Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
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…
Given everything that’s been going on, it may be a while yet before we get our hands on Google’s next mid-range phone. While most of the major stats about the Pixel 4a, Google’s follow-up to its best-selling phone to date, have already been revealed thanks to a steady trickle of leaks, its official release date…
After failing to find photos sufficiently terrifying enough to support its fearmongering narrative about ongoing protests, Fox News apparently made its own. On Friday, the outlet published images of a demonstration in Seattle on its homepage that had been digitally altered to make activists protesting police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death appear…
Apparently taking a page from Amazon’s book on How to Snub Employees Who Voice Inconvenient Truths, this week Facebook canned an engineer who openly criticized the social media giant’s milquetoast response to ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and President Donald Trump’s incendiary online rhetoric. Brandon Dail, a user interface engineer working at Facebook’s Seattle office,…
Officials in California and Washington State are investigating Amazon’s business practices with a focus on whether the tech giant abuses its power over third-party sellers on its online marketplace, according to reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Amazon’s been facing increasing antitrust scrutiny from both the U.S. and abroad over…
Airbnb has finally decided to settle it long-running lawsuit with regulators in New York City. The short-stay rental platform has agreed to hand over personal data about its hosts—like their phone numbers and email addresses, along with a full list of every home they’re putting on the platform—in order to help city authorities track down…
As if we didn’t have enough to be stressed about in 2020, researchers from the Cyber Security Labs at Ben Gurion University and the Weizmann Institute of Science have come up with a way to listen in on a room, even at long distances, using less than $1,000 worth of equipment that’s able to measure…
Google Stadia launched last fall, and when it came to streaming games on your phone, things were kind of limited. Not only did you need to have a Pixel phone, you also had to connect a Stadia controller via USB. However, thanks to an update this week, gaming with Stadia on your phone just got a…
A recent conversation between employees at Gizmodo dot com (a science and technology website) has led to an ongoing dialogue about the value of pastries. More specifically, my esteemed colleagues discussed—and have continued to discuss on various occasions—what qualifies as the most overrated among these not-quite-a-meal “treats.” To be clear, most pastries are bullshit, both…
HBO is changing the name of at least one of its HBO-branded services because no one gets the difference between them, The Hollywood Reporter’s Natalie Jarvey reported. HBO Go is going away completely, and HBO Now will simply be known as HBO. Jarvey cites “significant brand confusion” as the reason behind the move by WarnerMedia…
Even as statues commemorating the worst atrocities of the last thousand years continue to fall amid ongoing protests sparking by the police killing of George Floyd, several major cities have erected their own works of art (if only temporarily) to celebrate the movement for black lives sweeping the U.S. and several European countries. Last week,…
If you’re part of the growing chorus of folks around the world looking for ways to support the Black Lives Matter movement, there’s no shortage of ways to do it. You can donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund! You can donate to a bail fund network! You can donate to an organization like the NAACP…
Zoom will enforce Chinese Communist Party censorship, the company confirmed in an official release yesterday. Earlier this week, after it was alerted by the Chinese government, the company suspended three accounts for hosting Tiananmen Square memorials, including a U.S.-based pro-democracy group that featured mothers of those killed in the protests. The other two were based…
As Mark Zuckerberg continues to cement himself as CEO of one of Silicon Valley’s most amoral tech titans—namely by profiting of the slow erosion of democracy—his company has managed to sink to a new level of abhorrent by pitching a tool that could be used to blacklist hashtags related to organized labor. The Intercept reported…
Back in March, the Internet Archive launched its National Emergency Library, a program that made roughly 1.4 million books available to the public without the usual waitlists. But on Wednesday, the organization announced it was ending the program two weeks early after four major publishers decided to sue Internet Archive for copyright infringement. Internet Archive…
Over the years we’ve seen quite a few successful attempts to create robotic air hockey opponents, but Andrew Khorkin has dedicated himself to a much harder task. He’s managed to build a robot that can not only play table hockey—a more onerous task than playing air hockey—but one that can slap the puck into the…
We first discovered the WalkCar—a stand-on, electric-powered scooter that looks like a laptop with four wheels attached—back in 2015, when Cocoa Motors first debuted its intriguing car alternative. After five years of promises and teases, it looks like the WalkCar is finally available for sale, for a little over $1,800. Unlike an electric scooter that…
President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign is using antifa as the new boogeyman to terrify Republicans on Facebook. But the campaign’s latest scaremongering about the decentralized anti-fascist movement might be their most irresponsible yet. Trump is now using an old stock photo to call random protesters—people who’ve been accused of no crime—antifa “terrorists.” The new…
Twitter announced Thursday that it had shut down more than 170,000 accounts linked to a Beijing-backed campaign to spread propaganda about the Chinese government, particularly regarding its response to the coronavirus pandemic and pro-Democracy protests in Hong Kong. In total, it removed 23,750 accounts that were part of a “highly engaged core network,” as well…
A U.S. Air Force sergeant accused of orchestrating two deadly attacks on law enforcement in the Bay Area had a history of supporting right-wing extremism and the militant anti-government “boogaloo” movement online, the Mercury News reports. On Thursday, officers confirmed that Steven Carillo has been charged with 19 felonies, including murder, attempted murder, and carjacking…
