Gizmodo

Snapchat’s big, controversial redesign—the one that really put us in our place by separating our social from our media—doesn’t appear to have done the app much good. Snapchat still has 191 million daily users, but things aren’t looking up for the company that Facebook has done everything in its power to destroy.

NASA is set to launch its next Mars lander, InSight, early Saturday morning. But something’s different about this launch. It’s taking place on the West Coast, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

It’s still unclear who, exactly, has been begging to give Facebook even more intimate data, but the social giant’s newly announced dating features nevertheless pose a significant threat to other online dating businesses. News of Facebook Dating sent shares of the Match Group (the parent company of Tinder, OkCupid and…Read more...

The federal agency charged with policing the political activity of federal employees has determined that FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly violated federal law in February when he instructed a crowd of people to vote for President Trump, according to a letter obtained by Gizmodo.Read more...

Two years ago, a consortium of scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs announced a plan to synthesize an artificial human genome from scratch—an extremely ambitious endeavor that’s struggled to secure funding. Project organizers have now disclosed details of a scaled-down version of the venture, but with a goal that’s…Read more...

During Facebook’s F8 developer conference today, human CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the availability of the Oculus Go, the company’s latest VR headset and its first standalone device for virtual reality that doesn’t require a PC or smartphone.Read more...

High temperatures are forecast to reach the mid-80s this week in New York, and I’m dreading it. But I have a plan to stay cool: just thinking of how much hotter it is in Pakistan, which is in the middle of a blistering heat wave.

It’s the sort of story that you’d find in a Marvel movie, but with far less cool consequences. Doctors in Slovenia have reported what they say is the first instance of lightning shutting down a person’s brain implant.Read more...

Westworld may have only just entered its second season, but HBO is already saying every fan’s favorite four words: “Bring yourself back online.” The network has announced that Westworld has been renewed for a third season.

At Facebook’s F8 conference on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg discussed how Instagram will be changing in the coming weeks. The upgrades include video chat, an Explore redesign, AR camera effects, and a bullying filter.Read more...

Facebook, still reeling from a scandal concerning the improper sharing of tens of millions of its users’ data, now wants to get even more intimately involved in your life. At the F8 developer conference on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network will soon offer dating features slated to roll out…Read more...

Ford might not think it can make a profit off of a Fiesta, but it does seem to like the idea of a motorcycle that pops out of a car’s face.Read more...

If you were looking for another reason to hate crypto culture, then YouTube has a plethora of Bitcoin rap videos for you to peruse. Every single one of these blockchain anthems is just as bad as you can imagine, and often worse.Read more...

No one wants to pay for both cable and internet anymore. What’s more, no one, and I mean absolutely no one, wants to pay separate rental fees to put four cable TV boxes in their family’s home. What year is this? For cord-cutters who subscribe to Comcast, it’s apparently time to get screwed.

A new analysis of internal documents from tobacco company Philip Morris demonstrates that what the firm said publicly about tobacco dependency differed from what it knew to be true about the science of addiction.

When investigators revealed last week that a genealogy website had played a major role in catching alleged Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer, some people worried what that meant for DNA privacy. The Golden State Killer terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s, killing…Read more...

Facebook is holding its F8 developer conference on Tuesday. Given that it’s been going through a lot of trouble related to third-party developers it brought a surprise announcement to take your mind off of privacy concerns. It will soon give you control over the information that apps and websites are seeing about you,…Read more...

For a brief period on Tuesday morning, Facebook asked at least some of its users to report whether every single post in their feed contained hate speech. Right above where one would normally like or comment on a post, Facebook users were asked: “Does this post contain hate speech?” For users who saw this request…Read more...

Starting today, Google Chrome users will encounter a full-page warning whenever visiting a website whose SSL certificate is not registered with a public certificate log.

Twenty-two years ago, the Galileo spacecraft made its first flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. Scientists with NASA have taken a new look at the data collected during that historic encounter, providing tantalizing new details about this strange celestial object, its unique magnetic shield, and its unusually…Read more...

The British government keeps asking Mark Zuckerberg to testify about his company’s abysmal privacy record, and the Facebook CEO keeps turning them down. Zuck likes to send his lackeys instead, but the UK has had about enough of Zuck’s bullshit. The next time he’s in the UK, the government is going to make Zuckberberg…Read more...

In a unanimous decision yesterday, California’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of independent contractors seeking employee status from a last-mile delivery service in a case that could have wide ramifications for Uber, Lyft, Amazon, Instacart, and other companies buoyed by the sweat of the gig economy.Read more...

The Coinhive service was always intended to help people mine cryptocurrency for good, but we’ve mostly seen it deployed by bad actors hijacking people’s CPUs without their permission. UNICEF is giving everyone a chance to support refugees with the mining tool just by opening a webpage.

If you want to take better care of your teeth, buying a Philips Sonicare 2 Series toothbrush for $30 would be a great start.

Anker’s newest bluetooth speaker, a whole bunch of Yost vises, a Mother’s Day watch sale, and more launch today’s best deals.Read more...

Still reeling over Avengers: Infinity War? If so, Marvel has just released the trailer for the next movie in their Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ant-Man and the Wasp. Filled with plenty of energy and comedy, it’s sure to remind you of just how fun these movies can be.

Look, kitchen unitasker police, I hear you. I really do. But sometimes, you just want to make risotto without tearing your rotator cuff by stirring it for an hour. The Breville Risotto Plus can make creamy risotto without the manual labor, and it’s down to $89 on Amazon today, a rare sub-$100 sale.

SpaceX’s rocket just isn’t big enough to please NASA, Boeing says. Shouldn’t a big, important space agency be looking for a longer, more powerful rocket to fulfill its deep-space desires?

There are more rumors about new characters joining Star Wars: Episode IX. The stars of Avengers: Infinity War tease Ant-Man and the Wasp. Chris McQuarrie just won’t stop talking about a potential Man of Steel 2. Plus, Teen Titans Go to the Movies stands in the shadow of Justice League, and what’s to come in Handmaid’s…Read more...

There’s something not quite right about North Korea’s antivirus software.Read more...

This weekend, a VR-only theme park opened in Guizhou, China. One of the park’s centrepieces, however, is not virtual but a towering Transformers-style robot statue.

Few people would think of the British cartoon character Peppa Pig as a subversive icon. But don’t tell that to the Chinese government. China has started to ban Peppa Pig from social media for being too “gangster,” deleting over 30,000 videos of the cartoon pig on one platform alone.

Disney is currently broadcasting a livestream of the sunrise at the Magic Kingdom theme park in Florida. I have no idea why Disney is doing this, but it’s honestly just what I needed this morning.

Uber’s seemingly never-ending series of scandals could fill several books, but perhaps the most awful and damaging stories have been reports of the ridesharing service’s drivers sexually harassing or assaulting passengers. A CNN investigation released on Monday shows how huge the scale of that problem is, with at…Read more...

Apple put up, and then took down, a job posting that suggested the company is preparing to give up on wireless chips manufactured by Qualcomm—a supplier it is currently in a contentious legal battle with—and is possibly cutting out Intel as well for future generations of iPhones.

The New York Times has obtained a list of over 40 questions that Special Counsel Robert Mueller wants to ask Donald Trump, to determine whether or not the President of the United States committed obstruction of justice.

With the recent worldwide release of Avengers: Infinity War, many comic book fans spent the weekend processing the movie’s grand implications on the larger Marvel universe. Perhaps the most surprising revelation of all, however, isn’t being discussed in forum posts or on social media. Hidden among the movie’s numerous…Read more...

Jan Koum, the billionaire CEO of Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp, is leaving the company following disputes over “the popular messaging service’s strategy and Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption,” the Washington Post reported on Monday.

We’ve become accustomed to seeing high-profile class action lawsuits result in paltry payouts for plaintiffs, but this is ridiculous. On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over a privacy case that Google settled in 2013. The search giant agreed to pay out millions, but that money largely went to the…Read more...

Facebook’s annual developer conference, kicking off Tuesday at 10am Pacific, will be one to remember, at least for Mark Zuckerberg. The completely human CEO has had a whirlwind of a month, what with the two days he spent testifying in front of a very confused U.S. Congress, the controversy surrounding his company’s …Read more...

An unnamed Facebook security engineer is accused of using data accessible to them at work to stalk women online—and Facebook says it is investigating the situation.Read more...

Scientists in Israel have observed a strange behavior among brown widow spiders: When given the choice, the males of this species prefer to have sex with older females even though they’re less likely to bear offspring. More problematically, these older females are also more inclined to devour their partners after…Read more...

Thanos’ quest for the Infinity Stones comes to a head in Avengers: Infinity War, but the movie also finally gives us the reason why the Mad Titan has spent six years’ worth of post-credits teasers gathering such vast cosmic power. And, perhaps surprisingly, those motivations have deep roots in the comics.

A blaze swept through Amazon Fulfillment Center RIC1 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia this morning, overwhelming the building’s internal fire suppression systems.

Realtors have a new warning for prospective homeowners: you’re being watched.

In another stunning display of its might, Amazon will be transforming an old post office building into a new Amazon office building. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just announced that the Seattle-based online retailer will open a new tech hub on the site of a historic Canada Post building in Vancouver. The…Read more...

The Avengers finally went up against Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and set events in motion that could change the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Which means, of course, that Marvel’s television shows are going to have to address what happened in Infinity War. Right?Read more...

Scientists have long speculated that the “dirtier” the environment we grow up in—with lots of germs from different people and even animals—the better off our immune system and physical health ultimately will be. A new study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science provides early evidence that…Read more...

Superman can sleep soundly tonight. The FBI, fully aware of his secret identity, has decided to keep things under wraps, acknowledging the Kryptonian’s right to privacy ultimately outweighs the public’s need-to-know.

Cloak and Dagger’s introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe by way of Freeform is curious for a number of reasons—including the seemingly mystical destiny the show’s heroes are promised to have in the its latest trailer.Read more...