Gizmodo

A laptop computer belonging to the office of U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon was one of several electronic devices stolen by Trump loyalists during a failed coup attempt on Wednesday, according to a new report from Politico. The news comes as the Department of Justice tries to make an assessment of the property…Read more...

Approximately 5 million years ago back in October, Federal Communications Chairman Ajit Pai vowed to “move forward with a rulemaking” to “clarify” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a key legal shield that protects online platforms from liability for certain types of content posted by users. However,…Read more...

One country has put its foot down and decided that giving people carte blanche to print their own firearms is probably not a great idea.

Online shops for the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign went dark on Thursday after Shopify became the latest platform to block or remove the president in response to Wednesday’s botched coup attempt.Read more...

The Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday that it has finally reached a settlement with Tapjoy, a California-based adtech company that’s alleged to have defrauded consumers consumers out of the in-app rewards that they were promised. Per the FTC, Tapjoy’s scam had allegedly gone on for “several years,”…Read more...

Yesterday, a nauseated and tired public witnessed a clear, on-the-ground, real-time feed of Trump supporters committing countless potential felonies and misdemeanors. They saw it not through security footage or journalists’ reports but mostly from the culprits themselves, who gleefully livestreamed and tweeted from…Read more...

Waddling, wriggling, ambling, digging, laying eggs. There’s no shortage of verbiage when it comes to describing monotremata—the taxonomic order made up of only two animals, the platypus and the echidna. Rattling off the numerous weird traits of these creatures is trope in news coverage—and it’s near impossible to…Read more...

A68a, the world’s most famous iceberg, is still hanging out near South Georgia island, along with its recent offspring. Here’s what we know about these gigantic chunks of ice and how the situation might develop from here as ocean currents swirl the ‘bergs.Read more...

After years of warnings that YouTube is fostering the political radicalization of a generation by allowing debunked conspiracy theory content to thrive on its platform, the biggest streaming video site on the web seems to be feeling a little jumpy. Following the Wednesday attack by rioters on Capitol Hill, YouTube…Read more...

Doctors in Japan say a man’s accidental ingestion of a toothpick left him dealing with months of pain in his back and leg—all caused by said toothpick getting stuck in his rectum. Once the toothpick was removed, the man’s troubles fortunately went away.Read more...

On the night of November 23, 2014, a powerful telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii was trying to pick out the enigmatic movements of a black hole traveling through space. In the seven hours the telescope peered at the cosmos, it may have caught one, as a structure about the size of Earth eclipsed a star in our nearest…Read more...

The Capitol has a police force with a $500 million budget, and yet it failed at its one job on Wednesday. Members of Congress, among the most protected people on the planet, were forced to hide in undisclosed locations as violent extremists overran the Capitol.

Well-equipped vehicles come with climate control systems allowing every passenger to customize the temperature at their seat. Today Harman revealed a more ambitious idea that brings that same level of customizability to a car’s sound system, with retractable speaker wings on the headrest of every seat in the vehicle.Read more...

Kevin Feige’s arrival in the Star Wars galaxy still seems quite a way off, especially while he’s still wielding the Infinity Gauntlet over at Marvel Studios. But he’s apparently bringing some very interesting Marvel talent with him to begin tackling his Star Wars adventure.

Elon Musk told us that Tesla would achieve “complete autonomy” in driverless cars by 2018, and we’re still waiting. He once tweeted that he’d secured funding to take Tesla private when he was ultimately just trying to make a weird weed reference. He told us the covid-19 pandemic would be gone by April, then he got the…Read more...

Right now, pickings are kind of slim for anyone looking for an HDMI 2.1 monitor to pair with a new PS5 or Xbox Series console, but that’s about to change thanks in part to Acer’s newest 28-inch Nitro monitor.

Sony’s latest TVs are getting a big processor upgrade and a new native OS experience.

As Chromebooks continue to mature, device makers have also started to incorporate a wider variety of components. This year, Acer is announcing its first AMD Ryzen-based offering in the Chromebook Spin 514.Read more...

Late last month, the self-help coach Jordan Maurice Bowditch posted a comedically wide-eyed photo of himself on Instagram and Facebook with a caption announcing that he had “survived” covid-19. “The week I likely got it, I connected with upwards of 100 people (and somewhere in there was unknowingly exposed).” During…Read more...

Even if you aren’t knee-deep in tech news all the time, chances are you’ve heard a tech critic mention the so-called “attention economy,” or as I like to call it, the “cash-for-eyeballs” economy. It’s a concept that, at least in theory, makes a lot of sense: Companies like Facebook make their multi-billion dollar…Read more...

New research released Wednesday should provide comfort to covid-19 survivors worried about losing their natural immunity to the coronavirus anytime soon. The findings suggest that in most people, a robust immune response to the virus lasts for at least eight months—and there are good signs that it could even last…Read more...

As a joint venture between Lenovo and NEC, it feels like LaVie often gets a bit more freedom to have fun with its device designs, and so for CES 2021 LaVie created a concept device that looks like someone took a Nintendo Switch, added some PC parts, and then gave it a steampunk-reminiscent finish.Read more...

The Doctor’s next Parisian adventure isn’t quite what they expected, nor as romantic as a chance encounter in the city of love might suggest. After all, most Cybermen don’t take too kindly to the idea of feelings, anyway!

Two prevailing theories exist about the origin of domesticated dogs. One proposes that prehistoric humans used early dogs as hunting partners, and the other says that wolves were attracted to our garbage piles. New research suggests both theories are wrong and that the real reason has to do with our limited capacity…Read more...

Facebook has blocked President Donald Trump from accessing his accounts “indefinitely,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post on Thursday morning, just hours after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building seemingly at the president’s behest.Read more...

When Nvidia announced back in September that it had reached a deal to buy Arm Limited for $40 billion, a regulatory investigation was just a matter of time. And lo, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has begun soliciting third-parties to weigh in on how the deal might affect competition ahead of an…Read more...

Plummeting demand for fuel amid covid-19 lockdowns has left the oil and gas industry in shambles. That’s bad news for the recent college grads profiled in a piece the New York Times published this weekend, all of whom hoped to find “elite positions” in the fossil fuel industry. Cue the tiny violins, right?Read more...

Paramount wants to bring Spamalot to the big screen. Doom Patrol returns to filming. Get new looks at Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. Plus, a sneak peek at Solar Opposite’s return, and what’s to come on Legacies and The Stand. Spoilers away!

While every other console controller on the market uses internal rechargeable batteries, Xbox’s still let you use AA batteries to power them, and new remarks by a Duracell spokesperson possibly shed some light on why this is.

Star Trek: Discovery is three seasons in now, and we have a sense of the sort of big stakes and dramatic action it likes to hang its endgame scenarios on. So far, they’ve been an uneven affair, leaning heavily on big, explosive action, gambling on big shocks at the expense of really satisfying the ideas each season…Read more...

When people think of all-in-one computers, the first one that comes to mind might be Apple’s iMac. But Lenovo’s upcoming Yoga AIO 7 has more tricks up its sleeve than a Mac—or any other AIO desktop PC for that matter. This isn’t Lenovo’s first AIO desktop, but the company has vastly improved upon its current Yoga…Read more...

Last year’s Galaxy Chromebook was one of the slickest laptops announced at CES, and now for CES 2021, Samsung is returning with the Galaxy Chromebook 2 which sports a more affordable price tag and the first QLED display available on any Chrome OS device.Read more...

JBuds Air True Wireless Earbuds | $40 | Amazon

American Airlines announced early Thursday that it would no longer be serving alcohol on flights out of Washington D.C., after videos went viral of passengers being verbally abusive on flights into Washington for President Trump’s neo-fascist rally. The alcohol ban is one of many precautionary measures being taken by…Read more...

Newly-elected member of West Virginia’s House of Delegates Derrick Evans was among the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, and we know this because he streamed video of himself doing it in which he referred to himself in the third person.

Facebook and YouTube removed a video of President Donald Trump expressing love for a violent mob of supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and forced the evacuation of the Senate on Wednesday, but offered different reasons for taking action.

Update: A half hour after publication of this article, Twitter appeared to delete multiple Trump tweets falsely claiming he’d won the election. In a subsequent statement, the company said it had locked Trump’s account for 12 hours and that any additional violation of its rules would result in his permanent suspension.Read more...

An iOS beta clue seems to point to a forthcoming walking workout feature from Apple.

In yet another dastardly twist in the ongoing SolarWinds debacle, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday that hackers had accessed the inboxes of over 3,000 DOJ employee Microsoft email accounts.Read more...

Researchers at UCLA have created a model to distinguish conspiracy theories from actual conspiracies which will possibly allow robots to differentiate between things like Pizzagate and Bridgegate in the future.Read more...

New York could soon make it easier for people to legally get high. On Wednesday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his proposal for the state to legalize and regulate the cannabis industry. Though this would make New York the latest to embrace cannabis, health policy experts are pushing for a plan that openly tries to…Read more...

Some 33 million people in the U.S., or 1 in 7 Americans, have disabilities related to mobility, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Considered something of a silent health epidemic, the degree to which older and middle-aged Americans struggle with difficulties walking or climbing is immense.Read more...

A team of scientists claim to have found a novel way to treat stubborn skin infections that don’t respond to antibiotics. In experiments with mice, they showed that a combination of blue light mixed with a compound found in oregano oil could easily kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria living in skin wounds without…Read more...

Tile is looking to make its Bluetooth item-finders more powerful with ultra-wide band technology and by adding augmented reality to its mobile phone app, reports TechCrunch.

This summer, abolitionists and protesters were gassed and shot at in the streets and in their homes, all for rising up against a white supremacist paramilitary state intent on violence and subjugation. In D.C., President Trump orchestrated a similar tear gas attack on protesters outside a church on live television.…Read more...

Transformers is a franchise that from the get-go has almost been ceaselessly fascinated with its past. The long shadow of the fabled “G1” era—from its design sensibilities to its origin deep-dives—has cast a long shadow over so much of what has come since, including Netflix’s latest re-litigation of the War for…Read more...

Microsoft once proposed buying Nintendo in order to lock in its first-party games for the Xbox. The Japanese video game company didn’t just decline to entertain the offer; it laughed the tech giant’s executives out of the room, according to a new report by Bloomberg.Read more...

While AT&T prematurely scared its customers about the upcoming shutdown of its older 3G network, Verizon has recently decided to take things slower by delaying the shutdown of its 3G service indefinitely.Read more...

The Expanse season five has somehow already reached episode six with “Tribes,” a somewhat calmer installment that’s still packed with action and incredible character work, especially for Cara Gee’s Drummer and Wes Chatham’s Amos. Tensions are sky-high as the season enters its second half.

What fresh chaos will Facebook bring in the new year? How will it contend with a new political dynamic? Will Zuckerberg stick to his “no more annual challenges” pledge? To kick things off, the world’s biggest social network is making some changes to Pages including the retirement of “likes.”Read more...