Gizmodo

Just how vulnerable are the thousands of government-operated satellites speeding along their orbits above our heads? A team of researchers proved they could hack into a European Space Agency-owned satellite, allowing them to take full control of its communication, imaging—and even its maneuverability systems.Read more...

Balto the sled dog is famous for being part of a sled team that delivered medicine from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Nome, Alaska, through harrowing blizzard conditions in 1925. Now, a team of scientists has sequenced the dog’s genome using DNA found in his taxidermied remains.

If you’re looking to have the Force, er... your heart grow three sizes today, look no further than this incredibly charming skit from EA Star Wars that shows what happens when the legendary Mark Hamill shows up on the set of Star Wars: Jedi Survivor to give Cameron Monaghan some pointers.

House lawmakers participating in a hearing debating one of the country’s most controversial warrantless surveillance programs were left with more questions than answers Thursday. Heads of the federal government’s top intelligence agencies appeared unable or unwilling to reveal to the public just how much data is being…Read more...

Last week, BuzzFeed nuked its entire newsroom, laying off an already significantly reduced team that had never been quite the same since the company forced out droves of investigative and politics reporters last March. And while you certainly couldn’t call this the first major newsroom layoff in history, it did feel…Read more...

“I really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during the Q&A portion of a 2016 interview at a Vox Recode conference. “A Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person, right now,” he added. Or...did he?

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to fumble his presidential bid over unconstitutional squabbles with the Walt Disney World Resort that undermine his own political agenda.Read more...

It’s spring. Trees have leaves again. The birds are chirping. And insects are crawling back out of hell from their winter slumber, including the invasive spotted lanternfly.Read more...

Smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung spend millions of dollars to improve the quality of the cameras on their mobile devices, only for users to slap a vintage filter on their shots before sharing them on social media. The Tuner promises to give modern camera lenses a retro look by recreating the flaws of classic…Read more...

Long ago, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. That was the compromise of progress. Now, Chevy is taking what could’ve, at least, been a proverbial parking lot filled with compact, relatively affordable electric vehicles and swapping it for one stuffed with more, massive EV pick-up trucks.Read more...

Amazon has officially started up its most recent round of employee reductions. The company is kicking off its previously announced layoffs of ~9,000 staff by axing workers in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) and human resources sectors.

Twitter is eliminating its search feature for anyone not logged into an account. The change means that any person attempting to access the site’s search results would need to log in to their existing account or create a new one in what could be CEO Elon Musk’s latest attempt to drive up the number of users on the…Read more...

If Disney had to make an animated movie that obliquely celebrated the studio’s 100-year anniversary, it could have done far, far worse than an origin story of sorts for the stars that so many Disney characters have wished upon for the last century. And, according to this first trailer, that’s exactly what Wish is—a…Read more...

Initially revealed over a year ago, Dyson’s first audio product, a pair of noise-canceling headphones called the Zone that still manages to incorporate the company’s expertise with cleaning and purifying air, officially goes on sale today in the US with a price that’s as expensive as both Apple and Sony’s premium…Read more...

Sure, audiences are going to see a galaxy-spanning war, centuries of prophetic witch-women, and spice, but Dune 2 is also going to have a storyline that the first Dune installment only hinted at; romance.Read more...

Meta’s latest quarterly earnings report is hung up on the “efficiency” buzzword. In his call with investors on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked up “efficiency work,” more than once, all while sprinkling in talk of “monetization efficiency” and “organizational efficiency.”Read more...

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The Steam Deck was a groundbreaking device when it arrived last year to change what everyone thought handheld gaming could be, and while many competitors’ devices claim to outperform Valve’s handheld, Asus’ ROG Ally could be the first true Steam Deck killer, especially if this leaked pricing info proves to be accurate.Read more...

After being convicted of wire fraud for her dealings with her failed blood startup Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes has white-knuckled herself to freedom for just a little bit longer. A last minute legal filing on Tuesday has delayed her 11-year prison sentence, which was expected to begin today.Read more...

In a groundbreaking step towards establishing a human presence on the Moon, NASA extracted oxygen from simulated lunar soil in a “dirty” chamber with similar conditions to the Moon’s environment.Read more...

It’s been five years since Paramount’s Transformers franchise underwent a soft reboot with the 80s throwback (and fairly charming) movie Bumblebee. The next entry in the series, Rise of the Beasts, operates in the same new timeline first formed by Bumblebee, and brings with it some new blood. Along with Creed II’s …Read more...

When Spencre McGowan, an herbalist and a cookbook writer in Butte, Montana, started posting on TikTok to help pull herself out of a “depressive funk” in 2021, she could have never imagined her quick, rustic videos of comforting food recipes and outdoor wanderings would net her an audience of 110,000 committed followersRead more...

At 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 2 is so far that it takes more than 22 hours for NASA’s signals to reach the probe. With its power gradually diminishing, mission planners thought they might have to shut down one of its five scientific instruments next year, but a newly implemented plan…Read more...

After hacking the Minneapolis public school system in March, a ransomware gang proceeded this week to leak students’ personal information to the web. Included in the tranche were the usual deluge of personal data points—including students’ birthdays and social security numbers. But NBC, which reviewed the leaks, now…Read more...

Fresh off their trilogy re-imagining the Halloween franchise, producer Jason Blum and director David Gordon Green are doing it again. They’re prepping three Exorcist films to hit theaters in the coming years and at CinemaCon 2023, we saw the first footage from the first of those films. It’s now officially called The…Read more...

It doesn’t happen every year, but one of the coolest things that can occur at CinemaCon is a new discovery—when a studio plays footage from a movie that you knew nothing about and you instantly can’t wait to see it. That happened in 2016 when Paramount screened footage from a movie called Story of Your Life which was…Read more...

As a fan of Hugh Howey’s books, I am quite excited to watch Apple TV+’s live-action adaptation of the hit sci-fi series Silo, about the remnants of humanity who have been living in an underground bunker for so long they’ve forgotten why they’re there. But Apple has just revealed the opening credits for the adaptation,…Read more...

Things rarely go well in the grimdark universe of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 setting. It’s kind of there in the grimdark moniker: things either start bad and get worse, or every victory is wrenched from the jaws of defeat, sometimes literally, at great cost. As the game gears up for a major relaunch, that’s not…Read more...

A U.S. Air Force veteran was sentenced to four and a half years in prison on Wednesday for carrying out a fraudulent GoFundMe scheme claiming he was raising money to fund former President Donald Trump’s border wall. Brian Kolfage, who previously worked as an associate to Trump’s former advisor and White House…Read more...

The mustache is back for another mystery—this time, a supernatural one!—in Kenneth Branagh’s next Agatha Christie adaptation, A Haunting in Venice, once again starring the director as the gifted detective. The movie is based on Christie’s novel Hallowe’en Party and has just shared its first teaser trailer:

Editor’s Note 4/26/23, 5:10 pm: This article has been updated to include new information on the case, including expanded statements from Wizards of the Coast. It is a developing story and will continue to be updated.Read more...

Meta has had a lot to prove about its future ambitions. First it was all about the “metaverse,” but now it’s AI. Before, the company could sit back and let the ad revenue roll in, until regulators, along with Amazon and Apple, said it couldn’t. Fortunately for Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company managed to…Read more...

For iPhone users stuck between Apple and Microsoft’s worlds, there’s good news that will help make jumping from one to the other a little easier. Microsoft has announced that it will roll out support for iMessages through the Phone Link app starting today. The update is available for Windows 11 users and allows you to…Read more...

After the acclaimed debut of Star Wars: Visions volume one in 2021, a new collection of animated shorts is about to drop on Disney+. io9 recently spoke to Lucasfilm’s executive producers on the series—James Waugh, Jacqui Lopez, and Josh Rimes—about putting together the upcoming anthologyRead more...

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A new two-factor authentication tool from Google isn’t end-to-end encrypted, which could expose users to significant security risks, a test by security researchers found.Read more...

A wayward rocket has caused a rift between two Scandinavian nations after accidentally falling on the wrong side of the border.Read more...

The weather may be getting warmer, but there’s a spooky chill emanating from the pages of Brynmore—an IDW horror comic coming soon from writer Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and artist Damien Worm, who also worked together on October Faction. io9 got a chance to interview Niles over email, and we also have Brynmore …Read more...

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It may not reach the level of Clarence Thomas being buddies with a guy who owns a garden full of dictator statues, but there are plenty of other scandals to be had on the Supreme Court. Politico reported this week that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has found himself in a small ethics conundrum—one tied to the oil…Read more...

Tech bros are always chasing the next big thing, so much so that some developers are already trying to imply that chatbots like ChatGPT are old hat. The real big AI innovation, they say, is language model-powered AI “agents” able to carry out multiple tasks in a row.

When are three shots from a single movie more exciting than a whole trailer? When those three shots are from George Miller’s Furiosa, of course. That film was one of several teased in a sizzle reel at the Warner Bros. panel during CinemaCon, which also included extended looks at Wonka, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,…Read more...

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ fight with Disney continues after the company filed a lawsuit claiming DeSantis “orchestrated at every step” a campaign to punish Disney in ways that now threaten the company’s business.Read more...

Paizo announced today that it is working on updating and re-issuing four Pathfinder core books over the course of a year. The Second Edition Remaster Project will see new editions of Pathfinder Player Core and Pathfinder GM Core, release in November 2023. The other two books will release in 2024, and include …Read more...

Google’s cloud business has turned a profit for the first time in more than three years, the company announced in a Q1 earnings report Tuesday. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Inc., reported the cloud division saw a $706 million loss in its first quarter in 2022, according to CNBC, but a year later its earnings…Read more...

If there was one moment in Avengers: Infinity War that rankled fans, it’s when Peter Quill murdered half the universe.

Following Tuesday’s failed attempt to land on the surface of the Moon, Japan’s ispace said its lunar lander may have unexpectedly accelerated on its way down before crashing on the lunar surface.Read more...

Apple’s 2023 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros are here, and they look mostly the same as the 2021 models. The insides, though, are anything but. This generation of Apple powerhouses introduces the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, finally giving professionals an M2 MacBook Pro that is both performant and not using a design from…Read more...

The literal flexibility of OLED screen technology has allowed us to create everything from tablets that fold in half, to TVs that disappear into furniture. But researchers from Carnegie Mellon University are leveraging the flexibility of OLED panels in another way, and have created touchscreen devices your fingers can…Read more...

The Event Horizon Telescope, a network of radio telescopes around the world, has produced fresh observations of the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87.Read more...