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President Donald Trump, an unindicted co-conspirator and suspected Manchurian candidate, sent a lot of unhinged tweets over the weekend. But one of the most bizarre rants targeted Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. President Trump referred to the billionaire tech founder and owner of the Washington Post as “Jeff Bozo.” “So sorry to hear the news about…
Ten hut, Gizmodo readers! Do you have a New Year’s Resolution you should be working on? Do not answer that rhetorical question, because yours are the feeble dreams of weaklings and mine is to whip this sorry, good-for-nothing blog audience squad into shape! ROLL CALL! Scroll on down and click those links! I don’t want to…
A six-hour standoff between police and a 40-year-old man who allegedly splashed gasoline on the floor of a Novato, California, convenience store “while threatening to burn it down” and later fled to a nearby Safeway ended when police defused the situation with a robot carrying a vape pen, the Sacramento Bee reported Sunday, citing reports…
Hybrid Air Vehicles, the company behind the Airlander 10 airship (the world’s longest aircraft and also known as the “flying bum” for its resemblance to a butt), said on Sunday that its current prototype will not be rebuilt but that it plans to build a new generation of airships, the Guardian reported. HAV, which is…
Dozens of federal government websites are not working correctly due to the ongoing government shutdown, BuzzFeed News reported on Friday, including ones for the Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals and some NASA and Department of Justice webpages. According to BuzzFeed, these sites and others appear to be malfunctioning because they lacked valid…
One of the co-founders of the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm behind the powerful phone-surveillance software Pegasus, NSO Group, has denied that their products were involved in the Saudi Arabian government’s torture and murder of journalist in self-imposed exile Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year, the Times of Israel reported on Saturday. However,…
E-scooters can be crazy dangerous even if they’re functioning properly, but especially if they experience glitches or design flaws that can put riders at risk. In Switzerland, an alleged Lime glitch has reportedly left electric scooter riders with serious injuries. TechCrunch reported Saturday that Lime has pulled its whole fleet of e-scooters from the streets…
Just days after Elon Musk unveiled the first images of his aerospace company’s Starship test rocket, SpaceX has announced that it is slimming down its workforce by roughly 10 percent. “To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company. Either…
Late last year, the U.S. government accidentally revealed that a sealed complaint had been filed against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Shortly before this was made public, the FBI reconfirmed its investigation of WikiLeaks was ongoing, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice was optimistic that it would be able…
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has confirmed that Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, the 18-year-old Saudi woman who escaped her family and pleaded for protection on social media, has been granted asylum in Canada. “The [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] has made a request of Canada that we accept Ms. Alqunun as a refugee, and we…
In early December, Boing Boing published a piece about an e-scooter “conversion kit,” a $30 hotwiring option for users who were, in theory, able purchase any number of Bird electric scooters collecting dust at city impound lots. This apparently didn’t sit well with Bird, which promptly issued a “notice of claimed infringement” requesting the article…
The GoFundMe campaign raising money to build Donald Trump’s wall on the southern U.S. border never had a chance of succeeding. And now it is undead, an officially failed effort that somehow lives on. On Friday, the crowdfunding site announced that it will issue refunds to donors, citing the campaign’s failure to achieve its donation…
Responding to reports this week of unlicensed use of consumer phone location data, House Democrats have moved to call for an emergency staff briefing with the Federal Communications Commission to gauge its progress on addressing an issue that first surfaced eight months ago. Earlier this week, Motherboard published the results of an undercover investigation, revealing…
Marriott, the world’s largest hotel chain operator, has been slapped with a class-action lawsuit over the data breach now believed to affect more than 300 million people. The suit, brought by more than 150 past hotel guests, according to Vox, is at least the second to surface since the breach was disclosed in late November.…
The Consumer Electronics Show is typically an assault on your senses. There are flashing lights, blaring speakers, bizarre stunts, and this year, a yacht. Well, the Shenzhen 3iRobotics Co, LTD booth and a random guy snoozing while sitting upright in crappy chair offered us a perfect metaphor for CES 2019. It was sad, sleepy, and…
We made it 11 days into 2019 without a meme-inspired accident, but that’s all over now. Someone has officially failed the “Bird Box Challenge.” If you aren’t aware, the hot new trend is to try driving in traffic while blindfolded. Inspired by the Netflix movie Bird Box (in which a blindfolded Sandra Bullock walks around…
Fields as diverse as video game development, visual effects, and industrial design all rely on 3D software, but the tools used to make it remain firmly stuck in two-dimensions. For the past few years, Magic Leap’s mixed reality goggles have been heralded as the missing link between the digital 3D world and the real one…
Google’s deeply discounted Chromecast Audio dongle is reportedly canceled. The rise of Chromecast marked a big moment for Google, but the company’s even more stripped down audio dongle always seemed a bit removed from reality ever since it debuted in 2015. The gadget helped people smarten up their regular old speakers, but it wasn’t actually…
A viral tweet about the 1960s TV show The Jetsons recently brought up a troubling question. Was Jane Jetson a child bride? The answer: Not quite. But it’s easy to see why people might be outraged. If we do the math on the admittedly fictional relationship between George and Jane—specifically, when their daughter Judy was…
Amazon’s connected tokens of capitalism have been outlawed in Germany. When Amazon started selling its Dash buttons in 2015, it seemed like an April Fools’ joke—an empire built on making everything stupidly easy to purchase somehow made it even easier and more mindless for users to get the dopamine rush of consumerism and order something…