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A top artificial intelligence (AI) conference will officially use a different acronym as its shorthand name, following months of controversy fueled in part by last year’s event when Elon Musk reportedly made a joke about “tits” to a crowd of attendees. For decades, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference has gone by NIPS, which is…
The bizarre, winding tale of the $400,000 GoFundMe campaign for a homeless man just got even messier. Speaking through her attorney, Kate McClure is now claiming that she was involved in an abusive relationship, and that falsified, feel-good story was concocted by her boyfriend and a homeless man for a viral GoFundMe campaign. On Monday,…
On Monday, The Verge reported that Twitter “redesigned” its iOS app to put less emphasis on follower counts, a move in line with CEO Jack Dorsey’s recent comment that the platform has wrongly pushed users to “increase that number.” How is Twitter correcting its error? Well, you can see for yourself below: Squint hard enough,…
Coinciding with a buck wild, self-published “op-ed,” Governor Andrew Cuomo went on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show this morning to double down on his decision to offer Amazon, one of the largest retailers in the world, a glut of incentives estimated to total $4.6 billion. The interview was a rousing success—if his intention was to…
Over the last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook has made it a point to call out tech companies for indiscriminately collecting data on users and disregarding concerns about privacy. But one issue with his criticism is that Apple gets paid a boatload of money from Google for making its search engine the default on its…
A sleuth famous in the art world for tracking down works of art thought to be lost or destroyed has delivered one of his greatest finds yet—a Byzantine-era mosaic of Saint Marks that was stolen from a Cyprus church after the Turkish invasion in 1974. Arthur Brand is a Dutch art historian who moonlights as…
Announced as part of the iOS 12 update and now available as a separate app, Siri Shortcuts (or just Shortcuts) lets you do more with Apple’s digital assistant—you can wrap up a bunch of different tasks and launch them with one voice command. If you’re not sure exactly how this can be of use, keep…
In the 1950s and 60s, Americans were fascinated by the idea of flying cars and jetpacks that would let people soar above the traffic. But it wasn’t just the average commuter who was supposed to benefit from these space-age technologies. Emergency responders like police and ambulances were going to take to the skies to help…
Ours is a dog-eat-dog world—but is the same true for dogs? I’ve seen dogs tussle over discarded bits of hamburger meat, but I’ve never seen one try to enlist another in a shady multi-level marketing scheme, nor have I seen one dog try to distract another dog while a third dog steals the second dog’s…
It might be the second half of November, but the wildfire season in California is now functionally approaching a 365-days-a-year crisis, with two massive blazes burning down huge swathes of the state. The Woolsey Fire and the Camp Fire are slowly approaching containment, but not before the former destroyed whole sections of Malibu and the latter…
Tumblr has mysteriously vanished from Apple’s App Store, and it’s not clear why. The issue was first reported Friday by tech blog PiunikaWeb, which pointed to user reports that the app wasn’t working and noted that some users were “not able to turn off Safe Mode.” As of Sunday, the app was still nowhere to…
India’s right-wing, arch-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is using government-subsidized cell phones that have been handed out to millions of people as a campaign tool, the New York Times reported on Sunday, with the BJP using a $79 million free-phone program in the state of Chhattisgarh to appeal directly to voters. According to the Times…
Microsoft’s Cortana assistant is reportedly becoming more of an assistance aide than a standalone service, being moved from Microsoft’s AI + Research department to its Experiences & Devices Team and working with Amazon to pair it with the latter company’s Alexa technology. Now, per Engadget, Microsoft seems to be encouraging customers to just buy Alexa-powered…
You can now add YouTube to your list of sites to scour for free movie streaming, as the video-sharing giant has now added no-cost, ad-supported films to YouTube Movies. A spokesperson for Google, YouTube’s parent company, told Gizmodo that it introduced the “free to watch” section to its site in October, though reports of the…
A federal judge refused this week to throw out a lawsuit against neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer alleging it led a “terror campaign” against a Jewish real estate agent, Tanya Gersh, and the Southern Poverty Law Center tells the New York Times it expects the civil case to now proceed to a trial. The lawsuit accuses…
Apple’s new iPad Pro may be the last great tablet, but you’d be wise to handle it carefully. Apple’s critical darling appears to bend pretty easily under the right amount of pressure, which you might expect but is no less visceral to watch. This observation comes courtesy Zack Nelson, the YouTuber behind popular product review…
Almost precisely a year later, authorities have found the ARA San Juan, the Argentine submarine that went missing on Nov. 15, 2017, with all 44 people on board reported missing still unaccounted for. According to the BBC, the vessel was located by hydrographic survey company Ocean Infinity’s Seabed Constructor, and preliminary signs indicate that the…
Dozens of Android users reported that the Instagram app wasn’t working for them as of Saturday morning, with some posting about problems on mobile on Twitter late Friday. Instagram now says the issue is fixed. “Some users temporarily had trouble using Instagram on Android earlier,” the company said in a statement by email to Gizmodo…
If you’re a person even remotely annoyed by the pervasive presence of ads in virtually every digital space, it’s probably safe to assume you definitely don’t want them in your email. Microsoft appears to have only just realized this. The company seemingly backtracked on rolling out an A/B test for banners in its Windows 10…
Alphabet has halted a project under its biotech division Verily that aimed to create smart contact lenses for people with diabetes. The ambitious, years-long endeavor aimed to measure glucose levels in tears using on-lens sensors. Verily made the announcement Friday in a blog post about its decision with Alcon to table the project for the…
