Gizmodo

Much in the way that streaming has too many damn options now, gaming services are flooding the market as companies increasingly position themselves to compete for attention over singular domination of an entertainment medium. Netflix, for example, disclosed in an earnings report earlier this year that it viewed itself…Read more...

The consumer protections widely known as “net neutrality” are hugely popular among Republicans throughout the U.S., if only because cable and internet providers are American’s choice example of rapacious corporate gluttony. In Washington, however, things are radically different. Insofar as net neutrality is…Read more...

A 20-year-old college student used the Snapchat gender-swap filter to catfish a cop on Tinder, in a creative act of vigilante justice.Read more...

There’s a lot we still don’t know about Google’s forthcoming streaming game service Stadia, and we won’t know some of it until it’s available in the wild. But in a controlled demo of Stadia at E3, I was treated to a solid experience, as well as some fresh information about how the company plans to deliver Stadia to…Read more...

Be forewarned: the civil, polite, and respectful discourse that accompanies many online games could potentially devolve into something childish, even bordering on vulgar, with Nyko’s new Sound Pad. It’s a keyboard-like accessory that attaches to a controller allowing players to trigger sound effects in a game’s voice…Read more...

A discarded Apollo 10 lunar module known as “Snoopy” has been drifting in space for the past 50 years, its location a complete mystery. Now, after a meticulous eight-year search, a team of astronomers suspect they’ve finally found it.

Nintendo didn’t give us any new hardware during its E3 2019 presentation today, so you’ll instead have to lust and drool over Bill Paxton’s latest creation. He reinvented the clamshell Game Boy Advance, but with the guts of a fully-functional Wii packed inside, allowing the portable to run a huge list of games,…Read more...

A new study seems to deal a serious blow to one of the pro-cannabis movement’s talking points: the idea that the more medical cannabis is legalized, the fewer people will die from opioid overdoses. The findings suggest that there’s no real connection between the rate of opioid overdose deaths and a state’s medical…Read more...

If you hate climate change but love Radiohead, man do I have a two-for-one deal for you. The band has released 18 hours of OK Computer-era recordings it says were being held for ransom after band member Thom Yorke’s minidisc archive was stolen. The band is donating the proceeds from the sale over the next 18 days will…Read more...

As we continue to watch social media giants fumble their half-baked policies around hate speech and harassment, one of the most visible blunders recently has been YouTube’s mishandling of videos with homophobic and racist comments about one of its creators by another. During an interview at Code this week, YouTube CEO…Read more...

The internet is full of sites, and a crap ton of them are run by WordPress. But around 1:05 pm today, something went sideways for sites hosted on the Wordpress VIP Go platform...and an internet star was born. See this friendly ‘lil succulent? It’s currently plastered on any site that reverted to the original WordPress…Read more...

There’s a new season of the technology-themed Twilight Zone-like Netflix show, Black Mirror, and the premiere episode, called Striking Vipers, has a passing cameo from a very interesting car that reveals where the episode was actually shot, despite attempts to obfuscate this fact. I’m not going to spoil the episode…Read more...

“Welcome to Amazon Go,” a cheery man told me, explaining that there were two ways I could shop at the retail giant’s automated convenience store—both of which involved downloading an app. “Oh, I was going to pay cash,” I said. And then it got weird.Read more...

The U.S. Justice Department recently signaled it was exploring possible antitrust investigations into Google and Apple. Leading those investigations—assuming they actually happen—would be none other than Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, a former lobbyist that presidential hopeful and Massachusetts Senator …Read more...

Let’s think about this. Disappointing as it might be, we’re not getting a new PlayStation or Xbox in 2019. There are a lot of reasons why. (And if you for sure know of a specific reason, you should DM me, email me, or tip us safely and securely via SecureDrop.) But I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, and I…Read more...

As far back as 2015, major companies like Sony and Intel have sought to crowdsource efforts to secure their systems and applications through the San Francisco startup HackerOne. Through the “bug bounty” program offered by the company, hackers once viewed as a nuisance—or worse, as criminals—can identify security…Read more...

Security researcher Troy Hunt revealed on Tuesday that he is planning to sell his data breach service Have I Been Pwned (HIPB).Read more...

Thanks to modern paleontology techniques, finding dinosaur fossils isn’t as difficult or random as it once was. There are now more skeletons to go around, but unfortunately, based on an upcoming auction at the Parisian auction house Aguttes, you’ll still need a couple million dollars of disposable cash to add a…Read more...

Many presidential candidates have released climate change plans, but what about plans to address environmental health hazards like lead? Democratic candidate Julián Castro released a formal lead elimination plan Monday—making him the first White House hopeful to do so—and while the candidate is currently polling at …Read more...

A well-preserved head belonging to an ancient species of Pleistocene wolf has been pulled from the permafrost of northeastern Siberia. The enormous, well-preserved head could yield important genetic information about the evolutionary history of wolves and the origin of domesticated dogs.

It’s been one year since T-Mobile announced its intention to buy Sprint for $26 billion and, despite some scrutiny, the mega-merger has trudged forward at pace, save a few hiccups. That might have something to do with the lobbying blitz the companies embarked on a year ago.Read more...

Not long after Apple acquired music recognition app Shazam last fall, the music-ID service introduced a new feature called Pop-up that allowed it to identify songs being played on the device itself, in addition to outside sources.Read more...

Amongst the reveals we saw at WWDC 2019 was a new technology for apps and the web: “Sign in with Apple.” It’s supposedly a more private way to sign into apps and services, according to the company. But if Apple’s version is more private, what are you actually giving away when you sign in with a competing sign-in…Read more...

When speaking to David Lapola it is hard not to feel both his excitement and frustration. On the one hand, the biologist from the University of Campinas in Brazil is about to oversee the launch of a pioneering trial deep in the Amazon to see how its trees could respond to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. On…Read more...

Three TCL 65" TVs, a Bug-A-Salt fly gun, and a ThermoWorks Thermapen lead off a Tuesday’s best deals.Read more...

At Computex in Tapei last month, Intel showed off Twin Rivers, a new prototype of a wild laptop with one standard 4K display, and one half-size 4K display right below it. Earlier this week, the company let me check it out at E3, and while it looks goofy, it does present some smart ideas.

Paul Feig is still hoping for a sequel to Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. The crew behind the beloved X-Men: The Animated Series want to pitch a continuation to Disney. Michael Rooker could be joining the Dark Tower TV show. Plus, new looks at Midsommar and what’s to come on Krypton’s return. Spoilers now!

Facebook isn’t done with its spiffy new Portal video phones. You know, the ones which got largely favorable reviews, but are virtually impossible to fully trust, given they came out after months (years, really) of massive privacy scandals for the globe-spanning social media giant and are totally capable of spying on…Read more...

On Sunday, Microsoft announced a new iteration of the Microsoft Elite Controller. And that is great news because while the original was a landmark concept, in practice, it was kind of junk. The Series 2, at least from my limited time with it, seems like a substantial improvement.

Natural News was banned by Facebook over the weekend, causing founder Mike Adams to call for President Donald Trump to use military action against the tech companies. But we didn’t actually know what moved Facebook to finally ban the website. Facebook now says it banned Natural News for spam.

Saw and Drill Kit Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

Twitter is so close to understanding the problem. So close.

Kim Jong Un’s half brother Kim Jong Nam was an informant for the Central Intelligence Agency who met more than once with unspecified “agency operatives” before he was killed with VX nerve toxin in a Malaysian airport in February 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday—albeit citing a “person knowledgeable…Read more...

InfoWars founder, conspiracy theorist, and tainted supplement pitchman Alex Jones has settled with artist Matt Furie, creator of the unfathomably widespread Pepe the Frog meme, for $15,000 after InfoWars used the image on an obnoxious poster it sold during the 2016 elections, Vice reported on Monday.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from futuristic movies, it’s that, at some point, each and every one of us will become Keanu Reeves.Read more...

E3 hasn’t been just for games for a while. While the video games are certainly the focus, companies like AMD are reminding us that what we play on is sometimes crucial to what we play. Today the company announced a whole line of CPUs and GPUs intended to make gaming better, and the thing they all had in common? They…Read more...

Deadspin Play In Game 5, Coward, God Gave You Two Calves For A Reason | The Root Help! Trump Spoke to CNBC and I Don’t Understand Anything He Just Said | The Muse Black Mirror’s Miley Cyrus Episode Is a Sly Critique of Empowerment Feminism | Splinter Republicans Desperately Trying to Make ‘History’ the Next ‘Fake News’Read more...

We won’t get to feast on Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated cinematic take on Frank Herbert’s Dune until November 2020, but here’s some news that suggests Dune fever won’t be confined to the big screen: Villeneuve will also executive produce, co-write, and direct the pilot for a Herbert-inspired series, Dune: The…Read more...

Members of the American Astronomical Society are speaking out about the potential for large satellite constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink network, to interfere with scientific observations of space. In a statement issued today, the AAS said we need to re-think this technology before it’s too late.

License plate images and photos of individuals who traveled in and out of the United States were taken in a malicious hack impacting U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to a report in the Washington Post. The agency learned last month about the breach, which took place thanks to a hack of an unnamed…Read more...

Flying is, in theory, meant to make long distance travel a faster and more streamlined experience. In reality, flying is often hectic, cramped, and perhaps even terrifying, depending on your flight’s particular model of flying metal tube and other factors mostly out of your control.

Warning: This post contains descriptions of videos depicting animal cruelty.

If you’re the type to speculate on real estate and humanity not getting its shit together to address climate change, may I interest you in a little corner of the world called Siberia.Read more...

Dozens of U.S. government websites appear to contain a flaw enabling anyone to generate URLs with their domains that redirect users to external sites, a handy resource for cyber criminals looking to infect users with malware or trick them into surrendering their personal information.

If you envy people who wake up with the Sun, but you can’t seem to get to bed until well after midnight, some new research might help change your habits. An intriguing (but small) study suggests that it’s possible to retrain yourself to go to sleep earlier in just three weeks, without any drugs or other drastic…Read more...

Despite being 43 years old, Breakout still manages to be an addictive game, challenging your reflexes as much as the latest first-person shooters do. A browser-based game called Brickception manages to make the game even harder with a pop-up window that you’ll quickly find immensely annoying—even though it’s not…Read more...

Twitter is a lot of things, but where it consistently excels is as at being a petri dish to watch context collapse in real time. Take, for example, a very obvious joke turned nightmare scenario circulating credulously across the platform today via a celebrity news account.

Young people take the blame for a lot of the world’s problems. Ignoring the fact that wages have been stagnant for the last 40 years, we’re often blamed for killing the economy because we’re not buying as many houses or diamonds, having less babies, and waiting longer to move out of our parent’s homes.Read more...

Over the last few decades, the state of American election cybersecurity has been excoriated by hackers who hope to fix a host of glaring problems before the entire system is exploited.

Some 1.2 billion years ago, an asteroid measuring over 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) wide smashed into northwest Scotland. Trouble is, scientists aren’t sure exactly where the meteorite struck, as traces of the crater are long gone. With new research, however, scientists are starting to hone in on the impact zone.Read more...