Gizmodo

Without one ring to rule them all, the rights for creators to tell stories in Middle-earth have long been a confusing mess—a mess that has only gotten more confusing when Embracer Group announced it had acquired a chunk of Lord of the Rings’ rights. Not sure who exactly can do what? Here’s our guide.

In Vast’s quest to build a space station complete with artificial gravity, the private space company has acquired startup Launcher in order to take a step toward making its plans a reality. Despite the news of the acquisition, both companies remain tightlipped on Vast’s plans for the space station.

Cinema is in its awards season, and with that comes special screening engagements for nominated films like RRR. Horror films Scream VI and Cocaine Bear are carving out fun with interactive pop-ups as they hit theaters. At the theme parks, Super Nintendo World officially announces it is coming to Epic Universe; Disney…Read more...

When something goes wrong with one of your gadgets, you’re faced with a choice: Fix it yourself, or call in some professional help. With your options for these routes constantly changing (both Apple and Samsung have launched self-repair kits in recent years), we wanted to give you an up-to-date look at what you’ve got…Read more...

Live Nation Entertainment, the company that’s owned Ticketmaster since 2010, knows it’s hard out there for music fans. Really, it does. That’s why the company, which faced massive public pushback earlier this year in the aftermath of a Taylor Swift ticket sale meltdown, has proposed a (kind of) solution.

We’re still not living in a fully paperless world, and all kinds of documents still need to be printed now and again: Application forms, quiz sheets, training materials, wedding speeches, and more all need to be in physical form for one reason or another. However, you don’t necessarily need to have a laptop or desktop…Read more...

Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital has been awarded a hefty contract by Rivada Space Networks to build 288 low Earth orbit satellites, and 12 spare satellites, for its communications constellation.Read more...

The taskbar is at the center of everything you do on Microsoft’s operating system—launching and closing apps, switching between windows, personalizing the desktop—and has been around in some form since Windows 1.0. You’re definitely familiar with it. What you might not be familiar with is that you can actually…Read more...

Even if you’ve not watched the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard (which is not entirely necessary, for better or worse), the third season’s promise of a big The Next Generation reunion has Trek fans talking—and if you’ve not started it yet, Paramount’s giving you a tease for free.Read more...

A rare but sometimes fatal tickborne infection may be expanding its range in the U.S., local and federal health officials warn in a report this week. They say that a case of Heartland virus led to a man’s death in 2021. The infection is thought to have been caught in either Virginia or Maryland—a region of the…Read more...

If you’re in the market for a new smartphone, you’ve certainly got plenty of options to pick from—but it’s not necessarily all that easy to spot the differences between the dozens of glass-and-metal-and-plastic slabs that are out there. At the same time, certain specs and features that were once crucial are now less…Read more...

In an effort to stifle Elon Musk’s Starlink, researchers in China are planning to launch their own fleet. The proposed megaconstellation has no set launch date, but is expected to consist of 12,992 satellites equipped with technologies to conduct surveillance on Starlink, among other capabilities.

Amazon is facing a stampede of protest over third-party vendors being allowed to sell donkey-based products. A few Donkey-based items, remedies, and snacks easily found on the digital marketplace are products of an international, inhumane slaughter of donkeys, and one California-based equine nonprofit wants Amazon to…Read more...

It’s getting harder to avoid AI-generated images and text—and harder to spot them in the first place—and that’s true even on Shutterstock, one of the world’s leading providers of stock photography. Last month, Shutterstock rolled out a tool for paying users that allows them to generate AI images based on their…Read more...

The Shrek universe proves it still has stories to tell with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The sequel to the Antonio Banderas-led spin-off gives the DreamWorks franchise a soft reimagining that makes us excited for more.

February 2023 has been especially warm, causing early spring-like conditions throughout the U.S.

Pavitr Prabhakar is one of the most iconic alternate Spider-heroes in Marvel’s long history of Spider-People—and his name is going to be on the lips of a lot more fans when he takes a starring role in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. But io9 can exclusively reveal that this summer, Pavitr is getting his own comic…Read more...

People in East Palestine, Ohio are still struggling with uncertainty and fear for their health and community in the aftermath of the disastrous derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals on February 6. This week, the extreme impacts of that spill on local wildlife became clearer.

The biggest lie humanity has ever been told is that one size fits all. Every single one of us is different and unique, especially when it comes to the shape and size of our bodies. Bauer, a company that specializes in hockey gear, is finally taking that into account with a new partnership that will allow it produce…Read more...

The mega-hit Star Wars Disney+ series The Mandalorian returns next week and some fans might be a little confused when it does. Season two ended with Grogu leaving the Mandalorian to go train with Luke Skywalker. Season three will begin with Grogu already back by the Mandalorian’s side. And while the connective tissue…Read more...

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Federal officials from the U.S. Forest Service on Friday climbed into helicopters with high-powered rifles and set their sights on cows. A planned “lethal removal” of about 150 un-owned cattle roaming New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness in Gila National Forest was set to begin Thursday and run through Sunday, February 26.

This week, the Supreme Court is hearing two cases that could upend the way we’ve come to understand freedom of speech on the internet. Both Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh ask the court to reconsider how the law interprets Section 230, a regulation that protects companies from legal liability for…Read more...

Move over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Prometheus—there’s yet another large language model-powered artificial intelligence in town. Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, introduced its own AI today, called LLaMA.

Right now, if you want to know about Kang’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the person to talk to is Jeff Loveness. Loveness, best known for his work on Rick & Morty, not only wrote Marvel’s current hit Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, he’s also writing Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, the fifth Avengers film…Read more...

United Launch Alliance is hoping that the Force will be with them on May 4, a date the company is hoping to launch its Vulcan heavy-lift rocket for the very first time.Read more...

Late last year, the Pokémon Company shocked the world with the announcement that Satoshi—better known in the west as Ash Ketchum—would be bowing out as the enduring star of the long-running Pokémon anime. The company has started rolling out details about the anime’s new heroes... and by revealing that Pokémon could…Read more...

The hits keep on coming for Alex Jones, the disgraced radio host who peddled lies and conspiracy theories on his show Infowars following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Now having declared bankruptcy following his repeated trials for his misinformation about the mass shooting, Jones is sounding the alarm…Read more...

No matter what you may have thought of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, you have to admit the first end-credit scene, in particular, was awesome. It beautifully put into motion not just the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but tied up a few loose ends that had been set up in the film itself. When both of…Read more...

Google’s reliance on commonly used messaging systems that automatically delete conversations after a day has landed the company in hot water with the Department of Justice.Read more...

Last night when more Lord of the Rings movies were announced, everyone was deeply interested in what they could possibly be planning. After the beloved trilogy of films in the early 2000s and the less-than-beloved Hobbit trilogy, what more can be done? (Well, there’s War of the Rohirrim, but still!)

TikTok is pushing back against the European Union for not informing the company that they were banning the app on all government devices. The EU also took steps to ban the Chinese-owned app on staff’s personal devices with corporate access, amid concerns that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is accessing user data.Read more...

io9 has shared the work of Delilah S. Dawson before (check out an excerpt from her 2021 dystopian thriller The Violence), and we’ve got another unsettling exclusive for you today: a first look at Bloom, the tale of two women whose powerful attraction evolves into something that’s supernaturally toxic.

An 11-year-old girl in Cambodia has reportedly died after contracting H5N1 avian influenza, also known as bird flu, while her father has also tested positive for the virus. It appears to be the second confirmed human death linked to a surge in cases among birds and mammals since 2020, and this is the first documented…Read more...

As Apple continues to position its phones and watches as life-saving devices, the most compelling reason to upgrade to the iPhone 14 or 14 Pro is the Emergency SOS service that uses satellite communications when wifi or cellular are MIA. It’s not a feature that’s coming to older iPhones, however, so for those not…Read more...

The saga of Apple’s supposed mixed reality headset is starting to feel more like a ‘90s sitcom than a major tech release. Every time there’s a new episode, there’s a promise of real change to our beloved characters, and by the end of the episode it’s all undone. We return to where we began, and it starts all over…Read more...

New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys tease the mutants of Mutant Mayhem. Shazam: Fury of the Gods gets a bumper runtime. Plus, what’s coming on Kung Fu and La Brea’s season finale. To me, my spoilers!

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Facebook jail is about to get less crowded. Under a new set of policies revealed this Thursday, parent company Meta says it’s now harder for users to wind up with their Facebook accounts suspended for lesser violations of its rules. Those changes come after years of pushback from civil society groups and Meta’s…Read more...

When Kris Kashtanova attempted to copyright their comic book Zarya of the Dawn, the United States Copyright Office originally granted them the rights. Later, the agency put the book under review because of Kashtanova’s social media, where they said that they had produced the images using the AI-image generator …Read more...

Pedro Pascal is currently starring as two of television’s most prominent father figures, but The Mandalorian star has a confession to make: he feels uncomfortable using his Mando daddy voice when asked to in public.Read more...

Kodansha’s formerly Japanese-exclusive trio of manga using DC Comics characters are getting their first official English-language releases this year—excellent news for anyone who’s ever wanted to watch the Joker raise a baby Bruce Wayne.

On Thursday, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen spoke to a national organization that convenes investors, telling them that Meta was an unwise place to put their money —specifically the version of Meta under the direction of Mark Zuckerberg.Read more...

After securing a launch license, Relativity Space is eager to see its Terran 1 rocket get off the ground. The California-based company opted to skip a final engine test and set a launch date for the inaugural flight of its groundbreaking 3D-printed rocket.Read more...

Those of you who who sit up at night fretting about how American financial institutions are getting too damn woke, don’t worry: Your champion has arrived, and he’s gunning for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. On Tuesday, investor Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been called the “The CEO of Anti-Woke, Inc.” by The New…Read more...

During an investors’ call earlier today, Warner Bros. announced that it will be making more Lord of the Rings movies. No details have been released at this time, but wowie zowie.

Soon, you too can do this all day. Watch Rogers the Musical over and over we mean. The Disney Parks blog just teased that the fake Avengers musical that appeared in the Disney+ show Hawkeye will debut as “a short one-act musical” later this summer at Disney’s California Adventure, for a limited time only.Read more...

It will be nearly the end of the year before we see Apple’s next phone in person, but the rumor mill started churning pretty early on for the iPhone 15. This week, we’re looking at leaked three-dimensional CAD files rendered at 9to5Mac that supposedly show what the iPhone 15 will look like. Unsurprisingly, it looks…Read more...

Wizards of the Coast’s recent track record for tinkering with Dungeons & Dragons hasn’t exactly been stellar, but credit to the company, it hasn’t stopped trying. Of course, trying to improve the Druid character class is a lot less controversial than attempting to erase D&D’s beloved Open Gaming License, but these…Read more...

Behold the limitless, crowded cosmos. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey has put out its latest data release, increasing the size of the largest 2D sky map.Read more...