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As the pandemic has forced us to spend more time at home than we did previously, many of us have invested in making these spaces—which are now our offices, daycares, cafeterias, and entertainment hubs—a little more conducive to an always-home lifestyle. This has presented a unique opportunity for electronics makers, who’ve been making a killing…
It is the rare person who—logging off after a long day’s scrolling—thinks, “I need much more of that in my life.” Because the thing about the internet is, it’s awful. Even the good parts suck, because the good parts are swirled in with the bad—you can’t access one without wading through the other. Often, the…
Oracle, one of President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters in Silicon Valley, beat out Microsoft for TikTok’s U.S. operations on Sunday, multiple media outlets reported. Nonetheless, after weeks of talking about a sale, it is not clear that the deal will involve one. According to the Washington Post, Bytedance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, will announce that Oracle…
If you saw a new popup message when you opened Facebook recently, don’t worry: It’s not a hoax. In a bid to make up for, eh, letting the Russians run rampant on its platform before the last presidential election, Facebook has launched a poll worker recruitment drive this weekend. The measure is part of the…
As emergency responders in Oregon struggle to contain a record 900,000 acres of wildfires across the state, local police have been fighting to contain a torrent of bogus rumors spreading online. Throughout Thursday and Friday, tens of thousands of users shared posts blaming extremists on both sides of the aisle (but mostly antifa) for setting…
Since the very beginning of time, which has lost all meaning at this point, almost every September has delivered a new iPhone. It’s possible that Apple’s event next week will also deliver a new iPhone, but for the first time in many moons, we may not see a phone. Rumor has it that, due to…
One of the internet’s largest hub of Qanon conspiracy theorists, QMap, abruptly went dark this week after a fact-checking group uncovered the identity of the developer behind it, Bloomberg reported Friday. An investigation by Logically.ai identified Jason Gelinas, a financial information security analyst based in New Jersey, as the “developer and mouthpiece” for the site,…
The international game of chicken between China and the Trump administration over TikTok is starting to feel like an episode of “The Bachelor” at this point, with suitors like Microsoft, Twitter, and Walmart competing for the app’s U.S. assets in the face of a possible ban. Apparently, though, China would rather choose option d) None…
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…
Reader, if I may, can I bend your ear for a moment? In the two years I’ve worked for Gizmodo, I have struggled to identify a workstation more sadistic, more unhinged than the 18-million-pixel Craigslist rig that my colleague Tom McKay once reviewed (and for which Gizmodo paid real, actual money—a fact I frankly still…
Amazon Japan will pay around 1,400 suppliers a collective 2 billion yen, or about $18.85 million, for pushing the costs of discounts onto suppliers, the Japan Times reported yesterday. If you’re excited that Amazon had to cough up a couple million, so is Amazon, which arguably got off very easy. According to the report, the…
By Thursday evening, more than 10 percent of Oregon’s 4.2 million residents were under an evacuation order, according to state estimates. Uncontained wildfires fueled by sustained global heating and extreme winds have burnt enormous swaths of land to a crisp, leaving the state’s air quality on par with some of the most prolifically polluted cities…
Earlier today, Apple posted an update to its guidelines for the App Store including new language regarding game streaming that makes it appear as if game streaming services are technically allowed. However, in practice that doesn’t seem to be true. Aside from the recent spat between Apple and Epic after Fortnite got booted from the…
For a platform that likes to keep reminding us over and over and over again that it prizes our individual privacy, Facebook’s done a pretty piss-poor job of actually following through. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the company purposefully prevent any of us from opting out of this sort of data-mining machine, while…
Multi-factor authentication is one of the easiest ways to protect your accounts from unauthorized access or bad actors, but the security feature was noticeably missing on some devices in one of the most popular videoconferencing apps on the planet—and that’s a big problem. Now, virtual meet-up app Zoom—a service that’s used for everything from remote…
We may never understand why Donald Trump has decided to force the sale of TikTok’s US assets. More troublingly, his remarks on the matter, and its seemingly arbitrary deadline, indicate he may not fully grasp the concepts of cause and effect, or of linear time. “I’m not extending deadlines, no. It’s September 15th,” President Trump…
Ellen Lord, the top official at the Pentagon in charge of acquiring new technology, appeared on a virtual panel Thursday to discuss the threat posed to the U.S. by small drones made by Chinese companies like DJI. And while it might seem self-evident to many people within the national security establishment that a geopolitical adversary…
When Samsung released the original Galaxy Fold last year, other companies were fast to follow suit. Motorola followed up quickly with its rebooted Razr, while Microsoft took a little longer to show off its folding Duo phone. Now, it seems Apple might be tinkering with making a foldable iPhone. In a post on Weibo, noted…
What does Jon Hamm’s penis have to do with internet freedom and the future of memes? Quite a lot, believe it or not, following a new court ruling in New York. A federal judge in the Southern District of New York ruled on Thursday that digital news outlet HuffPost didn’t violate copyright law when it…
With the 2020 presidential election looming close on the horizon, Google’s nixing autocomplete suggestions that “could be interpreted as claims for or against any candidate or political party,” the company said in a blog post Thursday. While you’ll still be able to search for whatever you want, phrases regarding the electoral process or particular candidates…
