Gizmodo

After Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT and announced an investigation into OpenAI, residents of the country apparently grew interested in VPNs. After the Italian Data Protection Authority announced the ban and investigation, search volume surrounding the VPNs reportedly spiked in Italy—likely in an attempt to research…Read more...

Sadly, we live in a world where a few individuals have the power to wipe out civilization as we know it with nuclear weapons. We hope that power never gets used, as most of us living things wouldn’t make it far in a radioactive wasteland. Among other hazards, exposure to ionizing radiation has both short- and…Read more...

Ahead of Star Wars Celebration Europe getting underway in London on Friday, and the most sacred of Star Wars holidays, May the 4th, Lego has revealed three new sets arriving early next month that expand its excellent diorama collection, and finally the bring the X-wing into the Ultimate Collector Series family.Read more...

Apple Music Classical is now available, though only on the iPhone at the time of writing (other platforms will be supported in due course). If you already subscribe to Apple Music, then the classical component is a free add-on, though it’s in a separate app, so you’ll need to download it separately.

Bob Lee, the creator of Cash App and former CTO at Jack Dorsey’s Square, now Block, was stabbed to death in San Francisco on Tuesday morning.Read more...

Twitter owner Elon Musk is facing yet another lawsuit claiming he was too busy trying to fire half the company he didn’t give his former tweeps the legally required two months of notice. On Tuesday, ex-Twitter contract workers filed a proposed class action lawsuit against the blue bird app and their former employer…Read more...

The battle between Twitter CEO Elon Musk and the legacy verified accounts with blue checkmarks that for years made the platform attractive is at a standstill—for now, at least. April 1, the day Musk said he would remove checkmarks from anyone who didn’t pay $8 for Twitter Blue, came and went, but the blue checkmarks…Read more...

New Florida restrictions on drones manufactured by a “foreign country of concern” set to take effect this week have left local police, firefighters, and even mosquito control teams scrambling to maintain normal operations and ensure basic safety.

When people start complaining that your tech company is ruining the world, you hire a guy like Rob Leathern. He joined Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, just as the Cambridge Analytica scandal convinced the public that Facebook was an existential threat to democracy. During the 2020 election and coronavirus…Read more...

Newly published security research suggests that a certain brand of smart home devices have software vulnerabilities that could allow a savvy hacker to hijack them completely.Read more...

It might be time to update our animal-related trivia. Scientists in Malaysia say they’re the first to document a species of snake that intentionally cartwheels. The behavior appears to be an evasive maneuver used against potential predators and may be common among other, similar species.

When it first debuted back in 2021, our biggest complaint about Kobo’s first digital notepad, the Elipsa, was a lack of color temperature adjustments for its electronic paper screen. With the new Elipsa 2E, Kobo has remedied that, but are minor improvements to its e-note enough to help it take on both reMarkable and …Read more...

The Digital Frontier opens this week with the new ride Tron Lightcycle/Run at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.

I’m actually delighted to be featuring Gosu X—one of the few times board games to have made it onto this list (I’m simply not as plugged into what board games are coming out, I’m sorry everyone). Gosu X is a pre-build deck builder that encourages ever-increasing big swings as the game goes on. It’s a challenge, but…Read more...

Our latest look at Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is here! With it comes more hints as to just what Miles and his friends (and enemies) are going to be up to in Sony’s sequel to the Oscar-winning animated smash Into the Spider-Verse. Here’s all the details we spotted—the Spot included—in the new trailer.

After waiting almost 40 years for Nintendo to make a Super Mario Bros. movie that looks and feels like the games it’s based on, it took all of 40 seconds to realize it’s going to be a mess. The film begins with Bowser, the King of All Koopas, arriving with his followers to take over a kingdom of penguins. War is…Read more...

It’s been a little over a month since SpaceX launched 21 mini versions of its next-generation Starlink satellites, but it appears that one of those little guys just couldn’t cling to orbit any longer.Read more...

Critical successes—they’re not just for players anymore! The Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie has an incredible 91 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, an impressive number for a film adaptation of what was once considered the nerdiest of hobbies. But D&D fans and mass audiences alike love Honor Among…Read more...

One early crypto investor’s hopes to see a major telecom provider pay up for a 2017 crypto heist have been all but dashed. According to unsealed court documents filed last Thursday, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California shared that AT&T wasn’t liable to any damages due to the 2017 SIM swap…Read more...

Update: 4/4/2023, 3:47 P.M. ET: The 34 charges against Donald Trump are all counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, according to the unsealed indictment. The charges concern alleged hush money payments sent to two different women. Each count is a class E felony, per multiple news reports. Each of…Read more...

When Marvel Comics canceled The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl in 2019, it might not have seemed like a surprise. After all, for a publisher that puts out 60-plus comics each month, canceling one book doesn’t seem like anything to write home about—especially when that book was centered on one of the most oddball, unusual,…Read more...

Well, the day has come. As much of the country waited on pins and needles over the past few weeks for the indictment of twice-impeached former president Donald Trump, Tuesday, April 4, 2o23 became the day that Trump officially was arraigned in Manhattan.

The Apple weather app is working again after it appeared to struggle to meet consumer expectations on Monday night into Tuesday. As more and more people rely on technology, we’ve become dependent on it for nearly everything, including the (usually) quick and easy step of referring to a weather app on our phone instead…Read more...

A brave group of astronauts has been assigned a mission of a lifetime, carefully selected by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency according to their unique set of skills like leadership and ingenuity—but perhaps not punctuality.Read more...

The ‘90s were the time of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a burgeoning internet, and seemingly countless gadgets and gizmos hocked by sellers on television. These cheeky infomercials are staples of the post-Cold War era, and you may have memories of yourself basking in the glow of a late-night infomercial emanating from…Read more...

There’s still quite a bit of lingering nostalgia for Windows 95, and even though its notoriously easy to fake your way back into the days of blocky menus and balding men screaming at you that it’s “only $99,” one Windows experimenter managed to use ChatGPT to generate easy product keys for the venerable operating…Read more...

Tanner Cook, a 21-year-old YouTuber, was shot at Dulles Town Center in Virginia on Sunday while attempting to film a prank video, per Cook and family member accounts.

After allegedly lying her way into a $175 million deal with JPMorgan to purchase her student loan startup Frank, former CEO Charlie Javice has officially been charged with fraud by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly used a little-known administrative subpoena more than 100,000 times over six years to request information from schools, abortion clinics, and newspapers, all without first procuring warrants from judges.Read more...

Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates spoke out against recent calls to pause Artificial Intelligence developments out of fear of the risk to society. Gates is now advocating for finding ways to use and embrace AI and says it isn’t likely to go away.Read more...

A group of scientists is making a provocative argument about the nature of elephants. They posit that these gentle giants have achieved self-domestication, meaning they’ve self-selected for traits commonly found in humans and our domesticated animals, particularly reduced aggression. Not every outside expert agrees…Read more...

In the middle of an abandoned onsen, a door opens into another world. This idea propels Suzume, the latest anime film from writer and director Makoto Shinkai, known globally for works like the hugely successful Your Name and Weathering With You.Read more...

In the Atlantic Ocean, between the coasts of West Africa and the Caribbean, there’s a disjointed series of mats and clumps of brown, tangled algae known as sargassum seaweed. It’s supposed to be there. Or, at least, some of it is. In the Sargasso Sea—the only sea without a land border, bounded instead by four…Read more...

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There are innumerable reasons to be scared of AI, but once it starts dipping into dark, illegal perversion, those fears get much, much worse. That’s the concept at the center of The Artifice Girl, a new sci-fi thriller coming from XYZ Films and io9 has your exclusive look at the new trailer and poster.Read more...

California is breaking records once again. State officials on Monday announced that the levels of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains have reached historic depths, after a season in which more than a dozen major storms dumped intense amounts of precipitation on the state.Read more...

After an absolutely incredible teaser trailer for Barbie that aped the “dawn of man” sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the hotly anticipated full trailer has been released. Greta Gerwig came onto the production in 2019 and we’ve been paying attention to the hot pink Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling vehicle ever since.

Following months—if not years—of anticipation, Starship’s inaugural orbital test flight could soon be more than just a distant mirage for Elon Musk’s private space venture.Read more...

Is April Fools for pranks or not anymore? Yesterday, Asus revealed that the Steam Deck competitor it joked about over the weekend is apparently real, and now Nothing’s following suit by actually producing the craft beer it teased for the internet’s worst holiday.

Everything old is new again, especially for Illumination. Whether it’s working in sequels to its franchises like Despicable Me or Sing!, or this week’s release of the Nintendo nostalgia trip that is The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the animation studio du jour has a lot on its plate, most of it continuations of familiar…Read more...

A team of researchers performed magic tricks for several species of monkey, and they found that the animals’ gullibility may depend on the structure of their hands.Read more...

Klaus Teuber, the game designer who developed Settlers of Catan, has passed away at age 70. A statement on his death was released on Twitter by Catan Studios. According to the German Catan site, Teuber passed away on April 1 after a “short, severe illness.” Teuber was most well known for Settlers of Catan, but he also…Read more...

Jonah Hauer-King wants The Little Mermaid’s live-action Prince Eric to have some depth. Ben Affleck goes up against mesmerizing bank robbers in a new trailer for Hypnotic. Plus, a new teaser for the final episode of The Owl House. Spoilers, away!

Houston, Virgin Orbit has a problem. The satellite launch company from British entrepreneur Richard Branson has announced that it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware.

On April 3, NASA announced the crew for Artemis II, which will see astronauts spending up to three weeks on a flyby trip to the moon in 2024. This mission will be the first time in more than 50 years that humans will visit the moon—or leave low Earth orbit—since Apollo 17 in 1972. And a Canadian will be onboard this…Read more...

Who would’ve thought the lowly cooler would one day be elevated to an object of status? Rolling up to the beach with a Yeti in tow is now as much a status symbol as the car that got you there, but there’s another company vying for that same level of brand recognition with a slick cooler called the Tempo that promises…Read more...

“Free speech absolutist” Elon Musk’s Twitter algorithm is paying particular attention to the ongoing war in Ukraine. According to an analysis of the Twitter source code, the site makes specific mention of Twitter Spaces that reference the “Ukraine Crisis.” Though it remains unclear how Twitter policies speech about…Read more...

The first two trailers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse have put their focus on Miles Morales (Shameik Moore). With how long it’s been since we’ve seen this take on the young Spider-Man, the trailers have gone out of their way to show how much he’s come into his own since then (and remind audiences how great …Read more...

It’s been six years since the Nintendo Switch launched, and the handheld market is clamoring for a successor. While great games are still being made for the platform, recent buggy releases like Pokémon: Scarlet and Pokémon Violet show that the power of the system, which uses SoC architecture originally designed for…Read more...

When Elon Musk turned Twitter verification into a paid service, he promised to remove blue checks from “legacy verified” Twitter accounts that had earned their status before the change. He said this great de-verification was happening “in the coming weeks.” Then he said it would be “soon.” Then it was “in the next few…Read more...