Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Last December, an astronaut with NASA was fired for submitting over $1,600 in fake reimbursements for taxis they didn’t take. And strangely enough, we don’t know who it is. Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on the incident after reading about it in the…
In a completely expected but still shitty move, the FCC voted today to move ahead with Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to roll back net neutrality rules enacted under the Open Internet Order of 2015. The commission will now consider Pai’s proposal, which would repeal the reclassification of broadband providers as “common carriers” (a little like…
Twitter has been telling people I’m into dads. I learned this thanks to a revision in Twitter’s privacy policy that rolled out yesterday, which gives users more information about how advertisers see them and lets them toggle which bits of information they want to share. This includes a list of stuff that Twitter has determined…
Perth, Australia is the most remote major city on the planet. Which is apparently why it appealed to legendary director Stanley Kubrick. New research reveals that Kubrick was so concerned with the possibility of nuclear war that he actually planned to move to Perth in 1962. Kubrick was in the middle of editing his 1962…
AI-powered software that can automatically colorize old black and white photos exists, but it’s often far from perfect. In comparison, manually colorizing an image in Photoshop yields stunning results, if you’ve got lots of time and impressive skills. But a new app, developed at the University of California at Berkeley, cleverly merges both approaches so…
Does it feel like every time you wake up there are a dozen new scandals involving the Trump regime? Well, last night was no different. Here’s a breakdown of all the crazy shit that happened last night and early this morning. The Trump regime had at least 18 contacts with the Russians that went undisclosed…
When a celebrity dies unexpectedly, there’s a strange new ritual that fans partake in as we remember the person’s contributions to our lives. We scour the internet for social media posts for a glimpse of their last moments. In the case of Chris Cornell, the lead singer for Soundgarden who died last night at the…
Twelve students at a Houston preschool were injured on Tuesday when a class science experiment didn’t go as planned. Most reportedly had minor burns but seven of the students had to be rushed to a local hospital. According to CNN, the incident occurred at the Yellow School which is run by Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church.…
A terabyte isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? A petabyte. And companies like DigitalGlobe are creating more of them than they can upload to the cloud. That’s why Jeff Bezos has a service for shipping huge amounts of data via traditional roadways. https://gizmodo.com/uber-reportedly-will-invest-500-million-into-mapping-t-1784626844 DigitalGlobe is a company that sells highly-detailed satellite imagery to clients ranging…
Thanks to the ubiquity of recording devices and the duplicitousness of members of the GOP, we now know that top Republican congressmen were discussing potential collusion between Trump and Putin before he was even nominated. They didn’t care then and they don’t care now. https://gizmodo.com/citing-trump-tweet-senate-panel-demands-any-recordings-1795303745 The Washington Post has obtained a recording from a private…
Eyes away from whatever you’re looking at. No need to keep reading stressful, news about our President, fidget spinners, stuff dying, any of that. You like dogs, right? Good. Let’s talk about dogs. What about them? I don’t know, let’s talk about their pee. Ands their butts, sure. Did you think pee was sterile? I…
Another Google I/O keynote has happened and, again, we have mixed feelings about what we saw. Apparently, the search giant is shifting from being mobile-first to being AI-first. What does that mean? Who the hell knows. What we do know is that Google is releasing some software updates. Some of them are pretty damn neat.…
Today at the annual Google I/O developer conference, we learned about all the updates coming to the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, dubbed Android O for now—at least until its official release later this year. This is the eighth version of the OS (Android 8.0), and even though we’ve seen some of the…
Following requests by multiple congressional committees for former FBI director James Comey’s memos of conversations between himself and President Trump, the Senate Judiciary Committee is now requesting the White House turn over any of its any recordings of conversations between the two by May 24th. “Last week, the President tweeted a message implying that the…
Google is in the business of you. That’s why it exists. Its phones, Homes, and wireless routers all exist to cull as much information about you as possible so that it can then use that info for (hopefully not evil) financial gain. If you have forgotten that Google exists to collate your entire life, then…
Released last year, Google Assistant hasn’t really proven itself useful outside of checking the weather, searching Google, or setting an alarm using voice commands. So far it’s been limited to just basic features that are more than matched by other smart assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. But Google is trying to change that.…
Google just announced new updates to Assistant and Google Home. The smart speaker leans on Assistant to offer voice controls and artificially intelligent, well, assistance. But until now, the gadget hasn’t really been able to do that much. Thanks to some updates, however, that might change very soon. The new Google Home features help the…
With the exception of whatever weird shit humans are doing, lactation continues to be the source of food for all baby mammals on this nipple-sucking (or skin-licking) planet. When it comes down to how long mammals nurse for, though, orangutans hold the record: Six to eight years. A team of scientists from several universities set…
We consume all sorts of things before really knowing how they’re going to affect us, including probiotics and dietary supplements. But given how preliminary our understanding of our gut bacteria is, it’s very likely that some supplements can work in direct opposition of others. For instance, vitamin A might kill a bacteria hypothesized to promote…
Suck it, CIA. The US Senate has gotten permission to begin using the encrypted phone app Signal, according to a congratulatory letter from Sen. Ron Wyden’s office. Wyden’s letter thanked Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Frank Larkin for approving the use of the messaging app, which was launched under the name TextSecure by Open Whisper System in 2010.…
