Gizmodo

Welcome to our hub for all of the best Black Friday deals in the world of tech! Speakers, TVs, headphones, laptops, tablets, battery packs <deep breath> cameras, storage devices, sound bars, wearables...you’ll find it all here. Stay tuned, we’ll be updating this post as deals go live, and throughout the holiday…Read more...

President Donald Trump deployed over 5,800 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections. Why? The president insisted that a caravan of dangerous immigrants was going to “invade” America. It was all bullshit, of course. In reality, the people walking from Central America through Mexico…Read more...

The geography of King of the Hill is a little wonky, but I believe it takes place within a 60-mile radius of where I grew up.Read more...

Smoke from the wildfires that have devastated California for weeks has stretched some 3,000 miles to East Coast cities. The Weather Channel reported this week that the haze was expected to linger through Wednesday before an arctic chill descends on the Northeast over the Thanksgiving holiday.Read more...

Nest’s iconic thermostats don’t go on sale often, and sizable discounts on their other products are even rarer still, so Black Friday really is a great chance to join the ecosystem, or expand your collection. Save $70 on the third generation Nest Learning Thermostat, get the nearly-as-good Nest Thermostat E for $40…Read more...

Gavin McInnes, the founder of the far-right Proud Boys group, is bailing on the organization after leaked Washington state law enforcement documents indicated the FBI considers it an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism.” McInnes’ hasty departure follows a wave of arrests of the group’s members in…Read more...

In a conveniently timed pre-Thanksgiving news dump on Wednesday, Facebook shared a previously leaked internal memo from the company’s ousted Head of Communications and Policy Elliot Schrage and an accompanying note from Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg addressing a recent damning report from the New York Times.Read more...

Apple’s freshly launched iPhone XR and iPhone XS lines have hardware support for dual SIM configurations, but the rollout of the feature has been a bit delayed (or in the case of AT&T, rolled back) due to issues with carriers that have not been totally sorted out yet. Verizon, however, is reportedly planning on…Read more...

Hey Siri, how do I make you suck less? Turns out the answer is to link it to Google Assistant. A new update to Google Assistant for iOS adds support for Siri Shortcuts, so you can actually get some decent voice assistant action on your iPhone.

NASA’s newest Martian lander is slated to do groundbreaking geologic research on the Red Planet. But first, it has to touch down this coming Monday. And landing on Mars is no easy feat.Read more...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is taking things up a notch to investigate a mysterious polio-like disease that’s paralyzing young children. Earlier this week, the agency announced it would form a task force to better treat and confirm the cause of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), seemingly in response to…Read more...

A 70-year-old Hong Kong woman has contracted the rat-specific version of Hepatitis E, signifying only the second time the disease has been documented in humans. Health officials in China are now scrambling to understand the implications of this disturbing new development.Read more...

Earlier this July, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced price jumps for many of its brand name drugs, including the smoking cessation aid Chantix and the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. But less than a month later, the company reversed course, seemingly bending to pressure from President Donald Trump, who…Read more...

Although Star Trek is predominantly set in a utopian future where humanity has solved its problems and ventured out into the stars to explore the cosmos and forge peaceful new alliances, every once in a while the series likes to show a dark mirror to the price of maintaining paradise—and Starfleet does it with Section…Read more...

On November 2, 2018, Blizzard closed its annual BlizzCon keynote by announcing, to scattered applause, a Diablo game for phones. It was a baffling marketing decision that immediately set off controversy, as fans of Blizzard’s iconic action-role-playing game franchise loudly accused the company of neglecting its PC…Read more...

Last month, thousands of staffers walked out of Google offices around the world calling for a more inclusive company culture built around “equity, dignity, and respect.” Among the walkout organizers’ five demands was for the company to end forced arbitration for both harassment and discrimination claims. The company…Read more...

If you live in the Northeast, you better put some mittens on your turkey this Thanksgiving. Because temperatures are gonna’ drop—and not like it’s hot.Read more...

I don’t really remember how I first heard about the digital robot that would save money for me automatically, but the idea sounded so perfect I signed up immediately. At the time, about five years ago, it was a text message-based service that would watch how I spent money. When the time seemed right, a small sum of…Read more...

The website for an adult furry game was hacked, with 411,000 unique email addresses and other personal information leaked, according to Have I Been Pwned’s Troy Hunt. The website hosted High Tail Hall, an interactive puzzle game “where you can have erotic encounters with the surrounding characters.”

Asked about Julian Assange on Tuesday while departing the White House on his way to Mar-a-Lago for Thanksgiving, President Trump feigned ignorance, telling reporters he doesn’t “know much about” the WikiLeaks founder, whose publication of hacked Democratic emails Trump praised repeatedly on the 2016 campaign trial.

Mars boasts two of the ugliest moons in the Solar System, including Phobos—an oddly shaped, pockmarked moon featuring a distinctive set of stripes. Astronomers have debated the origin of these grooves for decades, but a new computer simulation suggests Phobos’ stripes were made by rolling and bouncing boulders…Read more...

If it feels like just weeks ago that Amazon inadvertently shared the email addresses of some of its customers—it was.Read more...

Last spring, Facebook was confronted with a flood of scandals and new privacy regulations in Europe that reminded users that they could use a feature on the social network to download their data. Now, it seems a lot of people are using that tool. More people than Facebook can handle.Read more...

For French President Emmanuel Macron to address delegates at this Thursday’s Climate Vulnerable Forum, he would have to hop an 8,510-mile plane ride from Paris to Majuro in the Marshall Islands. Roundtrip, that would put 7.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.Read more...

At its original $180, Sphero’s R2-D2 droid was something for Star Wars fans to drool over, but probably not buy. But at an all-time low $40? It’s the droid you’re looking for.Read more...

Are you ready to let Facebook put a connected camera into your home?Read more...

Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected is making its way to TV. The CW has plans for a series based on The Progeny. Cicada comes for Barry Allen in a look at the next episode of The Flash. Plus, what’s to come on Black Lightning and Future Man’s second season. Happy Spoilsgiving!

When President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions earlier this month, people started looking more closely at the man who was appointed to take his place, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. And the closer you look, the worse it looks, especially as new questions are raised over roughly $1.2 million that…Read more...

Once simply a purveyor of USB chargers and cables, Anker is now a major player in the world of car accessories too. Four of their most popular Roav products are on sale in today’s Amazon Gold Box, including a USB battery pack that can also jump start your car. Even if you already have a portable jump starter, this…Read more...

Facebook’s scandals in recent memory have included reckless sharing of user data with third parties like the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica political firm, several high-profile security breaches, and continued abuse of its platforms to spread misinformation and propaganda during elections. Other even worse stuff has…Read more...

The Centers for Disease Control has an ominous warning for the nation this week: Please, for the love of god, do not consume romaine lettuce of any kind.

Everyone knows HQ, right? The live mobile game show that was ridiculously popular a few months back? Well, it’s ongoing, and Monday night it did a full Marvel Movie quiz to honor the late, great, Stan Lee. Twelve questions, all about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the winners splitting $5,000.Read more...

One benefit of working at a university with an agricultural school is the availability of meat. That’s especially useful if you need something to stab cactus spines into.

The Federal Communications Commission plans to publish a report on Wednesday that will purportedly reveal whether internet service providers are providing the broadband speeds they claim they are.Read more...

The FDA calls teen vaping an “epidemic,” but the influence of e-cigarettes on teens’ overall health might be more complicated than assumed, according to a new study out Thursday in the journal Tobacco Control. It suggests that while teens and young adults in the U.S. did start flocking to e-cigarettes these past few…Read more...

Earlier today, Evgeniy Lvovich Zubarev, the sole shareholder and General Director of a “domestic and international news” corporation called Federal Agency of News LLC, filed a suit against Facebook for booting his page from its platform this April. In and of itself, the lawsuit is unremarkable. People sue internet…Read more...

Samsung’s Level Ons are some of the best looking Bluetooth headphones on the market, and Samsung’s blowing them out for just $60 per pair on their website right now, less than half the price of buying them elsewhere. That’d be a great price for any name brand wireless headphones, but it’s incredible for a set with…Read more...

Blockchain is meant to be secure—but a new paper from quantum computing scientists warns that quickly advancing quantum technology poses a vulnerability for the much-hyped blockchain.

A few years ago I wrote about how YouTube opened up rallying to the world in a way that it never had before, taking the sport out of forests and onto screens everywhere. I didn’t expect the same of drones and drifting but here we are.Read more...

You won’t find a standalone sound bar more advanced than this model from Sony, and it’s $300 off for Black Friday. Granted, it still costs $1200 even during this all-time low sale, but it has seven channels of audio up front to bounce audio off your walls for virtual surround sound, a wireless subwoofer for bass, and…Read more...

According to the Washington Post, NASA will launch an extensive “safety review” of SpaceX and Boeing, assessing the culture of the two private companies tapped to fly the agency’s astronauts. Citing three unnamed officials, the newspaper reports that the review was provoked by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s…Read more...

While we’ve watched tech companies provide a means for us to tear apart the fabric of society, they’ve been credited with keeping the financial markets booming over the last year—but that could be coming to an end.Read more...

Jose Herrada, an inmate at Florida’s Gulf Correctional Institution, first heard news about Hurricane Michael on the radio. Initially, Herrada thought little of it. Although the state of Florida had issued a mandatory evacuation order for nearby Panama City and surrounding areas, officials at Gulf CI hadn’t brought up…Read more...

The world of Wreck-It Ralph was born from video games. In the first film, there’s Fix-It Felix Jr., Sugar Rush, and Hero’s Duty. And even though the second film, Ralph Breaks the Internet, doesn’t take place in an arcade, the filmmakers were not going to miss a chance to add another game to the universe.Read more...

A 16-year-old girl in South Sudan was recently auctioned on Facebook for marriage, according to a report from CNN. The social network reportedly didn’t remove the post until 15 days after it was published and nearly a week after she was already married.Read more...

One of the strangest things that can sicken us—a rogue misfolded protein that destroys the brain, known as a prion—is even scarier than we knew. Researchers were able to find the prions responsible for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common prion disease in people, seeded everywhere in the eyes of…Read more...

Of all the things you do with your iOS devices, listening to music is probably still one of the most common reasons you reach for them. The iPod isn’t dead; it just got lost in a sea of other features. But you could make it the star of the show again with this tiny case that (sort of) transforms your Apple Watch back…Read more...

A 47-year-old Asian elephant named Happy has lived in isolation at the Bronx Zoo for the past 12 years. A team of lawyers is now fighting for Happy’s freedom, saying she’s a legal person who’s been falsely imprisoned.

Earlier this year, Huawei passed Apple to become the second largest smartphone maker in the world. That marks a big shift in the handset power rankings, but there’s one phone company that’s arguably made even bigger strides, and unlike Huawei, it’s a company you’ve almost certainly heard of before: NokiaRead more...

There’s no doubting the Pixel 3 has one of the best cameras out there. There’s also no denying it’s been beset by bugs since Google released it last month. Now, Pixel 3 owners say a yet another bug has the device serving up ‘fatal errors’ when they use the camera, and the issue apparently appears both in the main…Read more...