The government of Iran has denied reports that the U.S. shot down an Iranian drone this week in the Strait of Hormuz, contradicting claims by the U.S. military and President Donald Trump that an enemy drone had been destroyed.
In a move that is bound to piss off more than a couple of publishers, Google is readying to fix the “loophole†that allowed sites to see when you’re browsing in Incognito Mode.Read more...
Ahead of its earnings report next week, Boeing on Thursday said it will report an after-tax charge of $4.9 billion related to its grounded 737 Max jets.
Instagram’s recent rollouts of updates to its platform continues this week with two more changes around post and account take-downs, as well as a new process for appealing content deletion that it will expand in the coming months.Read more...
Tru Kids Brand, the organization that bought the rights to the Toys“Râ€Us name as part of the chain’s massive fire sale last year, announced today that it was bringing the toy stores back to the United States in time for the holiday season. But not as the giant warehouse stores you remember with toys stacked to the…Read more...
A newly described species of flying squirrel is teaching researchers more about these enigmatic, tree-hopping rodents, but its threatened status means scientists will have to act fast.
You might want some privacy when consuming porn online, whether that’s going in incognito mode, locking the door, putting in headphones, or all of the above. And while this certainly conceals your activity from a roommate or someone who might look at your search history, researchers have demonstrated that your…Read more...
While 5G is still very new, we’ve already seen a handful of 5G-ready phones like the Galaxy S10 5G, LG V50 5G, and the Moto Z4 (with a 5G mod of course). So now, alongside the launch of 5G service in St. Paul, Minnesota, Verizon is announcing its first 5G hotspot: the Inseego MiFi 1000.Read more...
by Brian Kahn on Earther, shared by Maddie Stone to G on (#4KF3H)
Vast stretches of Earth’s northern latitudes are on fire right now. Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that are being seen by satellites.
Medical professionals are getting increasingly entangled in the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has gripped the U.S. and other countries—and, predictably, it’s having horrible consequences for their patients.
by Yessenia Funes on Earther, shared by Maddie Stone on (#4KEQQ)
All week, opponents to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) have been putting their bodies on the line to prevent construction from starting on top of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. Now these opponents, who are largely Native Hawaiian, are finding allies among an unlikely group: astronomers, including those whose research would…Read more...
Electric scooters are dangerous. It seems like you can’t go a day without seeing a scary story in the news reminding the world of this fact. People die riding these things. So it wasn’t surprising when Boosted emphasized safety in announcing it’s new e-scooter. The $1,600 Boosted Rev has three brakes, wide…Read more...
If there’s not a fancy, over-tuned car in your driveway, there’s a good chance there’s a fancy, over-tuned gaming PC sitting on your desk. The beige PC boxes of the ‘80s are long gone, now replaced with cases adorned with blinking lights, LCD screens, and exotic shapes—including one now shaped like the ultimate power…Read more...
Mission planners for the lunar Gateway project have decided how the lunar outpost should orbit the Moon—and it’s actually quite brilliant.Read more...
Slack is resetting roughly 100,000 user passwords for accounts that were active in 2015. The company has only recently learned that an old security breach from four years ago was perhaps worse than previously thought.
by Cheryl Eddy on io9, shared by Andrew Couts to Gizm on (#4KE9Z)
Pennywise hath risen, and it’s time for the Losers’ Club to reassemble in Derry and take him down for good. We got a first glimpse at Andy Muschietti’s It Chapter Two back in May, but this brand-new trailer gives us a much better look at the troubled grown-up versions of the kid characters from the first film—and, of…Read more...
You might not have heard much about DisplayPort, as the HDMI rival is limited mostly to high-end monitors, dedicated graphics cards, and other premium, professional tech. A new version of DisplayPort is upon us though—the standard’s biggest upgrade yet—and it could be enough to earn the technology a place in more…Read more...
Prior to the first Moon landing, scientists had good reason to believe the lunar surface was covered in a fine layer of dust. While this might not sound like a big deal, it presented a host of concerns to the Apollo mission planners.
If you’ve been bragging to your friends about the excellent deal you scored during Amazon’s Prime Day stunt, don’t. There’s little chance you did as well as many members of the Slickdeals forum did. Thanks to an error on Amazon’s website, several of them were able to score some very expensive photography gear…Read more...
Flying is objectively horrible. We let the magic of heavier-than-air transport cloud the fact that we pay hundreds of dollars to be squeezed into spaces too small for comfort so we can be treated like shit and spew greenhouse gas into the sky. Unless we’re rich or flying across the world, we usually don’t even get a…Read more...
by James Whitbrook and Gordon Jackson on io9, shared on (#4KDVP)
Kevin Smith teases not one, not two, but a trio of Batmen actors in the Jay & Silent Bob reboot. Quentin Tarantino promises his Star Trek film is basically Pulp Fiction with phasers. Snoopy is heading to space for Apple TV+. Plus, Arrow and Supergirl promote some regulars, behind the scenes on the bonkers Cats movie,…Read more...
Donald Trump held another neo-fascist rally yesterday in North Carolina, where the crowd chanted things like “treason,†“traitor,†and “send her back,†while the president talked about Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Online dictionary searches in the U.S. from last night show…Read more...
Google has yanked several apps from its Play Store after cybersecurity firm Avast identified them as “all likely designed by a Russian developer to allow people to stalk employees, romantic partners, or kids,†CNET reported on Wednesday.
The European Union is planning an antitrust investigation into e-commerce giant Amazon over its treatment of third-party merchants that rely on the company’s marketplace to sell goods, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
by Beth Elderkin on io9, shared by Tom McKay to Gizmo on (#4KCXB)
For the past few years, the CW has been on a hot streak. The network is producing some of the best comic book shows on television and has branched out beyond the DC universe with Riverdale, Charmed, and others. Its latest venture into hard sci-fi, Pandora, accomplishes something the CW hasn’t done in years: It’s made…Read more...
Netflix, our collective trash heap of mostly unwatched or unwanted content, would like you to know that despite a tidal wave of speculation that it’s not going to start serving you up ads. The stock market darling is suddenly losing subscribers and executives appear to be a little touchy about it. Halfway through its …Read more...
by Germain Lussier on io9, shared by Tom McKay to Giz on (#4KD18)
The men primarily responsible for Game of Thrones won’t be attending San Diego Comic-Con after all. David Benioff and DB Weiss have pulled out of the show just two days before they were scheduled to appear in front of a crowd of thousands.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced this week that it has elected to declare the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo a “public health emergency of international concern,†a decision that comes nearly a year after the outbreak was first declared and after the infection of thousands of people.Read more...
A comprehensive robocall-fighting piece of legislation—that would help stop the robocall scourge and prevent American consumers from paying for blocking tools—is finally slated for a U.S. House of Representatives voteRead more...
On Tuesday, the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to ban the use of facial recognition technology by the city, including its police force. It’s the third ban of the tech by a U.S. city since May.
The fact that no one has died from being struck by dark matter is enough proof to rule out certain ideas about the mysterious stuff, according to one new theory paper.Read more...
You can’t spend hours combing through archives of breached data to see if your login credentials were leaked, so Mozilla’s rebranded in-browser password manager, Lockwise, will soon notify users if their saved usernames or passwords were exposed in a data breach, and recommend that they change them.
People who prefer using menstrual cups during their period can be reassured by a new study out this week. It suggests the products are cost-effective and environmentally friendly compared to tampons and pads, while still being safe and able to provide roughly the same level of protection against leakage. But there…Read more...
Like approximately 126 million other people, I willingly plunge my brain into the sewer that is Twitter every morning, expecting varying levels of awfulness until I surface around 6 or 7 pm from a platform that’s unwilling or unable to improve its user experience in any meaningful way. Call it an occupational hazard.
As our lives are increasingly lived online, what seems like an innocuous (or even silly) digital act can end up having serious privacy consequences. It’s a bleak reality that many are confronting once again thanks to a face-morphing app that ages the photos of users—who probably don’t know they have signed away the…Read more...
by Brian Kahn on Earther, shared by Maddie Stone to G on (#4KC5S)
We’ve reached the “what if we just make it snow a lot to save Antarctic’s ice sheets†phase of our time on Earth. Good job, everyone.Read more...
Choppy video taken by a camera next to Buzz Aldrin’s window is the only visual record we have of the first Moon landing. Using archival data and new high-res images, a team from NASA has recreated the Apollo 11 landing, showing Neil Armstrong’s perspective for the very first time.
Facebook’s new digital currency, Libra, has the potential to be worse than the September 11th attacks. At least that’s what Democratic Congressman Dril (sorry, Congressman Brad Sherman) of California said today at a House Committee on Financial Services Hearing in Washington, D.C.
There was a time in our not-too-distant past when the idea of a personally piloted object that spits fire would seem totally batshit insane—in fact, it still seems batshit insane. But makeshift flame-throwing drones have been around for a minute, and now, you can purchase one of your very own.Read more...