Tom McKay, Author at Gizmodo

After Disastrous Hawaii Incident, Senators Propose Ending States’ Power to Send Missile Alerts

In mid-January, the Hawaiian state Emergency Management Agency sent out an erroneous text to all cell phones in the state warning of a “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII,” sending many residents into an hour-long panic as they ran for cover from what they feared was a North Korean nuclear bomb. Though it first appeared…

Tech News Tom McKay

SpaceX Landed the Falcon Heavy’s Two Boosters, But Its Core Clipped Its Drone Ship at 300 MPH

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch went pretty well this afternoon, with the rocket’s two partially reusable Falcon 9 strap-on boosters making successful landings at Kennedy Air Force Station after jettisoning from the craft three minutes post-launch. However, the rocket’s center core did not function as founder Elon Musk and team intended, and appears to have later…

Space & Spaceflight Tom McKay

Pornhub Says Digitally Generated ‘Deepfakes’ Are Non-Consensual and It Will Remove Them

After Reddit and image-hosting platform Gfycat began removing porn videos digitally altered via machine-learning techniques to swap performers’ faces with those of someone else’s—a genre known as deepfakes—porn site Pornhub is following their lead. Per Motherboard, Pornhub said that it considers generating deepfakes of other people to be clearly non-consensual. It compared deepfakes to revenge…

Privacy & Security Tom McKay

Report: UConn Dental Students, Staff Took Selfie With Severed Heads (Updated)

University of Connecticut dental school grad students and an orthodontics professor took a selfie “with two severed heads used for medical research at a training workshop at Yale University” in 2017, the Associated Press reported on Monday. According to the AP report, the students nabbed the selfies during the DePuy Synthes Future Leaders Workshop, “which…

Health Tom McKay

Ram’s Martin Luther King Jr. Ad Was Maybe Just Intolerable Brand Trolling After All

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream was explicitly not for everyone to drive around in expensive, gas-guzzling trucks, which should go without saying but everyone understandably felt the need to clarify to Ram and its parent company Chrysler after they aired a Super Bowl LII ad selectively quoting one of the civil rights…

Tech News Tom McKay

Police Departments Warn Facebook Users to Stop Allegedly Sharing a Child Abuse Video

Police departments across the country are warning Facebook users that a child abuse video captioned with a vague plea to identify the perpetrator is spreading across the site via direct messages and status updates—and that sharing this nightmare chain letter or even viewing its contents is, obviously, a crime that could result in serious penalties…

Social Media Tom McKay

Flat Earth Rocketeer Once Again Fails to Launch Himself Into the Sky at 500 MPH

We’ve all been playing a waiting game with “Mad” Mike Hughes, the DIY enthusiast and Flat Earth theory advocate who planned to launch himself in a steam-powered rocket some 1,800 feet into the sky at 500 miles per hour as some kind of confusing statement on the curvature of the planet. Hughes, who has one…

Gadgets Tom McKay

Chinese National, Three Others Plead Guilty in Apple Counterfeiting Scheme

A Chinese national who was living in the U.S. on a student visa pleaded guilty on Friday to charges of trafficking in counterfeit goods and conspiracy over a plot to sell Chinese-made Apple knockoffs to U.S. customers. According to a Department of Justice press release, 43-year-old Jianhua “Jeff” Li’s company Dream Digitals conspired with at…

Tech News Tom McKay

White House Pulls Nominee for Top Environmental Role Who Called Carbon Dioxide the ‘Gas of Life’

Donald Trump’s administration plans to withdraw climate change denier and White House senior environmental adviser Kathleen Hartnett White as its nominee to lead the Council on Environmental Quality, the New York Times reported. The CEQ chief is responsible for coordinating environmental policy across the various agencies that comprise the executive branch. Though the CEQ’s influence…

Climate Change Tom McKay

Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup All Ban Cryptocurrency Purchases on Credit Cards

Some of the world’s largest banks announced on Friday that customers are now prohibited from buying cryptocurrencies with credit cards, citing market volatility. Per CNBC, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup all announced the new restrictions as the price of Bitcoin plummeted to below $8,000 on Friday, less than half of the high…

Tech News Tom McKay

Watch the Japanese Space Agency Set a Record for Smallest Rocket Used to Launch a Satellite

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency has set a record for the smallest-ever rocket to launch a satellite into orbit, using a SS-520 sounding rocket modified to include a third stage carrying a 13.6-inch TRICOM-1R cubesat as its payload. Per Engadget, JAXA’s original SS-520 launch with the same objective ended in failure in January 2017 when…

Space & Spaceflight Tom McKay

China May Be Testing a Ship-Mounted Railgun

As the U.S. commitment to its long-running railgun program appears ready to wane, China’s own program might be winding up, recent reports suggest. According to Ars Technica and TechCrunch, photos appear to show a railgun mounted on a Chinese warship design normally used to land tanks. According to an anonymous analyst cited by Ars, that…

Privacy & Security Tom McKay

The Philippines Halts Mass Use of Dengue Fever Vaccine, Saying It May Be Linked to Three Deaths

On Friday, Filipino authorities tied at least three deaths to the 2016 deployment of Dengvaxia, the world’s first dengue fever vaccine, Reuters reported. Vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur admitted in November that the vaccine, Dengvaxia, might increase the odds of severe illness in inoculated children who had not previously been infected with the dengue virus. Over…

Health Tom McKay

Elon Musk Claims He Can Get Through Customs By Labeling Shipments ‘Not a Flamethrower’

Chipper villain Elon Musk has been having what appears to be a lot of fun selling dubiously safe Boring Company “flamethrowers,” which despite outrage from some politicians are actually just garden-variety torches packaged to look like a weapon from Portal. He’s sold 20,000 of them for $500 a pop, netting a cool $10 million in…

Sploid Tom McKay

Ebay Is Finally Breaking It Off With PayPal, Which Is Doing Just Great By the Way

PayPal and eBay, two brands that were best friends forever for like 15 years or so, are destined to be platonic besties no longer. Per Recode, eBay announced on Wednesday that it plans to stop using PayPal as its back-end services provider, and when their contract expires the online marketplace will switch to a long-term…

Tech News Tom McKay

Xerox Is No More, Will Now Merge Into Japan’s Fujifilm

Xerox, the brand that dominated the printing hardware market for decades to the point that it became a verb, has lost its independence and will now be managed by Japan’s Fujifilm Holdings Corp. Per Bloomberg, Xerox and Fujifilm have agreed to a multi-part merger which will leave Fujifilm in control of the combined $18 billion…

Tech News Tom McKay

Equifax Extends Free Credit Freezes Until June 30th, Should Be Forced to Do It Forever

Equifax, the credit-rating agency which royally screwed up in 2017 when it lost the personal data of at least 145.5 million Americans to hackers despite being warned months before that exact thing could happen, has extended its free credit freeze services another five months to June 30th, 2018. A credit freeze helps prevent lenders from…

Privacy & Security Tom McKay

Here Is Your Warning That Fake Twitter Followers Are Now a Thing With Consequences

This weekend, the New York Times published an in-depth report on the online market in social media identity theft and fraud, including a list of precisely which celebrities are (stunner!) inflating their online followings with overpriced bots. Film critic Richard Roeper—once co-host of At the Movies with Roger Ebert—happened to be one of a long…

Tech News Tom McKay

Trump Brags He Got Apple to Invest $350 Billion in the US (Hint: He Didn’t and They Aren’t)

During his first State of the Union on Tuesday, in between cloying pleas for Democrats to help build his dumb wall and confused references to “beautiful clean coal,” President Donald Trump once again promised the country that tech giant Apple would be investing a badly needed $350 billion in the U.S. The SOTU is one…

Tech News Tom McKay

MAGA Chuds Try to Take Down the Guggenheim on Facebook and Yelp Over a Golden Toilet

If you haven’t been paying attention for the last 81 years of Western cultural history, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is one of the biggest, most popular, and respected art museums in the world. It also recently happened to decline a request from Donald Trump to loan Vincent Van Gogh’s 1888 painting Landscape With…

Tech News Tom McKay

Tom McKay

After Disastrous Hawaii Incident, Senators Propose Ending States’ Power to Send Missile Alerts

SpaceX Landed the Falcon Heavy’s Two Boosters, But Its Core Clipped Its Drone Ship at 300 MPH

Pornhub Says Digitally Generated ‘Deepfakes’ Are Non-Consensual and It Will Remove Them

Report: UConn Dental Students, Staff Took Selfie With Severed Heads (Updated)

Ram’s Martin Luther King Jr. Ad Was Maybe Just Intolerable Brand Trolling After All

Police Departments Warn Facebook Users to Stop Allegedly Sharing a Child Abuse Video

Flat Earth Rocketeer Once Again Fails to Launch Himself Into the Sky at 500 MPH

Chinese National, Three Others Plead Guilty in Apple Counterfeiting Scheme

White House Pulls Nominee for Top Environmental Role Who Called Carbon Dioxide the ‘Gas of Life’

Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup All Ban Cryptocurrency Purchases on Credit Cards

Watch the Japanese Space Agency Set a Record for Smallest Rocket Used to Launch a Satellite

China May Be Testing a Ship-Mounted Railgun

The Philippines Halts Mass Use of Dengue Fever Vaccine, Saying It May Be Linked to Three Deaths

Elon Musk Claims He Can Get Through Customs By Labeling Shipments ‘Not a Flamethrower’

Ebay Is Finally Breaking It Off With PayPal, Which Is Doing Just Great By the Way

Xerox Is No More, Will Now Merge Into Japan’s Fujifilm

Equifax Extends Free Credit Freezes Until June 30th, Should Be Forced to Do It Forever

Here Is Your Warning That Fake Twitter Followers Are Now a Thing With Consequences

Trump Brags He Got Apple to Invest $350 Billion in the US (Hint: He Didn’t and They Aren’t)

MAGA Chuds Try to Take Down the Guggenheim on Facebook and Yelp Over a Golden Toilet

Apple’s Siri Isn’t Just Going to Use One Chatbot. It’s Going to Use All of Them

Why ‘For All Mankind’ Season 5 Is the Key to the Rest of the Series

ASUS ZenScreen 15.6-Inch Portable Monitor Is Now Cheaper Than Black Friday in Amazon’s Big Spring Sale

Early Wildfires Are Surging Across the US—and Trump’s New Fire Agency Isn’t Ready

INIU Brings Another Power Bank to the Spring Sale as SnapGo Keychain Portable Charger Drops to Its Lowest Price

Attorney Hit With Historic Fine for Citing AI-Generated Cases

Travelers Experiencing the Longest Security Lines in TSA History

Could There Be a ‘Project Hail Mary’ Sequel?

Meta Has More Smart Glasses Coming Whether You Want Them or Not

Apple Requires Device-Level Age Verification in the UK Now. Could the US Be Next?

Sonos Play Review: Call It a Comeback

Sonos Era 100 SL Review: The Cheapest Way Into Wired Sonos Sound

Asus ROG’s Massive Swift OLED Gaming Monitor Epitomizes Excess in the Best Way

The Ikea Varmblixt Smart Lamp Fills a Donut Hole in My Life

Nothing Headphone A vs. Headphone 1: Which Pair of ANC Wireless Headphones Wins?

Asus ROG’s Cetra Open Wireless Gaming Earbuds Might Be Better Than Wearing a Headset

Nintendo’s Talking Flower Is Annoying as Hell. I Love It

Level Lock Pro Review: As Good as a Secret Smart Lock Gets

Apple Studio Display XDR Review: It Looks So Good, I Wish It Were an iMac

RayNeo Air 4 Pro Review: My Eyes Love These Video Glasses, but My Nose Disagrees