Gizmodo

For years, Google has offered users a master privacy setting which controls a major chunk of the data collected about you, but using it came with an enormous drawback: you had to give up a variety of useful features across the company’s services. Today, that’s changing. In a major revamp of its settings, Google will…Read more...

Superhero fans on the far-right political spectrum have one less movie to get excited about, putting their options for hateful heroes to—well—none. As first reported by The Daily Beast, a movie that was set to give us a big-screen rendition of an “anti-woke superhero” is shuttered, and the thousands of dollars fans…Read more...

NFTs exist solely to destroy the planet and occupy the attention of people who believe in the ownership of imaginary nonsense. And yet, Warner Bros. Discovery’s new NFT plan for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring seems even more ludicrous than normal. The plan is to release the movie as a set of NFTs...…Read more...

For the past 30 years, Geotail has been sailing through the magnetic envelope that surrounds Earth to study this region of our atmosphere. But the long-running mission may be coming to an end as NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency recently discovered that the spacecraft’s last remaining data recorder has…Read more...

The Biden administration officially launched its online portal (StudentAid.gov) to apply for student debt cancellation on Monday, after a soft-launch over the weekend. And though the site appears to be working so far—with more than 8 million borrowers filing applications in just the first few days—the federal…Read more...

You’ve heard the pleas from scientists: Squash these bugs without mercy. Entomologists and agriculture experts have been begging the public to help stop the spread of the ultra-destructive spotted lanternfly for several years now, but despite our best efforts, the invasive insect is now a familiar sight in 14 states,…Read more...

In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, She-Hulk’s Jessica Gao confirmed that Hulk’s son, Skaar, was a cameo that came directly from Kevin Fiege himself. Skaar appeared alongside Hulk at the very end of the finale episode, showing up in the middle of a family picnic just before the credits ran. No explanations…Read more...

A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a pair of dusty tails extending out from Didymos-Dimorphos, the result of NASA’s DART spacecraft smashing into the smaller member of the binary asteroid system.Read more...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the state is suing Google for allegedly collecting biometric data from millions of Texans without consent, his office said in a press release Thursday. The case is part of a recent flood of lawsuits against tech companies over biometrics, which measure physical…Read more...

Jordan Peele’s Nope is full of unexpected elements—including an alien that doesn’t look or act the way anyone thinks it will, and human characters who surprise us almost as much. One of the film’s biggest breakouts is Brandon Perea (The OA), who plays UFO enthusiast Angel Torres; ahead of Nope’s arrival on Blu-ray…Read more...

The hits keep coming from Webb Space Telescope, which has now spotted a rainbow “knot” consisting of an extremely red quasar and a snarl of massive galaxies that existed about 11.5 billion years ago.Read more...

While time traveling to hang out with your younger self may only seem possible in movies like The Adam Project, a real-life photographer and musician in Montreal has come pretty close to pulling it off. Unlike in the film, Conor Nickerson didn’t bring together his adult and younger selves to save the world—he simply…Read more...

All good things must come to an end, and so must some incredibly shitty things too, which is why UK Prime Minister Liz Truss announced today that she is resigning her position after just 45 days. Truss takes the mantle as the shortest premiership in British history, but like all good stupid things about the country,…Read more...

The Scottish islands of Shetland are taking a digital hit as a deep-sea internet cable has reportedly been compromised. The islands, located northeast of Scotland, are seeing landline and mobile phone outages.

Rocket technicians working on the front lines of the private-era space race are literally playing with fire. New details on how one SpaceX employee, who suffered grave injuries during a routine test, offer a new sense of the costs for the lightning-pace that companies are working at to put more rockets into the big…Read more...

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Do you remember R.I.P.D.? The movie about a cop (Ryan Reynolds) who gets killed and then enlisted into the Rest in Peace Department, a.k.a. heaven’s law enforcement division, to fight souls that have escaped hell? Chances are your answer is either “no” or “vaguely,” and yet, somehow, the film has gotten the sequel no…Read more...

Even with magnifying glasses being replaced by smartphone cameras, a child can tell you what happens when light shines through a focusing lens: a basic science experiment that the creators of this recalled bird bath appear to have forgotten.Read more...

Elon Musk couldn’t stop himself from talking Twitter, even when no one really asked. In the Q&A portion of a call with Tesla shareholders on Wednesday, the billionaire said, unprompted, that he was looking forward to acquiring the social media company—despite the hefty bill.

Have you ever prepped a photo for printing but regretted not being more generous with your framing when snapping the image? Extending the borders of a photo before digital editing was all but impossible, and it still represents a time-consuming challenge for even Photoshop masters, but a new tool teased by Adobe on…Read more...

Ebay will no longer let users sell Jeffrey Dahmer themed costumes, a blow sure to bum folks looking to ruin this year’s Halloween party by casually dressing up as the notorious necrophiliac serial killer.Read more...

It’s been roughly a year since Mark Zuckerberg laid out his ambitious plans to found a futuristic new world existing purely in a digital space. Acknowledging this new construct did not yet “fully exist,” the CEO — whose origins lie in far less noble pursuits — encouraged viewers of this announcement to experience the…Read more...

With just one month in between their respective showcases, both Dr. Lisa Su of AMD and Intel’s Pat Gelsinger declared their forthcoming line of CPUs to be the best and fastest gaming CPUs on the market. These are bold claims from both manufacturers, however, AMD’s Zen 4-powered juggernaut left an impression that…Read more...

Charlize Theron teases The Old Guard 2. David Andry, Alejandro Aragon, and Skylar Patridge’s Resonant is becoming a TV series. Go behind the scenes on Netflix’s Wednesday. Plus, what’s coming on Star Trek: Lower Decks, Titans, and more. Spoilers now!

In the Canadian High Arctic, climate change is bringing together viruses and potential hosts in new combinations, according to recently published research. Every novel interaction increases the risk of “viral spillover,” i.e., pathogens jumping to different hosts. And every instance of spillover is an opportunity for…Read more...

The European Space Agency is now targeting late 2023 for the inaugural launch of its next-generation Ariane 6 rocket, in what is yet another delay for the debut of this heavy-lift launch vehicle.

The universe is a spooky place, filled with zombie stars, invisible matter, and monster galaxies lurking in the silent darkness of the cosmos.Read more...

Google is turning the Messages app into its own bonafide variation on iMessages. The company’s announcement details a bundle of features coming to the Android app, including emoji reactions for iPhone users and voice message transcriptions. But the kicker is that some of the new abilities are only available to other…Read more...

You may recall last year’s Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, in which squished monkey balls took the top prize. Now, the storied competition is back with a new slate of comedic characters. Coming by land, by sea, and even through the air, the expressive animals in the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards show how…Read more...

This piece is part of Gizmodo’s ongoing effort to make the Facebook Papers available to the public. See the full directory of documents here.

JPMorgan Chase has hired former Celsius executive Aaron Iovine to be the executive director of digital assets regulatory policy, according to Iovine’s LinkedIn profile. And if you’re looking for an easy answer as to how anyone could escape from the recent Celsius catastrophe unscathed, we’re sorry to report we don’t…Read more...

Wikipedia editors have added a new landing page that asks readers to be more specific if they’re searching for the “2022 United Kingdom government crisis.” And it speaks to just how poorly things are going for recently installed conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss.

In the court of io9 I too am guilty of finding Daemon Targaryen himself, Matt Smith, surprisingly attractive. For me it happened somewhere between Last Night in Soho and his dancing sequence in Morbius. Maybe there were hints of it in The Crown but never really occurred to me when he was the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor…Read more...

This is Halloween and it’s time for costumes that will make us scream in horror or delight. For week three of io9's official costume show, we have some costume party goodness and comment submissions. And of course dogs in costumes, thanks to our editorial team!Read more...

Nope—the latest wholly original, thought-provoking spine-tingler from Oscar-winning writer-director Jordan Peele—comes to Blu-ray next week, meaning the film, which was shot on IMAX cameras, will now squeeze onto TVs for home viewing. Though it’s not the ideal way to view his sci-fi chiller, Peele has made peace with…Read more...

An unfortunate group of Longmeadow, Massachusetts police clearly didn’t get the message about minding their own beeswax.Read more...

Early birds get the worm, and early flights depart on time (usually), according to a new report from the Airlines Reporting Corporation and Expedia.Read more...

“I’d like to punch Aquaman in his face.” That’s Noah Centineo, one of the stars of this week’s mega DC film Black Adam, when asked which DC hero he’d like to share the screen with. His co-star, Quintessa Swindell, said Rorschach from the Watchmen, and those two answers, different as they may be, tell you so much about…Read more...

Microsoft is desperate to get in on the mobile gaming market, so much so that a big part of its plans to buyout a huge chunk of the game publishing world apparently hinge on creating their own mobile gaming app store.Read more...

Parler, the rightwing knockoff of Twitter that’s not Truth Social, accidentally exposed the personal email addresses of some of its most elite members on Monday. Rushing to tell them about the company’s acquisition agreement with the artist formerly known as Kanye West, top brass sent out an email that CC-ed a group…Read more...

A researcher in Canada has reported a discovery aptly timed for spooky season: a black-coated Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis). This appears to be the first recorded sighting of a lynx with this particular coloring.Read more...

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The Federal Trade Commission held an event Wednesday focused on the problem of “stealth” advertising in content geared towards children, where it’s difficult to differentiate between marketing and regular content. In the opening hours of the day-long event, the commission provided a glimpse into its thinking on the…Read more...

News flash everyone: public trust in tech companies isn’t exactly thriving. While it doesn’t take an expert to smell the bad blood that’s been brewing between tech and its users, research released this week from Edelman provides new, clear insights into just how much the relationship has soured over the years.Read more...

On November 11, a new character will become Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But is it Shuri? Is it Nakia? Okoye? We don’t know for sure, but apparently everyone in Wakanda has their own opinion about it.

Meta is chugging along on their Universal Speech Translator, which hopes to train an artificial intelligence to translate hundreds of languages in real time. Today, the tech giant claims to have generated the first artificial intelligence to translate Hokkien, which is a language primarily spoken and not written.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that it would pull an additional 15 million barrels of oil out of the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to help juice up oil supplies and keep gas prices low in the face of the global energy crisis.

It seems Uber just isn’t content with letting users travel in peace and awkward silence during their point-to-point trips. The ride-hailing company now plans to advertise to users at every point of a trip from the moment you open the app. These ads will potentially appear on multiple screens, blasting consumers with…Read more...

Episode seven of Andor traces the ripples of the Rebel strike on Aldhani across the galaxy. Every side sees the lines drawn, and action begins to build in another tension-filled hour of the events that lead up to Rogue One and Star Wars.Read more...

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