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A former computer science student who used the moniker K!NG and made more than $900,000 scamming visitors to legal porn sites using ransomware has been sentenced to six years in jail, the BBC reports. Zain Qaiser is now 24, but authorities say most of his hacking activity took place when he was 17 through 19,…
YouTube shut down numerous chat rooms being flooded for over an hour by racist comments when thousands of people tuned into YouTube on Tuesday to watch a House Judiciary Committee congressional hearing on the rise of white nationalism. The hearings featured officials from Facebook and YouTube, two platforms that have been under fire for their…
If you’ve dabbled in mobile gaming, particularly more resource intensive titles like one of the many battle royale games out there, you know jank. It’s the slight hiccup, frame skip, or graphics lag that can sometimes mean the difference between an early exit and a chicken dinner (or perhaps a victory royale). But on the…
As technology becomes more central to our lives, kids are increasingly being steered towards careers in programming with things like toys that promote coding. Is there still room for the arts in a world run by apps, AI, and computers? It turns out there might be a closer connection between the two than you’d think,…
People have been complaining about iTunes for ages. The bloated and confusingly arcane piece of software has been updated and repurposed and jerry-rigged to handle new tasks for the past 18 years, and one developer says it won’t live to see its 19th birthday. It looks like Apple is finally about to kill iTunes and…
I don’t consider myself anything close to a sports fan, but even I understand that the Lord of the Flies-level chaos that transpired following Texas Tech’s victory over Michigan State on Saturday is remarkable if for no other reason than the bonfire of flaming Lime scooters. Video shared to Facebook and Twitter following Saturday’s NCAA…
Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has approved Project Wing’s plans for drone delivery of food and medicine in suburbs around the capital city of Canberra, a “world-first,” according to a new report by the Guardian. Project Wing, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, has been testing self-flying delivery drones in Australia for over…
Spammers on Twitter are annoying. That’s why Twitter is thwarting one their most obnoxious tactics by further slashing the number of people you can follow per day from 1,000 to… 400. Basically, the site says it’s trying to limit a practice called “follower churn,” or when an account will follow and then unfollow a large…
California Representative Devin Nunes, one of the president’s biggest yes-men in Congress and recent filer of a lawsuit against Twitter and several of its users, including the account @DevinCow and Republican strategist Liz Mair, over mean things said about him has launched yet another lawsuit. This one again targets Mair, as well as the McClatchy Company,…
New details are starting to trickle in about the Chinese woman arrested while carrying a suspicious number of electronic devices and trying to get inside President Donald Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club—among them that a USB drive in her possession began to auto-install files on a Secret Service agent’s computer the minute they plugged it in.…
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is refusing to make public any records it has amassed on whistleblower Chelsea Manning, even though the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst waived her rights under the Privacy Act and requested in a letter that her more-than-8,000 page file be released. In response to a Freedom of Information/Privacy Act request,…
It appears not even our goddamn horoscopes are free from the targeted marketing of Jeff Bezos and his e-commerce monstrosity Amazon. According to Fast Company, the company has been shipping monthly horoscopes to its Prime members in its Insider newsletter. Its horoscopes program—let’s just call it what it is, shall we?—has evidently been live for…
If you were looking for another reason to hate the rich, Red Carpet Home Cinema is here to help out. For $1,500 to $3,000 per film, the company will let you rent first-run films from the comfort of your tricked out mansion. But not just anyone can sign up for this anti-MoviePass service. To qualify,…
Welcome to AIstrology. With the help of research scientist Janelle Shane, we developed a bot to generate monthly horoscopes. Its language faculties will be tweaked and trained as time goes on. Sometimes they may more closely resemble human syntax, and other times, well… less so. There is a desire, granite smooth but yielding. We wish…
To weary enthusiasm, Facebook announced last month it would ban white nationalists and white separatists from the social network, dissolving the company’s bizarre distinction between those ideologies and white supremacism. The policy change, first reported by Motherboard, felt like progress. But as with all things Facebook, here comes the inevitable disappointment. A very basic data…
In the process of reporting a related story, a Facebook spokesperson provided Gizmodo with the company’s internal slides discussing its position on white nationalism and white separatism, adopted in late March. What follows is a glimpse into the confusing, often contradictory thinking of one of the most powerful and frequently inept companies on Earth. “Under…
The most downloaded app in Apple Store’s China region, with over 100 million users, awards points for reading articles, taking quizzes, learning about socialist theory and watching videos about President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party. The app, Study the Great Nation, was developed by the public opinion research division of China’s Central Propaganda Department…
Today brings some small relief for New Yorkers worried about the face-scanning tech being used at the city’s entry points: So far, the system has reportedly been a total bust, detecting 0 percent of faces “within acceptable parameters.” But that isn’t stopping the city from expanding the pilot program. In October 2016, you may remember,…
At the risk of making the understatement of the century, the global conversation about Facebook has changed. When the New York Times first talked about the site in 2005, founder Mark Zuckerberg was a literal “whiz kid” ambitiously recruiting high schoolers to his web site. Earlier this weekend, New Zealand privacy commissioner John Edwards called…
It hasn’t been very long since the most recent barrage of iPhone rumors. However, the latest round of iPhone reports and musings are a bit more exciting, with word about the iPhone SE getting a reboot for 2019, a patented nanoparticle coating that could increase iPhone durability, and even a die shrink for Apple’s A-series…
