Gizmodo

Marriott, one of the world’s largest hotel chains, announced on Friday that it has experienced a jaw-dropping data breach that may have exposed the personal data of up to 500 million guests going all the way back to 2014.Read more...

In recent years, doctors have explored an unorthodox method to address cases of depression that haven’t responded to other treatments: sending precise electrical shocks directly to areas of a patient’s brain, otherwise known as deep brain stimulation (DBS). While the technique has shown some promise, its positive…Read more...

Consider this post a Hogwarts acceptance letter — that is, if Hogwarts also taught coding. Wizards who also aspire to become code whizzes can combine their interests with this Kano Harry Potter Coding Kit, now on sale for $80. Students build their own coding wand, and with just a swish and flick, they’ll see instant…Read more...

The director behind Bao is working on a new feature at Pixar. King of the Monsters is sneakily tying itself into Godzilla’s movie past. The Russos shoot down yet another Avengers 4 theory. Plus, Katherine McNamara makes her Arrow debut, and more pictures from the Elseworlds crossover. To me, my Spoilers!Read more...

Here’s the thing about the Misfit Vapor 2: It’s the smartwatch Misfit should have released a year ago.Read more...

Labo is Nintendo at its weird best. The cardboard Variety Kit can turn your Nintendo Switch into a fishing pole, a motorcycle, a piano, and more fun toys. Again, this is cardboard!Read more...

Google’s Project Dragonfly, the controversial project for a censored search product for China, has sparked two separate letters from the company’s employees arguing either for or against the project. As of Friday, however, a letter in opposition of the project had amassed more than 600 signatures, eclipsing the…Read more...

Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was directly involved in the company’s decision to seek information on billionaire philanthropist and vocal Facebook critic George Soros, the New York Times reported Thursday.Read more...

Protesters took over a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) meeting on power company PG&E’s safety culture Thursday morning, responding to the company’s possible role in starting the Camp Fire, SF Weekly reports. The hearing was part of a three year investigation into PG&E’s safety practices by the CPUC.

The show that kicked off Marvel and Netflix’s ambitious series of interconnected superhero shows has come to an untimely end.

After Amazon informed its customers last week that a “technical error” had inadvertently exposed their email addresses, the e-commerce giant is now reportedly offering gift cards as restitution to victims of the breach.Read more...

On Wednesday Jezebel wrote about a viral story, written by the James Beard-award winning food critic Kevin Alexander in Thrillist, that appeared to be either an act of shoddy journalism or a self-serving acceptance of a single unreliable narrator’s statement of fact. The truth, Jezebel has learned, is that it was a…Read more...

The price of cryptocurrencies may be steadily going down the tubes, but true believers are still hanging on to the blockchain dream. Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, is still all in. After buying BitTorrent for $150 million this summer, he now says that he’s investing $100 million to build video games on the…Read more...

A Microsoft exploit made public last year after being pinched from the National Security Agency has now been used by hackers to compromise more than 45,000 internet routers, according to researchers.

The past year has seen its fair share of largely indistinguishable cryptocurrency scams. Think of a noun. [Noun]Coin and its founders were probably charged with fraud in the past 16 months. Most of these boneheaded grifts bleed together into one long, libertarian migraine—but only one of them can claim to have cost DJ…Read more...

If you own the Philips OneBlade—and we know a lot of you do—you can grab two replacement blades for an all-time low $20 (or $19 with Subscribe & Save) on Amazon right now, the best price we’ve ever seen. Philips claims they last about four months, but I went nearly a year with my first one.

A project claiming to have produced the world’s first gene-edited babies has been stopped by the Chinese government, which is declaring the work of scientist He Jiankui as being both unlawful and unethical, according to the Associated Press.

The discovery of 2.4-million-year-old stone tools and butchered bones at a site in Algeria suggests our distant hominin relatives spread into the northern regions of Africa far earlier than archaeologists assumed. The find adds credence to the newly emerging suggestion that ancient hominins lived—and evolved—outside a…Read more...

NASA announced the names of companies who’d be able to bid on contracts for lunar exploration projects as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services at a press conference today.

Amnesty International on Thursday said it had submitted a formal request to Israeli authorities two weeks ago asking that the export license of a Herzliya-based hacking firm be revoked over reported efforts to sell Saudi Arabia sophisticated surveillance software.Read more...

The year is winding down, and it’s very unlikely Microsoft will announce another major product, so naturally, we need to look forward to 2019 and beyond. Brad Sams of Thurrot has plenty of delectable rumors in his new book Beneath a Surface. Some of his claims about Microsoft’s product roadmap reinforce things we’ve…Read more...

Capturing a rhino is no easy task. In fact, capturing one female Sumatran rhino on the Indonesian section of the island of Borneo took seven months.

Late in July, lawmakers sent a letter seeking details on Rekognition, Amazon’s in-house facial recognition software. Amazon wrote back, blandly, in August, but according to this increasingly impatient group of congresspeople, the company “has failed to provide sufficient answers.”Read more...

The world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is a dystopia that just won’t go away. On the heels of the Titan’s recently-announced Blade Runner comics series, Adult Swim has just revealed its plans for a new animated series set before the events of the recent sequel film, Blade Runner 2049.Read more...

Jumping spider mothers provide milk to their spiderlings far into development, according to a new study that might turn your understanding of invertebrate parenting on its head.

This’ll surely give anyone concerned about privacy the creeps. More than 200 manufacturers—including Volkswagen, Ford, General Motors, BMW, and Tesla—submit precise locations of vehicles to the Chinese government, according to an eye-popping story from the Associated Press.Read more...

Without the internet instantly dispersing images to millions of people, it was probably a lot easier to keep video game prototypes under wraps in the ‘80s. Just a handful of photos backed up rumors about the possible existence of a miniature version of the ill-fated Vectrex console, but it’s a rumor no more now that…Read more...

The health of the United States remains in decline, according to a series of new reports released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Life expectancy in the U.S. has once again declined from the previous year, extending a years-long slide the likes of which we haven’t seen since the World War I…Read more...

Between Mozambique and Madagascar lies the island of Mayotte. Since May 10, the French Geological Survey has been keeping an eye on a collection of earthquakes taking place just off the island’s eastern shores, which peaked with a magnitude 5.8 shake. This swarm was curious enough all by itself—and then, on November…Read more...

In April, Mark Zuckerberg told a congressional hearing, “I can’t be clearer on this topic: We don’t sell data.” But just because Facebook doesn’t currently sell data, it doesn’t mean they didn’t actively mull it over. Improperly redacted court documents from February 2017 show that Facebook explored charging companies…Read more...

Security researchers have issued a warning that two pieces of support software for Sennheiser headphones contain a severe vulnerability that leaves systems open to man-in-the-middle attacks. But Sennheiser has a fix.Read more...

A closer examination of a fossil found more than four decades ago has led to the identification of a new species of whale—a 33-million-year-old cetacean featuring neither teeth nor baleen. Its discovery could solve a longstanding mystery about the origin of filter-feeding whales, but some scientists say the new…Read more...

While the jury is still out on how practical bendy phone screens will be, the tech behind them is still one of the most lucrative trade secrets in the industry. So it probably doesn’t come as a surprise to hear that the CEO of a Samsung supplier and eight employees have been charged by South Korean officials for…Read more...

Godzilla marches into action in a new still from King of the Monsters. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ Dracula adaptation has found its Count. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina adds some intriguing guests for its holiday special. Plus, a new Toy Story 4 poster, and details on the CW’s big DC Elseworlds crossover. Spoilers…Read more...

Even if you get the flu shot, a cold winter spent hiding indoors with the means at some point you’re going to get sick. But just how sick are you? For just $20, iHealth’s new no-touch digital thermometer can help you figure that out, without requiring you to probe anywhere unpleasant.Read more...

‘Tis the season and Google is feeling generous. Today it rolled out a bunch of new Google Assistant features, including improvements nifty to-do list functionality and a new feature that encourages you to be polite to your inanimate, question-answering bot.Read more...

Bad news for those of you with small hands or small pockets (or both): It looks like phones are staying big for the foreseeable future. But owning a handset with a big screen doesn’t mean you can’t operate it with just one hand if you need to—these are the software tricks and apps you need to familiarize yourself with.Read more...

The American Civil Liberties Union wants to know how and why, exactly, a joint federal-state task force tracking the MS-13 gang tried to order social giant Facebook to build a backdoor into its Messenger app for surveillance purposes, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday.

Starbucks has reportedly decided to pull the plug on viewing explicit imagery in its stores following pressure from an anti-pornography activist group.Read more...

Twitter has banned an account first registered in 2012 that purported to be the official English-language channel of Russian President Vladimir Putin but was, in fact, that someone else entirely. Archived versions show the account had over one million followers and had previously popped up in news reports.

Microsoft has secured a $479 million-plus contract with the U.S. Army for Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) prototypes, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, expanding its relationship with the military and beating out a slew of other companies competing for the contract.

The Trump administration will move to ban bump stocks in the coming days, sources tell CNN. The new federal rule will outlaw the attachments that make semi-automatic guns fully automatic.

Ground Control to Mr. Trump

Just a few weeks after it originally aired, Goodbye Kansas Studios has shared a behind-the-scenes video of its work on The Walking Dead episode “What Comes After,” where Rick, with some help from a pile of dynamite, blows up a bridge full of approaching zombies. Creating one of the series’ most complicated shots…Read more...

Look, when a decidedly Dad-ish Peter Parker becomes your Spider-Mentor, there are going to be certain things that you learn as you go along. Like, say, how to avoid death from calamitous falls/angry scientists with laser guns through the power of webs.

For people with visual impairment, Instagram just got a bit easier to use. The photo-heavy social media app announced two new features today that will let screen readers read photo descriptions generated through artificial intelligence as well as custom text written by users.Read more...

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Dell has announced its online marketplace experienced a “cybersecurity incident” and the company has reset all Dell.com customers’ passwords.Read more...

Parasites that control the behavior of their hosts for their own benefit are a well-documented natural phenomenon, but the discovery of a previously unknown relationship between a parasitic wasp and a social spider is particularly upsetting.

Hundreds of military service members reportedly got caught up in a sextortion scam run by prison inmates using cellphones, according to a release issued on Wednesday by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).Read more...

Physicists have created atomic clocks so precise that they can measure deformations in spacetime itself, according to new research.