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There’s been a lot of discussion over the ethics of posting violent livestreams on Facebook, and the social media site has decided to release subjective guidelines: if a person posts violent content to “raise awareness,” the video can stay. If someone shared the same video to mock the victim, it will be removed. This means…
The biggest regret of my life right now is not being as smart as these two geniuses, who battled out Roman candle fireworks with lightsabers like they were Jedi knights. Sure, I’d totally get lit up and smoked and would miss more blasts than I would hit, but the feeling of shielding yourself with just…
Dallas police used a “bomb robot” today to a kill a suspected gunman involved in the murder of five police officers and the wounding of seven others. The decision to kill the suspect using a robot armed with an explosive, was made after an hours-long standoff. Dallas police chief David Brown said, after negotiations “broke…
Typhoon Nepartak hit Taiwan Friday morning and reached winds of over 150 mph. According to the Weather Channel, three people have died and over 100 were injured due to the super typhoon. Seeing the incredible strength of the storm is truly terrifying—you can see the powerful winds tossing cars, shaking buildings, and ripping the ground.…
The great grudge match of bread spreads—butter vs. margarine—has a new champion. After several decades of inexplicable margarine-dominance, the trend has finally flipped in butter’s favor. The USDA took a look at the last 100 years of per-person American consumption of butter and margarine, including a graph comparing the rise and fall of both through…
For the past few days Pokémon Go has been tricking us into exploring parts of our hometowns we’d never normally go. But for Riverton, Wyoming resident Shayla Wiggins her quest to catch them all resulted in stumbling across a dead guy in a river, County10 reported. Wiggins, 19, was staying with her mother for part…
Fifteen years ago, when many of you were sucking at the teat of your mothers the rest of us were sucking at the teat of technology, and we, being brave technological pioneers, bought our RAM and installed it ourselves. And the RAM manufacturers, being douche canoes of the highest order, collaborated to artificially inflate the…
It’s almost always happily ever after. Pixar movies end with every one cheery, problems solved, relationships mended, fish found, and smiles animated. That is, they all end so damn nicely that they’re all utterly forgettable. I love most of these movies and can recall classic scenes in my head, and yet I don’t remember any…
Non-alcoholic beer doesn’t taste all that good. This week on Happy Hour we tried three non-alcoholic beers and felt only slightly hydrated afterwards. Welcome to Gizmodo’s Happy Hour. Substance abuse for nerds. First up, we tried O’Doul’s Amber, and it was by far the best of the bunch, though still not very good. Like most…
This morning Dallas Police chief David Brown said a bomb detection robot attached with an explosive device was used to kill a suspected gunman apparently involved in the horrific fatal shootings of five police officers. [Update] The Dallas Police have released an official statement regarding the robot used to kill one of the Dallas shooters…
Clinical trials of a promising new therapy, in which white blood cells are reprogrammed to attack cancer cells, has resulted in the deaths of three patients. In response, the US Food and Drug Administration has ordered a temporary halt to the trial. The new therapy, called JCAR015 (also known as the “ROCKET” trial), uses genetically…
Which one of these crazy people would you rather be? The person making a low pass on a stunt plane knowing if you fly any higher you’re definitely going to end up in prison? The dude doing a backflip on a motorcycle while jumping over that stunt plane? Or the totally exposed lunatic walking on…
Facebook stood by their claim that a technical glitch was the reason why a Facebook Live video of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Minnesota man, bleeding after being shot by police was briefly removed. In a call with Gizmodo, the company denied a report that a police officer was responsible for the video being removed. The…
Think streaming music, and the first name that springs to mind is probably Spotify—but there are some great alternatives out there. Both Apple and Google have music services for streaming, downloads, and playing local files across phones, tablets, and desktop. There are lots of different ways to compare the two services, but we’re going to…
If you’re in Los Angeles and looking for something to do this weekend, I suggest heading down to the Petersen Automotive Museum. They’ve got a free screening of the documentary Outatime. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s the documentary about the DeLorean time machine from the Back to the Future trilogy. The movie chronicles…
A few hundred miles off the coast of Ghana is Null Island—the point of zero longitude and zero latitude. It’s not a real island in the physical sense, but data, photos, and whole people have been there, if only for a little while. How they got there comes down to shoddy programming. As Tom Scott…
Explorers hoping to find easily accessible liquid water on Mars may be out of luck. A new study questions the source of recently discovered surface water on the Red Planet, a revelation that may force Martian colonists to settle in the arctic regions where ice is plentiful. So here’s the problem: Scientists recently detected dark…
According to Dallas Police chief David Brown, after hours of negotiations failed with a cornered suspect at the El Centro College in Dallas, officers sent in a robot to detonate a bomb and kill the suspect. This is what Brown said during a Friday morning press conference: We saw no other option but to use…
Pokémon Go has been available in the US for a couple of days now, and by any measure it’s a runaway success. My only complaint so far is that the game keeps making me walk to weird places, and I’m not the only one. YouTuber Beware The Flood was driving around with his girlfriend looking…
Facebook says it’s going to implement end-to-end encryption into its extremely popular Messenger app. Unfortunately, the company is going about it all wrong. The encryption will be require that users opt-in to use the security measure, which bows to the the FBI’s wishes, and flies in the face of what experts consider best practices. Encryption,…
