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While the two-year legal battle between Apple and Qualcomm is far from over, we’re starting to inch toward some kind of resolution. On Thursday, Southern District of California Judge Gonzalo Curiel handed down a preliminary ruling in favor of Apple, declaring that Qualcomm is on the hook for $1 billion. The two tech giants’ legal…
In an about face, Netflix has decided to pull footage of the tragic Lac-Mégantic rail accident from its original film Bird Box—almost two months after a spokesperson said the clip will stay in the movie. In an emailed statement to Gizmodo, a Netflix spokesperson said, “Netflix and the filmmakers of Bird Box have decided to…
When the insular Silicon Valley venture capital world found out this week that over a dozen local wealthy parents got caught bribing their way into colleges like the University of Southern California, their first reaction was to throw their head back in laughter: They paid $200,000 to get their kid into USC and UCLA, of…
Android Q is here—in an early, beta form—and if you’ve got any generation of Pixel phone on hand then you can give it a test run. We’ve been playing around with the beta edition, and these are the most significant changes we’ve spotted, alongside the new features Google has been trailing. If you want to…
At least 50 people are dead and dozens more have been seriously wounded during multiple terror attacks today in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attacker used several long guns to target Muslims at two mosques and had what police described as explosive devices. One series of attacks was livestreamed on Facebook for 17 minutes. Three people…
There are many reasons to be critical of Google. But on Thursday, General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stopped just short of accusing the tech giant of treason. Dunford’s incendiary comments came during a budgetary hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee this afternoon. During his time for questioning, freshman Senator…
The Phantom high-speed cameras used by YouTube channels like The Slow Mo Guys to capture mesmerizing slow-motion footage are obscenely expensive. But soon, thanks to a new technique that can extract slo-mo videos from a single photo, the smartphone in your pocket could outperform even a high-speed camera that costs well over $100,000. Researchers from…
Technologists like to put machine learning on a pedestal, exalting its ability to complement and even exceed human labor, but these systems are far from perfect. In fact, they are still tremendously vulnerable to self-owns. A research paper from January details how just how easy it is to trick an image recognition neural network. “If…
Chris Cox, one of the first handful of engineers hired to Facebook, a close personal friend of Mark Zuckerberg’s and, until very recently, Chief Product Officer of the entire suite of the company’s products, is departing the company. He’s joined on his way out the door by Chris Daniels, Vice President of WhatsApp. Both began…
During the push to repeal net neutrality in 2017, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai made a lot of big promises. At the top of the list were assurances that if America would only revert back to “light-touch” regulation of the broadband industry (as the two-time Courage Award winner put it), we’d all see huge boosts in…
You’ve sat too close to the TV. Or to the screen at the theater. Everything warps when you get up close. People become giants. The screen seems to go on forever. Everything takes on that 8-Bit video game look as you can see the sharp outline of each pixel. But have you ever sat too…
After the better part of a day, Facebook’s “family of apps” are being restored to normalcy. Small outages are not unusual, even for sites of this size—although, in recent memory, protracted inaccessibility of major services is more often caused by backbone outages. The cause for Facebook, Instagram, and Oculus’s long (and probably costly) goof? Allegedly,…
There’s a glob of stringy, black rubber spilling out of the street at the corner of Speed and Fernwood in Louisville’s Highlands neighborhood. A block away on Rosedale, the same spongy substance that covers most of Google Fiber’s buried lines in the city snakes in and out of the asphalt. Google Fiber, Alphabet’s gigabit broadband…
Even though the government shutdown ended more than a month and a half ago, we’re still feeling its effects. That’s because, despite HP issuing an expansion for a battery recall back in January, the notice wasn’t posted to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) website until earlier this week due to the shutdown. HP’s…
A group of bitcoin bandits hit paydirt by taking advantage of buggy cryptocurrency ATMs in seven Canadian cities, according to police, netting a $195,000 CAN score—about $150,000 U.S. And Toronto police are asking for help identifying the suspects. The fraudulent transactions took place over a 10-day period from September 16 to 26 last year, and…
After six years, Google is shutting down Spotlight Stories, its in-house immersive entertainment studio. What exactly was Spotlight Stories, you ask? Fair question. Unless you’re an avid virtual reality enthusiast, there’s a good chance you’ve never even heard of Google’s attempts at creating 360-degree short films for smartphones. An email from the studio’s executive producer…
Slowly but surely, it appears that Facebook is getting its “family of apps” back online. The consequences of the longest outage in the company’s history, however, remain to be seen. On Thursday, one of Facebook’s underrecognized competitors, Telegram, said that it added three million new users in the last 24 hours. When it comes to…
Apple likes to tout its smartwatch’s heart-tracking features as being able to potentially save a user’s life one day. But a man in Nimbin, New South Wales, Australia, may owe his life to his smartphone, which stopped an arrow fired by an assailant while he was trying to snap a photo. According to the NSW Police…
Despite being a 30-year-old image format in desperate need of replacement, the animated GIF still rules the internet. It’s useful for so many things; from visually illustrating a point, to delivering a devastating comeback. If you’ve ever wanted to make your own, with complete control over the quality and file size, here’s our guide to…
Most Americans are terrified of riding in autonomous vehicles, according to a new survey released by AAA. And rather than getting more comfortable with the futuristic technology, people are becoming more afraid. According to the new survey, a whopping 71 percent of Americans say that they’re afraid to ride in a self-driving car, up from…
