Gizmodo

It’s been a while since the sheer brutality of Prime Video’s Invincible dropped on the streamer. Season one’s hyper-violent superhero family drama showed us the destruction of a one-man alien invasion posing as a hero and a good father. Really, I still shudder thinking about impactful season finale.Read more...

Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that publishes Dungeons & Dragons, has been under fan scrutiny since a draft of its new Open Game License leaked earlier this month, and over the past two weeks all hellfire broke loose in the fandom. The company had to backtrack and apologize and then announce entirely new…Read more...

Following the banning of third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific, which access the social media platform’s application program interface (API), Twitter has retroactively edited its developer agreement after issuing a vague statement about the bans.

It makes complete sense for a company to want to protect a well-established brand, but does Rolex really need to worry about consumers potentially mistaking a colorful $25 learning clock for a luxury time piece that costs tens of thousands of dollars more?

Cobra Kai never dies, but it is coming to an end. Netflix just announced that the hit Karate Kid spinoff show has been renewed for a sixth season, which will also be its last. But show creators Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald simultaneously released a letter letting fans know: this is exactly how they…Read more...

It’s neat that my 2021 Dell XPS 15, with its mobile RTX 3050 Nvidia graphics card, now runs Cyberpunk 2077 on max settings like it’s installed locally. It’s running off servers exclusive to Nvidia’s GeForce Now Ultimate, launching this week in select regions.

Prosecutors are demanding disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reside in prison instead of an expensive estate while she appeals her prison sentence. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison last year for fraud related to her blood-test startup company.Read more...

Analysis of the three returning manikins will uncover the extent to which Orion and a promising new radiation vest will protect human crews during future missions to deep space.

ChatGPT writes well enough to fool scientific reviewers, ace AP tests in English and computer science—it even passed the bar exam. The bot sparked a lot of hand-wringing about an upcoming plague of cheating, and many educators are scrambling to get out in front of the problem. ChatGPT is already banned at public…Read more...

To be honest, 2023 really started with M3GAN. But now that she’s introduced herself to the world, it’s time to look at all the other genre films—the ones without murderous dancing AI dolls—that will be in theaters this year, and it’s an impressive list.Read more...

T-Mobile announced that hackers accessed data on 37 million of its customers, in a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The massive security breach impacts both prepaid and postpaid customer accounts, and is the second notable hack in less than two years. The company said it is in the process…Read more...

Genesis, one of the largest crypto lending firms in the space finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday. Though Genesis managed to cling on to life for months longer than some of its largest competitors, recent market shake-ups and festering fallout from FTX’s collapse flung it over the edge. Now, the firm…Read more...

Amid the deafening silence from Wizards of the Coast after io9 reported on a leaked draft of their new Open Gaming License, Paizo, one of their competitors, launched a bold new initiative. Alongside a few key partners, which include popular third-party publishers like Kobold Press, Chaosium, and Green Ronin, the …Read more...

As if there weren’t enough things to worry about when connecting a device to the internet, you might now have to stress over your pet fish making online purchases you didn’t approve—at least if you run a YouTube channel where you live stream your pet fish playing video games like Pokémon.

An underground landfill fire has been smoldering since November, creating toxic smoke that has affected nearby residents in a rural Alabama county. Officials have called in the help of the Environmental Protection Agency to find a way to extinguish the fire.Read more...

Things are looking good for a second season of Willow over at Disney. A new Powerpuff Girls is truly on the way. Plus, Batman heads back to Gotham’s roaring ‘20s in a new animated movie. All this and Star Trek Picard, Clone High, and more. Spoilers, hope you survive the experience!

Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto empire included dozens of companies under its ragged umbrella, all headlined under the FTX brand. Now that the whole enterprise has gone into bankruptcy, entities both big and small that dealt with any number of Bankman-Fried’s defunct entities are trying to get as far away as they…Read more...

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Layoffs are plaguing the tech industry left and right, but that doesn’t mean the big-wigs have to suffer too. Ahead of laying off several thousand employees, Microsoft hosted an exclusive Sting concert at Davos for executives.

The European Union warned TikTok it will face a ban if it doesn’t comply with local rules and regulations regarding the privacy policies of country members. The EU’s internal market top official told TikTok’s CEO on Thursday that the company needs to align its business model with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA)…Read more...

Eggs used to be something you could rely on, a faithful stalwart, always there to boil or fry in moments when my wallet was light and more expensive kitchen staples like beef felt out of reach.

Google told employees in an email on Friday that it would be cutting 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce, in its largest layoff ever.Read more...

The power of friendship abides in YOLO: Silver Destiny, the sequel season for YOLO: Crystal Fantasy. The adult animated series returns January 22 on Adult Swim and January 23 on HBO Max; it’ll reunite us with party besties Rachel and Sarah and the fantastical portals they often drunkly stumble into, resulting in…Read more...

The 2023 movie season kicks into high gear this week with the start of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Each year, Sundance is where many of the big, buzzy, independent films start their journeys to either box office success or critical glory—and, with the festival now being both digital and in-person, audiences…Read more...

Instagram launched a new “Quiet Mode” this week to help users spend less time on the company’s totally, absolutely not addictive platform.Though any user can use the new features, Meta’s launching them partly with teens in mind in what marks the company’s latest attempt to recover from a string of reports and leaked…Read more...

Some of 2023's genre series have already premiered or picked back up after a holiday hiatus—see: Quantum Leap on NBC and Peacock; Ghosts on CBS; Star Wars: The Bad Batch on Disney+, Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches on AMC, Servant on Apple TV+, The Last of Us on HBO, and Miracle Workers: End Times on TBS. But you’ll need…Read more...

Last year, amid increasing competition and production costs, reduced consumer spending, and years of accused financial mismanagement, Netflix struggled with and focused most of its energy on subscriber numbers. As new subscriber numbers seem to have stabilized in the final part of 2022, the company may be putting more…Read more...

A team of researchers investigating tens of thousands of citizen science observations of the night sky found that stars in the night sky are rapidly becoming harder to see due to human light pollution.

Reed Hastings, Netflix co-CEO and one of the company’s co-founders, is stepping down. In his place, the streaming service’s board has appointed two executives to lead the company together: Ted Sarandos, who has been a chief executive officer alongside Hastings since 2020, and Greg Peters, previously Netflix’s chief…Read more...

Elon Musk’s Twitter era feels like an absolute fever dream, especially now that an auction of the San Francisco office’s furniture has completed. Items across the board went for thousands of dollars, with a statue of Twitter’s iconic logo selling for $100,000.

The leader of one of Washington, DC’s most influential foreign policy think tanks got caught shilling for an oil CEO on a major news site—by a right-wing publication that runs hit pieces on renewable energy. This sounds like a Mad Lib, but it’s 2023, and anything is possible!

Samsung announced an upcoming update to SmartThings that lets you peek in on a security camera feed directly from your smartwatch. The update will roll out to Galaxy Watch devices, including the Galaxy Watch 4, Watch 4 Classic, Galaxy Watch 5, and Watch 5 Pro.

When Snow White bit the poisoned apple, she fell into a deep coma. The folks who bought into the promise of the failed crypto exchange FTX were much like our young Ms. White. They were all assured that putting their digital currencies on the crypto exchange would make their dreams come true. Now all those customers…Read more...

Fighting for humanity’s survival against a monstrous, existential threat is often a noble cause in apocalyptic fiction—heroes raging against the dying of the light to ensure some facet of our civilization lives on in the face of doom. But what happens when it’s just a contract job that pays like shit?

When federal agents kicked in his door one icy morning last November, Joerg Arnu was still asleep. Roused by deafening bangs and shouts, the 60-year-old retired software developer stumbled out of bed to find a crowd of unfamiliar men in military gear standing in his foyer.Read more...

New research casts doubt on certain claimed benefits of intermittent fasting, finding no link between a person’s timing of meals and their chances of long-term weight loss. The frequency and size of people’s meals, however, was linked to modest changes in weight.Read more...

If you’ve sent a money transfer over $500 to another person in recent years, there’s a decent chance U.S. law enforcement agencies could know about it. That’s according to new documents unearthed by The American Civil Liberties Union and The Wall Street Journal that show more than 600 law enforcement agencies…Read more...

Dungeons & Dragons released a statement today saying that the future of its open gaming license will be under the purview of the Creative Commons. The Creative Commons is “a nonprofit dedicated to sharing knowledge, and it developed a set of licenses to let creators do that,” says the newest update from Kyle Brink,…Read more...

Look. I know io9 runs a lot of Archie Comics previews. The problem is they’re so damn fun, whether the classic gang of Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead are facing monsters, angsty alternate universe doppelgangers, or giant robots. So we’d be doing you and ourselves a disservice if we didn’t show you this preview…Read more...

Mexico is cracking down on experiments in solar geoengineering. The controversial proposed climate solution, in which aerosol particles are released into the upper atmosphere to reflect the Sun’s heat, will no longer be allowed to take place in the country, the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources…Read more...

There’s a lot of Spider-Folks in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. This we knew, as we pored over its trailer, as well as many slices of a poster depicting a whole legion of webslinging heroes. Now we have the full poster in glorious high quality, and it turns out? Yeah, still a lot of Spideys in this movie.

Now is an appropriate time to but out your trumpet for the long-awaited demise of Google’s cloud-gaming service, Stadia. The shuttered service’s website makes it clear: Stadia officially shut down on Jan. 18, 2023.

The folks at CoinDesk were simply too good at their jobs. The crypto news site was the first to poke holes in Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto sandcastle that was FTX, but now the company who owns the crypto news site is reportedly exploring a sale partially due to fallout from Bankman-Fried’s failed and allegedly…Read more...

Amid a sea of mass layoffs in the tech industry, Amazon’s previously announced intent to reduce its workforce with nearly 20,000 job cuts began rolling out this week—and reports are that Comixology, the digital comics storefront Amazon purchased in 2014, is being hit hard.

GuliKit, makers of the truly excellent KingKong Pro 2 wireless controller for the Nintendo Switch, which we reviewed last year, has just released an upgrade/repair kit for the official Nintendo Joy-Cons that brings its drift-free Hall effect joysticks to the handheld console’s native controllers.Read more...

Tron 3 is like The Flash or Avatar 2. You’ve been hearing about it for so long, it’s almost comical. But, much like Avatar 2 last year and The Flash this year, it seems Tron 3 may actually be happening. Again.Read more...

NASA will invest $425 million to help Boeing develop a demonstrator aircraft for its Transonic Truss-Braced Wing design, which the space agency hopes will improve the fuel efficiency of commercial aviation.Read more...

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly,” said Robert F. Kennedy. It’s a noble sentiment, but it still means there are going to be people who never get around to the “achieving greatly” part, and that’s who Failure to Launch, an upcoming comics anthology from Iron Circus, will showcase—the people…Read more...

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I am an avid music consumer, but lately I’ve been in a little bit of a discovery rut. I find myself falling back into the same old artists and albums I’ve been listening to for the past few years. While this realization has weighed heavy on me in the weeks following New Years—when seemingly everyone is rebranding…Read more...