Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
For those of you who still routinely scroll through your Facebook feed, the social network may have already given you more power over what topics you might stumble upon. On Wednesday, News Feed Product Manager Shruthi Muraleedharan announced in a post that Facebook is starting to test a snooze feature for keywords. The feature—Keyword Snooze—lets…
Your favorite tech companies are trying to trick you into giving up your data, and a new study shows how they’re using design to do it. A study from the Norwegian Consumer Council dug into the underhanded tactics used by Microsoft, Facebook, and Google to collect user data. The study comes in the wake of…
Some people here in the 21st century still think of solar power as a futuristic, unproven technology. But solar-powered machines have been around for well over a century. In a short article called “Electricity From the Sun,” the October 1923 issue of Science and Invention magazine told the story of a German dream to build…
Skyrocketing temperatures, unbearable humidity, and sweaty armpits all add up to one embarrassing side effect of the summer: body odor. But despite being literally under your nose, it’s not always easy to tell if your deodorant is winning the battle against BO, so Japan’s Tanita has created an electronic nose that can quickly confirm whether…
Following a series of embarrassing mishaps, the Senate has decided that local authorities can’t be trusted with the keys to the emergency alert system. On Tuesday, Senators unanimously agreed that federal oversight of the system would help prevent scaring the hell out of citizens with erroneous “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND” warnings. In January, the phones…
The Gateway podcast follows Gizmodo’s investigation into the influence internet spiritual guru Teal Swan has over her thousands of followers across the world. Swan delivers her self-help teachings through hypnotic YouTube videos. She specifically uses SEO techniques that target people who are struggling with depression and suicidal ideation, then encourages them to undergo her signature…
On Wednesday, Slack confirmed that users worldwide were experiencing difficulty connecting to the workplace messaging service, pledging to investigate the problem and provide updates soon. For those who don’t use Slack nearly every second of their jobs, this might seem like just another service outage. For the rest of us, it is nothing short of…
Among updates about new features coming to Android P, a new direction for Android Wear, and improved image recognition in Google Lens, the thing that really stole the show at Google I/O 2018 was Duplex, the automated phone service that can make a dinner reservation or an appointment at a hair salon without you ever…
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old progressive activist, became the Democratic candidate for New York’s 14th congressional district after a primary election yesterday. Ocasio-Cortez defeated 56-year-old Joseph Crowley, a man who served ten terms and was the chair of the House Democratic Caucus. The weird part? Ocasio-Cortez didn’t even have a Wikipedia page on Monday. But she…
The Department of Justice announced on Tuesday the “first nationwide undercover action to target vendors of illicit goods” on the dark web, the portion of the internet only accessible via specific software like the Tor network. According to the DOJ, the operation involved at least five federal agencies and entailed Homeland Security Investigations agents posing…
Facebook has abandoned a key portion of its Aquila project, an effort to build solar-powered, passenger jet-sized drones that would wirelessly connect parts of the developing world to the internet, Business Insider reported on Tuesday. According to Business Insider, Facebook’s Director of Engineering Yael Maguire wrote that the company will focus on the “underlying technologies” behind…
Ride-sharing giant Uber, which lost its license to operate in its millions-strong London market in September 2017 amid a Transport for London (TfL) ruling the company was “not fit and proper to hold a private operator license,” has won at least a temporary reprieve in its battle against UK regulators. According to Quartz, Uber has…
By today’s standards it was ugly, it was slow, and it was primitive, but Windows 95 was the first operating system I mastered inside and out, and I’ll always have a soft spot for Microsoft’s most memorable PC OS. That can be the only explanation for why part of me would also love suffering through…
In a self-congratulatory move, Microsoft announced some major improvements today to its fundamentally biased facial recognition software. The Azure-based Face API was criticized in a research paper earlier this year for its error rate—as high as 20.8 percent—when attempting to identify the gender of people of color, particularly women with darker skin tones. In contrast,…
With fresh data breaches surfacing nearly every day, it’s impossible for one person to keep track of it all. Thankfully, there’s an app for that, and starting soon, it will be even more accessible for millions of users. Security researcher Troy Hunt on Tuesday announced that his data breach service, Have I Been Pwned (HIBP),…
The public beta version of Apple’s newest mobile operating system, iOS 12, is now out in the wild, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it to find out whether Apple had really fixed the most annoying thing about using the iPhone X—screenshots—as we expected it would when the developer beta became available…
The Moon is incredible, and you should look at it. Our view of it is always in flux, but sometimes, the Moon’s visage changes in a particularly dramatic way—like when it sneaks behind the Earth’s shadow and turns red. An especially long lunar eclipse will occur at the end of next month (July 27), which…
Recent headlines have suggested that California lawmakers are considering a bill that would give Californians “unprecedented control over their data.” This is true but that is not the whole story. What’s really happening is that California lawmakers have 48 hours to pass such a bill or the policy shit is going to hit the direct…
When the website TrumpHotels.org popped up last week, most people assumed it was created by some left-wing advocacy group. The parody website features photos of America’s immigrant detention camps, with children in cages and quotes from President Trump about Mexicans being rapists. But surprisingly, the website was actually started by a conservative. And Gizmodo talked…
Apple showed signs that it hasn’t given up on its former show horse—at least not yet.
