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The following petition appeared two months ago: I ride public transit to work daily, but Elon Musk says it’s bad. “I think public transport is painful,” he said recently. “It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t…
Instacart just nailed two of Silicon Valley’s classic misbehaviors—blaming the machines and mistreating contractors. On Friday, the $4.2 billion company said in a blog post that it unintentionally shorted some of its workers’ tips and charged some customers a service fee who had waived it. CEO Apoorva Mehta faulted a “bug” for the mishap, noting…
Dropbox, the company best known for nearly rescuing a ragtag group of emoji from a teenager’s phone, has filed for an initial public offering. Famously told it was doomed to failure by the late Steve Jobs, Dropbox reportedly began preparing paperwork for its long-rumored IPO back in July, which it kept under wraps until today.…
Technology—the breaker of chains, the breaker of backs. It is everything both right and wrong with humanity today. But today, I want to focus on the good side of things, specifically the small things developers might have put into a product that, if you dig around long enough, turn out to be surprisingly useful. So…
On Thursday evening, Robert Mueller’s special investigation filed even more charges against former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates. Gates pleaded guilty on Friday and it’s easy to see why. He allegedly had to repeatedly convert incriminating PDFs to Word docs because Manafort didn’t know how. Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller…
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai joined the pack at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday alongside fellow Republican commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Brendan Carr—the architects of the recent order repealing net neutrality protections passed in the Obama era. Upon taking the stage, it was announced that Pai was receiving an award from the National…
If your password winds up in a mega-breach like the ones at Yahoo, Dropbox, or Tumblr, it can be easy for a hacker to take over your account—especially if you reuse the same password across multiple services. But it’s not always easy to tell if your password has been stolen, and companies can sometimes take…
As city officials around the US continue to carve out incentives that might convince Amazon to build its new headquarters in their town, lawmakers in Oregon are having regrets about their own efforts to please Big Tech. A new bill there would repeal tax breaks that were intended to lure Google to deploy high-speed fiber—but ended…
Earlier this week, a storm spawned by the former Cyclone Gita swept across New Zealand, damaging buildings, knocking out electricity, and creating floods. But along the Rakaia River, the storm triggered a bizarre natural phenomenon known as granular flow—essentially a raging river of rocks. This incredible video was captured by Donna Field as she was…
When you’re having a picnic, the last thing you want is ants, and when you’re a billionaire venture capitalist, it’s equally irksome to have plebeians accessing the beach next to your 89 acres of land. On Thursday, Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla filed a 151-page petition with the Supreme Court in order to fight to…
As feared, oil from a sunken Iranian tanker has reached the shores of over a dozen southern Japanese islands, Japanese Coast Guard officials have now confirmed to Reuters and AFP. The Sanchi sank on January 14 after colliding with a Hong Kong-registered freighter in the East China Sea, spawning four giant oil spills. Packed with…
Update, 7/12: Gizmodo has discovered that LifeLock has continued to grant discounts to NRA members nearly five months after claiming it cut ties. Symantec, one of the country’s largest security software companies, has ended its partnership with the National Rifle Association, Gizmodo has learned. The company is the latest to sever ties with the NRA…
Just a couple days before the world’s biggest smartphone convention kicks off in Barcelona, Google is rolling out updates for a number of its most interesting Android features. The first of which is Google Lens, which will finally be available inside the Google Photos app over the new few weeks to all English-language Android users…
Last fall’s updates for Apple Watches and iPhones were supposed to make requesting emergency assistance easier and faster, but in one California county, Apple could be interfering with the response process by bombarding local emergency systems with false alarms. Emergency responders in Elk Grove and Sacramento County say they have been receiving about 20 calls…
The owner of car rental brands like Enterprise, National, and Alamo, has announced that it will no longer provide discounts to members of the National Rifle Association. And activists on Twitter and Facebook are putting pressure on other companies to distance themselves from the gun rights organization. Backlash against the NRA has intensified in the…
Bitconnect is being sued yet again, according to a document filed today with the US District Court of Northern California. This lawsuit, to the best of our knowledge, is the sixth brought against the company since its abrupt closure in mid-January. On its face a crypto exchange and lending venture, Bitconnect was widely considered—even among…
Humans assign value to brands. Brands represent wealth, strength, and yes, sex. We are our brands. And for some rhesus macaques in a lab, one brand, Adidas, represents monkey genitalia. You may have seen the wacky image above circulating online. It’s from a fairly incremental set of scientific results that don’t say much about us…
The FCC’s rollback of Obama-era net neutrality rules was formally challenged in court on Thursday by a coalition of 23 state attorneys general who assert the rollback was passed in violation of federal law. The leader of the coalition, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, said in a statement that the Federal Communication Commission order,…
A week after the deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead, debate around gun control has showed no signs of slowing. And today, a Twitter hashtag calling for Amazon to drop the National Rifle Association’s TV service from its platform began trending in New York and LA. The hashtag—#StopNRAmazon—has…
When you look at fur, the light has taken an extended journey before hitting your eye, bouncing around lots of fur fibers and their microscopic structures. You can imagine that it’s quite difficult for filmmakers to render these structures in CGI. Researchers at the Universities of California in San Diego and Berkeley have devised an…
