Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Amazon is inching ever closer to making its long-awaited decision on where to build its second North American headquarters, with the company entering “advanced discussions” to set up shop in Arlington County, Virginia’s Crystal City, with additional facilities in nearby Potomac Yard in Alexandria, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. However, on Sunday the Wall…
Politicians and tech executives are split on San Francisco’s Proposition C, which would impose an annual 0.175 to 0.69 percent tax on businesses with over $50 million in gross receipts and would double the city’s current spending on services for the homeless. And while many have spoken out about their position ahead of Tuesday’s vote—including…
Georgia Secretary of State and increasingly desperate Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, who is tied in the polls with Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams, has shamelessly used his position as the state’s top election monitor to purge hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls and close hundreds of polling sites over the past few years.…
Two men were killed in a partial building collapse at an Amazon Fulfillment Center in Baltimore late Friday in an incident resulting from severe weather, an Amazon executive confirmed Saturday. The incident occurred at Amazon’s facility BWI5, a sortation center that opened roughly four years ago and preps packages for shipping, according to Recode. Both…
5G speed might be coming to Apple products as soon as 2020, according to a recent report. Fast Company wrote this week that “a source with knowledge of Apple’s plans” says that a line of iPhones using the Intel 8161 5G modem chip is planned for release in 2020, and that Intel is developing a…
A former Bitcoin tycoon who served a year in prison for his role facilitating transactions on the Silk Road digital drug bazaar is being sued by none other than the Winklevoss twins, the HarvardConnection creators famous for suing Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook from them. According to the New York Times,…
The heat is on in an apparent fight between two e-scooter companies after Lime said earlier this week that some of the batteries made by one of its manufacturers, Segway Ninebot, could catch fire. Now, Segway is squaring up against the allegation, suggesting instead that Lime doesn’t understand how batteries work. Lime addressed the apparent…
Uber is planning to put its self-driving car technology back on the streets in Pennsylvania after it suspended the program earlier this year. The ride-sharing company ceased operations of the program in several cities following a fatal crash in which one of its cars was involved in Tempe, Arizona in March. An Uber spokesperson told…
With the hotly contested midterm elections coming up this Tuesday, Twitter is cracking down on attempts at using the service to dissuade people from showing up at the polls. Between September and October of this year, Twitter deleted more than 10,000 bot accounts that posted messages aimed at convincing people not to vote, according to…
Honestly, guys, this shouldn’t be so hard. With billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and some of the finest engineering minds on the planet, Facebook just can’t seem to figure out how to stop profiting from advertising categories that don’t comply with its advertising principles. And a new damning discovery was just made by The…
An island half the size of Manhattan in the south Atlantic Ocean is so isolated, it’s called Inaccessible Island. On that island, and only on that island, live nearly 6,000 puny featherballs called Inaccessible Island rails. But they can’t fly, and the island is only a few million years old. How did the birds get…
I’m a simple woman. When I’m riding the bus, walking down the street, or working in the open offices here at Gizmodo Media Group, I just want to pop in my earbuds, turn on some good music (buy Honey on iTunes) and ignore everything around me. Luckily, this experience only costs 10 American dollars (plus…
The iPad has always been a fantasy, and even as the device is more powerful and beautiful than it’s ever been before, I can’t bring myself to understand why most people would ever want one. I remember sitting in a newsroom nearly a decade ago as extremely smart and well-meaning editorial executives told a group…
Filmstruck, the best video streaming service ever created, is dead. Well, it’s almost dead. The last day of the service is November 29, 2018, which means that if you already have a subscription, you can keep using it until then. But with just a month to go, you might be asking yourself what to watch.…
Kids are not great at eating. They make messes and miss their mouths, and knock full cups and plates off the table. It’s sometimes funny, but it’s less funny when the food is hot and burns a kid bad enough to send them to the emergency room. And that happens a lot—nearly half of serious…
NASA just released the first ever 8K video shot in space. With help from the European Space Agency (ESA), astronauts collected a bunch of clips inside the space station—and a few looking out—using the Helium 8K camera by RED. You can download the original file on NASA’s website. (It’s over 3 gigabytes LOL.) However, you…
Spotify’s long-awaited Apple Watch app is already in the hands of beta testers, according to a Reddit post and some screenshots uploaded to Imgur today. Spotify’s online forums have been bombarded with requests for Apple Watch support for years, but until today it’s never seemed like the integration ever had much momentum. For its part,…
The Bank of England has announced it would like to feature a scientist on the new £50 banknote. So, whom should they pick? The initial announcement of a £50 redesign sparked social media campaigns for all sorts of famous Brits, including British spy Noor Inayat Khan and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But a new post…
A new report might make you think twice before installing that next Chrome extension. The private Facebook messages of at least 81,000 people have reportedly been stolen, probably due to an exploit in a browser extension, and compromised accounts are now apparently up for sale for just $0.10 apiece. The BBC reports that a shady…
Flickr is under new ownership and that means new rules. Now it’s time to back up all those photos that you just assumed would be there forever. February 5, 2019 is the day that Flickr will officially begin the mass purge of photos. The company was purchased from Yahoo in April by SmugMug and it…