of this stuff is (at least by the company’s standards) not for the little ones.Read more...

Watching Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS robot backflip its way through a parkour course is impressive, but those seemingly effortless maneuvers actually represent thousands of hours of unseen development and testing to perfect. While this robot made from random branches struggling to crawl across the floor is comparatively…Read more...

You probably have not heard of the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), but by its name could likely guess, correctly, that it’s a trade group representing the likes of Walmart, Target, Dollar General, Coca Cola and other world-swallowing corporations, most of which have done plenty to win profits at the…Read more...

Movie prices just ain’t what they used to be. And with box office numbers still dwindling, Regal Cinemas is reportedly the latest movie theater chain to jump into that unlimited subscription fray.Read more...

Elon Musk and two former Onion writers began developing Thud, a satire company in 2017. The eccentric billionaire tech CEO gave the project $2 million and asked for virtually nothing in financial returns. It could have been an ambitious and hilarious endeavor, but then Musk reportedly backed out due to his fears of…Read more...

Facebook’s track record for tackling misinformation on its platform is, well, you might say not exactly great. It’s not just limited to dumb or misleading political memes either—it also includes seriously dangerous health misinformation and alleged “cures.” Realizing the error of its ways and their potential for harm,…Read more...

Just last month, we were calling The Walking Dead #192 “the end of an era,” thanks to a stunning issue (spoilers at that link). But if you thought creator Robert Kirkman and artist Charlie Adlard couldn’t top that twist, here’s another shocker: The Walking Dead comic is ending tomorrow with issue #193.

What is going on with this strange, winking star?

It’s not just the Alaskan landscape that’s on fire right now. The university system could also go up in smoke if the Governor Mike Dunleavy’s proposed budget cuts go through. That includes crucial research into how the U.S. Arctic is shifting as temperatures rapidly rise.Read more...

Apple’s Project Titan car has long been shrouded in mystery—most of what we know about it comes in the form of patents that trickle out into the public every few months. The latest patent, released this morning and originally filed in November 2016, shows Apple at one point imagined an extendable, somewhat inflatable,…Read more...

Public health experts are fed up with the anti-vaccination movement, which is most recently behind a surge of the completely preventable disease measles in the U.S. this year. So much so that a group of them has decided to issue a statement calling for institutions around the world—from search engines and social media…Read more...

Like self-checkout kiosks—perhaps even more so—automated phone menus are a prime example of shitty automation. They are exemplars of the kind of automated system that no user asked for, that are deployed solely in an effort to pad corporate bottom lines by cutting labor costs, and that ultimately make everyone who…Read more...

NASA reached an important stepping stone to a crewed mission to the Moon today, with a successful demonstration of the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort system.

It looks like board games, toys, and video games won’t be seeing a monumental price hike anytime soon. President Donald Trump has announced that he’s suspended the planned $300 billion worth of additional tariffs against select imported goods from China—although, knowing Trump, this could easily be undone a week from…Read more...

If you don’t already deal with a condition called presbyopia, you probably will by your mid-40s. It’s when the lenses in your eyes lose elasticity making it hard to focus on objects up close, like the words in a book. The solution is to occasionally wear reading glasses or glasses with progressive lenses that can…Read more...

Cloudflare had trouble again.

When geoscientist and mountaineer John All started studying the impacts of climate change on world’s highest mountain glaciers over a decade ago, he said it was like monitoring a sick patient. Now, it’s more like doing an autopsy.Read more...

The Moon will cast its shadow over a small swath of Earth today. But unlike the hyped-up 2017 eclipse, the odds of the eclipse passing over your town are a whole lot lower.

An outage hit AT&T network callers on Tuesday, affecting calls to emergency services and users’ ability to send text messages.

When the Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU came out back in January, we marveled at its price (nearly twice its predecessors) and respected its performance (good but nothing spectacular), and if you decided to buy it, I am so sorry. Because today the Nvidia RTX 2060 Super GPU starts shipping, and it’s so much better you’ll…Read more...

Wyld Stallyns ride again. The Haunting of Hill House’s Mike Flanagan is ready for even more horror stories. Plus updates from Agents of SHIELD, Swamp Thing, Scream, and more. Spoilers away!

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced on Monday that it will investigate the shocking Facebook posts of some employees, the same employees who oversee the vast network of concentration camps that have been described by independent observers as “torture facilities” at the U.S.-Mexico border.

After allegedly sending a death threat to a Muslim lawyer on Twitter last year, a North Carolina man is facing federal felony charges of issuing a threat via interstate commerce that could land him in prison for up to five years, the New York Times reported on Monday.

Lake City, Florida paid out a bitcoin ransom worth $460,000 to hackers who disabled the city’s computer systems with sophisticated ransomware last month, hot on the heels of a $600,000 ransom paid out in similar circumstances by Riviera Beach, Florida just weeks later. Now, as flagged from local media reports by ZDnet…Read more...

A update to Virginia’s law against revenge porn banning the distribution of explicit videos and images that have been deepfaked—i.e., modified using machine learning algorithms to picture someone else—or otherwise created with the intent to “coerce, harass, or intimidate” a victim went into effect on Monday, per CNET.

Last month, two high-ranking Ethiopian officials were murdered in an attempted coup. The consequences of the murders quickly rippled out into cyberspace, a bloody illustration of the diverging lines between the internet and the physical world.Read more...

Apple design wunderkind Sir Jony Ive is leaving the company after 27 years and Apple is scrambling to ensure the public that this is fine, everything is fine.Read more...

Six months after announcing it would be breaking with the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Japan has officially resumed commercial whaling. Hundreds of whales will now be permitted to be hunted commercially each year in defiance of the IWC’s moratorium on the practice.Read more...

Keanu Reeves has always been great. That said, we are truly living in the golden age of the Keanu Renaissance. So much so that someone has created a DIY, portable Keanu gif player, because why resign yourself to merely imagining his glory, when you can watch multiple ten-second clips of it?Read more...

This list is HUGE. It’s a literary MONSTER. And it is filled with space adventures, supernatural encounters, fantasy quests, dystopian near-futures, folklore beasties, robots, dragons, aliens, time travelers, and so much more. Fair warning: After you look through this giant list, you’ll be wanting to do some serious…Read more...

Gossipy new accounts about Jony Ive’s final months at Apple have been rolling in since news of his departure broke last week, and boy does it seem like he was sick of working at Apple. As the company struggles to invent new products and slow-motion train wrecks its way towards a new services business, you might wonder…Read more...

Oh America, is there anything we love to do more than dip our diarrhea-filled bums into recreational sources of water? Apparently not! Because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is once again warning sick people to please keep their literal asses away from swimming pools, lest they spread a hardy parasite…Read more...

A Facebook mailing facility in the company’s home city of Menlo Park, California has been evacuated following the reported detection of sarin—a powerful and deadly nerve agent.

What exactly is happening with Huawei right now?

The negative effects of secondhand smoke are well-documented—the CDC estimates that tens of thousands of nonsmokers die every year in the U.S. due to exposure to someone else’s cigarette habit. But a new study out Monday suggests that the secondhand effects of alcohol consumption are another source of serious harm,…Read more...

Content with even a hint of sexual suggestion is not long for the internet in China—even ASMR videos have been wiped from the nation’s video streaming services. And on Friday, over two dozen audio apps were censored by China’s central internet regulator.

Thursday is projected to be a lovely summer day: high of 86, slight breeze and slightly overcast, no chance of rain—in New York anyhow. It’s also a national holiday. If all that sounds like good conditions to get away from the computer and enjoy the sunshine, incidentally, you’re part of a protest!

The European Union is making a major safety push to add fake noises to electric vehicles, but some may sound goofier than others and that’s causing disagreement in the UK.Read more...

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Uber changed how its surge pricing works last year. Not for riders, but for drivers. The changes have resulted in drivers earning less from surge pricing, but riders are still paying the same inflated costs, with Uber pocketing the difference.Read more...

Europe isn’t the only part of the world that’s been roasting and burning of late. So is Alaska.

What do you do if your cat often gets in a murdery mood and tries to bring dead, blood-dripping varmints into your house? Well, if you’re engineer Ben Hamm, you create an AI-powered cat door to lock out the furry boy when he tries to bring you a filthy meat present.

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Guadalajara’s streets became rivers briefly over the weekend. A powerful storm dumped rain and hail over the central Mexico city, and when the slurry finally settled, parts of it were buried up to five feet deep in hail.

About a 30-minute Uber ride from Wall Street, there’s a dim purple basement where women, myself included, steadily accumulate bills, one by one, in three-minute song cycles. Some are as young as 18; others, old enough to be their moms. We come from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Brazil, and Colombia.…Read more...

The Alabama Cooperative Extension System has warned Alabama residents to watch out for “Volkswagen Beetle”-sized yellow jacket nests throughout the state, according to a news release. Read more...

Apple’s foray in the ever-crowded streaming space raises some big questions about the kinds of content an otherwise clean-cut company plans to create. If Eddy Cue is to be believed, Apple plans to tackle content with a markedly different approach from streaming rival Netflix, which has a reputation for churning out…Read more...

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Later this month, some of the original videotapes that captured the first Moon landing will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But they’re not being sold by NASA. Incredibly, these tapes were sold to a random NASA intern back in the 1970s who had no idea at the time that he’d purchased an important piece of…Read more...