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As hundreds of millions of people flood social networks, tech companies are struggling to weed out harassment on their platforms—and so they’re turning to machines for help. On Tuesday, Instagram announced it was doing just that. “While the majority of photos shared on Instagram are positive and bring people joy, occasionally a photo is shared…
After years of trial-and-error Google has finally done what we’ve all asked for and made a Chrome OS tablet. It could be the perfect device for the barebones operating system. The Google Pixel Slate might look like an iPad with a Google Pixel veneer applied, but there aren’t a lot of products that have me…
Just a day after Facebook announced its virtually feature-less Portal smart display, Google debuted one of its most loaded IoT devices ever. The first Google Home with a display is available for pre-order starting at $150. Despite privacy concerns and a general pointlessness, almost 27 percent of U.S. households have brought a smart assistant device…
Google’s third-gen Pixels might be the most leaked phones ever. From numerous Russian tech sites getting their hands on production-ready devices to stores in Hong Kong selling handsets a week ahead of the official announcement, there’s a lot info about the new Pixels floating around. But one thing all of the leaks couldn’t reveal were…
It all started with a mystery: Why would a fitness tracker detect a beating heart on a roll of toilet paper? As Chinese tech site Abacus reports, toilet paper is having a bit of a viral moment in China after fitness tracker owners discovered the Xiaomi Mi Band 3 would display a heart rate when…
Russia’s most famous “troll factory,” a building where Kremlin-financed shitposters wage a battle of words in the New Cold War, was hit with a molotov cocktail overnight. No one was injured in the attack. The English-language news site The Moscow Times reports that the St. Petersburg building was hit around 3am local time, citing the…
No matter how careful you are, problems tend to crop up on Windows and macOS anyway—from little annoyances you can’t get rid of to full-blown system-wide issues that make it hard to use your computer normally. We’ve got some good news for you though: You can find plenty of free apps to help at least…
Android, Chrome OS, and general Google fans today is your day! Google+ may be in ashes, but Google’s hardware is, presumably, not. Today Google is expected to announce a new Pixel phone, as well as, possibly, a new Chromecast, Chrome OS device, and even a Google Home gadget or two. If you want to watch…
As is the custom, Google’s big hardware day is here, and there have been so many leaks about the new Pixel phone, it practically feels like we’ve used it. Heck, some people say they’ve already bought one. But don’t let a few leaks spoil the fun. There are still bound to be some surprises. https://gizmodo.com/what-to-expect-from-googles-pixel-3-hardware-event-1829461865…
Pop star Taylor Swift endorsed two Democrats this week in a surprise Instagram post that upset many Trump supporters who assumed she was a secret Republican. And Swift’s endorsements are having a real impact. According to Vote.org, the number of voter registrations has gone through the roof. “We are up to 65,000 registrations in a…
Google has dropped out of the competition for a Pentagon cloud computing project that could be worth as much as $10 billion and last up to a decade, citing a possible clash with its corporate values, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project, which involves the mass transfer of data previously…
Some employees at Facebook have been furious that one of their top lobbyists, vice president for global public policy and former George W. Bush administration official Joel Kaplan, publicly supported Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings even as the latter faced multiple allegations of sexual assault. This probably won’t help: Over the…
Following a report Monday alleging that Google kept secret a data breach potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of Google+ users, the company is offering only a meager defense of why it kept silent for so long. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google opted not to publicly disclose the exposure—both out of concern of how…
The first rule of 2018 is to greet any accusation of foul play with an assertion of exactly the opposite. Verizon has certainly gotten the memo. In August, the company was criticized for throttling the “unlimited” data plan of firefighters battling record-setting blazes in California and now it has a slick new ad campaign about…
If you bought a new iPhone this fall, we have some good news to share: Apple pushed out an update to all users today that fixes two of the more frustrating issues that have plagued iPhone XS and XS Max owners. If you’ve encountered charging or connectivity issues, you’ll want to update your iPhone to…
Last week, a report from Bloomberg made some wildly egregious allegations about Apple and Amazon, claiming they were among a number of victims of a Chinese surveillance operation. Both tech companies quickly and fiercely refuted the claims in the report, and now yet another strongly-worded denial is available to read in full. Apple wrote a…
Google+, a social network that we can certainly say existed and not much more, is slated for a long-overdue trip down the memory hole. A ten-month sunsetting period was announced in a Google blog post today about increased security efforts, dubbed Project Strobe, which found a bug in Google+ that could have leaked some personal…
If you’re in the market for a new desktop CPU, then Intel’s got a whole bunch fo new 9th-Gen chips for you to check out, including one with the fastest clock speed ever a mass-produced processor. The new i9-9900K has a turbo clock speed of 5GHz (and a base clock speed of 3.6GHz). That’s significant…
Facebook announced its new Portal hardware today, a limited-purpose device that allows users to video chat on Facebook almost exclusively. And there’s something strangely retro about the concept: This is the standalone videophone device that George Jetson had in the 1960s and that AT&T imagined in the 1990s—the device that we were supposed to skip…
Hot off the news of a massive user-data breach, today Facebook is entering the smart display wars with Portal, a connected gadget with speakers and a screen, built-in Alexa integration, and even deeper ties into Facebook for people who don’t yet distrust Facebook with every fiber of their being. The Portal comes in two configurations:…
