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Those of us who experience the cold of winter here in North America have definitely had our fill of snow and frigid temperatures. There is beauty to be found when the thermometer drops below freezing, like the sights and sounds of lake ice cracking and piling up on the shore, but it’s mostly soothing as…
You may remember that, as a publicity stunt, SpaceX propelled a red Tesla, driven by a dummy in a spacesuit named Starman with the words “DON’T PANIC” written on the control panel, into space using its Falcon Heavy rocket. That car is now a permanent advertisement on the NASA HORIZONS directory of solar system bodies.…
HTTPS, or the secure version of the ubiquitous Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, can’t solve every problem when it comes to online security. As far as preventative measures go, however, it’s relatively cheap to implement and serves as a strong baseline before tackling other, more difficult issues. That’s why, starting in July 2018, Google will start…
Patrick Shanahan, deputy secretary of defense, has only been on the job for six months, but he’s quickly learning that seemingly innocuous gadgets can pose a security risk at the Pentagon. Which gadgets? Innocent things like his Fitbit. “I’m guilty. I used to wear a Fitbit up until this last week,” Shanahan said while delivering…
The National Science Foundation will require the institutions it funds to report findings of sexual or any other kind of harassment involving a principle investigator, according to a notice passed to Presidents of NSF Grantee organizations. Sexual harassment cases have rocked universities across the United States, such as the recent high-profile case involving students and…
Emoji 11.0 is fixed and prepped for delivery in June. Some of them look promising—useful even. But Anthony Hawk, long-time purveyor of fine video games and friend of Gizmodo, has taken umbrage with the Unicode Consortium’s depiction of his stock and trade. He’s also been given the opportunity to fix it. Unicode—who seemingly have never…
Belen Aldecosea used to have a dwarf hamster that served as her emotional support animal. Then she tried to fly Spirit, which would not let her hamster on the plane. Then she claims a Spirit employee told her to flush the rodent down the toilet. Then Aldecosea—for reasons privy only to her—flushed that hamster down…
When Twitter announced last November it was finally doubling the 140-character limit of tweets, after months of speculation and handwringing, some vocal users tweeted out their snark and certainty that this development was a death knell for the medium. Twitter assured users at the time that there was no need for alarm. The company had…
We’re hoping that common sense stops the vast majority of people from trying to look into the business end of a jet engine while it’s blasting out incredibly hot exhaust. But since there are people out there intentionally eating laundry detergent pods, here’s a fun demonstration that shows what a running jet engine will do…
Last month, a local California newspaper left more than 19 million voter records exposed online. Gizmodo confirmed this week that the records were compromised during an apparent ransomware attack. The Sacramento Bee said in a statement that a firewall protecting its database was not restored during routine maintenance last month, leaving the 19,501,258 voter files…
You probably have this image of the circle of life in your head where a zebra eats a plant, a lion eats the zebra, the lion dies and fertilizes the soil, and then new plants grow. I mean, that sort of happens, but have you considered where snakes fit into all of this? A new…
This week, parents looking for information on their kid’s AP exam registration might’ve instead ended up with a ton of dicks in their faces. Earlier this week, the Google Maps “My Business” link for Cherokee High School in Georgia navigated to porn. People looking for the school on Monday and Tuesday were reportedly navigated to…
Remember the feelings of thrill and terror when you launched your sled down a steep snow-covered hill? American Skeleton racer John Daly has been doing that competitively for 15 years, but his sled, which slides down an ice-covered bobsled using a pair of metal runners, can actually hit speeds of up to 90 miles per…
Apple is well known for keeping a notoriously tight grip on the code powering its iPhones, only rarely revealing the inner workings to the public. But in a move that some Mac and iOS experts are calling the “the biggest leak in history,” an unknown source appears to have laid bare parts of the iPhone’s…
Great news: On Wednesday, the Unicode Consortium released the final version of its 11.0 emoji set, with approximately 77 new emojis being added to the list. There’s a lot of new content, including a few new faces, various organs or body parts, animals, foodstuffs, and science equipment including petri dishes and lab coats. While artists…
Twitter, the social media service that gave us a Trump presidency and a potent weapon of the New Cold War, has announced that it turned a net profit for the first time in the company’s history. Twitter’s stock rose in pre-market trading. But while profits are up, the total number of Twitter users is flat.…
John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of the 1996 manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” has died. He was 70 years old. Barlow was a seminal child of the 1960s who took LSD with Timothy Leary, wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and eventually became an internet activist…
Despite massive blood-letting in the cryptocurrency markets over the past few weeks, the pace of brands just announcing some kind of ambiguous “blockchain” venture in hopes they can send their stock prices skyrocketing has barely slowed down. Photo company Kodak is now selling crypto miners, while other bit players like iced tea companies and Hooters…
The Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic Winter Games is handing out special “Olympic edition” Galaxy Note 8 smartphones to competitors this year, but athletes from North Korea and Iran won’t receive them thanks to United Nations sanctions on both countries, Agence France-Presse reported on Wednesday. Samsung, one of the game’s sponsors, is handing out roughly 4,000 of…
On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts released a damning report detailing extensive social media surveillance in Boston between 2014 and 2016. Thousands of documents obtained through public records requests reveal that police used advanced social media data mining techniques to monitor what they termed “Islamist Extremist Terminology.” The authorities worked with Geofeedia,…
