Gizmodo

When corporations become monolithic, they tend to stalk familiar, doomed territory. The planned communities of the world’s Disneys and Fords are largely out of vogue now, but for tech giants, the white whale is always skywards, in the form of a grandiose universal internet initiative. It’s only surprising that Amazon,…Read more...

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand last month, Australia is putting major pressure on Big Tech to prevent the spread of hateful and violent content on their platforms, with a new law that threatens major fines and imprisonment.Read more...

ABC News aired an exclusive interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this morning on Good Morning America. And instead of asking Zuckerberg tough questions, interviewer George Stephanopoulos lobbed softball after softball so that Zuck could deliver his prepared talking points.

French and English share the same 26-character alphabet, but additional accents, symbols, and punctuation make it challenging for Francophones to use keyboard layouts designed for English speakers. The solution so far has just been to learn to adapt, but researchers led by Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland,…Read more...

Look, having someone’s secret plans revealed via slideshow isn’t the most-thrilling villain exposé known to man, god, or librarian. But that’s what we have Matt Frewer (aka Max Headroom, aka Dr. Aldous Leekie) for. He could sell us anything—even a millennia-old conspiracy only suited for something like The Magicians.…Read more...

Smartglasses have a bad rep—you can thank the glassholes for that. To this day, most people still can’t help but think of the first iteration of Google Glass when anyone brings up the topic of smart eyewear. That also means people start thinking about being recorded against their will, dorky design, and absurd prices…Read more...

The discovery of a fossilized, 42-million-year-old, four-legged whale is shedding new light on the evolution and geographical spread of these aquatic mammals.

Last year, a borked server migration resulted in MySpace losing all of the music uploaded to the website between 2003 and 2015—a loss estimated at more than 50 million tracks from 14 million artists. But now a small fraction has been recovered thanks to an anonymous group of academics and uploaded to the Internet…Read more...

You’ve heard of handsets with pop-up selfie cameras, but what about phones with full-on pop-up second screens? While the whole concept sounds a bit daft, it seems that’s precisely what Chinese phone maker Oppo may be cooking up based on its latest patents.

Get a better look at Detective Pikachu’s cast of pocket monsters in some new posters. Expect to see a lot more Jason Todd in Titans’ second season. Clark Gregg teases his mysterious new Agents of SHIELD role. Plus, more images from Game of Thrones’ return, and what to expect from the end of Gotham. To me, my spoilers!

Plenty of cat owners will happily tell you their felines are capable of responding to their own names, but the scientific jury remains ambivalent on the matter. A fascinating new experiment suggests this might actually be true for some cats, and it’s a capacity very much tied to the social environment in which the cat…Read more...

Knock on wood, but Solid State Drive pricing seems like it might finally be recovering from a multi-year, worldwide NAND shortage. And SSDs, like this SanDisk SSD PLUS 480GB, can do more for performance than, say, a new CPU or more RAM. And for $50, there is no reason to hesitate. This particular 2.5-inch model is…Read more...

Spaceflight company SpaceX test-fired the engines of its prototype Starship vehicle on Wednesday at its Boca Chica, Texas, test facility, the Verge reported, in a “static fire” configuration that saw the spacecraft tethered to the ground.Read more...

The pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 followed proper procedures before the March 10 flight that killed 157 people, according to a preliminary report by the Ethiopian government.Read more...

Facebook is paying British newspaper the Daily Telegraph to run a series of sponsored articles called “Being human in the information age” defending it against claims it is encouraging the spread of misinformation, aiding in the spread of hate speech, violating privacy, and generally ruining society in myriad other…Read more...

When it comes to Aladdin songs, “Friend Like Me” is the showstopper. Sure “A Whole New World” is beautiful and “Prince Ali” is catchy, but it’s that big, intro song sung by the genie that sticks in your head the most. So when the lights went down at CinemaCon 2019 and “Friend Like Me” from Guy Ritchie’s upcoming …Read more...

Last night at a Republican fundraiser in DC, Donald Trump claimed that wind turbines cause cancer with the citation, “They say the noise causes cancer.” This may be because the president has a grudge against wind power because he thought it would spoil the view from one of his golf courses in Scotland or it might just…Read more...

With just weeks to go before its release, we’re at peak Avengers: Endgame anticipation these days. CinemaCon 2019 audiences just got a glimpse of the most massive Marvel Cinematic Universe film to date, and io9 is there to report what we saw.Read more...

The economic juggernaut we call the internet has thrived principally thanks to a single U.S. law passed more than two decades ago—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It states quite simply that website operators shall not be treated as the publishers of information posted by their users. To wit, Gizmodo…Read more...

A new study out Wednesday in the BMJ is the latest to showcase even the short-term benefits of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. It found that the routine vaccination of preteen girls in Scotland, starting in 2008, led to drastically lower rates of cervical disease by the time the girls turned 20. That included…Read more...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced that it is investigating a potential link between seizures and vaping after receiving dozens of voluntary reports over a nearly 10-year period.

Hospitals, like the rest of us, are extremely online. The equipment we use, the data it discovers and the critical medical information it deciphers can all be connected to the internet — and if it’s connected, it needs to be carefully secured.

France’s attempt to curb fake news backfired on Tuesday when Twitter rejected the French government’s attempt to run its own social media advertising campaign. Oops.Read more...

The premise of Our Planet, Netflix’s new nature documentary, is to include humans in the story of Earth. It’s a radically simple concept, and one that makes sense given our increasingly major role in shaping the natural world. But at the end of the day, any David Attenborough-voiced documentary worth its salt better…Read more...

Researchers at the cybersecurity firm UpGuard on Wednesday said they had discovered the existence of two datasets together containing the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users. Both were left publicly accessible.

A 25-year-old middle school teacher in Long Island was fired after a topless selfie she took was nonconsensually obtained by a student at her school. The teacher, Lauren Miranda, is now in the process of suing the school district for gender discrimination.

Shazam is a ridiculously fun and at-times silly film that’ll undeniably appeal to younger moviegoers, while at the same time feeling like a breath of fresh air to adults who’ve grown weary of Warner Bros. and DC’s fondness for grimdark cape stories. But when io9 spoke to director David F. Sandberg and actor Asher…Read more...

Big companies like to get bigger, and for many big tech companies these days, the clearest path to growth is increasing how much money generates with content services. That’s why Apple launched a whole slew of them last week, and why Google announced a video game platform the week before. Microsoft too has envisioned…Read more...

If the second generation of AirPods seemed underwhelming, the new Powerbeats Pro by Beats might just get your blood moving. They’re truly wireless earbuds designed for sports and equipped with the new Apple-made H1 chip, superior sound quality, as well as an eye-popping nine hours of battery life. In other words, the…Read more...

You might think of young brains as soft clay that can take on new shapes in response to various inputs. But as time passes, the clay hardens and is less workable—and like clay, older brains can be less likely to change in response to new situations. Scientists doing research in mice have realized this analogy seems to…Read more...

Following the outcry over a disturbing government research practice that resulted in what critics have described as kitten slaughter, a research agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced it will no longer conduct the deadly testing as part of its research.Read more...

Archaeologists working in the ancient Turkish city of Laodicea have discovered a monumental statue of Trajan, a famed Roman emperor who led the empire to its greatest geographical extent.

One of Apple’s biggest selling points is the general high quality of its products. But after continued problems with the butterfly keyboards on recent MacBooks followed by a new lawsuit regarding the Apple Watch and issues with late-model iPad Pros, Apple’s reputation for making reliable premium devices is starting to…Read more...

Before meeting its end in a planet-circling dust storm, the Opportunity rover traversed nearly 30 miles over the perilous Martian surface. In some ways, we traveled along with Oppy thanks to the thousands of images it sent back to Earth. But what did Oppy’s journey sound like?

A popular DNA testing company seems to be targeting true crime fans with a new pitch to let them share their genetic information with law enforcement so cops can catch violent criminals.

It’s been nearly two years since the bloody peak of a social media-fueled genocide in Southeast Asia, but Facebook is still not doing enough to prevent the ongoing promotion of violence and hate in Myanmar on its social network, according to a member of the United Nations team that found the Silicon Valley company for…Read more...

Flying is about to get ever so slightly less awful this year as the Transportation Security Administration is rolling out much-needed security checkpoint equipment upgrades at several airports that will drastically speed up the screening process by doing away with the need for passengers to empty the electronics and…Read more...

Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno has accused Julian Assange of violating the terms of his asylum and leaking private photos of Moreno’s family and friends online in the latest dust-up between the WikiLeaks founder and his increasingly frustrated hosts.

Anthony Russo is still teasing the run time of Avengers: Endgame. Kumail Nanjiani is joining the adaptation of Any Person, Living or Dead. Detective Pikachu shows off its unique take on a few classic Pokémon. Plus, what’s to come on Legends of Tomorrow and The Twilight Zone. Spoilers, away!

In 2010, Adobe introduced one of Photoshop’s first true ‘smart’ features: a tool called Content-Aware Fill that could intelligently remove and replace objects in a scene. Today, Adobe is now bringing a version of that tool to its compositing software, After Effects, that does essentially the same thing but on moving…Read more...

Get ready to say hello to an all-new incarnation of Batman’s most infamous foe.

Philips Hue lights and Amazon Echoes go together like whiskey and hunting, and now, you can get a two-bulb color starter kit with an Amazon Echo Dot for $90.Read more...

Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have suggested that the pilots of two flights in Ethiopia and Indonesia didn’t follow proper procedures before their 737 Max 8 planes crashed in recent months. However, new reports indicate that the pilots in Ethiopia tried to do the right thing and override the…Read more...

Facebook has been prompting some users registering for the first time to hand over the passwords to their email accounts, the Daily Beast reported on Tuesday—a practice that blares right past questionable and into “beyond sketchy” territory, security consultant Jake Williams told the Beast.

My roommate loves wellness trends—she drinks water and lemon every day, makes kombucha in our apartment, and tries to get me to eat vegetables. I appreciate her efforts to keep me alive, but the only wellness hack I will ever partake in belongs to 64-year-old fashion editor Carine Roitfeld, who credits her youthful…Read more...

The Department of Justice has warned the CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Dawn Hudson, that any attempts to prevent Netflix and other streaming video companies from receiving eligibility to be considered for an Academy Award may earn it antitrust attention, Variety reported on Tuesday.

The trailer officially drops tomorrow, but CinemaCon 2019 audiences at the Warner Bros. presentation in Las Vegas just got a first look at footage from Todd Philips’ Joker. io9 is there, and here’s what we saw:Read more...

A neat tool for Twitter got some renewed attention this week, reigniting conversation around the problem of subconscious gender bias and the proclivity of men to follow other men on social media. It is, essentially, one way to help diversify your feed to make it less of an echo chamber and something more like what I…Read more...

In another example of the increasingly strange stories coming out of Mar-a-Lago, a Chinese woman was arrested at President Trump’s flagship Florida resort after she was discovered to be carrying a laptop, two Chinese passports, four phones, and a USB thumb drive loaded with what officials describe as “malicious…Read more...

The first thing you notice about rich people in Silicon Valley is the vest. What in god’s name is going on with all these vests?