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The RIAA is a real stickler about copyright. It basically wants to turn Google into its own private Internet copyright police, to make sure the Internet is free of offending links. But as we’ve learned before, the RIAA doesn’t always feel like paying attentionto copyright laws itself, and over the weekend, we learned that this…
Details have been dribbling out bout the Valve’s new push into living room gaming. First we got the announcement, then the specs, and now the first prototype boxes are showing up in the wild. https://gizmodo.com/valves-first-piece-of-hardware-is-a-steam-box-prototyp-1385903248 Engadget got a look, and it’s a strikingly minimalist box, but a pretty large one. Of course, it’s worth noting…
Police has found what’s probably the biggest stash of stolen art ever: 1,500 paintings valued at roughly $1.35 billion hidden by 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt in his Munich apartment. Of course, the art was stolen by the damn Nazis during the 30s and 40s. Cornelius inherited the paintings—which include works from Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc…
A Japanese company may have finally solved the issue of umbrellas flipping inside out during nasty storms with a new, rather brilliant design: why not have the umbrella inside out to begin with? You’ll probably need to take a few minutes to wrap your head around the concept, which actually has several advantages over a…
Child porn on the Internet is nothing new, but an international organization, Terre des Hommes, has adopted a novel method for busting the perverts who consume it. Meet Sweetie, the virtual Filipino girl who busted 1000 Humberts overseas. In an effort to raise awareness about “Webcam Child Sex Tourism,” TDH posed as a 10-year-old Filipino…
What happens when a Fortune 500-ranked, 120-year-old company like GE partners with a four-year-old startup like Quirky? Today, six months after announcing a partnership, the companies launched their first co-branded products. https://gizmodo.com/ge-is-freeing-up-thousands-of-patents-to-fuel-your-imag-5994291 They’re designed to bring a little bit of gee-whiz connectivity to mundane household objects, from your egg tray to your power strip. Each…
The Nexus 5 is finally here, and it looks lovely. But it was a long road to Nexus 5 greatness, and with this GIF from the folks at GadgetLove, you can speed down it in just three seconds. It’s clear from a glance that Google’s come a long, long way with its Nexus offerings, and…
The only thing that could possibly be funnier than that recently discovered collection of Star Wars outtakes is if someone replaced all the clips in the original Star Wars trailer with blooper reel footage. So thankfully the folks at Slacktory did just that, and the results are amazing. https://gizmodo.com/hilarious-new-star-wars-bloopers-video-discovered-1453393702 If there was ever a way…
National Geographic made precise maps on how Earth would look in the case all the planet’s ice melted. The bad news: New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, London and other cool cities would be completely gone. The good news: the entire state of Florida would disappear. But that’s the only good news. The rest is…
It’s enough of a nightmare to have malware of any sort, but the more persistent the stuff is, the scarier it gets. That’s why the rumors of badBIOS, a bug so bad that it can affect Macs and PCs and communicate itself wirelessly while the infected computers are being taken apart is terrifying. But maybe…
You’re excited the FAA isn’t going to make you power down electronics during your flight anymore? So is Amazon. And to commemorate the momentous occasion, it’s knocking 15 percent off the price of several Kindles all day today. https://gizmodo.com/faa-personal-electronics-can-be-safely-used-in-all-pha-1455949764 That brings the price of a basic Kindle down to $60, the Kindle Fire HD to…
Google Street View is slowly becoming the window to a world that most of us may never get to see in real life. And if you’ve already explored every last nook and cranny of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider via Street View, you can now head on over to the UK and poke around the retired…
Woe is BlackBerry; the company’s hail mary acquisition has fallen through, and its CEO Thorsten Heins has been canned. There’s nowhere to go from here but… well, nowhere. [Globe and Mail]
If there’s one man who talks tech sense it’s Woz—and never more so than in a recent interview with the BBC. Woz would love it if Apple and Google played friendly, and he makes a very, very good point. Both have strengths and weaknesses, after all. He explains: “Sometimes I say ‘Go to Joe’s Diner’…
A few rumors suggested Google might be planning an 8-inch Nexus tablet earlier this year, but nothing came of it. We got the new Nexus 7 and were happy about it. However, this pic may show the next slightly bigger thing being used by a Google promotional person. Nexus 8, anyone? The image, taken from…
It’s getting easier and easier to snag yourself a pair of Google’s smart glasses, but there’s still plenty that feels exclusive about the things. Like, for instance, the fact that Google insists that you spend 45 minutes talking with them before you use ’em. https://gizmodo.com/report-its-going-to-be-a-whole-lot-easier-to-get-goog-1453558337 Despite the fact that the latest rash of Glass sales…
If your Surface Pro 2 has been underperforming in terms of battery life, go upgrade to the latest firmware release: it provides an almost 20 percent increase in longevity. Which is kinda crazy.
When hackers break into the databases of the great and good—like Adobe—they’re often left with an encrypted password and an unencrypted password hint. In other words, a giant, modern version of a crossword puzzle. https://gizmodo.com/hackers-have-seized-38-million-adobe-customer-records-1454590078 As Randall Munroe points out, the hackers are essentially presented with a set of clues, the answers to which are…
A hacker’s broken into the databases of an online limousine service, grabbing details of more than 850,000 customers—including Fortune 500 CEOs, lawmakers, and A-list celebrities. The hackers nabbed the details from CorporateCarOnline, based in Kirkwood, Missouri, which bills itself as “the leading provider of on-demand software management solutions for the limousine and ground transportation industry.”…
Digital storage is always getting cheaper and more capacious—but Western Digital has a plan to fill it with helium to make hard drives way more efficient than ever before. If you could see inside a normal hard drive, you’d find it was a pretty brutal environment. The plates on which data are stored spin at…
