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The 20 Most Common PINs Are Painfully Obvious

We already know people are really bad at picking passwords, but they’re also god awful at choosing obvious, crackable credit card PINs. In fact, the most common four-digit code is not-so shockingly, 1-2-3-4. Come on, people. Privacy guru Nick Berry crunched the numbers from previously exposed pass codes to find the 20 most popular and…

This Vintage Reverb Amp Lets You Wail Like It’s 1982

Reverb on some songs is like a cowbell—once it hits your ears, the only answer is more. You’ll have as much echo as your tape deck can handle with this $89 Sansui RA-700 reverberation amplifier. To top it off, this Japanese unit has a rainbow LCD display—a trippy visual punctuation to show where your reverb…

This spectacular image is the deepest view of the Universe ever captured

Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have just released the most detailed view of the early Universe ever captured. It’s called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF for short. The image combines over ten years’ worth of photographs by Hubble. It required 2-million seconds of exposure time to produce, and contains over 5,500 of…

The Princess Bride cast reunites, and we melt into puddles

I’m not sure how we’re going to hold it together during this heartstring-yanking 25th anniversary of The Princess Bride. On October 2, Fox will be releasing a special Blu-ray with tales from cast members about such topics as André the Giant snoozing in hotel lobbies. Just the theme music from this movie makes me want…

Countdown Starts for Daredevil Space Jump

October 8th. That’s the final launch date for fearless Felix Baumgartner, the daredevil that is going to jump from the edge of space. The 42-year-old Baumgartner is eager to attempt the record-breaking super-sonic parachute jump. He says that he feels like wild animal in a cage right now. https://gizmodo.com/fearless-man-makes-successful-13-mile-space-jump-5893813 Baumgartner will jump from an altitude…

Gorgeous Cameras and the Nerds Who Love Them

Biannual photography trade show Photokina took place last week in Cologne, Germany. It was a gathering of companies, journalists, and enthusiasts, all there to swoon over the latest camera gear. If you couldn’t make the trip, gaze upon this symphonic ode to camera lovers everywhere. Camera Geeks is a wonderful little creation by famed DSLR…

The Best SSD: Corsair Neutron GTX 256GB vs. Samsung 840 Pro 256GB

The pace of development in the SSD world is staggeringly awesome, as each generation of SSD controllers has delivered substantial increases in performance and reliability, while at the same time we’ve seen flash prices drop like a stone. It’s a great time to be storing and accessing data, for sure, but we’ve also seen the…

The Pokémon Plot: How One Cartoon Inspired the Army to Dream Up a Seizure Gun

In 1998, a secret Army intelligence analysis suggested a new way to take out enemies: blast them with electromagnetic energy until their brains overload and they start to convulse. Amazingly, it was an idea inspired by a Pokemon episode. Application of “electromagnetic pulses” could force neurons to all fire at once, causing a “disruption of…

Help Us Write the Second Chapter in This Tale of Stealing a Planet-Sized Spaceship

The io9 community and the Framestore art department are collaboratively writing a story – half in prose, and half in images. Now you can help that story continue. Last month, we posted original concept art developed by Framestore’s visual development department (see the images integrated into chapter one below). Your job was to post in…

See-Through Solar Panels Are a Window To Wider Usage

New technologies have a greater chance at being accepted and embraced when they’re easy to adopt. And to help the spread of solar power Sharp has developed a new see-through solar cell, allowing them to be used as architectural accents that blend into a building. So instead of having to cover a roof or fill…

Java Vulnerability Could Affect a Billion Macs and PCs

Every currently supported version of Java is vulnerable to a new exploit, according to Adam Gowdiak, a security expert who is known for finding Java exploits. That could include up to a billion computers, according to Oracle’s instillation statistics. Gowdiak has sent the source code of the vulnerability, which can be used to install malware…

The New Apple: It Doesn’t Just Work

Some people willingly overpay for half-baked features in obscure gadgets. These are the early adopters of the world, and they know full well that the things they buy will not work perfectly. Hiccups and glitches are just part of the contract, the accepted trade-off for being first. Apple’s customers are not these people—iPhones are the…

This Is the Closest View of Mars Yet

The Mars Curiosity Rover has touched a Martian rock for the first time. And, in the process, it gave us the closest, most detailed view of the Red Planet (a tiny part of it) yet, using her Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at ten, two and one inches from the rock. The target was…

Kindle Fire HD’s ad opt-out will include getting rid of Recommended items on the home screen after an upcoming patch.

How Game of Thrones Will Improve on its First Two Seasons. Plus Our First Look at The Hobbit‘s New Elf!

Check out new trailers for Cloud Atlas, Doctor Who, and Fringe. Robb Stark drops a tantalizing Game of Thrones hint. The Rock could be starring in a brand new monster-fighting epic. Plus Robopocalypse, Once Upon a Time, and more! Spoilers from here on out! Top image from Cloud Atlas. Looper Noah Segan, who previously worked…

This Trotter-Shaped Bench Looks Good Enough to Eat

There are few things more pleasant in life than having a nice comfortable sit down. Apart, perhaps, from pork. So why not combine the two? That’s exactly what Portuguese designer Fernando Brizio did by creating pé de porco—literally, pig foot—which is simultaneously a porcine trotter and comfortable bench. Made from cork oak sourced from the…

This Is What the Final Version of Windows Phone 8 Looks Like

We’ve seen a few Windows 8 phones in the flesh, namely the HTC 8X and 8S, plus Nokia’s Lumia 920 and 820, but no one’s had a chance to thoroughly poke around Microsoft latest and greatest yet. Until now that is; courtesy of a leaked, final WP8 SDK, meet Windows Phone 8. The folks over…

How Long It Takes to Earn a Beer, Visualized

Sometimes, the best bits of data analysis are the simplest ones. Like this gem, uncovered by The Economist yesterday, which shows the average number of minutes you need to work in order to afford a beer. The data was actually put together by researchers from the bank UBS, so I reckon we can trust the…

Cheap Goodies on Google Play for the Next Five Days

Google just crossed the rather staggering 25 billion apps downloaded mark, and to celebrate it’s offering some heavy discounts. For the next five days you can download apps from top developers (Game Loft, EA, Rovio, and others) for just 25 cents a pop. And that’s just the app side. There’s also going to be steep…

Intel: Windows 8 Is Being Released Before It’s Ready

Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini is creating a bit of a stir for Microsoft. Bloomberg reports that he’s been telling employees in Taiwan that Windows 8 is being released before it’s fully ready. A Bloomberg source claims that Otellini still feels that the software needs improvements to be made to it. The report goes on to…