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The chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, is much likelier to end up facing prison time in the United States after her legal strategy to avoid extradition from Canada suffered a massive blow on Wednesday. Meng is facing multiple charges in the U.S., where prosecutors have pegged her as the mastermind…
If there’s one thing Apple prides itself on, it’s design. (The company even published a $300 coffee table book about how iconic its products look.) But while they certainly are distinctive, whether you like these designs is another matter. Generally speaking, Apple knows how to make pretty products, but there’s one exception. For some reason,…
Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington dismissed a lawsuit that claimed major tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Apple worked together to “intentionally and willfully suppress politically conservative content” online. According to Bloomberg, the federal appeals court said nonprofit group Freedom Watch and Laura Loomer, a right-wing YouTube personality, failed to provide…
Since the beginning, Quibi has been adamant that its streaming video service is a mobile-first endeavor. However, after launching right as The Pandemic was gaining steam—which made the idea of watching short videos on a phone or tablet during your daily commute seem like quaint nostalgia from a before time—today Quibi has finally added the…
Regardless of his motives, knowledge of the subject, or consideration of the national security implications involved, President Trump on Wednesday elevated his position on Americans’ privacy rights above that of the Democratic Party—the most powerful members of which have dedicated several months now to undermining efforts at reform. Although it’s really been something of a…
In high school, I had an intense love affair with my graphing calculator, a silver transparent TI-83 Plus. Not only did it help me with my math homework, it was also a handy way to play classic games like Tetris and Snake during class and still look like I was paying attention. Now, it appears…
Twitter quietly added fact-check links to two of Donald Trump’s tweets last night, and the president responded with the only way he knows how: nuke! the! site! At 7 am this morning, Trump complained (on Twitter) that social media platforms “silence” conservatives and threatened that “we will strongly regulate or close them down.” The fact-check…
Tabletop gamers often use hot wire cutters to turn chunks of foam into elaborate miniature landscapes, but this pair of robot arms turns hot wire carving into an intricate art form. By coordinating their movements, they can recreate even the most complex curves of a 3D model by bending and warping a flexible metal rod…
Apple was the first company to make smartwatches a product consumers actually wanted, but there was a time, not too long ago, when Microsoft could have defined the future of wearables. The company’s SPOT platform took a deceptively simple but clever approach to wireless connectivity years before technologies like Bluetooth, wifi, and even LTE were…
Earlier this month, Samsung cryptically announced that it would be launching a debit card this summer and that it was partnering with fintech startup SoFi to do it. Now, we have some more details about what this new debit card will look like—and how it’ll work. For starters, this card is called Samsung Money by…
Having the right soundtrack is key to getting stuff done, but it can be tough to find the balance between jams that lull you to sleep and earworms that distract you with their catchy choruses. With the obvious caveat that everyone’s tastes and concentration levels are different, here are nine different music and audio mixes…
Twitter, amid a controversy over its inaction on Donald Trump’s baseless tweets asserting that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is a murderer, has for the first time begun attaching fact-checking links to some of the president’s posts. It’s… certainly something? Two of Trump’s Tuesday tweets railing about imaginary Democratic voter fraud now have a link titled…
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) late Tuesday withdrew his support for a House amendment aimed at curbing the FBI’s ability to collect the internet search and browsing records of Americans without a warrant. A Wyden spokesperson told Gizmodo that the Oregon senator’s decision came shortly after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) provided a statement…
An alleged snake-and-monkey duo has stirred up some controversy at a Trinidad and Tobago hospital. The Port-of-Spain General Hospital does not deny that a monkey broke into its operating room. But contrary to a video purporting to show a monkey and a “big snake” (with footage of said monkey) in the O.R., the North West…
The Wikimedia Foundation has been asked by its board to overhaul its safety and compliance standards to better address “harassment and incivility” on Wikipedia and related Wikimedia communities. The foundation oversees Wikipedia as well as its sister projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, and Wikisource, among others. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees voted last week…
Long before Spotify was a thing, I collected music on my computer during my college days. That collection, which had everything from Cradle of Filth to Dashboard Confessional, to Reverend Horton Heat, easily surpassed 10,000 songs by the end of my first semester as a freshman. By the time I graduated, I had close to…
There are a few norms that constrain the behavior of newsgathering, one of which is to at least try, for any given story, to get the perspective of all parties involved. Many company PR teams abuse this constraint by providing journalists with spin or misinformation, which a reporter may or may not infuse with the…
Just days before the official launch of its new streaming service, HBO seems to want to clear up any confusion about the difference between its services Go, Now, and soon-to-launch Max—and buddy, I’m not sure it’s working. Over the holiday weekend, HBO released an explainer on the “differences” between the three services. The important thing…
There are plenty of ways to use your phone to pay with stuff: You can use your face, your fingerprint, a passcode, and, now, simply your voice. Google just rolled out a limited pilot program that will let a few lucky people make purchases with nothing but their voice, according to The Verge. You can…
Facebook announced today that it would be completely rebranding the wallet for its long-anticipated cryptocurrency—perhaps in an attempt to shake off its troubled reputation. “Today, we’re excited to introduce Novi—the new name and brand for the digital wallet that will help people send and hold Libra digital currencies,” said Novi’s head, David Marcus, in a…
