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A watchdog group investigating the deployment of federal police against protesters in Portland and other cities announced a lawsuit against the U.S. Justice Department and other agencies on Friday, accusing government officials of unlawfully withholding public records under the Freedom of Information Act. American Oversight, a nonprofit staffed by several former U.S. government officials, is…
Movie theaters have been royally screwed by the global pandemic, and in the latest blow, a federal judge has given the go-ahead to axe the 71-year-old Paramount Consent Decrees, which should elicit shrieks of horror for the four of you who have any idea what that is. For the rest of the class: what exactly…
I’m not sure if Moflin is supposed to be a robotic hamster, guinea pig, baby bunny, or some alternate take on a Tribble, but goddamn this robo-pet is cute. Launched as part of a Kickstarter campaign from Vanguard Industries that went live earlier this week, Moflin looks to follow in the steps of Sony’s Aibo…
Facebook has banned one of the largest groups devoted to the far-right, rabidly pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, Business Insider reported on Friday. A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that the group, titled “Official Q/QAnon,” was removed for “repeatedly posting content that violated our policies” on Thursday. Those rule violations included bullying and harassment, hate speech,…
Apple launched what very well may be the last Intel iMac this week, and while we haven’t had nearly enough time with it for a full review yet, early benchmark results reveal an absolute beast of a machine (even if our review unit is loaded with enough stuff to bring the price up to a…
Capitol One is being slapped with an $80 million dollar fine for its role in a 2019 breach that exposed the data of over 100 million customers. According to a statement issued Thursday by the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC)—the wing of the US Department of Treasury meant to regulate all things banking—Capitol…
The Markup has obtained internal memos from Google, dating back to at least 2019, with lists of bad words employees should never use, or else Google has to put a billion dollars in the antitrust swear jar. Rather than We will strip the meat from Yelp’s bones and throw its lifeless carcass into our search…
When you’re on the hunt for a new smartphone, it’s likely that you’re focused on price, design, and features first—and probably not the silicon inside powering it. However, researchers have found that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip, one of the most widely used in Android phones, has hundreds of bits of vulnerable code that leaves millions of…
The Trump administration’s battle against the imminent threat of Chinese apps finally reached a head late Thursday night when President Trump issued two executive orders—one against TikTok and the other against the popular social messaging app Wechat—essentially issuing a blanket ban on both of these companies’ US-based operations within the next 45 days. And just…
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is running new Facebook ads that insist the president is an advocate for peace and will stop America’s so-called “forever wars.” Oddly enough, the ads also acknowledge that Trump dabbles in political assassinations. In fact, those assassinations are central to Trump’s idea of “peace,” and in many ways, Trump’s entire foreign…
Cloud storage services like Dropbox and iCloud came along to stop us from running out of room on our phones and laptops, but what happens when you’re running out of cloud storage space too? To save you having to pay Apple, Google or anyone else even more money every month, here are some quick tips…
The U.S. State Department issued a new travel warning for New Zealand this week, warning Americans to exercise “increased caution” because the country poses a “health risk” due to the covid-19 pandemic. In reality, New Zealand hasn’t had community spread of the coronavirus in months and has just 23 active cases of the disease, all…
Microsoft has stopped mincing words, and in a statement shared with Gizmodo, claims that Apple is entirely to blame for the lack of cloud gaming apps and subscription services on iOS. As we’ve reported repeatedly, there’s no option to enjoy Stadia, Nvidia GeForce, or Microsoft’s own Project xCloud on iOS devices. In the past, Microsoft…
Earlier today, a Twitter user leaked 20GB worth of confidential Intel documents stored on a file-sharing service—documents that the Twitter user claims they received from an anonymous hacker. According to the leaker, the folder contains classified information under NDA, and the hacker who provided the documents to the leaker said they had obtained the files…
Microsoft’s cloud gaming service, Project xCloud, seems to be running into the same issues as its competitors have—specifically, Apple’s guidelines are reportedly making it difficult for xCloud to get into the App Store. So Microsoft has decided to end its Project xCloud preview period using the iOS TestFlight app, effective immediately. The company recently announced…
In its latest spin around the misinformation merry-go-round, Facebook has temporarily restricted a pro-Trump super PAC that’s spent nearly $10 million in the 2020 election cycle from placing ads for repeatedly sharing lies, the company told Gizmodo in a statement. The group in question is the Committee to Defend the President, which happens to sound…
Your car’s dashboard is a smorgasbord of information when it comes to the health and performance of your vehicle. But the one thing it can’t warn drivers about is when the tread on their tires has worn out. It’s a safety risk that researchers from Carnegie Mellon University are focusing on with a new real-time…
When Microsoft officially emerged as the frontrunner for a potential acquisition of the teen-fave-turned-national-security-concern TikTok earlier this week, tech critics ‘round the globe found themselves with an endless set of questions that seemingly nobody could answer. Why would a company as corporate as Microsoft be throwing its hat into the tweenage market? Did President Donald…
Late last year, Intel sold off its smartphone modem business to Apple for around $1 billion, but that still left Intel with the problem of figuring out how to add 5G connectivity to its laptop and PC business. So in an effort to support next-gen connectivity, Intel has teamed up with MediaTek to bring 5G…
The U.S. Senate passed a bill on Thursday prohibiting federal workers from downloading TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app the White House has recently threatened to ban citing national security concerns. The ban, which specifically applies to government devices, was approved via unanimous consent. (There was no vote, but no senator objected to its passing.) A…
