Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
When you know everything about two billion people but don’t want to tell anyone what you know, it’s tough to convey an image of transparency without actually being transparent. One solution that Facebook has come up with is hiring Liz Spayd, a former public editor for the New York Times to “consult” on “transparency” in…
The man who is known among the alt-right “Based Stickman,” due to a viral clip from March 4th where he cracked a wooden pole over the head of a counter-protester in Berkeley, California, is in jail, charged with “possession of an illegal weapon.” And according to East Bay Express, a judge has barred him from…
Is Barnaby Dixon the reincarnation of Jim Henson? It’s hard to believe that there isn’t at least a little bit of Henson inside the young puppeteer as he demonstrates his latest creation, a glowing bug puppet that’s so articulated it even has moving fingers that can grasp tiny objects. Made from a lightweight, form-fitting plastic,…
The Seattle-based internet book seller Amazon just announced plans to open an enormous fulfillment center in the North Randall, Ohio. This is a big deal for the small community which has suffered greatly since the Randall Park Mall, once the largest in America, shut down due to retail sales moving online. Amazon is actually building…
The world’s largest video sharing platform has started rolling out measures to restrict the reach, visibility, and profitability of “controversial religious or supremacist content.” Is it working? Let’s find out. As we learned earlier this month, YouTube’s plan for videos that don’t necessarily break the rules, but nevertheless fall into this liminal category of hateful…
During the Cretaceous Era some 70 to 100 million years ago, long-necked sauropods ruled the Earth. But in Africa, not so much. The discovery of a previously-unknown species of titanosaur in Tanzania expands what we know about dinosaurs on this continent, while revealing the surprising degree to which these creatures were related to similar dinos…
How many times have you stumbled in the dark, trying to locate a flashlight, only to discover the batteries inside it are dead? It’s an inconvenience in the middle of the night, but a genuine problem in an emergency, which is why this roll-up paper flashlight from Nendo seems like a brilliant idea for when…
One of the biggest challenges for a hardware startup is to actually create a finished product. But another is actually delivering the product to the customers that paid for them. It’s a common problem. And based on the recent frustrations of people who ordered Andy Rubin’s super hyped new phone, Essential Products is running into…
On Thursday, the Baltimore Police Department released the third of three videos since July that have raised accusations of officers planting or staging evidence. In this latest video, taken in June, two officers chase down and tackle a man suspected of dealing drugs. After his arrest, CBS reports, the suspect revealed the location of drugs…
Australian scientists have managed to crack the code of a mysterious 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet, revealing a level of mathematical sophistication that pre-dates the ancient Greeks by a whopping 1,500 years. This Babylonian tablet, known as Plimpton 322, is the world’s oldest—and most accurate—trigonometric table, according to research published this week in Historia Mathematica. The…
Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook, however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of “People You May Know,” the social network’s roster of potential new online friends for me. The People You May Know feature is notorious for its uncanny ability…
Federal authorities recently searched the property of Kyle Lamar Myers, the guy who’s famous for pretending to be Russian then shooting huge guns and causing violent explosions on the popular YouTube channel FPSRussia. Before the search, the sheriff of Franklin County, Georgia arrested Myers for receiving drugs in the mail. And the story only gets…
In a historic move, a South Korean court convicted Lee Jae-yong—known as Jay Y. Lee in the western world—of bribery and embezzlement on Friday. Mr. Lee has been sentenced to five years in prison, and the future of leadership at Samsung is now in question. For South Koreans, the verdict signals a new era of…
Twitter shut down anonymous posts on an internal question-and-answer forum last year after an employee anonymously questioned Twitter’s support of LGBTQ causes, according to four former and current Twitter employees who spoke with Gizmodo on the condition of anonymity. The decision came after the forum had also been used to question CEO Jack Dorsey’s leadership…
Synesthesia is a rare condition where experiencing one sense (like sound) triggers an involuntary experience of another sense (like vision). If you’ve never experienced this phenomenon yourself, this colorful abstract animation by Andy Thomas simulates what it’s like to visualize sounds. Inspired by a recent trip to the Amazon, Thomas turned the unique and diverse…
Word on the street is that new White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, has forbidden aides from bringing President Trump any news stories from InfoWars, the conspiracy theory website founded by Alex Jones. InfoWars, the only news site that tells the truth about child slaves who are currently on Mars (seriously), is an absolutely…
“People You May Know.” “Suggested Friends.” “Suggestions for you.” No matter what it’s called, most of the social networks have it: a feature that recommends other users for you to connect with. How do the networks find those other people? Sometimes the recommendations seem creepy and privacy-invasive, like when Facebook suggested a psychiatrist’s patients friend…
A 36-year-old Chinese national was arrested in Los Angeles this week in connection with a computer hacking conspiracy involving malware linked to the 2014 US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data breach. Yu Pingan of Shanghai, China, was arrested on Wednesday while traveling at Los Angeles International Airport. Also identified by the hacker pseudonym “GoldSun,”…
Coffee seems to be the most overstudied beverage; seemingly every day we’re bombarded with another study about it causing or curing cancer. But surprisingly, there are plenty of scientists who don’t really understand its many effects. In fact, it may even be changing the way we taste all the other things we eat in a…
When we think about wine in Italian history, we think of the booze-soaked bacchanalias of ancient Rome. But it turns out that Italians were using wine to get their drunk on long before that, as evidenced by an exciting new discovery of the region’s oldest vino near a Copper Age site in Sicily. It’s a…
