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Frequently shirtless supplement salesman and Infowars founder Alex Jones, whose small media empire has been fully or partially banned from virtually every major internet platform, is suing to get back on PayPal. PayPal was late to the party, only banning Infowars and its affiliated Prison Planet website on September 21st over Jones’ long history of…
Amazon and its subsidiary company IMDb are preparing to launch a free, ad-supported service for its Fire TV digital media player “similar to The Roku Channel or some parts of Hulu,” CNBC reported on Monday, citing sources knowledgeable about the project. According to CNBC, the new channel will feature a library of both shows and…
The Seattle Police Department launched a program this week to let the public notify them they could be potential victims of a “swatting” hoax, according to Ars Technica. Swatting is a crime in which a malicious party deceives police into thinking a dangerous situation is developing at someone else’s address in the hopes that officers…
Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla really wants to keep the public off of his stretch of the coastline—so much so, that he petitioned to have his case heard by the nation’s highest court. On Monday, however, the Supreme Court decided that it won’t hear the Silicon Valley billionaire’s appeal. Khosla’s San Mateo County property sits…
Instagram’s co-founders are getting replaced by this guy. For nearly ten years, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have led Instagram, first independently, then later as a bright spot in the greater Facebook hellscape. And in the last few years, Instagram has stood in stark contrast to Facebook as a pretty harmless way to spend your…
After an earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia on Friday left more than 800 people dead, a spokesperson for the nation’s board of national disaster affairs revealed that a critical part of its warning and detection system hasn’t been working for years. Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesperson for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB), said a network…
Rubik’s Cube-solving robots are far from a new idea. In fact, while the human record holder can solve a cube in just 4.22 seconds, the fastest cube-solving robot does it in a little over half a second. This robot isn’t quite as fast, but it’s ability to quickly solve a Rubik’s Cube using just one…
Bad news for fans of innovative email systems: Inbox by Gmail is shutting down, less than four years after it first saw the light of day. If you’re a deeply invested Inbox user, where can you find the same sorts of features and tools beyond next March? We’ve got some ideas. You might want to…
In August, federal agents in Ohio made a suspect unlock his iPhone X using his face, in what may be the first instance of law enforcement using such a tactic. Forbes reports that a child pornography investigation led the FBI to the home of Grant Michalski, 28, in Columbus, Ohio, where agents searched the house.…
It’s been a few years since Japan’s AIST updated its HRP humanoid robot line. While the last iteration, HRP-4C, strived to make the robot seem as human as possible with a realistic female head, the new industrial-looking HRP-5P looks like it escaped the factory before its bodywork was finished. It’s not pretty, but the ‘skills’…
Depending on whom you ask (and where you live), the average American spends between 17 and 33 minutes each way commuting to work, which adds up to a nearly a day (or more) of wasted time every month. So to help take a little stress out of your daily work route, Google is building a…
At first glance, The HP Spectre Folio looks like any old tablet in a leather case. It’s not outstanding or even very interesting looking. But it’s a very clever device, hiding in an elegant package. When you see it in person, your excitement slowly builds as its design reveals itself to you. Indeed, if you…
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams recently posted an interesting question to Twitter. Adams shared a graph showing that the percentage of people between the age of 18 and 34 who live with their parents skyrocketed after 2008. Adams tweeted, “The iPhone was launched in 2007. Is it a coincidence?” The implication, of course, is that people…
California Governor Jerry Brown on Sunday signed into law Senate Bill 822, legislation that seeks to reestablish net neutrality as the core principle by which internet service providers treat all data carried over their networks within the state. Like the 2015 Open Internet Order repealed by the FCC in December, S.B. 822 extends to the…
It’s September 30th, 2018, and the theme of the last week was memory. Not just at Gizmodo, where we wrapped up Memory Week, our series on nostalgia, neuroscience, and all that data tightly locked up in our brains. No, you should additionally be trying to remember everything you’ve put into the sprawling Facebook information ecosystem,…
Facebook’s stunning disclosure of a massive hack on Friday in which attackers gained access tokens to at least 50 million accounts—bypassing security measures and potentially giving them full control of both profiles and linked apps—has already stirred the threat of a $1.63 billion dollar fine in the European Union, according to the Wall Street Journal.…
In August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk set off an entirely preventable and catastrophic chain of events by tweeting that he was “considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” Musk provided no financing details, and the Securities and Exchange Commission later determined that he never finalized any kind of deal with the Saudi sovereign wealth…
A joint federal-state task force tracking the MS-13 gang tried and failed to force Facebook to help it wiretap calls made through its Messenger app, Reuters reported on Friday, even launching an unsuccessful attempt to hold the social media titan in contempt of court for refusing to do so. Reuters reported that a federal judge…
Getting into the FBI is not easy, as the agency’s new “Do you have what it takes?” fitness app will happily tell you. The app, which was released in August 2018, walks users through the five legs of the fitness requirements former director James Comey re-implemented in 2015—daring them to achieve high scores on sit-ups,…
Over the last week or so, bloggers have been posting warm and fuzzy reflections about Android because we’ve just passed the 10th anniversary of the reveal of the T-Mobile G1, (AKA the HTC Dream, or colloquially the “G phone”), the platform’s first commercial device. Many folks—including this here blogger—had basically the same idea: Get your…
