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Japanese investment titan SoftBank disclosed on Monday that it expects to take up to a $16.7 billion loss for the past year in its Vision Fund, a key backer of huge, growth-at-all-costs tech firms like WeWork and Uber. According to the Wall Street Journal, that likely means its investments are worth less now than when…
Coronavirus testing centers are slowly opening up across the country, but tracking them down and finding out if you’re even eligible to take the test has been a challenge. Apple over the weekend rolled out an application for labs and businesses offering covid-19 tests to submit their information to Apple Maps, which should make it…
It’s happened to all of us: You’re unexpectedly pressured to fly around in a military fighter jet despite your lack of aviation experience before you accidentally mash that eject button. That scenario is exactly what occurred last March at an airbase in Saint-Dizier, France, according to a French government report released this month. Colleagues of…
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has seen a recent surge in demand for its boards due to the covid-19 pandemic. Part of that demand comes from people experimenting with the cheap computers with newfound time to kill at home, but the foundation is reserving some of its Pi Zero inventory for hospital ventilators. The $5 single-board…
If you haven’t seen your personal stimulus check yet, you could be waiting a while. Multiple states are relying on computers running a 60-year-old programming language to process the sudden influx of households, businesses, and individuals covered by the $2 trillion covid-19 response bill, the CARES Act. And unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of people…
While covid-19 tears through Amazon facilities, prompting at least one OSHA probe, Jeff Bezos is enjoying the quarter of a lifetime. Recode has observed that with the combined damage to temporarily-shuttered retailers and a 35 percent rise in consumer spending on Amazon since this time last year, Amazon may ride those gains forever. Now, less…
With Quibi’s official release last week, the overwhelming criticism of the new mobile-first video service was that—despite having a ton of content with a ton of star power behind it—the product was frustratingly limited in terms of streaming avenues. Everyone wanted it on their televisions even though Quibi has repeatedly told us that it wasn’t…
As others have pointed out, Taiwan is something of a coronavirus “success story.” Despite being a stone’s throw from Mainland China, the island’s managed to keep the virus’s spread under wraps, and its body count low, and has been no stranger to spearheading new, (arguably invasive) tech to keep things that way. The latest idea…
If you want the best wireless earbuds out there, we recommend the Jabra Elite 75t. If you want an equally excellent pair that also works great with the iPhone, you can’t go wrong with the Apple AirPods Pro. But if you want to charge and carry around your earbuds in a replica Poké Ball, you’ll…
Strikes have rippled across Amazon’s vast logistics network in recent weeks, led by workers who feel the company isn’t doing nearly enough to protect and compensate them during the global coronavirus pandemic. This afternoon, their white-collar colleagues across a variety of tech firms began showing solidarity for these warehouse and grocery workers whose essential work…
As Amazon buckles under the increased demand presented by social distancing guidelines and shelter-at-home orders, the company now says that new customers to its Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market grocery delivery services are being waitlisted. An Amazon spokesperson told Gizmodo by email that the waitlist is a result of both “restricted capacity due to…
After eight generations of G-series phones, it seems LG is finally ready to move on and try something different with a new family of handsets headlined by the upcoming LG Velvet. And while a shakeup from LG’s mobile division has been long overdue, an important question remains: How fuzzy will the LG Velvet really be?…
Humans have names, plants have names, animals have names, even terrifying diseases have names, so why shouldn’t colors? Crayola has always been great at coming up with creative names for its crayons, but now’s your chance to help give a unique name to all 16.7 million colors represented in the 24-bit color space. Head on…
Nevermind competing rumors on whether the next flagship iPhones are even on schedule to launch this fall, it would appear Apple’s got a major design refresh planned for the forthcoming 5G phones. According to Bloomberg, that includes riffing on the iPad Pro and the iPhone 5. In particular, Bloomberg cites anonymous sources saying the next-gen…
As convenient as getting the morning news through an app, a podcast, or even a website can be, there’s something aesthetically pleasing about the precisely laid out design of a printed newspaper’s front page. Feeling nostalgic for the medium, Max Braun used a giant E Ink panel to turn the front page of the New…
You’re maybe using video calling software a heck of a lot more than you were, say, a month ago—and you don’t want to be the only remote worker out there without a video feed to your name. If your home computer setup doesn’t come with a webcam built-in, then you can use the camera on…
From the historical record, it would appear that the medical profession ca. ancient times was a death cult with a body fluid fetish, whose members passed the bulk of their workdays draining patients’ blood and/or slathering them with animal droppings. Of course, to fault them for getting it wrong would suggest that we’ve gotten it…
Julian Assange secretly fathered two children during his almost seven years in Ecuador’s embassy in London, according to a YouTube video released by WikiLeaks over the weekend. The WikiLeaks co-founder was forcibly removed from the embassy in April of 2019 and was sentenced to almost a year in prison for jumping bail in 2012. The…
Happy Easter, everyone! Or, as I like to call it, “The Day Before I Regret Eating All Those Chocolate Bunnies.” Here’s a question for you, dear reader: Do you start with the ears or the tail first? Or, if you failed decision-making 101 in adulting school and now break out in a nervous sweat at…
Samsung is pulling the plug on its S Voice assistant, the company’s first attempt to compete with Apple’s Siri, on June 1 of this year. In reality, Samsung itself pushed S Voice aside with the launch of its new assistant, Bixby, a few years ago. But now the company is making it official. Bye-bye S…
