Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
During World War I, far away from the lines of battle, the UK was faced with a different crisis. As thousands of khaki-clad “Tommies” shipped off to the front, the British economy teetered on the cusp of grinding to a halt. With the men gone, the task of keeping the country’s lights on fell to…
Passwords are your way into almost all of your online accounts, from social networks to email platforms, but how do you know whether the ones you’re using are strong enough to stand up to repeated hacking attempts? If you want to know how to do a self-audit on password security, and the best combinations to…
It might look like the $300 GoPro Hero 5 (which is now two years old), or the $400 GoPro Hero 6 (which was released last year) but this is actually a brand new, and much cheaper GoPro. Simply called the GoPro Hero, this new $200 action camera will feature most of the best features of…
Facebook’s big data-sharing scandal apology tour continued on Wednesday with the announcement the site would be cancelling its “Partner Categories” advertising section, in which the site partners with third-party data brokers to aggregate even more monetizable information about users. Per the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is under the impression that this will somehow help dispel…
A South Carolina facility owned by aerospace and defense contracting giant Boeing was hit by a WannaCry attack on Wednesday, the Seattle Times reported, but the company is now trying to tamp down fears that the dreaded ransomware is back on the rise after it was only barely snuffed out last year. Per the Times,…
A website that allowed Gindr’s gay-dating app users to see who blocked them on the service says that by using the company’s API it was able to view unread messages, email addresses, deleted photos, and—perhaps most troubling—location data, according to a report published Wednesday. The website, C*ckblocked, boasts of being the “first and only way…
GoPro is rumored to be releasing a new budget model soon—but it appears a Best Buy in El Paso, Texas has jumped the gun and accidentally stocked them onto its shelves. Look for yourselves: Twitter user Anry Black reached out to Gizmodo with a photo of the gadget just sitting out in the open. The…
In April, Verizon will begin charging its customers a surprisingly high fee if they intend to pay their monthly bill over the phone with a representative. It’s an overlooked practice that’s spreading among big telecoms and provides huge profit potential while eliminating needs for human personnel. All the while, those who likely can least afford…
Loving your new Google Home Mini? Hating its tinny sound and lack of auxiliary output options? Well Google appears to have heard your lo-fi cries of anguish, and responded by adding a way to control your third-party Bluetooth speakers using your Google Home device. Nice work! It only took a whole year. The update, should…
Exactly one year ago, Elon Musk revealed that he’d co-founded a new startup, Neuralink, with the ambition of inventing a brain-computer interface or, as it was later called, a “wizard hat for the brain.” These types of interfaces, in their current iterations, are mostly used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other brain disorders, and the…
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who’s been hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the past six years, had his internet cut off today. And his supporters are so worried about his inability to communicate with the outside world that they’ve started to assemble outside the embassy. Ecuador issued a statement confirming that the…
An imagined war between dozens of meme communities on Reddit has been called off following the hacking of a chat server and the posting of a moderator’s personal information online. From start to finish, the entire conflict took less than a week. Early skirmishes of the Meme World War, as it came to be known,…
Nest just released a new ad, and let me tell you: there are some issues with the content. So you see this teenage girl in a prom dress ring a Nest doorbell, and a teen couple walk out the front door. The two girls walk to a car, as a low robotic voice beckons the…
Even though the iPhone X wasn’t the first handset with a notch (please see examples A and B), after Apple added cutouts to its $1,000 phone, a lot of Android fans suddenly developed strong feeling about the whole notch trend. Then, at Mobile World Congress in late February, things got even more heated when it…
There are innumerable ways to die and now, a US government agency wants to discuss some new, internet-connected ones. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is now accepting public comments on “potential safety issues and hazards associated with internet-connected consumer products.” In short, please tell the government about your ideas for Final Destination-style, internet-of-things-related deaths. The…
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey directed the Arizona Department of Transportation to suspend Uber’s testing of self-driving cars on Monday, in response to an incident last week in which an autonomous car struck and killed a pedestrian. In Ducey’s letter to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the governor called dash footage of the crash “disturbing and alarming”…
You’ve chosen a strong password and you’ve set up two-factor authentication, which requires an additional device to authenticate on log in, so your accounts are safe, right? Not so fast—all of your online accounts and apps will have recovery processes in place to help you, should you get locked out of your accounts, and it’s…
Facebook has been playing a shell game with your privacy for years, but now it says it will put all of the settings that control your data under one shell. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which Facebook lost control of 50 million users’ personal data, the social media company’s stock price…
When Playboy was founded in 1953, conservatives were up in arms about the way that it contradicted traditional “American values.” But how times have changed. Playboy has become the latest brand to delete its Facebook pages, claiming that Facebook is both “sexually repressive” and contradicts Playboy’s values. Playboy’s decision follows other companies that have recently…
A flaw in ostensibly untraceable cryptocurrency Monero, which has picked up steam as market leader Bitcoin has stumbled in value, may make it possible to trace transactions—and since the entire history of Monero is encoded in its blockchain in what is now known to be a semi-vulnerable method, transactions that happened years ago could potentially…
