Gizmodo

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg spent what felt like the bulk of Apple’s big iPhone announcement evangelizing 5G, the fifth generation of wireless cellular technology. According to the two men, 5G is going to revolutionize how you use your phone with incredible 4 Gbps download speeds and…Read more...

For the past few years, I never felt like I understood Google’s approach to streaming video. It vexed me, I was terribly vexxed. That’s because while Google was happy to provide Android TV to partners like Sony, Hisense, Nvidia, Xiaomi, and others for use in TVs and streaming video boxes, when it came to Google’s…Read more...

A 28-year-old Brazilian resident participating in a covid-19 vaccine trial run by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford has died of complications related to the coronavirus, a local media outlet reported Wednesday. Health officials and those leading the study have not confirmed whether the volunteer had received…Read more...

Election officials have reportedly alerted law enforcement to a blast of goonish emails threatening to blackmail voters unless they vote for Donald Trump. According to Vice, which first picked up the story, the subject line read “Vote for Trump or else!” and opened with “We are in possession of all your information.”…Read more...

No one can escape spooky season, not even Star Wars. While there are plenty of frightful things in the galaxy far, far away—the Dark Side and the Sith, the Empire and the First Order, when you watch your idealized Jedi savior just casually swig milk straight from an alien teat—Star Wars has a legacy of turning to …Read more...

According to a CNN report, President Trump is allegedly pressuring the Department of Defense to give Rivada Networks, a company with several well-known Republican investors, what is basically a no-bid contract for extremely valuable mid-band 5G spectrum.Read more...

Whether we’re talking about the Obama administration or the Trump era, the position of law enforcement agencies has been that tech companies need to give authorities a backdoor into encryption. The infosec community agrees that this would just make us all less safe. Along the way, we’ve known that cops use expensive…Read more...

Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice, still won’t say if she thinks climate change is real.Read more...

This morning Acer announced its latest lineup of consumer notebooks across its Swift, Spin, and Aspire series. And they all include an Intel 11th-gen processor with Isis Xe Graphics. Some of them we already knew were coming, like the Swift 5 which will be Evo-certified, and the smaller and less expensive Swift 3, but…Read more...

A novel and controversial vaccine trial for covid-19 is officially set to begin in the UK next January. On Tuesday, researchers from the Imperial College London and elsewhere announced that they plan to conduct a human challenge trial that will involve 90 young and healthy adults. These volunteers will be given…Read more...

It’s hard to be a kid obsessed with gadgets when you’re lacking a disposable income, but as a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, one of my earliest attainable electronic obsessions were digital watches. I grew up in a time when companies like Casio and Timex were competing to cram as many features into their timepieces as…Read more...

Way back in the Before Times, during February’s Super Bowl, GMC hinted an electric Hummer was coming. Now, it’s here (for preorder).Read more...

After ripping off features from TikTok, Snapchat, and just about every other popular app, it seems like Facebook is setting its sights on the hyperlocal platform Nextdoor, just days after rumors emerged it was chasing a multi-billion dollar IPO.Read more...

The diabolical ironclad beetle, in addition to having one of the coolest names in the animal kingdom, boasts one of the toughest natural exoskeletons. A team of scientists has finally figured out the secret behind this extra durable armor and how these insects can survive getting run over by a car.

One of the remaining struggles with making virtual reality experiences feel more ‘real’ is the lack of tangible interactions between the user and objects that only exist in VR. To help bridge that gap, Microsoft Research has developed a wearable device with a hammer-like appendage that swings in and out of a VR user’s…Read more...

Rep. Raul Grijalva introduced a House bill yesterday that, if passed, would make oceans a central piece of climate policy. The legislation includes many good and important ideas, including stopping all offshore oil and gas drilling, pouring resources into marine ecosystem restoration, making fisheries more climate…Read more...

Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nintendo Switch | $300 | Amazon

I admit I’m kind of a sucker when it comes to Porsche Design gadgets (I once bought a Porsche Design lighter for well over $100 for no real good reason) because even though devices like the Porsche Design Book One, multiple Huawei phones, and others are typically wildly expensive, there’s something about their…Read more...

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are a fun way to skirt money-laundering laws and pay for drugs, but, according to reporting by Reuters, it appears you’ll now be able to use it to pay for Beanie Babies and fake Rolexes. That’s right: PayPal is getting into the crypto game.Read more...

On Instagram, I am besieged with ads for personalized skincare and hair care. Curology, Skintelli, Proven, Skinsei, Prose, Function of Beauty—you name it, and I have been targeted by it. The general gist is that either via a selfie, quiz, or sometimes even a form of DNA testing, I can get a direct order beauty product…Read more...

Daniel Kaluuya gets distressingly existential about the Barney movie he’s producing for Mattel. Jamie Foxx could be hunting vampires at Netflix. Nia Da Costa teases Candyman’s approach to making a monster. Plus, Sigourney Weaver talks diving deep (literally) for Avatar, and don’t expect Clancy Brown to return on The…Read more...

It began on Monday with a simple question: “Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote?” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked on Twitter, and nearly every even vaguely left-leaning streamer on Twitch answered. Mere hours later, AOC had a verified Twitch channel with hundreds of…Read more...

As part of Instagram’s ongoing crackdown on the scourge of fake followers leaving fake likes on the accounts of equally fake influencers, parent company Facebook announced earlier today that it filed two separate lawsuits targeting four individuals whose stock and trade was selling fake engagement.Read more...

A new report fresh from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlights the stark difference between covid-19 and the seasonal flu. For hospitalized patients, the report found, the risk of serious complications like pneumonia and shock was significantly higher from covid-19 than from the flu. People…Read more...

There’s learning and then there’s “learning.” According to a report in the Huffington Post on Tuesday, students in a 10th-grade history class at Maumee High School in Ohio were offered extra credit to do a little of the latter by watching videos produced by Prager University (PragerU). That is not, in fact, a…Read more...

Tuesday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

Even with its new A14 chip, Ceramic Shield screen, and revamped design, Apple’s new MagSafe for iPhone charging might be the iPhone 12's most important new feature because it solves the most annoying thing about traditional wireless chargers. The MagSafe charger for iPhones appears to be a major innovation, but it’s…Read more...

Buildings and the construction industry account for 35% of all emissions in the U.S., so it’s clear that any decarbonization plan can’t ignore them. That’s why Joe Biden’s climate plan includes massive promises to make sure “that all U.S. government installations, buildings, and facilities are more efficient and…Read more...

Given that the U.S. is now in this third high peak of covid-19, many Americans are understandably nervous about waiting in long lines and entering enclosed crowded spaces in order to cast their vote for the Nov. 3 election. So just how big a transmission risk is voting likely to be? The answer is complicated but…Read more...

Atari continues to struggle with getting its long-promised throwback console to consumers, but in the meantime it’s turned one of its most iconic games into a portable gaming machine that allows two players to smack a blocky ball back and forth across a virtual ping-pong table. Pong is back...again...but now in a more…Read more...

The White House has, in a way, complied with a federal judge’s order to get clarification from President Trump himself on whether he intended to declassify some of the most sought after documents in his government when he tweeted that he... declassified said documents. As of today, the administration’s position is…Read more...

The allure of internet stardom is becoming increasingly hard to resist, and after Sony created the ZV-1 to help support vloggers, Canon is advancing the trend with its own EOS M50 Mark II.Read more...

Bytebase, a new app by two Columbia University software engineers, promises to let you store your snippets, thoughts, and notes in a way that is instantly searchable and automatically organized.Read more...

Racist infiltrators disrupted a virtual town hall organized by the re-election campaign of Rep. Jahana Hayes, the first Black woman to represent Connecticut in Congress, on Monday.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to any of the major streaming services, first I have to ask: How have you avoided them? Second: You’ve missed the boat when it comes to trying the biggest names for free.Read more...

I have to admit that when Apple showed off the Pacific Blue iPhone 12 Pro Max, I thought: “Damn. That looks real nice.” Too bad it belongs behind a case.Read more...

As folks in the U.S. start to meander into flu season, Facebook decided that now’s the time to formally issue a “ban” on ads that discourage its users from getting vaccinated.Read more...

My great lament since I ripped the open the box to my iPhone 6 and found a giant and unpocketable beast resting in my tiny hands was that the era of the small phone was no more. It felt like we baby-handed people had been forced to pay some kind of small-hand tax: either we had to go with something cheaper and…Read more...

Well, folks, we’ve survived the second in what is looking like Apple’s multi-event series of fall product launches—with another presumably on the way before the year’s end. Today, Apple showed off its new line of iPhones and a miniature version of its expensive-as-hell HomePod that mercifully doesn’t pummel your…Read more...

To be honest, themost surprising thing about this is that it hasn’t happened already.Read more...

As far as desktop processors are concerned, AMD has been killing it for the last few years. If you missed the big announcement on Thursday, the company’s launching its next-gen CPUs, Ryzen 5000, on November 5. If all the benchmark numbers they presented in its presentation are true, we could be looking at a major…Read more...

In the latest chapter of the Epic Games vs. Apple feud, a federal judge granted an injunction Friday to keep Apple from terminating Epic’s developer account but also said the tech giant wouldn’t be compelled to bring Fortnite back to its App Store.Read more...

If you were looking forward to seeing President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden shout over each other like two geriatric playground bullies again next week, I have some bad news.Read more...

On top of the regulatory probes, risky revenue sources, and at least one suicide tracing back to its app, it looks like stock-brokering startup Robinhood has another major problem. Well, actually, two: The first is that the app’s quickly become a popular target for hackers looking to game its users out of thousands of…Read more...

Get ready for a “wildly original” journey into déjà vu. Ernest Cline has shared new plot details about Ready Player Two, his long-awaited follow-up novel for Ready Player One. Maybe it’s commentary. Maybe it’s laziness. But either way, this book sounds like the same damn thing we already got.Read more...

Oh, Quibi. Quibi, Quibi, Quibi. Whatever will happen to you? No viewers want to pay you for your service, and now it seems not even Apple, a company very keen to jump-start its own streaming TV empire, is interested.Read more...

On Friday, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Dr. Anthony Fauci told CBS News Radio that there was a “superspreader event at the White House”—specifically, the Sept. 26 ceremony in the Rose Garden. The president himself, as well as numerous White House aides and GOP politicians, tested…Read more...

Since Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness premiered on Netflix earlier this year, most public attention has been focused on the lives of the series’ prime subjects: Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. On Thursday, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring gave everyone a reason to say, “oh yeah, I forgot about that Doc…Read more...

Less than a week before the 2020 presidential election, three of the biggest names in tech—Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—will testify before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about a longstanding law that protects websites from liability…Read more...

What happens when you mash up military action Michael Bay-isms with the fantastical world of Monster Hunter? You get this, and it looks, uhhh, wild.Read more...