Gizmodo

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...

Ransomware cyber-gangs made about $456.8 million in 2022. It sounds like a lot of money until you compare it to the record estimated profits from 2021: $765 million. All told, hackers managed to extort 40% less from their victims this past year, vs. the year before, according to a new report from Chainalysis published…Read more...

Several New Jersey environmental groups are defending offshore wind development after seven dead humpback and sperm whales washed up along New York and New Jersey coasts in the past month.Read more...

Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, claims the metaverse will one day become as big a part of consumers’ lives as the smartphone as the company works to create a bigger edge in the digital world.Read more...

Just because a company files a patent for a new device, feature, or random idea, doesn’t necessarily mean it plans to make it a reality. Sometimes, it’s just to prevent other companies from doing it. So it’s impossible to say what will come of this recent AR-centric patent filing by Nintendo, but the included images…Read more...

Artificial intelligence has already beaten chess. Hell, the most sophisticated AI systems have a very good chance against top players in the incredibly complicated game of Go.Read more...

To say I watched a lot of TV as a kid is an understatement. My brain is a more comprehensive resource on ‘80s and ‘90s TV shows than the Library of Congress, and while I probably couldn’t put my finger on a favorite genre when I was younger, looking back, it’s clear I endured countless shows—good, mediocre, and…Read more...

The stars have talked a big game about Scream VI, the upcoming sequel that takes the increasingly venerable horror franchise from the sleepy yet murder-filled town of Woodsboro and takes it to the big city. And if you were wondering exactly how the serial killer Ghostface—or, rather, whoever’s running around under the…Read more...

It’s no secret that humans have made big changes to Earth and its atmosphere. But as greenhouse gases have built up in the air and our planet’s average surface temperature has risen, a lesser-known phenomenon has been happening.

A floor statue featuring Twitter’s blue bird logo sold for $100,000 in a Wednesday auction of more than 600 office items the company’s new overlord, Elon Musk, decided it no longer needed.Read more...

Amazon is set to shutter its charity program AmazonSmile next month. The move comes as the company lets go of thousands of employees as the e-commerce giant looks to cut cuts.

If you haven’t seen Nope, you’ve had plenty of time to catch up—but if you want to have it explained and don’t care about spoilers, here you go.Read more...

There’s Something Wrong With the Children drops a big hint as to what it’s about with that title—but what’s wrong with the kids, as well as the adults surrounding them, not to mention how everyone got that way, are the prickly pleasures in Roxanne Benjamin’s (Creepshow, XX, Body at Brighton Rock) new film, written by…Read more...

The smart home has become a renewed priority for companies since Matter launched, soon to usher in all sorts of refreshed gadgets. Until recently, Apple was trailing behind a bit in terms of offerings, which is why we’re buzzing over the revelation of a temperature sensor not only in the brand-new HomePod but also in…Read more...

This week we got our first look at Power Rangers’ big celebration for its 30th birthday—a new special episode reuniting a mix of first and second-generation rangers from the original Mighty Morphin’ team. But a notable face was missing among them.

The word “reshoots” means different things to different people. Some assume they’re a sign of a troubled production, one that needs to fix its own mistakes. Others see them as a blessing, a rare chance to go back and make something better with added perspective. Depending on the situation both viewpoints can be true,…Read more...

Researchers combing the surface of Antarctica for space rocks hit the jackpot by finding five meteorites in the tundra, one of which weighs almost 17 pounds.

The font style used in the U.S. State Department is changing, prompting complaints from employees who find the change to be an inconvenience. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent an email to the state department, headlined “The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin,” ala Bob Dylan, saying they will be changing the font…Read more...

On Wednesday, the Wikimedia Foundation finally showed off the changes it made to the desktop version of its open online encyclopedia, an update that’s been over a decade coming and close three years in development.Read more...

The potential benefits of taking vitamin D supplements may be affected by your weight and height, new research suggests. The study found that overweight and obese people taking these supplements experienced a smaller increase of vitamin levels and other related markers relative to those with a lower body mass index.Read more...

Watch out, Chucky. There’s a new killer doll franchise in town. After a massive opening weekend, the buzz for a sequel to M3GAN began almost immediately. Now, it’s official. Titled M3GAN 2.0, the horror sequel will hit theaters on January 17, 2025. Two years from yesterday.Read more...

Tesla CEO and former world’s richest man Elon Musk began a long awaited trial this week centered around his fateful August, 2018 “funding secured” tweet where he claimed he had successfully lined up funding necessary to take Tesla private at $420 per share. Tesla investors lawyering up against the billionaire say…Read more...

James Cameron really said “the whale stays in the picture.” Avatar: The Way of Water’s MVP sea creature is confirmed to be returning to the franchise in a big way, and we couldn’t be more excited to see the fan favorite become even more integral in Avatar 3.Read more...

The Commerce Department announced Wednesday that it is launching an investigation into how widespread data collection and corporate surveillance pose an outsized risk to marginalized groups.

A U.S. government agency issued a citation to Amazon.com Inc. for reported safety hazards in the workplace. The agency said Amazon failed to keep its workers safe and found workers were exposed to ergonomic hazards after inspecting three warehouses.Read more...