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Some things never change. Dying terribly from bone cancer, for instance: that’s something humans have been doing from about the beginning of our time. Has it always been like this, or was there some blissful period, in our species’ salad days, in which no one perished from bone cancer? Which sickness has burdened us—or our…
A Georgia man pleaded guilty last week to using phishing tactics to hack the Apple accounts and credit card details of a number of “high-profile” celebrities and athletes, scamming victims out of hundreds or thousands of dollars, according to the Justice Department. For roughly three years beginning in at least March 2015, Kwamaine Jerell Ford…
Neural adaptation is our brain’s ability to gradually ignore sounds, smells, and other stimuli we’re routinely exposed to. It’s what allows people who live in crowded urban settings to tune out all the noise at night and sleep, and then continue sleeping right through a familiar alarm clock sound in the morning. Odd Alarm is…
Google’s ubiquitous email service has now been around for 15 years, so to celebrate this milestone, Gmail is getting a couple of important new features. The first big addition to Gmail is actually something people have been asking about for years: the ability to schedule emails. Now, when you’re finished writing an email in Gmail,…
Google announced the formation of a global council on technology ethics last week to some deserved trepidation. Sure, the company had amassed some highly qualified individuals to fill seats on this board—but Google’s track record of following its own internal ethics codes is less than spotless. What provoked the most outrage, however, was the appointment…
It seems as though with every passing year the smartphones in our pockets become more powerful and capable—and more prepared than they’ve ever been to be the only computing device we need in our lives. However, before you give away or sell that old laptop without replacing it consider these scenarios where you really can’t…
At least five airlines are experiencing delays this morning due to a computer problem. Early reports indicate that Delta, United, Southwest, Alaska, and JetBlue all experienced the same outage, which has reportedly been fixed. A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines told Gizmodo over email that the outage was caused by “a vendor that services multiple carriers…
Over 2 million credit cards have been compromised after hackers installed malware on point-of-sale systems for Earl Enterprises, a restaurant company that owns national chains like Buca di Beppo, Planet Hollywood, and Earl of Sandwich. The hacking occurred between May 23, 2018 and March 18, 2019, according to the company. Krebs on Security was the…
Well, folks, it’s just a few hours shy of the turn of the month, and you know what that means: April Fool’s Day. Yes, it’s that special time of year when insipid brands, mean-spirited teens, and tech titans compete to be the first to trick you into thinking they released Skittle’s… For Men, that it’s…
The Drug Enforcement Administration maintained a database of people who purchased money-counting machines as part of a “legally questionable” effort to identify suspected drug dealers for further surveillance and enforcement efforts, the New York Times reported on Saturday. The Times reported that a U.S. Department of Justice inspector general report indicated that said program operated…
It turns out that Facebook’s onetime plan to build huge drones that would relay wireless networks to parts of the world without widespread access to high-speed internet, Project Aquila, isn’t the only odd method the company has explored in its quest towards world e-domination. According to a recent report in Business Insider (paywalled), Facebook worked…
Earlier this year, Jeff Bezos beat the National Enquirer to the punch by announcing the dissolution of his marriage—which the tabloid was planning on blowing up anyways in the form of a lengthy expose of his affair with news anchor and media personality Lauren Sanchez. The mildly-interesting-at-best story got a whole lot more interesting, however,…
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg—whose company has blundered its way into controversies over everything from user privacy and data breaches to amplification of extremist content and literal genocide as of late—responded to growing criticism of the tech sector by calling for more outside regulation in an op-ed in the Washington Post (and on his own personal…
As March draws to close, so does our celebration of the World Wide Web’s 30th birthday, making it as good a time as ever to take a look back at some the features and formats that bit the dust along the way. The internet has come a long way from the bare-bones, plain text and…
There is a good reason people call Twitter the hell website. Cynicism, egos, unprovoked hostility, unchecked propaganda, sexism, bigotry, and outright hate—Twitter is as full of it as virtually anywhere online, and worse, it’s unbearably nonstop. The design of the place feels uniquely unhealthy due in large part to its speed and unrelenting stream. Opening…
It can be easy to forget how much personal data we share with the various technologies geared at streamlining our lives, be they voice assistants, smart home devices, or the phones we carry with us virtually everywhere. And if you own a car, that may go for your ride too. According to a report from…
A Tennessee woman has been awarded nearly half a million dollars after a furniture company illegally hounded her with hundreds of robocalls, sometimes more than 10 times per day, even after she asked them to no longer contact her, per court records. Furniture chain Conn’s began contacting Veronica Davis in September of 2015, according to…
Two weeks before voting to rollback the net neutrality rules, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in which he laid out his case for killing off the policy that ensured a free and open internet. In it, he offered up one widely-disputed argument for doing so: that blocking, throttling, and…
Without Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, most of your favorite websites would not survive—nor would they have existed at all. The modern internet would be a much different place without this short little bit of legislation that has become a sort of First Amendment of the web. Now, a growing contingent of conservative…
Apple has completely canceled its much-hyped AirPower project. The wireless charging mat would have charged an iPhone, a pair of AirPods and an Apple Watch simultaneously but now it will charge nothing. On Friday, Apple made the embarrassing decision to admit defeat. AirPower was announced along with Apple’s first generation of smartphones that were built…
