Gizmodo

Law enforcement officers across the country have obtained access to an obscure cellphone tracking app allowing them to map out people’s movements going back several months in time. The app, known as “Fog Reveal,” was first brought to light this month in a story by the Associated Press, which relied on documents…Read more...

It’s clear that Twitter vice president of product Keith Coleman genuinely believes in Birdwatch, the platform’s community-based debunking feature that will be expanding to 50% of U.S. users this week. The feature has been met with skepticism by some, who worry bad actors will misuse it and fill the social network with…Read more...

Children’s hearing protection product HearMuffs are designed to protect your kid’s ears at loud events like concerts and football games. But the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a recall on Thursday, warning that batteries in the HearMuffs—used to power the device for both “active” noise reduction and…Read more...

On a spring afternoon in Guatemala, I watched Patrick Melder, a 55-year-old missionary, find a potential convert. He began his pitch with the cadence of an experienced salesman.Read more...

With Black Adam now just a few weeks away, it was about time for another trailer to get unleashed on the world. This new trailer makes the upcoming film look much different from its previous teases. Yes, Black Adam (played by Dwayne Johnson) is at the forefront, but now the Justice Society—the super team tasked with…Read more...

Twitter agreed to pay whistleblower Peiter Zatko about $7 million dollars in settlement money back in June. Zatko also signed a non-disclosure agreement, as part of the settlement, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, which is based on an unspecified number of anonymous “people familiar with the matter.”

Like a student late to submit an assignment, NASA has requested an extension from the Space Force that would allow the space agency to perform a third launch attempt of its mega Moon rocket later this month.

A health and fitness app launched by a popular social media influencer suffered a glitch that may have shared users’ intimate workout photos and other personal account information with the wrong users.Read more...

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds brought a first-look clip for season two and some exciting casting news to its segment of Star Trek Day. Carol Kane (whose dozens of credits include The Princess Bride, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Scrooged, and Broadway’s Wicked) is coming aboard the USS Enterprise.

Five of the world’s biggest fossil fuel giants aren’t putting their money where their mouths are. Shell, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies are all spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to look better on climate change—while at the same time investing a relative pittance in their own…Read more...

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out in 1982. Now, 40 years later, its writer-director, Nicholas Meyer, returns to Star Trek to tell the story of Khan and his followers on Ceti Alpha—before the events of the film—in Star Trek’s first scripted podcast. Meyer announced the podcast alongside Paramount+’s Star Trek…Read more...

The USS Protostar crew is back just in time for Star Trek Day, debuting a look at the mid-season premiere of Star Trek: Prodigy, the animated kids’ show set within the Trek universe.Read more...

If the lexicon of the modern day Internet has left you scratching your head, don’t fret, Internet culture evolves at a breakneck speed, with apps like TikTok and platforms like Twitter serving as petri dishes for the next handful of buzzwords. Merriam-Webster is trying its best to recognize this, and is officially…Read more...

Star Trek Day rolls on with a spotlight on Star Trek: Lower Decks, offering a glimpse at the episode arriving October 13: “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus.” It’s a follow-up to “Crisis Point,” a season one standout that paid delightful tribute to Star Trek movies. Can the sequel live up, under what looks like Boimler’s…Read more...

During the global live stream of Star Trek Day, Paramount+ showed off a behind-the-scenes set tour of Star Trek: Discovery—hosted by Wilson Cruz, Dr. Hugh Culber himself. Paramount+ also revealed a dusty first look at star Sonequa Martin-Green in the season five premiere, which you can see at the top of this post.Read more...

We knew they were coming, but now we’ve got an idea of the threat that is going to reunite Captain Picard with his classic TNG crew—and they’re going to need a new ship to boldly go in.

The opening of Star Trek: Lower Decks’ third season has so far tackled the question of whether or not it’s time to knock our heroic ensigns down a peg or two, to get them back to the hapless nobodies they started the series as lest the whole premise fall apart. But three episodes in, its messaging is getting a bit…Read more...

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth, monarch of the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth realms, which includes England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, huge swathes of the internet have become a field of tributes.Read more...

Just when we begin to forget about the old Hubble Space Telescope, it comes back with another amazing look at the cosmos. It’s most recent target? Two spiral galaxies, more than a billion light-years from Earth, that appear to be colliding.Read more...

Private aerospace companies Rocket Lab and Sierra Space are joining the U.S. Air Force’s Rocket Cargo project, which aims to transport cargo around the world with space as its highway.Read more...

Donkeys are a ubiquitous beast of burden, and are regularly employed to slog materials across long distances, just like they were in the ancient past. Now, a team of geneticists has pinpointed exactly how ancient that past is: They believe they’ve determined when and where the first donkeys were domesticated.Read more...

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World” by MKRNYILGLD. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on Lightspeed’s…Read more...

Snapchat has come under scrutiny after a filter released on the app resembled face tattoos that are sacred to the Māori people, who are the indigenous people of New Zealand.

A few weeks ago, my editor asked me to review a new telescope. Having never reviewed a single product for Gizmodo in all the years I’ve worked here, and having never laid my hands on a telescope, I made a valiant attempt to weasel my way out of this assignment. Unswayed by my arguments, my editor described the…Read more...

You just knew the fourth episode of She-Hulk: Attorney At Law was going to be different when it started with a lame magician. His name was Donny Blaze (Entourage’s Rhys Coiro) and you might have thought you were watching the wrong show until he pulled out the Sling Ring. But even then, the scene and subsequent…Read more...

If the prospect of flying electric taxis zooming to and from major airports via an app sounds like a pie in the sky, try not to tell United Airlines.Read more...

NASA hopes to land a man and a woman on the lunar surface in late 2025, but the space agency currently lacks a functional moonwalking spacesuit. Houston-based Axiom Space has now been brought in to fill this glaring gap.Read more...

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Uber is back at it again. The digital ride-sharing is appealing a decision made by a Kenyan court that would cap the commission it can take from drivers in the country at 18%, which is down from the usual 25% the company charges.

After Lee Jung-jae’s international breakout role as Seong Gi-hun in the megahit Netflix series Squid Game, it seemed like only a matter of time before he got snapped up for more productions. Now, Deadline has revealed that Lee will be the male lead in the Star Wars series The Acolyte.Read more...

The summoning circle has manifested modern magical girl fashion inspired by Hocus Pocus right in time for the Disney cult movie’s sequel, which hits Disney+ at the end of September. io9 has this exclusive look at Loungefly’s Stitch Shoppe collection to suit your inner Sanderson sister. Whether you’re a Winifred, Sarah,…Read more...

If you’re deep in the Google ecosystem, you should get on board with Nearby Share. The wireless file transfer feature now works across Android devices of all types and even Chromebooks. And in its latest Android feature drop, Google is promising it’s about to get as easy to use as sharing a link.

If there was any question that Playmobil had its targeting systems locked on adult collectors, the company’s Star Trek line removes all doubt. Following up on a truly gigantic and obscenely expensive $500 USS Enterprise playset, Playmobil is introducing a worthy adversary for Captain Kirk with a new Klingon…Read more...

Headphones with active noise cancelling are a useful way to tune out unwanted noises, but what if you instead wanted to silence unwanted sounds at the source? Say you’re on a sensitive phone call, or you’re unleashing a tirade of expletives while gaming? There’s a device for that too, although it doesn’t look quite as…Read more...

Apple unveiled a suite of new products yesterday, from the iPhone 14 to updated AirPods, in a livestreamed and recorded event. You could’ve tuned in on the company’s website or YouTube to learn all about the “dynamic island” and the bigger/better cameras that are soon to be available on the newest generation of iPhone.

Joker: Folie à Deux adds another cast member in a mysterious role. New Black Panther: Wakanda Forever art highlights its heroes. Superman & Lois has found its replacement Kent son. Plus, what’s to come on the hilariously retitled Pennyworth: The Origins of Batman’s Butler. Spoilers now!

Still struggling over whether you should upgrade to the Apple Watch Series 8 or the new Apple Watch Ultra? Game developer Tomas Vyzmazal has answered that question for you by successfully porting Quake to Apple’s smartwatch: it’s a game that will definitely be far more enjoyable on the Ultra’s much larger screen.Read more...

Since the debut of its original scooter 22 years ago, which sold an astonishing five million units after launch, Raz0r’s name has been synonymous with scooters. Its latest model isn’t entirely about fun, however. With capacity for passengers or cargo, it might be the first Raz0r scooter to challenge your need for…Read more...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s excuse for trying to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter—too many bots, he says—is gaining steam. First, it was the Twitter whistleblower’s claims. Then, on Wednesday, Musk received an assist from former Disney CEO Bob Iger, who had wanted to buy Twitter for the House of Mouse years…Read more...

For two decades, we have watched as the tech sector rose from quirky start-ups – many of which originated here in the state of California – to global behemoths with the power to entertain, inform, manipulate, addict, and destabilize at an individual, local, and global scale.

If you watched along with Apple’s Far Out event, you saw the numerous dramatic vignettes interspersed between announcements. While I felt perhaps a little too affected by one particular scene of a mother and her child getting rescued atop of a mountain—this was during the segment for the Apple Watch Ultra—I realized…Read more...

The workers managing Apple’s iCloud datacenter in China, employees of Apple-partner Guizhou Cloud Big Data, haven’t been able to see their families in a week, thanks to a lockdown of the city of Guiyang over covid-19 concerns, according to a new report from Bloomberg News.

Remember that time in 2019 when there was, however briefly, evidence of a Starbucks in Westeros? That caffeinated Game of Thrones moment was soon corrected by HBO, but its existence at all offers a reminder that even lavishly budgeted series sometimes make it to air with technical errors intact. And now, we’ve got…Read more...

Bose stepped into the custom active noise-canceling game today, defying Apple’s AirPods Pro 2nd Gen reveal to announce its QuietComfort Earbuds II. Eschewing features unrelated to audio quality like spatial audio or, um, wireless charging, these $300 earbuds focus solely on custom active noise canceling, which…Read more...

I have a question for God, or maybe Jeff Bezos, that I’ve been thinking about ever since I saw the first two episodes of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s a gorgeous looking show, but every time I see its sweeping vistas practically screaming “Amazon spent yacht money on this!!!” all I can think is: but is…Read more...

Eighty-six years ago today, the last known thylacine died in a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. To commemorate the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger, as it’s commonly known, September 7 is now National Threatened Species Day in Australia, a day to celebrate Australia’s remarkable wildlife and consider how best to conserve it.Read more...

As temperatures drop and pumpkin spice invades everything we eat and drink, another sure sign that Fall, and eventually the holidays, are quickly approaching is Apple debuting a new lineup of smartphones and smartwatches for everyone to put on their wish lists.Read more...

How many state regulators does it take to screw a bankrupt crypto trading platform? While one could probably do the job on its own, apparently there are 40 states and their financial regulatory agencies gunning after the defunct crypto lending platform Celsius. One of those agencies comes so very close to calling the…Read more...

Preparing for a trip to the Moon and knowing what to do once you get there are two completely different things. That’s why astronauts are partaking in an intensive course that’ll help them to identify landscapes, collect samples, and report on scientific finds.

Television is one of the most visceral forms of escapism, with the best TV shows building a world so robust that it feels like it’s a slice of our own. A little hobby of mine is trying to figure out where, exactly, some shows take place within our world’s geography—even if these towns are stand-ins for real-life…Read more...