Kate Knibbs, Author at Gizmodo

Selling Erotic Ebooks Is Illegal in Germany Before 10pm

Thanks to an old-fashioned law that treats ebooks like movies, online booksellers in Germany are eligible for a $56,000 fine if they sell erotic ebooks before 10pm. That means any young fraus desperate to buy sensual Clippy stories may have to wait until after dark if booksellers come up with a plan to comply. After…

Commerce Kate Knibbs Jun 22

Planes Grounded After Hackers Hijack an Airline’s Flight Plan System

A cyberattack on Polish airline LOT left ten flights canceled this Sunday, stranding around 1,400 people at Warsaw’s Chopin airport. The attack hit the airline’s ground computer system, which is used to make flight plans. The hackers didn’t break into the IT on the planes, but this incident makes it even more obvious that the…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 22

Drink Sparkling Wine

Summer is a fantastic time to enjoy sparkling adult beverages, much more so than winter, where I sip on mead from my Chamber of Furs. Now that it’s warm, Champagne is an obvious drink choice, but I deeply hate spending more than $20 on anything, let alone booze, so I turn to prosecco. Prosecco is…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 19

How a Jailbird Con Artist Uncovered a Secret FBI Surveillance Tool

A convict lawyer, sitting in jail, obsessed with a wacky theory that the government tracked him by sending secret rays into his house… ends up discovering a secret government cell phone tracking program. Sounds like bizarre noir, right? But it’s true. It happened to Daniel Rigmaiden, who found out that the government had used Stingrays—covert…

Privacy & Security Kate Knibbs Jun 19

Witches Are Pissed That Etsy Won’t Let Them Earn a Friggin’ Living

Witches gotta eat, witches gotta work — we learned that from watching Kiki’s Delivery Service as kids. But guess what? Etsy doesn’t give a crap about helping Kiki. The online sales platform for homemade goods is NOT scared of hexes, and it won’t let witches sell spells anymore. Etsy’s new guidelines ban “any metaphysical service…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 18

YouTube Wants To Get Into Eyewitness News

YouTube doesn’t want to give you a reason to turn on CNN. The Google-owned video hosting site is trying to legitimize eyewitness accounts of breaking news by launching YouTube Newswire, a special feed for footage it verifies as accurate. Video uploaded from people on the scene can provide crucial context, but these services can also…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 18

6 Horrible and Doomed Space Missions, Brought to You By Crowdfunding

Government funding for space travel ain’t what it used to be. Private organizations are our best hope for exploring beyond Earth’s increasingly noxious atmosphere, and to get your cash they’re turning to Indiegogo and Kickstarter to fund ambitious space missions. Unfortunately, most of the projects are bonkers messes doomed to fail. Reach for the moon,…

Space & Spaceflight Kate Knibbs Jun 18

Mormon Doomsday Survivalist Preppers Are All Over Pinterest

Pinterest—the mason jar lobby’s most effective propaganda apparatus—is an aggressively wholesome social platform. It’s The Container Store of social networks, but past the arrangements of DIY barn-wedding souvenirs, there’s another Pinterest, one focused on surviving doom. This is Mormon survivalist Pinterest. It’s grade-AAA Pinterest, a hodgepodge of pins that remind me of the 1998 film…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 17

Uber Drivers in California Will Be Employees, Not Contractors (Updated)

An Uber driver is an employee, not a contractor, according to a ruling from the California labor commission. This is horrible news for Uber but good news for anyone concerned that the ruthless ride-hailing service is building a corporate empire by dicking over its drivers. Uber insists that it’s a merely a tech company peddling…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 17

Am I An Idiot for Still Using a Password Manager?

Hackers broke into popular password manager LastPass this week, which raises some obvious questions: If the service you use to protect your passwords from getting compromised gets compromised, should you still use it? Is it really wise to store all our passwords in the cloud? You’re not an idiot First off, no, you aren’t an…

Privacy & Security Kate Knibbs Jun 16

People Pretended This Dome Was on Mars For Eight Months, God Bless ‘Em

Looking through the dome’s small porthole, the only view was of a barren field of red rocks. The astronauts ate freeze-dried food and shared cramped quarters for eight months to further space exploration, only venturing out to the alien landscape wearing spacesuits. At the end of the claustrophobic mission, they were greeted with a “Back…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 15

Silicon Valley Had Exactly the Right Ending This Season

“Two Day of the Condor” is one of the strongest episodes of Silicon Valley yet, turning California labor law and server stability into compelling television. It didn’t have the equivalent of last year’s perfect dick joke, but it had something better: Dramatic tension, and sweet lady justice. Last week, Richard admitted that he used a…

Television Kate Knibbs Jun 15

State Dept. Stops Issuing New Overseas Passports, Possibly Due to Hack

The State Department is having some technical difficulties with its overseas passports and visa systems, and while it’s working to figure out the problem, it stopped giving out most new travel documents. People who applied for overseas passports after May 26 and people who applied for visas to the U.S. after June 9 will have…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 12

AP: Hackers Stole Documents About Spies Taking Drugs and Going Bankrupt

This is a bad week to be a federal employee, and it just got worse. The AP is reporting on a second brutal cyberattack on the federal government revealed this week, carried out by the same hackers who reported accessed the records of every single federal employee. This second hack focused on grabbing extremely personal…

Privacy & Security Kate Knibbs Jun 12

Is Dead Golden Girl Rue McClanahan Haunting Twitter?

Looking at Twitter yesterday, it looked like Rue McClanahan, erstwhile star of The Golden Girls, had just died. People were losing it over the death of saucy southern belle Blanche Devereaux. But McClanahan didn’t die yesterday. She left this earthly existence five years ago. So why the belated outpouring of inaccurately timed mourning? Are people…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 12

Report: Hackers Stole Social Security Numbers of Every Federal Employee

The largest government hack in history is even larger than officials have admitted, with some sources saying every single federal employee had personal information stolen, including social security numbers. In a letterobtained by the AP, American Federal of Government Employees president J. David Cox alleged that the data breach of the government’s civil service human…

Privacy & Security Kate Knibbs Jun 11

I Read This Mammoth Essay on Code To Make You 38 Thousand Times Smarter

Want to know enough about code that you don’t sound like a complete dunce? Bloomberg Businessweek has publisheda 38,000-word explainer/meditation/opus on coding called “What Is Code?” by programmer and writer Paul Ford. Here’s our TL;DR version. It is good! (“And thorough” – Maude Lebowski) But it’s SO long. Bloomberg takes a photo of your face…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 11

Twitter Just Made A Bulk Troll-Banishing Tool That’s Actually Useful

Twitter has a troll problem that’s never going to go away, but its most recent tool is the smartest thing Twitter has done to help users deal with abuse. You can now share lists of users you’ve blocked with other people getting harassed. By allowing people to import and export their lists of blocked users,…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 10

Former BlackBerry Leader Tells Weird Lie About the Storm’s Return Rate

Intrigue! Mystery! Really shitty phones from 2008! We have a strange situation on our hands: The former co-CEO of BlackBerry recently broke his years-long silence on the company to reminisce about one of its worst failures, the BlackBerry Storm, but he told a weird lie that made the Storm sound like an even bigger trashcan…

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 10

This Alternative to the Selfie Stick Actually Sounds Amazing

Pretty cool idea right! [A Better Kind of Selfie Stick]

Tech News Kate Knibbs Jun 9

Kate Knibbs

Selling Erotic Ebooks Is Illegal in Germany Before 10pm

Planes Grounded After Hackers Hijack an Airline’s Flight Plan System

Drink Sparkling Wine

How a Jailbird Con Artist Uncovered a Secret FBI Surveillance Tool

Witches Are Pissed That Etsy Won’t Let Them Earn a Friggin’ Living

YouTube Wants To Get Into Eyewitness News

6 Horrible and Doomed Space Missions, Brought to You By Crowdfunding

Mormon Doomsday Survivalist Preppers Are All Over Pinterest

Uber Drivers in California Will Be Employees, Not Contractors (Updated)

Am I An Idiot for Still Using a Password Manager?

People Pretended This Dome Was on Mars For Eight Months, God Bless ‘Em

Silicon Valley Had Exactly the Right Ending This Season

State Dept. Stops Issuing New Overseas Passports, Possibly Due to Hack

AP: Hackers Stole Documents About Spies Taking Drugs and Going Bankrupt

Is Dead Golden Girl Rue McClanahan Haunting Twitter?

Report: Hackers Stole Social Security Numbers of Every Federal Employee

I Read This Mammoth Essay on Code To Make You 38 Thousand Times Smarter

Twitter Just Made A Bulk Troll-Banishing Tool That’s Actually Useful

Former BlackBerry Leader Tells Weird Lie About the Storm’s Return Rate

This Alternative to the Selfie Stick Actually Sounds Amazing

First Statewide Data Center Ban Passed by Maine Legislature

FCC Exempts Netgear from Foreign-Made Router Ban for Some Reason

Jamie Dornan Is Your New Aragorn in ‘The Hunt for Gollum’

Trump’s Fed Pick Is Knee Deep in Tech and Crypto Investments

The First Trailer for ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ Takes Terror Stateside

The Trump Phone Still Looks Like Total Trash

‘Masters of the Universe’ Really, Really Wants to Be the Next ‘Barbie’

Samsung’s Micro RGB TVs Provide So Much Color It May Be Too Much

The Crypto Bros Want to Get Their Hands on Anthropic’s ‘Super Dangerous’ Model

This Is What a Music Industry ‘Plant’ Looks Like in 2026

Sony Inzone H6 Air Review: A Perfect Case for Open-Back Gaming Headsets

Anker’s EufyMake E1 Finally Brings Printers Out of the Dark Ages

The Soundboks Mix Is Going to Make You the Most Popular Guy at the Park

Asus Zenbook A16 Review: Start Considering Snapdragon on PC, for Real

Aqara Thermostat Hub W200 Review: Almost Better than My Ecobee

HP Omen Max 45L Review: 4K60 Gaming Has Never Been So Easy

Ecovacs Winbot W3 Omni Review: Window Cleaning Robots Have a Long Way to Go

AirPods Max 2 vs. Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen): Which ANC Headphones Win?

The Best Gadgets of March 2026

AirPods Max 2 Review: Still Ridiculously Expensive and Ridiculously Nice