Gizmodo

So we’re really doing this, huh?

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Xbox Series X development docs, distributed courtesy of a leaker on Twitter, tease a long-rumored second Xbox Series X. As the Verge’s Tom Warren notes, the second console, code-named Lockhart, has been rumored for some time. This is just more fuel for the “Lockhart is real” fire. If it is indeed in development it…Read more...

As the ongoing examination into gross sexual harassment across multiple corners of the entertainment industry continues, more incidents of abuse in the comics industry are coming to light. Now, a familiar name at Dark Horse Comics has had their relationship with the company severed entirely after facing a new…Read more...

Tough times seem to keep rolling for makers of augmented reality glasses. North, the Canadian startup behind the consumer-focused Focals by North smart glasses, is in the final stages of a $180 million sale to Alphabet, according to a Globe and Mail scoop.Read more...

After shuttering all of its U.S. retail locations in mid-March to prevent the spread of covid-19, Apple began reopening stores last month in May. But now, due to a recent spike in covid cases, Apple has decided to reclose 10% of its stores, primarily in southern states such as Florida.Read more...

Dearly beloved, we are gathered to mourn the loss, and celebrate the memory, of all 82 of Microsoft’s retail locations. They became incapacitated as a result of complications due to the current coronavirus pandemic in mid-March; their parent company, Microsoft, opted to take the ailing stores off life support today.

Disney could push back Mulan’s release once more. Try to be surprised, but yes, Chiwetel Ejiofor will be back for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The Michael Bay-produced coronavirus disaster movie expands its cast. Plus, Flex Mentallo helps Rita out in new Doom Patrol pictures, and Gerard Butler runs…Read more...

I’ve spent a good portion of my time inside during lockdown sifting through the best Instagram Live workouts, but working out at home isn’t really my thing. The global covid-19 pandemic—and subsequent gym closures—forced me to reevaluate that stance. Free streaming workouts are fine and all, but what I really needed…Read more...

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Meeting up with friends or heading to the movies isn’t quite as easy as it used to be—in some place, it’s not even possible. But streaming services are filling in the gaps with a growing number of ways to watch something with other people, even when you’re physically alone.Read more...

Kingdom Hearts All-In-One Package (PS4) | $40 | AmazonRead more...

Amid nationwide PPE shortages, one Silicon Valley investor and his business partner apparently found the most ridiculously shady way to profit off medical facilities’ scramble for medical-grade face masks in the wake of the coronavirus. The two would leverage popular gig economy apps like Venmo and TaskRabbit to pay…Read more...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expanding the list of people it considers to be at higher risk of severe covid-19. Its new guidelines, published Thursday, say that people living with many chronic conditions including diabetes, kidney disease, and sickle cell are more likely to develop a serious case…Read more...

In its push to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the U.K., the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday published a superseding indictment aimed at broadening “the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.” The names of certain organizations…Read more...

Twitter does not have to stop a merry cow from dunking on California Republican Congressperson and Trump bootlicker Devin Nunes, a court has ruled. She will mock him until her last breath. Which will not be today. To greet the arrival of the good news, the cow squirted celebratory milk all over Nunes’s face.Read more...

There’s a buffet of things to be scared shitless about these days, but for those who have sampled even a taste of big tech’s eagerness to build and sell facial recognition surveillance software to law enforcement, it’s uniquely rancid.Read more...

Black holes aren’t supposed to leak any light when they smash into each other—or at least that’s what physicists thought.Read more...

Some Tesla workers who were originally informed they were not “obligated” to show up for shifts at the company’s Fremont, California production facility as it reopened during the coronavirus pandemic have in fact received termination notices, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

It’s lawsuit week for Big Oil. A day after Minnesota filed a groundbreaking suit, Washington, DC District Attorney General Karl Racine sued ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell, alleging that the companies “systematically and intentionally misled consumers ... about the central role their products play in causing…Read more...

Cox has officially rolled out its own “Elite Gamer” internet add-on service in the U.S., something it started testing in April 2019 in select cities. Elite Gamer is a Gamers Private Network (GPN) that helps reduce lag while playing an online game. New and existing customers anywhere in the U.S. can now try Cox’s new…Read more...

It only took 84 years but someone involved with distributing Gone With the Wind has finally acknowledged that its glorification of the antebellum south is racist and that it perhaps should not be disseminated to audiences without some kind of warning.

In 2016, The 100 went into a metaphorical butthole. In the span of a few episodes the show murdered one of its most prominent Black characters in a brutal manner and then murdered its most high profile lesbian. The audience fled in droves, the show was critically panned, a national conversation about the wanton…Read more...

In California, trucks won’t be able to pollute the air and planet for much longer. The state is approving the nation’s first-of-its-kind rule for truck manufacturers on Thursday. The goal? To make more electric trucks.Read more...

Google’s push to become a privacy-positive company over the past year has been, depending on how you look at it, an act of genuine benevolence, a brilliant marketing decision, or straight-up bullshit. So when Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company’s latest moves in the privacy-protecting space on Twitter…Read more...

Scientists have traced the ancestry of modern sled dogs, such as Siberian huskies and Alaskan malamutes, all the way back to the end of the last ice age, highlighting an extraordinarily long period of genetic continuity.

It’s finally hot out. That means tasty barbeque and cute little socially-distanced kickbacks with good music. But first! You’ll need a grill to actually cook those kebabs and baby back ribs. Luckily, I’ve put together a brief roundup of well-known charcoal grills to suit your very specific needs. Who wants to deal…Read more...

Faced with the increasingly vocal criticism that it’s one of the primary reasons why newsrooms are struggling, Google announced today a new licensing program that will pay certain publishers for content ahead of launching a “new news experience” later this year.Read more...

Earlier this week, after years of rumors, Apple finally announced its third major CPU transition for the Mac by moving away from Intel to custom-designed Apple processors. But now that the dust has settled, a lot of people are asking why.Read more...

Are you a frontline worker dealing with new stresses or irresponsible management? Is working (or not working) from home starting to take a psychological toll? How are you coping with reopening? Submit a story using this Google form or send me an email with the subject line “My Covid Story” and provide as much…Read more...

Local health officials and the World Health Organization today finally declared the end of an outbreak of Ebola that had plagued the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa for nearly two years. It was the second-largest outbreak of the deadly viral disease in recorded history, infecting over 3,400 people and…Read more...

White actors voicing animated characters of color has been an issue for as long as animation has existed. It can lead to racist and stereotypical interpretations and just generally unacceptable appropriation. It’s an overdue realization that (finally) led The Simpsons to rethink the character of Apu. This week, at…Read more...

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Lana Condor will jet off to Mars in HBO Max’s new sci-fi rom-com. Universal has plans to bring Twister back. Another day, another tease for a mysterious creature in the Avatar sequels. Plus, get a look at a sequel to a Twilight Zone classic, and Doom Patrol gets its disco on in a new clip. To me, my spoilers!

Lightroom might not have seeped into the common vernacular like Photoshop has, but in some ways it’s just as useful as the powerhouse image editor—and you get both as part of the $20 Creative Cloud Photography subscription and the deluxe CC package. Whether you’re just getting started with the software or you’re used…Read more...

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A trio of Republican senators have introduced a bill that would force tech firms to engineer backdoors into their encryption techniques whenever a judge asks them to—essentially banning encryption that prevents hackers from stealing stored data and end-to-end encryption that prevents anyone but senders and recipients…Read more...

We’re gonna need a bigger TARDIS. After over a decade apart, and several Doctors in between, Big Finish has announced that David Tennant and Alex Kingston are returning as the Tenth Doctor and River Song in a new Doctor Who audio series.Read more...

Following a series of grievances with the social media networks that millions of people actually use, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is floating the idea of setting up shop on a new platform, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Well, there’s a perfectly good network sitting right there.

It’s been a long road to regulation for Uber and Lyft in their home state of California, but it may be coming to an equitable end—one that would see their massive workforce of driver-contractors finally given legal employee status.

Just in time for primary season, the organizers of San Diego Comic-Con’s annual Eisner Awards have made the last minute decision to toss out all of the votes after a number of people discovered that the online portal was rather insecure in a way that made it possible for people’s votes to be changed.Read more...

A recent investigation into arsenic contamination levels in bottled water has found that a brand sold by Whole Foods—and, by extension, on Amazon—contains high levels of the toxic metal, butting up against the federal cap for maximum contamination. And not everyone agrees that the federal cap is safe enough.Read more...

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced on Wednesday that he’s suing ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute because the three firms deceived customers about the climate crisis. This is the first lawsuit of its kind to name API and Koch Industries, and it takes a novel approach by…Read more...

Antarctica’s sea ice has crashed in recent years. It’s nothing to celebrate, but apparently some Antarctic penguins are loving it. A new study out Wednesday found that a group of Adélie penguins actually thrived during a period of sea ice loss. Don’t get too excited, though. This sea ice loss doesn’t affect all…Read more...

In a spectacularly rare admission of likely very common fuckery, police copped to using face recognition to make a wrongful arrest, according to the ACLU, confirming a long-suspected but nearly-impossible-to-prove practice. On Wednesday, the civil rights litigation group lodged a complaint against the Detroit Police…Read more...

Tuesday’s primaries have reshaped the Green New Deal landscape. Much of the focus has been on the top tier Congressional races featuring big names like AOC cruising to victory and major upsets like newcomer Jamaal Bowman blowing the hawkish House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Eliot Engel out of the water in New…Read more...

It’s official, as of today, Boston’s become the second-largest US community to ban police use of facial recognition technology, thanks to a unanimous vote by more than a dozen city council people. The move follows similar bans by the neighboring cities Brookline, Somerville, and Cambridge a few months back, along with…Read more...

There might be a lot of mystery surrounding the town of Hawkins, Indiana, but one thing that isn’t a secret is how the story of Netflix’s Stranger Things is going to end. At least not to the guys making the show, that is.Read more...

The Internet Archive set out in the 1990s with an improbable mission to become the “Library of Alexandria Two”; by 2020, they’ve arguably surpassed that goal, plus delivered their collection straight to the masses. It’s the only repository where a NASA recap of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster logically coexists…Read more...

Val Kilmer has made all kinds of movies throughout his long career, and many of his most high-profile performances (think Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and his groovy debut in Top Secret!) can be found in drama and action films. But when the Juilliard-trained actor—who’s had some health problems…Read more...