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The most effective way to tell your co-workers you don’t want to be bothered is to close your office door. But if you’re stuck in cubicle purgatory, that’s not an option. Instead, try this Scrabble tile rack desk lamp that lets you spell out seven-letter warnings like ‘GO AWAY’, ‘NOT NOW’, or other, blunter messages…
The Chinese government’s anti-pornography office announced earlier this month that video streaming services in the nation need to “thoroughly clean up vulgar and pornographic ASMR content.” And while the agency called for a crackdown specifically on content that is “vulgar” or sexual in nature, many of China’s leading video hosting sites have scrubbed all ASMR…
More than 2,000 academics, including graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and at least 1,300 professors, have signed a letter denouncing the Department of Homeland Security’s policy separating immigrant children from their families at the border. The letter opens: As scholars of education, history, psychology, sociology, and various other academic fields and disciplines, we unequivocally denounce the…
Where do you go to tell a secret? Probably depends on the secret. What you’d feel comfortable murmuring to a friend in a private meeting is likely not what you’d say loudly to a coworker while your boss is in earshot. Online, we not only communicate, we calculate—based on who we’re speaking to, or what platform…
Dig out your Fitbit tracker, wristband, or smartwatch from whatever drawer it’s gathering dust in and strap it back on—we’re about to show you some cool tricks you can try to do more with your wearable. From improving device accuracy to exporting your data, here’s how to get the most from your Fitbit. 1) Plug…
Despite President Donald Trump and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross’ best efforts to save ZTE from a seven-year ban on using American goods, the Senate on Monday passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision to reinstate the ban on the Chinese phone manufacturer. While it’s difficult to say exactly how the vote…
For those averse to talking on the phone, hotel stays can resemble a war of attrition, testing your mettle to see how long you’ll go without calling the front desk and admitting you forgot to pack your toothbrush. But Amazon’s new Alexa for Hospitality service, which puts an Echo device in your hotel room, might…
The problem with becoming a massively successful company that’s publicly traded is that you have to keep growing. Facebook is running out of new places to force its ads and it’s now going to start throwing autoplaying videos into messenger. Messenger alone is ranked as the third most popular social network by monthly users and…
Blindly reaching under your desk to find an available outlet to plug in your dying laptop is never a safe idea—I’ve had it go wrong… it was not pleasant. Reaching for a flashlight is a safer approach, but Ten One Design’s new Stella plug is an even better one. It’s got its own built-in flashlight…
Adobe has embraced mobile photo editing with open arms, releasing robust apps like Lightroom for processing and perfecting your images on a phone. It hasn’t been quite as committed when it comes to mobile support for video production, which is why it’s nice to see its four-year-old Premiere Clip app being eclipsed by its new…
The United States currently has over 100 concentration camps along the U.S.-Mexico border. The facilities have become controversial due to the Trump regime’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents—a policy that health care professionals explicitly call child abuse. And now Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia, has unceremoniously added this shameful chapter of American…
Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose company took in $17.9 billion in 2017’s last quarter from China and has much of its supply chain located there, has been running around trying to slow down a possible US-China trade war threatened by Donald Trump’s administration—and while the White House might be largely ignoring his warnings, Cook has…
Electric car giant Tesla is pulling out all the stops trying to hit make-or-break production targets of 5,000 Model 3 four-door sedans a week, going so far as to set up a third line in a tent outside its Fremont, California plant. At the same time, it’s reportedly burning through financing, has faced claims of…
Apoidea, welcome to the resistance. On Sunday, tens of thousands of unrelenting enemies of the racist surveillance dystopia enveloping America took to Times Square to protest Big Brother. The NYPD estimates 20,000 bees simultaneously swarmed a surveillance camera on 42nd Street and Broadway. In a towering message to all of us, the hive mind temporarily blocked…
The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider an appeal in a long-delayed case that revolves around whether Apple’s App Store policies constitute a monopolistic practice that violates antitrust laws. Before we can get to that issue, however, the courts must answer a question that at first seems simple and clean but gets messy once…
A couple months ago, Google announced that it would be suspending development of yet another messaging app to focus on Android Messages and to help carriers adopt Chat, a new messaging protocol based on RCS that should make texting a whole lot better. So today, as part of the transition, Google is bringing over some…
How many times have you accidentally given yourself a papercut after excitedly tearing open a delivery from Amazon? As Japan’s most resourceful knife maker demonstrates, those papercuts could be a lot worse if you spend hours painstakingly turning those cardboard boxes into a razor-sharp chef’s knife. The process involves soaking the cardboard in water, repeatedly…
Tensions are high within Microsoft, as new scrutiny is given to a partnership between the company’s Azure Government cloud computing arm and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to several Microsoft employees who spoke to Gizmodo on the condition of anonymity. Two were considering leaving the company based on the response. The partnership was…
Researchers at Purdue University have found a new way to get surveillance cameras to “talk” to the people they see. The system is called PHADE, which stands for “private human addressing,” and it enables cameras to send messages to people’s devices when they’ve entered a specific area without collecting their personal data. Instead of using…
One of the hardest video effects to fake is slow motion. It requires software to stretch out a clip by creating hundreds of non-existent in-between frames, and the results are often stuttered and unconvincing. But taking advantage of the incredible image-processing potential of deep learning, Nvidia has come up with a way to fake flawless…
