Gizmodo

President Donald Trump suggested this morning that Attorney General Bill Barr might go after the big tech companies, seeming to confirm rumors that the U.S. Justice Department would soon launch an onslaught against Silicon Valley. The DOJ is reportedly thinking about an antitrust investigation of Google but Trump’s…Read more...

A Spirit Airlines passenger has reportedly been banned for life for vaping during a recent flight and setting off the plane’s bathroom smoke alarm.Read more...

The Midwest floods portended a bad year for the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone way back in March—it was just a question of how bad things could get. Now with a few months more date, scientists have an answer.

In the sort of nerdy debate over who would win between the cosmic fury of the Phoenix Force and a cyborg warrior from Mars, you never thought the answer “whichever was backed by James Cameron” would be the deciding factor. And yet, here we potentially are?

For more than a decade, we’ve been able to count on one crucial piece of software being available entirely for free: web browsers. But that may soon change. Kind of. In an interview with German publican t3n spotted by the Next Web, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard said a premium Firefox is on its way sometime in fall this year.Read more...

Instant Pot Ultra 6 qt. | $89 | WalmartRead more...

A Greenworks lawn care gold box, an OXO coffee grinder, and an Oral-B and Braun gold box lead off a Monday’s best deals.Read more...

TechCrunch has learned that Maker Media, the company behind the DIY magazine and online publication Make:, as well as the Maker Faire science, art, and hacking festivals that happen all around the world each year, ceased operations last week and let go of the rest of its 22 employees.Read more...

The Candyman remake wants to tackle toxic fandoms. Meet Christina Hendrick’s new Toy Story 4 villain. Plus, watch Tom Holland and Chris Hemsworth goof off about Far From Home and Men in Black: International, what’s to come on Fear the Walking Dead, and more. Spoilers get!

While Samsung, Apple, Huawei, and others continue to push out $1,000 phones, Motorola has run in the other direction and completely abandoned the flagship market. That’s a pretty serious about-face from just two years ago when Motorola released the $750 Moto Z2 Force, especially when you consider that the most…Read more...

Probably no more than ten people on Earth have a “favorite” texture, and these are almost certainly not people you would like to know. Conversely, pretty much everyone has a least-favorite texture. What do slugs, unsightly thigh boils, and disease-ridden swamps all have in common? They are all, of course, slimy. But…Read more...

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has requested that Congress delay the ban on federal contractors using Huawei equipment. The ban, part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), will prohibit contractors for the federal government from using Huawei equipment over concerns that the…Read more...

Facebook has suspended Natural News from posting on the social media platform where it has amassed almost 3 million followers. Natural News, which pushes wild conspiracy theories and once published an injectable DIY homeopathic “vaccine” for Ebola, had already been banned from Twitter and YouTube. The site was also…Read more...

Happy Sunday evening! Hopefully the events of the last week have been going better for you than YouTube, which spent an impossibly long time flailing around like a Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man after refusing to remove videos of a conservative internet personality taunting a journalist with racist,…Read more...

Some intriguing new games are coming from Bethesda’s studios, including new ones from the folks behind The Evil Within and Dishonored. Bethesda’s E3 2019 show featured new games plus lots of updates for Doom, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Wolfenstein and more. Even Commander Keen is back.Read more...

It’s pretty much conservative dogma at this point: Silicon Valley is secretly discriminating against Republicans and conspiring to push left-wing propaganda on everyone! Donald Trump throws out unsubstantiated bile on the topic left and right, while Republicans in Congress and right-wing media parrot it nonstop.…Read more...

While Google has already held two splashy events about Stadia, its big bet on streaming games, Microsoft, has been a little more lowkey about its own streaming game initiative, xCloud. We still don’t know a whole lot about it, but today I got to play it—and watch it break.Read more...

Group of 20 finance ministers meeting in Fukuoka, Japan reached a tentative agreement on Saturday to “compile common rules to close loopholes used by global tech giants” such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Reuters reported—with a particular focus on reducing the practice by some companies of routing profits…Read more...

Harley Quinn has a distinctive look. Whether she’s wearing a jester costume or not, she’s regularly adorned with the symbol of a playing card. One card in particular, actually: the three of diamonds.Read more...

Sony and Google have spared few details about their next-gen video game systems, but Microsoft has been quieter about how it plans to deliver games in the future. Sure we heard a few details about the console, codenamed Scarlett, and the cloud service, xCloud. We know these things exist. We just haven’t known what…Read more...

Time travel is complicated, which means it’s time for some charts.Read more...

Developing a complicated, high-tech action game with robust physics, stunning graphics, and a lore-accurate Star Wars story? Oh, that’s tricky, but doable. Getting those wipe transitions correct? Dear Lord.Read more...

Sometimes, when two major military contractors love money very much, they get together and reverse-mitosis into one larger military contractor.

Recently, actress Sigourney Weaver, who played Dana Barrett in the original Ghostbusters, suggested to Parade Magazine that she might be returning for the new film, helmed by Jason Reitman.Read more...

It’s a noble cause—trying to help bees thrive as populations face catastrophic collapse. One of the ways folks have been doing this recently is by purchasing bee houses. Bees will build their nests and lay their larvae inside these cute little tube-filled wood boxes, which have become prevalent at garden centers.…Read more...

Kindle Paperwhite (2018) | $100 | Amazon | 10% cash back for Prime holdersRead more...

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels | $3 | AmazonRead more...

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Brian Walsh rejected tech giant Google’s efforts to have a lawsuit originally brought by ex-Google engineer James Damore dismissed, the Mercury News reported on Friday, meaning that the case can now proceed into the discovery phase.

When Nintendo released Splatoon 2 for the Nintendo Switch in 2017, the company announced that it would provide Splatfest events for two years. That commitment is nearing its end, with Splatoon’s chief creator Hisashi Nogami announcing in Los Angeles today that the game’s final Splatfest will be held from July 18…Read more...

Disney’s crowning attraction right now is Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the sprawling Star Wars theme park experience. But for some fans, even the non-Star Wars parks had some novel excitement thanks to unendingly delightful Spider-Man actor Tom Holland.

Chinese government officials summoned representatives from major tech companies both from the U.S. and elsewhere this week to warn them of “dire consequences” if they go along with the Trump administration’s prohibition on sales of certain U.S. technology to a number of Chinese companies, the New York Times reported…Read more...

Brittany Avery worked at Xseed, a US studio that specializes in localizing and publishing JRPGS, for seven years as a localization producer and then left the company. Recently she discovered that her name had been removed from the credits on a game she worked on. In response to the controversy, Xseed revealed a policy…Read more...

When I think of movies I need to see again, with new actors and a slightly refreshed script, of course I think of the moderately charming late-’80s Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged. Do you—do you not?Read more...

Ridesharing giant Lyft is fighting to retain total control of the docked and dockless bike share market in San Francisco, the Verge reported Friday, and has filed a lawsuit that its contract prohibits the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) from issuing permits to competitors.

Check out the new gameplay footage from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a game that is still, somehow, not about Ahsoka Tano.Read more...

Janet! I need tissues.Read more...

Bosch Blaze Pro Laser Distance Measure | $50 | Amazon

Blendtec Designer 650 Blender | $300 | AmazonRead more...

Many of us are familiar with the uniquely infuriating hell that is robocalls, and folks, I hate to say it, but the problem isn’t getting any better. A recently announced iPhone feature arriving with iOS 13, however, might help quiet some of those unknown callers by kicking them straight to voicemail. So far, I’m…Read more...

YouTube dug a great big hole for itself earlier this week when its PR bungled its response to the ongoing harassment of a journalist by a far-right pundit. Internally, the backlash from employees at its parent company is growing as LGBTQ and allied workers mobilize to demand a satisfactory response.

Multiple vaping companies were sent letters by federal regulators this week over posts by social media influencers that did not include necessary warnings about the vape products.

For more than two hours on Thursday, one of China’s largest internet providers forced a huge chunk of European mobile traffic to be rerouted through its own servers.

In case you hadn’t heard, Facebook’s working on a cryptocurrency. There have been plenty of rumors floating around on the secretive project, codenamed Libra, for a while now, but this week we saw the floodgates open with reports of a likely official launch on June 18.Read more...

Earlier this decade, as Marvel Studios was building toward its own mega-movie crossover, Fox was doing the same thing. A new report claims the studio hired writers and even courted a director to make an X-Men vs. Fantastic Four crossover movie, and now details have emerged on what that might have looked like.

Starting as early as next year, NASA will make the International Space Station available to space tourists and other business ventures. Sounds exciting, but the associated costs are far beyond what most of us can afford.Read more...

Comcast violated the Consumer Protection Act a whopping 445,000 times, a Washington State court ruled on Thursday. The ruling stems from accusations by the state’s attorney general that the telecom giant signed up tens of thousands of customers for a shitty monthly program without their consent.Read more...

Warning: This post contains graphic imagery.Read more...

You know how it is, in between days of shilling scientifically dubious lifestyle methods to women and filming cameos for Marvel movie after Marvel movie. They all blur together to the point that you just don’t have a clue where you’ll eventually show up.

A new campaign headed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) called IAU100 NameExoWorlds will allow each country in the world to name a star and its exoplanet, the IAU announced yesterday.

You wouldn’t expect that finding a tapeworm egg in your brain would be seen as good news, but such was the case for New York resident Rachel Palma this past fall. That’s because the larva found inside was the true cause of Palma’s worsening symptoms of insomnia and hallucinations, rather than a brain tumor that her…Read more...