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Judge Approves FTC’s Largest Ever Fine, To Be Paid By Google

Nine months on from the Wall Street Journal spotting a massive Google privacy issue—namely, that it was circumventing cookie privacy settings in Safari—the search giant’s fate is now sealed. A judge has approved the FTC’s largest ever fine, in the process rejecting appeals from a consumer-rights group that the sum should be higher, which means…

Is Your Windows Phone 8 Handset Randomly Rebooting?

The earliest of early adopters have now been using Windows Phone 8 for almost three weeks—and it seems that there may be a few teething problems. In particular, some users are reporting infuriating random reboots and some battery life issues. The Verge has stumbled across a stack of forum posts over at WPCentral about the…

Thor 2 Set Photos from WENN.com

Photo via WENN.com Photo via WENN.com Photo via WENN.com Photo via WENN.com

Best of the Week: November 10-16, 2012

THE SOCIALIST OCEAN PARADISE | One of several astonishing pictures of Neft Dashlari, Stalin’s utopian ocean city that is destined to be submerged forever. Read more here. https://gizmodo.com/remembering-neft-dashlari-stalin-s-utopian-ocean-city-5960793 What happens to women denied abortions? This is the first scientific study to find out. https://gizmodo.com/what-happens-to-women-denied-abortions-this-is-the-fir-5958187 Abortion is a hotly debated and poorly studied medical procedure. There…

The Carp and the Seagull: A Story Waiting for Your Spin

The Carp and The Seagull isn’t what you might normally call a “film” despite having many of those characteristics. Instead, it blurs the lines between “film,” “game,” and “experience” by taking your input and morphing itself accordingly. Made in WebGL by Evan Boehm for The Creators Project, a VICE and Intel collaboration, The Carp and…

The Stratford 4: Where the Ocean Meets the Eye

I don’t know anything about The Stratford 4 really. From what I can scare up with a cursory Google search and their languishing Myspace page, they were a quartet active from roughly 1999 to the mid 2000s and have since disbanded. What I do know is that their song “Where The Ocean Meets the Eye”…

In a town where horror movie tropes are real, babysitting is serious business

Derry is a sleepy little town—or at least it would be, if a Michael Myers-type slasher didn’t periodically menace the residents. Fortunately, the citizens of Derry have developed certain measures to protect against the slasher, including making babysitting one of the town’s most important jobs. Chris Cullari’s The Sleepover is a proof-of-concept for a feature…

The Evolution of the Mobile Phone in One Giant Picture

The mobile phone, or cell phone, or smartphone as we now tend to call it, has come a long way since its invention. To celebrate its 20th anniversary Japanese communications company NTT DoCoMo put together an actual display, illustrating the the evolution of its phone line. While you probably can’t go see the physical installment,…

What life looks like inside the world’s narrowest house

Earlier this year, we told you about the construction of the Etgar Keret House, a residence in Warsaw that would measure a mere 133 centimeters across its widest spot. Now that house is a reality, wedged between two buildings, and we can see what this skinny house really looks like on the inside. https://gizmodo.com/worlds-narrowest-house-will-be-less-than-60-inches-wide-5904147 The…

Retro travel posters for the world’s top cryptozoological hot spots

Typically, when you see advertisements tempting travelers to visit Puerto Rico, you hear about the beautiful beaches, the history, but not El Chupacabra. Artist Fernando Reza corrects this and similar oversights with a line of mythical travel posters. Come for the bioluminescent kayaking, stay for the goatsuckers. Reza has these posters—as well as posters advertising…

Crowdfund a zombie doc from The People Vs. George Lucas team and more

Zombie movies are a dime a dozen, and Exhibit A Pictures, the folks behind the Star Wars documentary The People Vs. George Lucas are out to find out why. If you’d like to know the answer, you can toss a few dollars their way. You can also crowdfund a gorgeous coming-of-age short film, a figurine…

Are Facebook and Yahoo Teaming Up on Search?

Are Facebook and Yahoo getting ready to go in on a search venture together? According to a report from The Sunday Telegraph sourced by anonymous insiders, yes. Rumor has it that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have been chatting about working together to maybe get a search engine going. Ever since…

Scarecrow Laser Tanks are As Awesome As They Are Overkill

Scarecrows are a tried and true piece of human technology, but nowadays birds harass more than just crops; they also bother planes. That’s why South Korea has developed a new kind of overkill scarecrow for airports: an unmanned tank with laser and acoustic weapons. The Korean Atomic Energy Group and a subsidiary of LG have…

Slick futuristic anime about the hunt for a legendary food truck is the greatest car commercial ever

How do you get folks to watch a six-minute commercial for Mercedes-Benz? You hire the animators at Production I.G. to produce Next A-Class, a short movie featuring a futuristic city, movable streets, and a food truck whose noodles are legendarily delicious. Oh, and you feature your Mercedes tearing through those streets on a hunt for…

Reports are coming in of yet another iMessage outage. Is it working for you? [The Next Web]

The young Jedi run off and join the circus on Clone Wars

When last we left the young Jedi, Ahsoka had been kidnapped by the pirate Hondo, leaving the younglings to head back to Coruscant and drum up a rescue party. But when damage to their ship and an intervening battle leaves the younglings on their own, they come up with a plan to rescue Ahsoka themselves,…

Watch a Nexus 7 Die a Painful Death In This Brutal Overkill Drop Test

The worst drop any of your gadgets are likely to suffer is a couple of feet. Maybe a little more if you’re dangling one over the edge of a balcony or drop it down the stairs or something. But gadgets, no matter how robust, aren’t build to handle more than that. That’s why this 65-foot…

Would You Eat With These Bizarre Mouth-Massaging Utensils?

Silverware is boring. Always the same purely functional shapes. Glorified mouth-shovels. Bleh. These utensils designed by Jinhyun Jeon are intended to shake it up a bit. The bumps and weird-shapes are designed to try and stimulate the sense of touch, emulating all the best parts of synesthesia, which is admittedly a really cool disorder. Would…

This would be the Milky Way’s most massive star… if not for one tiny detail

That tiny, insignificant detail? Well, it turns out that the brightest star in the Pismis 24 cluster is actually three stars, possibly more. But don’t feel bad for these stars: they’re both still 100 times as massive as our Sun. That’s certainly impressive in its own right, but the star Pismis 24-1 was originally thought…

Tigger is Eleven and Piglet plays a Dalek in this adorable Doctor Pooh cake

The Doctor has stripes now. Stripes are cool. Likely inspired by this Tigger in the Tardis tee, the confectionary wizards at Nerdache Cakes devised this darling sugary treat. It’s Piglet’s homespun Dalek outfit that really sells the sweetness, though. [Nerdache Cakes via Neatorama]