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A second lawsuit has been filed against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week over the secrecy shrouding its plans to kill off net neutrality. An investigative journalist filed paperwork suing the FCC in New York Wednesday afternoon, accusing the agency of improperly withholding records about a May cyberattack that it claims temporarily took down…
Two more members of the Apple family just got put in the ground. On Thursday, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that it has “officially discontinued” the iPod Shuffle and the iPod Nano. As first noticed by MacRumors, Apple pulled both MP3 players from its website as available products today, something the company has…
Any Carl Sagan fan knows you’re made of star stuff. Protons don’t decay into any other particles (as far as we can tell), so you can reliably assume that most bits of you have been around since a second after the Big Bang. But if you’re thinking a little more locally, you might wonder whether…
Working out on a stationary exercise bike can get pretty dull really quick. But if you want to make it fun, you might want to hack your bike so you can’t watch TV unless you complete your workout. A clever engineering student named Ronan Byrne recently came up with Cyxflix, a program that interrupts your…
Last night, Amazon share prices surged and Microsoft shares dipped, allowing Jeff Bezos to surpass Bill Gates in new worth, dethroning Emperor Clippy to become the king of the rich nerds for the first time. At the close of trading on Wednesday, Bezos—CEO of Amazon, owner of The Washington Post, and founder of Blue Origin…
And why the hell should they? In the past three months, President Trump’s favorite social network has grown by zero (0) users, according to Twitter’s latest earnings report. That’s 66 million fewer new users than Facebook added in the same time period, and 9 million fewer than Twitter itself added during the first quarter of…
Ever notice how Christopher Nolan’s movies (Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige) feel like an anxiety attack? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. But the director does have a knack for creating an unnerving degree of tension. Turns out he’s using a little bit of musical magic to do it. The magic is actually a science-based audio…
Shortly after the Super Soaker was first released in 1990, it became surrounded with controversy about hooligans allegedly filling the toy with harmful chemicals. But if that sounds dangerous, just imagine how local news stations would freak out over a squirt gun that blasts molten liquid metal. https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-super-soaker-is-powerful-enough-to-s-1796820585 Kevin Kohler—aka the Backyard Scientist—used pewter, a malleable…
You don’t necessarily need to install a desktop application to get your hands on a decent office suite any more, and the biggest names in tech all have free, online productivity tools you can access from any browser—so which one should you be using? We take a look at the features, strengths, and weaknesses of…
As virtually every school-aged child knows, birds are descended from dinosaurs. But holy toledo, does this newly discovered oviratporid ever look like a modern cassowary—right from the dramatic crest atop its head through to its long neck and ostrich-like shape. The paleontologists who discovered the dino are now studying modern cassowaries to get a better…
It’s official. President Trump is, objectively speaking, a threat to the safety and security of the United States. And perhaps nothing demonstrated that better than when Trump started a tweetstorm that sent the Pentagon into a panic yesterday. The US military spent nine full minutes wondering if the president was about to start a war…
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, ISP-endorsed frontman and villain of a theoretical future Revenge of the Nerds reboot, is trying to dupe everyone into believing abandoning open internet principles is inevitable because no opponents have any convincing arguments. At an FCC oversight hearing with the House Commerce Committee this week, Democratic Rep. Michael Doyle challenged Pai…
While Adobe is finally mercy killing Flash, its multimedia software that helped power countless web applications like games and videos faced but widespread criticism for its rapid decline in usefulness and growing number of security vulnerabilities, some fans want to keep it alive as an open-source project for the future. A petition circulated by web…
On Wednesday, top Republican leadership including President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan all appeared at the White House alongside Gov. Scott Walker and Foxconn CEO Terry Gou to announce a new LCD production line in Wisconsin. The $10 billion plant, which they said would create 3,000 jobs…
In 2010, Google’s then-VP of Search Products Marissa Mayer called Instant Search a “fundamental shift in search,” and the media marveled at this new time-saving feat of engineering. Now that shit is dead, because technology has fundamentally shifted once again. https://gizmodo.com/what-is-google-instant-5632969 Google Instant was the search giant’s response to the fact that a lot of…
Kris Duggan looms large in Silicon Valley, serving as an adjunct professor at the Ray Kurzweil-founded Singularity University, and according to his Crunchbase profile, holds advisory positions with nine different companies including the secretive Palantir Technologies. Duggan is best known for co-founding BetterWorks in 2013, which has since sopped up a generous $35 million in…
One of the most memorable music videos of the 1980s is A-ha’s “Take On Me” featuring a young woman who’s pulled into a world that looks like it only exists as crude pencil sketches. The video took 16 weeks to animate by hand, but Trixi Studios created an augmented reality app that can recreate the…
In nature, blue is much rarer than you might think. Sure, the sky is blue when the weather’s nice, and so is the ocean. But the vast majority of plants and animals are incapable of making blue pigment. Brilliantly-colored peacocks appear blue not because their feathers are colored that way, but because of how they…
Less than a week ago, headlines declared that a market-shaking fork in Bitcoin had been averted. But the people backing a new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Cash have now announced that the expected compromise between warring factions is dead. Next week, the huge Bitcoin fork will begin, and here’s what it’s all about. https://gizmodo.com/37-million-in-ether-stolen-as-people-refuse-to-learn-t-1797075264 The debate…
Well here’s something you don’t see everyday—wild rabbits riding on the backs of sheep to flee rising floodwaters. The remarkable scene was captured by a New Zealand farmer who said he’s never witnessed anything quite like it. As reported in the Associated Press, the event was captured by Ferg Horne, 64, on July 22 on…
