Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
A mere eight hours after Britain declared war on the Nazis, a German torpedo struck the SS Athenia, sinking the passenger liner and killing more than 100 civilians. The ship’s final resting place has eluded shipwreck-hunters for nearly 80 years, but sonar images taken off the coast of Ireland now show what appears to be…
Did you know that Ivanka Trump is an expert on education policy? Well, the president’s daughter wants you to know that she is, especially when it comes to “tech.” The 35-year-old former fashion designer outlined her grand plan for the future of technology education in a New York Post column on Thursday. In brief, the…
Augmented reality promised us a world of whimsy not confined by the rules of science. This week, we instead got a tech behemoth promoting their struggling app by plopping virtual sculptures into already magnificent places. And the art world is already firing back. In response to Snapchat’s new collaboration with Jeff Koons—a project that places…
From the moment Google’s big product event kicked off on Wednesday, it seemed as if every speaker was attempting to temper expectations and say, in not so many words: “We get it, you’ve seen this before. But this time… Google’s doing it.” The most blatant example of a Google spokesperson teeing up this admission came…
The former head of AT&T, Robert Eugene Allen, passed away in September 2016 at the age of 81. And while Allen’s 223-page FBI file is relatively unexceptional, it serves as a good reminder that telecommunications companies have been working on sensitive government work for their entire existence. When you think of Top Secret security clearances,…
Fabrications, hoaxes and other lies about the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas this week which killed at least 59 people and wounded well over 500 others have been spreading rampant on YouTube, and it’s unclear if the video giant has any plans to do anything about it. Per the Guardian, entering simple search queries…
Looking at the new Pixelbook from afar, it’s really hard to understand why anyone, let alone Google, could demand a retail price of $1,000 for this thing. It’s got Chrome OS inside—the operating system you stick in cheap laptops with cheap guts because it needs practically no processor power to run. And Google made no…
The Google Pixel 2 might not have as vibrant a blue color scheme, but this is a different phone from last year’s model, with a sharper design (that colorful camera button) and some new features that could inspire hope in Google fans who were less than stoked after last year’s outing. The Google Pixel was…
Spend enough time in New York City, and there won’t be much that can surprise you. Two-hour lines to get a donut? Yeah, that makes sense. Mummified bat corpses in the alley behind the local church? Of course, that’s where mummified bat corpses belong. Human feces inside a Chinese takeout box on the floor of…
“I definitely spend way more time reading tweets than writing tweets,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross in 2011. Back then, his company was enjoying praise for its (largely accidental) role in helping to organize the Arab Spring, with Stone describing himself as “an infrequent tweeter” and a “consumer of the information…
Moss, in case you were not already aware, is a pretty freaking amazing plant. It does not have roots, allowing it to grow in unlikely places like bits of rock at the top of a glacier or on lifeless, barren fields of lava. It provides a habitat for an entire community of microscopic critters. Its…
Do not lose sleep tonight, the world will not end as the result of some enormous supervolcano eruption in Yellowstone National Park any time soon. But there is a whole lot of other interesting stuff going on there—so maybe it’s worth losing sleep by getting excited about science. Nerd. A swarm of earthquakes rumbling since…
Google announced some new hardware at a characteristically low key event in San Francisco on Wednesday. Nearly everything had been leaked ahead of the event, but there were a few surprises—some more exciting than others. Inevitably, one thing seemed clear: Google wants to be a gadget company, too. The gadgets aren’t bad, either! There’s a…
We’re all guilty of performing stupid stunts as kids, but most of us tend to avoid risking life and limb as we grow older. YouTube’s Giaco Whatever has done just the opposite. Using his machining skills, he attached a bunch of razor blades to a high performance yo-yo, creating a toy that’s possibly even more…
Have you ever felt like you deserved the Nobel Prize in trigonometry after successfully parallel parking your compact car? Sadly, your skills can’t hold a candle to this truck-driving Jedi who squeezes a full tractor trailer into an impossibly narrow spot without a scratch. The drone’s eye view of the maneuver makes the driver’s skills…
Lifelogging—the act of recording your every waking moment—has been declared dead numerous times. But now it looks like Google is trying to resuscitate the movement with a new camera it introduced at its Pixel 2 event on Wednesday. Google Clips is a portable camera that takes photos and videos for you. According to Google, the…
Archeologists in Turkey think they may have reason to rewrite Christian history. Saint Nicholas, the inspiration for Santa Claus, is believed to have been born in the Demre district in Antalya, and new research at a church that bears his name there has uncovered a tomb that could house his undisturbed remains. https://gizmodo.com/among-the-many-items-joining-king-tut-in-the-afterlife-1694719983 On Wednesday,…
Facebook and Twitter will send representatives to testify at a Senate hearing next month on Russian interference in the US presidential election, sources at the companies told Gizmodo. Facebook turned over 3,000 ads linked to a Kremlin troll farm to Senate staff earlier this week and has briefed staffers on the Russian ad campaigns that…
The US Senate Commerce Committee has unanimously approved a bill that would prevent states from creating laws that regulate development and performance of self-driving cars and help put more autonomous vehicles on public roads. Within three years, the bill would allow auto manufacturers to sell 80,000 autonomous vehicles annually as long as they are demonstrably…
The company responsible for AlphaGo—the first AI program to defeat a grandmaster at Go—has launched an ethics group to oversee the responsible development of artificial intelligence. It’s a smooth PR move given recent concerns about super-smart technology, but Google, who owns DeepMind, will need to support and listen to its new group if it truly…
