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Last September, after debuting several years prior, Boston Dynamics’ impressively agile robotic dog Spot was made available to a select number of companies as an experiment to see how the robot would perform outside of the company’s R&D labs. A year later, Spot is now officially available for sale, although not everyone can buy one…
Back at CES 2020, Lenovo promised it was going to make the world’s first 5G laptop. And now, just six months later, it appears Lenovo is ready to deliver on that promise with the new Flex 5G, which goes on sale later this week. In addition, to supporting both sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G, the Flex…
New Zealand has identified two new cases of coronavirus after going 24 days without a single active case, according to an announcement by New Zealand health officials on Tuesday. The two cases have been identified as two women from the UK who were granted exemptions to travel within New Zealand to attend a funeral during…
Apple has long been rumored to be working on a flexible smartphone that would rival some of the experimental devices we’ve seen from Samsung and Motorola—though presumably more refined, one would hope. But today in Apple rumors that make you go “…what the fuck?” the foldable iPhone might have two displays separated by a hinge…
T-Mobile customers across the U.S. are reporting that they cannot send or receive phone calls, and sometimes text messages. According to TechCrunch, the outage starting around 9-10 a.m. PT (12-1 p.m. ET) this morning, and at the time of this writing, is still the No. 1 trending topic in the U.S. on Twitter. Downdetector shows…
We know that the cops surveil us at protests, which is why you generally should be cautious about posting crowd photos and get a burner. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, Democratic voter registration groups have jumped on the BLM surveillance bandwagon, collaborating with the tech firms in order to identify protesters’ locations (or, geofence…
Donald Trump’s ridiculous and likely unenforceable executive order demanding the Federal Communications Commission begin punishing internet companies insufficiently subservient to conservatives is drawing skepticism from his own side. The GOP controls three out of five commissioner slots at the FCC, which Trump’s order in May tasked with reinterpreting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.…
Roughly 42,922 pounds of ground beef products that were shipped to stores across the United States are being recalled over concerns that the meat may have been contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. The regulatory agency urged consumers in a notice on Saturday not…
Correction: 6/16/20 11:38 a.m. ET: Thanks to a few astute Windows 10 version 2004 users, we’ve been able to verify that the Fresh Start feature is not actually gone, but rather moved to a totally different location within the Settings. It also looks like Microsoft updated its support page yesterday to reflect this change. “For…
Both the newspaper Tulsa World and a local health official have urged Donald Trump to cancel his cursed Saturday rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is sure to be a memorable stop in his Superspreading Across America tour. The president has effectively announced, under the Trump 2020 banner, that he’s done with covid-19, and that if…
An unfortunate reality of journalism is that, while anyone in the industry for long enough has gotten their share of death threats, some coverage—reporting on white supremacists, taking photos in a war zone, exposing deep-pocketed oil companies—simply tends to be more emotionally, physically, financially dangerous to pursue. Not to be outdone by the other various…
Github is preparing to overhaul coding terminology that has long been criticized for being racially insensitive, the company’s chief executive said. Github, the Microsoft-owned developer platform, is working on implementing language that moves away from long-used “master” and “slave” terms, the programming language that refers to the dominant relationship between processes. Google Chrome developer Una…
A few months ago, rumors started making the rounds that Microsoft’s upcoming dual-screen phone—the Surface Duo—might go on sale significantly earlier than Microsoft’s original late 2020 release date. But now, based on new rumors, it appears that one of Microsoft’s main goals for Surface Duo’s early arrival is to beat Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Fold 2…
It may not be immediately clear why a cyber libel case from the Philippines matters in the U.S., but the guilty verdict for Maria Ressa, the chief executive of an independent news site called Rappler, has serious implications for the free press and free speech worldwide. This particular cyber libel charge revolves around a 2012…
Exploring the stars, thousands of light years away from Earth, sounds pretty great right about now. While Darian Johnson hasn’t invented intergalactic travel, he has created a tiny desktop computer that looks straight out of Jean-Luc Picard’s ready room, letting you at least pretend that you’re safely aboard a distant starship. It’s a testament to…
The Android 11 beta is finally here and available to download on newer Pixel phones—but don’t worry, it will soon expand to other handsets, too. Google had to cancel the in-person portion of its Google I/O developers conference (for obvious reasons) this year, so the company hasn’t had the chance to show off the new features in…
Show me a museum of important historical inventors and I will show you a gallery of deluded mass murderers. I’m not talking about machine gun manufacturers or nuclear scientists—those people, at least, have some sense of what they’re up to. I’m talking about the folks behind the printing press, the automobile, various kinds of boat…
When it was built nearly eight decades ago, the Nazi submarine base in Bordeaux, France was meant to house 43 U-Boats, German submarines that wreaked havoc at sea during World War II. But there are no signs of submarines or war at the base today. Now, it is called Bassins de Lumières, and it is…
I hope everyone had a good week, except for my coworker Catie Keck who recently committed slander by calling macarons and oatmeal raisin cookies overrated. Fact: Those are fire and anyone who says otherwise is a cop. This week, the folks at Gizmodo covered some truly amazing stories. Like how a team of researchers used…
Germany will soon roll out its coronavirus-tracking smartphone app, the country’s health minister, Jens Spahn, announced Sunday. “It’s coming this week,” Spahn told ARD television, though he declined to confirm several local reports about a possible Tuesday release date, per Reuters. Developed in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom and software company SAP, Germany’s app works similarly…
