Tom McKay

Trump’s WeChat and TikTok App Store Bans Are a Cybersecurity Nightmare

The Trump administration has barely even bothered to back up its case that its use of emergency powers to strong-arm Beijing-based ByteDance into selling TikTok’s U.S. operations to an American company is based on cybersecurity concerns. It’s actually setting the stage for a meltdown of its own making. While the White House officially cited cybersecurity…

Free Speech Champion Mark Zuckerberg Announces Plan to Censor His Employees

Facebook employees have recently been wondering if perhaps Facebook—which lets politicians lie in ads, festers with extremist movements like QAnon, and by design amplifies authoritarian propaganda, misinformation, and hate speech—is actually the bad guy. Hey, pal, why don’t you shut the fuck up, CEO Mark Zuckerberg responds. According to reports in CNBC and the Wall…

Hell Is in Space and It Belongs to Russia, Roscosmos Chief Says

This week, a team of researchers announced they have discovered traces of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus—a gas produced almost exclusively on Earth by anaerobic microorganisms, but the presence of which on Venus scientists currently don’t understand. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s state-run aeronautics corporation Roscosmos, responded to this discovery by asserting two…

Oracle’s Bid for TikTok Is Down to the Wire and Also a Huge Mess

The Trump administration’s efforts to strong-arm Beijing-based ByteDance into selling its U.S. subsidiary TikTok to an American company are closing in, with enterprise software giant Oracle attempting to get regulators to clear a deal. Unsurprisingly, everyone involved is really making a garbage fire out of it. The White House, claiming that TikTok’s owner poses a…

Everything Store Becomes Everywhere Store

Ready for Amazon to get even more ubiquitous in your day to day life? The e-commerce giant is planning on opening 1,000 to 1,500 small distribution hubs in suburban areas across the country, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, in part spurred by major delays in shipping during the novel coronavirus pandemic. The e-commerce company saw extensive…

Data Leak Shows Chinese Firm Compiled Data, Social Media Posts of Millions

A Chinese intelligence firm’s database on 2.4 million people—including some 50,000 Americans—was recently leaked, exposing it to researchers. Per a Tuesday report in the Register, Fullbright University Vietnam researcher Chris Balding and Australian security researcher Robert Potter co-authored a recent paper on Beijing-based company Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology, whose data on millions was obtained by an Australian…

This Comic Book Writer Spent a Year Mailing Michael Cohen Movie and TV Spoilers in Prison

For the entire year Donald Trump’s shady former attorney, Michael Cohen, spent in federal prison for campaign finance violations, financial fraud, and other crimes, he was receiving spoilers for movies and TV shows courtesy of comic book writer Matt Miner. Thanks to the novel coronavirus pandemic, Cohen was released to home detention in May 2020…

Microsoft’s Underwater Data Center Rises From the Seafloor a Grimy Success

Microsoft’s underwater Northern Isles data center has risen again from the ocean depth, the company announced on Monday, and it is remarkably intact other than being covered in sea scum. The data center—which Microsoft sunk under 117 feet of water off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands in 2018—resembles a large, airtight fuel tank. After…

Facebook Routinely ‘Ignored’ Efforts to Manipulate Elections Across the Globe: Whistleblower

Facebook has royally screwed up its response to political misinformation, conspiracy theories, and organized manipulation campaigns in the U.S.—where it’s based. Outside the West, the company has long been a sort of absentee landlord that ignores the spread of propaganda, state-backed armies of trolls, and incitement to violence whenever it’s politically inconvenient. An internal memo…

Dem Congressional Nominee Abruptly Drops Out of Race Against QAnon Conspiracy Theorist

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for Congress in Georgia’s 14th district, was already more than heavily favored to win. Now it’s a virtual guarantee that she’ll walk into Congress next year with the dropout of her Democratic opponent in the race. Per the New York…

Mining Firm CEO Resigns After Razing an Australian Indigenous Site

Three executives from the mining company that detonated a 46,000-year-old  Indigenous Australian heritage site to expand an iron ore mine—and later insisted that it did nothing wrong—are leaving the company. Rio Tinto destroyed the Juukan 1 and Juukan 2 rock shelters in the Pilbara region of Western Australia in May 2020, blasting out of existence…

NASA Is Soliciting Bids to Bring Capitalism to the Moon

Mankind’s quest to really fuck up the Moon is taking another step. NASA has filed a “request for quotations” for any company willing to scrape the lunar surface for the first off-world sale of space resources, in a sort of baby step towards Moon Capitalism. The project isn’t complicated: NASA is offering $15,000 to $25,000…

City of Charleston Sues 24 Oil and Pipeline Firms ‘Directly Responsible’ for Chronic Floods

The city of Charleston, South Carolina filed a lawsuit against two dozen of the largest pipeline and oil conglomerates, saying the firms are responsible for making the floods that often hit the port city more frequent and more damaging. Charleston, South Carolina’s largest city, has experienced a rapid uptick in flooding—with the Charleston Harbor tide…

Whistleblower: DHS Goons Whitewashed Intel to Downplay White Supremacist Threat

It’s not exactly a secret that Donald Trump’s race-baiting, fascistic administration has turned a blind eye to violence committed by extreme far-righters. Trump said there were “very fine people” among the ranks of the neo-Nazis behind a deadly march in Charlottesville in 2017, encourages bigoted conspiracy theories like white genocide and QAnon, and recently came…

Oh, So We’re Doing This Section 230 Bullshit Again

Republicans in the Senate unveiled the party’s latest piece of political theater attacking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act on Tuesday—the latest in a string of GOP proposals that are either legal gibberish or dead on arrival so long as Democrats have strong footing in at least one chamber of Congress. Senators Lindsey Graham,…

I, Too, Had a Terrifying Encounter With Satanism in an Airbnb or Maybe My Own Apartment or Whatever

On Monday, an Airbnb user named Frederick Joseph tweeted out his experience with his Labor Day weekend rental—namely, that it was filled with “seemingly Satanic items and stuff for witchcraft rituals” such as a small replica of the Satanic Temple’s statue of Baphomet, a pheasant skin, a photo of a topless woman, a windup toy of…

Facebook’s Militia ‘Mistake,’ FCC’s Speech Police, and TikTok’s Secret Sauce

The never-ending battle over content moderation is only intensifying as we get closer to the 2020 elections and beyond. We’re trying out new formats to round up and summarize developments in this space—both in the interest of everyone’s sanity and to allow more time for the ramifications and context of the outcomes of various screaming…

In response to BuzzFeed News’s statement that it will now primarily refer to QAnon as a “collective delusion” instead of a “conspiracy theory,” the Gizmodo Copy Desk is making the decision to call QAnon “the future of the GOP.”

Drone Makes It Rain Weed in Tel Aviv

A drone over Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square dropped hundreds of bags of weed on Thursday, setting off a mad scramble by onlookers to stock up, the Jerusalem Post reported. According to the Post, the giveaway was orchestrated by a Telegram group called Green Drone that advocates for the legalization of marijuana throughout Israel. (Medical marijuana…

Seven Years Later, Court Finally Finds Illegal NSA Spying Program to Have Been Illegal

The National Security Agency’s program to hoover up details on billions of domestic phone calls and text messages in the U.S. was illegal, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday, and was probably an unconstitutional abuse of power. Per Politico, the findings were unanimously handed down in a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals case concerning…