Gizmodo

A face recognition app used by thousands of law enforcement agencies, which has drawn considerable scrutiny in past weeks over its creator’s dubious data collection methods, contains code hinting at an unreported range of potential features, based on a version of the app discovered by Gizmodo.Read more...

Apple really, really wants you to consider the iPad a MacBook replacement, so after adding cursor support in the latest version of iPad OS, the company reportedly has a reimagined Smart Keyboard with a built-in trackpad on deck.Read more...

A whistleblower from the Department of Health and Human Services has alleged that officials sent more than a dozen workers to receive American evacuees from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the global coronavirus outbreak, without providing sufficient protective gear or medical training, according to recent reports from …Read more...

Walmart is gearing up to launch a new membership program called Walmart+, a service that’s reportedly being tailored to compete with Amazon Prime by offering deals and services that a Prime membership doesn’t.Read more...

In 2019, broadcast news programs produced more climate coverage than the previous year. But it’s still far from enough.

In June of last year the world was introduced to the Raspberry Pi 4: a tiny computer with an even smaller price tag that could run a full desktop operating system making it useful for more than just hacks and homebrew projects. To celebrate the Pi’s eighth birthday it just became an even better bargain with the base…Read more...

When we think about companies “harvesting our data,” chances are we’re thinking of The Big Tech Names doing that harvesting. But sometimes, even these companies get taken for a bit of a ride. Case in point: earlier today, the adtech company OneAudience got slammed with a hefty Facebook lawsuit, on charges that the…Read more...

On Wednesday, a British appeals court issued a ruling that Heathrow Airport’s long-planned third runway expansion in London is illegal due to its climate impacts that planners failed to adequately account for. The move is the latest in a decade-plus of wrangling over the expansion that would be a climate disaster.Read more...

Frederick Brennan, the founder of the fringe 8chan discussion board that disbanded after users on its far-right /pol/ subforum were linked to multiple mass shootings, could face arrest in the Philippines thanks to criminal libel charges brought by the site’s current owner, Jim Watkins.Read more...

The spread of coronavirus is prompting companies to cancel nonessential travel. That includes trade shows like the smartphone-centric Mobile World Congress, which was scheduled to be held in Barcelona this week but was called off. Now Facebook has canceled its own annual event, the F8 developer’s conference, citing…Read more...

Earlier this week, the developer behind Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios, invited press to watch hours of gameplay in which a developer died over and over again in the difficult isometric RPG based on Dungeons and Dragons. I went because the Baldur’s Gate series is one of my absolute favorite ever made—and also because…Read more...

The Clone Wars is back, which can only mean a few things: One, some of our favorite Star Wars characters in the galaxy have returned. Two? It’s all about to end rather tragically for most of them. But Rex and Ahsoka will come out of the Clone War...mostly unscathed, and for the voice behind the former, their…Read more...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to seek a total of at least $200 million in fines from cellphone carriers accused of illegally sharing the location data of their customers, Gizmodo has learned.Read more...

This week, the other shoe dropped for people living in the U.S. worried about the spread of the new coronavirus. Officials have reported the first local cases of the respiratory illness, COVID-19, in California. The virus is here—and has probably been here for some time—and the U.S. is almost certain to face the sort…Read more...

Facebook is already responsible (at least in part) for one of the biggest and most poorly named smartphone flops ever: the HTC First. But in a new book about the inner workings of Facebook, author Steven Levy reveals the social media giant had an even wilder prototype device that never saw the light of day.Read more...

Etsy is rolling out a new campaign for offsite advertising that automatically enrolls its sellers and charges them a fee for sales from those ads, but some sellers won’t be able to opt out—meaning they’ll pay for the service whether they like it or not.Read more...

Scientists have discovered evidence of the largest energy outburst ever recorded. The clues to this ancient explosion come in the form of a giant bubble of ancient radio waves.Read more...

He knows what’s up. Danger, that’s what’s up.

The Associated Press published a story early Thursday morning using reporting from Chinese-based Ningbo Evening News that Chinese authorities were deploying 100,000 ducks to Pakistan to help combat the locust swarms plaguing the country. Outlets around the world picked the ducks vs. locusts battle up before AP amended…Read more...

Earlier this week, British medical journal The Lancet published a brief correspondence from two Chinese medical aid workers who said they were currently fighting the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. The letter, which describes extreme and intolerable working conditions inside the isolation wards, was suddenly retracted…Read more...

The Apple Watch is the smartwatch to beat. It’s massively popular, has a full range of features, and compared to some of its competitors, leads the way in rethinking how wearables can function within the health sector. During the Apple Watch portion of Apple events, you can generally expect a feel-good reel of…Read more...

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Unless artist Jeff Koons, known for his giant balloon dog sculptures, decides to get litigious, Moose Toys will be introducing some competition for Sony’s Aibo later this year with Squeakee, the world’s first robotic balloon dog that could potentially put clowns and birthday party entertainers out of business.

Let’s skip past all the hemming and hawing. Between its huge 6.9-inch 120Hz screen, beastly specs, 5G support, 108-MP main camera, Space Zoom lens, and 8K video capture, the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is an absolute powerhouse. It has practically any feature you could ever want (aside from a headphone jack), and unless…Read more...

One of the benefits of going all-in on Apple hardware is that everything works so seamlessly (most of the time): Photos from your iPhone appear on your Mac, you can switch between the desktop and mobile when working on documents, video calls can be made from anywhere, and so on. A similar sort of integration can be…Read more...

Twenty countries have reported their first cases of the new coronavirus this week, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to over 82,000 in 50 countries since the outbreak began in December. At least 2,800 people have died worldwide.

When DJ Casper picks up the phone, it’s like getting a direct line to a messiah, or the Moviefone guy. You know he exists of flesh and blood, but speaking with him is the miraculous proof that he is out there. “DJ Casper?”

NETGEAR Orbi Whole Home Mesh WiFi System (RBK23) | $200 | AmazonRead more...

Centuries after humanity has been all but destroyed by nuclear holocaust, a woman wakes up on an alien spaceship. She finds out the aliens that saved her want to help bring back the human race.Read more...

The latest news from the White House on the ongoing spread of the novel coronavirus, which the Centers for Disease Control has warned is likely to hit the U.S. imminently, is not very reassuring: Vice President Mike Pence, whose poor epidemiological instincts helped fuel an HIV outbreak in his home state of Indiana,…Read more...

A scathing opinion piece in the BMJ is accusing the World Health Organization of conducting a pilot program in Africa for an experimental malaria vaccine without acquiring the informed consent of participants. Experts are calling it a “serious breach” of international bioethical standards and potentially “a disaster…Read more...

Nerds love watching gargantuan kaiju beat the snot out of each other almost as much as they love watching professional wrestlers get greased up and brawl in the ring, which makes it surprisingly as hell that a movie like Paramount’s upcoming Rumble wasn’t made years ago.Read more...

Scientists say they’ve for the first time conducted an extensive analysis of the bacteria that live in the human vagina. And they seem to have found plenty of surprises.

Ten dollars a month will buy you some decent things, even in this economy. Or you can flush it down the shiny new toilet that is Seamless+.Read more...

Streaming giant Twitch.tv issued 24-hour bans to some of its biggest left-wing podcasters on Tuesday night, including Chapo Trap House, radio host David Pakman, and Mychal “Trihex” Jefferson, citing Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests over streams of the Democratic primary debate in South Carolina.

A security breach at a face-recognition startup, already embattled over its unfettered collection of Americans’ personal data on behalf of its hundreds of law enforcement clients, further underscores the potential hazards faced by consumers at the hands of a controversial and largely-unregulated surveillance technologyRead more...

Until recently, Lisa McCarrick was a loss prevention manager at Amazon, albeit one who alleges she was compensated significantly less than men who held her title prior, and her male subordinates. But in a wrongful termination lawsuit, filed yesterday in her home state of California, McCarrick references a pattern of…Read more...

Game designer Elizabeth Hargrave helped jumpstart a tabletop revolution with Wingspan, an environmental board game about creating habitats for birds. Her upcoming release, Mariposas, has players guiding monarch butterflies on their migration. But there’s something unsettling lurking beneath the table.

If for some reason you have willingly handed over your Gmail address to allow yourself to be spammed by presidential campaigns—perhaps because you want to be alerted to fundraising efforts or to find out more on the candidates’ stances—you might have already noticed something a little funny about which candidates’…Read more...

As tech and social media giants engage in a kind of Whac-A-Mole for COVID-19 scaremongering and product misinformation on their websites, Facebook says it’s cracking down on ads intended to mislead users about their products on its Marketplace.Read more...

Thanks to some dedicated coders and hardware developers in China, fans of handheld gaming no longer have to rely on Nintendo to get their fix. The Anbernic Retro Game 350 might not play the latest and greatest titles like the Switch or 3DS do, but when it comes to classic gaming, the RG350 delivers the best experience…Read more...

On January 3, 2019, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) accomplished a human first: It successfully placed a lander on the far side of the Moon. Today, the team is revealing new insights about what they found beneath the lunar surface.Read more...

Scientists think they’ve helped settle a debate over one of the most endangered (and cutest) animals around: the red panda. New genetic evidence suggests there are really two different species of red panda, each with a unique evolutionary history.

Indiana Jones is coming back for a fifth adventure—this we’ve known for ages, as the film’s been in a long development process. But now as it begins to slowly come out of that process, it’s going to be doing so without the man that has been behind the camera since the very first movie in the franchise.

On Wednesday, the House is holding a hearing on Trump’s racist border wall and the threat it poses to the cultural and environmental resources in Arizona, including Organ Pipe National Monument and parts of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s tribal lands. Guess what else is going down Wednesday? The Department of Homeland…Read more...

In 1998, Disney’s attempts to launch its animated take on the fable of Hua Mulan in China hit a snag that delayed its release by nearly a year. Now, on the precipice of releasing its live-action remake aimed even further at capitalizing on the Chinese market, Disney finds itself in another problematic situation: the…Read more...

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Astronomers from the Catalina Sky Survey say they have detected a rare mini-moon around Earth. Sadly, we shouldn’t get too attached to our new natural satellite, as the rock—if that’s indeed what it is—will only hang around for a few months.Read more...

The dark, rocky face of the Dois Irmãos Mountain rises over the rainforest and through the clouds, overlooking the largest slum in Latin America. A young man emerges from around the corner of an alleyway to meet me with a handgun tucked under his arm; the local gang’s “manager.” Weaving our way down the hill through…Read more...

Ever since Kohei Horikoshi’s seminal shonen manga, and then Studio Bones’ incredible adaptation of it, hit the world, it feels like it’s just kept powering up, quite like its cast of rough-and-ready wannabe heroes. Now the series’ second crack at the box office continues to amp up the scale, but in doing so it might…Read more...