Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Motorola’s Droid RAZR HD and RAZR MAXX HD will be available on Oct. 18th for Verizon for $200 and $300. [Verizon]
Apple was just granted a patent for technology that could lead to a fancy new biometric unlocking mechanism on future Apple products. The technology could also be used to implement new security features for ecommerce. The patent comes just a few months after Apple bought security technology company AuthenTec for $356 million over the summer.…
TED Talks! What was once a proud educational lecture series long ago descended into a smug parade of increasingly ridiculous ideas. They’ve never been more ripe for skewering. Thank goodness The Onion noticed. https://gizmodo.com/proof-that-ted-is-past-its-prime-5915942 Above is just a short preview of Onion Talks, but if a dog eating pie isn’t more educational than half of…
After a successful Samsung appeal, the Galaxy Nexus injunction has been lifted. You are free to enjoy your Nexii again!
Used to be that if you were aboard a sunken submarine, your best hope for rescue was to grow a set of gills—fast. Now, however, the US Navy can reach and extract sailors who are in over their heads with this deep-diving 16-passenger ROV. The Submarine Rescue Diving Recompression System (SRDRS) is a 183-ton remotely…
In what has to be one of the most wasteful ways to traverse stairs, Harvard’s Self-organizing Systems Research Group has designed a robot that builds its own access ramps by randomly flinging thousands of glue-covered toothpicks. When the pile eventually solidifies, it provides a sturdy support for the robot to climb. It’s another attempt to…
According to school officials, almost 300,000 students and faculty members have had their personal information compromised in a widespread hack around Florida colleges. Enough information was leaked to lead to identity theft, and there are at least 50 cases of that occurring already. The hack is centered around Northwest Florida State College, and affects about…
Before LED displays came along, the mechanical flip clock provided an easy way to read the exact time for those who preferred specific numbers to hands on a dial. So a flip clock that instead displays a set of hands is completely and utterly pointless, in a wonderful kind of way. Instead of flipping every…
This is Stijn Oom, a 14-year-old kid from the Netherlands. Stijn started to play with Lego right after he was potty trained (literally). Just a short time later, he’s a certifiable Lego genius. He builds the best Lego tanks I’ve ever seen. The accuracy and precision is uncanny. His sense of design, the way he…
Mimicking the touch sensitive pad on the back of the PlayStation Vita, the Sensus iPhone case lets you interact and play games with your handset without ever mucking up its display with fingerprints. The case features capacitive sensors on its back and right edge so there’s at least one spot left where you can hold…
The new iPod touch is out, so naturally it’s already been cracked open for a look at its guts. The verdict? Tightly packed goodness, according to iFixit. The iPod touch’s innards are intricately laid out to make it even thinner than the iPhone 5. While you can pry off its face after blasting it with…
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Japanese mobile carrier Softbank is in advanced talks to acquire US operator Sprint for a cool $12.8 billion. That’s a hell of a lot of cash, and a big gamble for Softbank itself. Currently Japan’s third biggest provider, it would mark its first attempt to go global…
Earlier this week we saw some blurry photographs of what we think might be LG’s new Nexus phone. Now there are some clearer images… and it looks more sparkly than ever. https://gizmodo.com/why-does-lgs-leaked-nexus-phone-have-a-sparkly-bedazzl-5950255 Russian site Onliner seems to have gotten its hands on a prototype unit. According to the site it’s rocking a 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm…
If you’ve always wanted to lucid dream but never yet managed it, don’t fear: here are some scientific tricks you can use to help train your brain and body. You’ll be controlling your dreams in no time. There are different levels of influence, of course: some subtle, others much more complex. And a little scary.…
Street View has been been given its biggest ever refresh, updating 250,000 miles of road and doubling the number of special collections so you can sneak inside famous locations around the world. There’s now wider Street View coverage over the US, Canada and the UK, as well as plenty of other countries. So, if you…
Seriously, these days you just have to have a sidebar: Facebook has one, Spotify has one, hell, even Evernote has one. Now, Google is catching up, to make its mobile web page a little more sleek. Ditching the tab-style menu at the top of page, the new mobile version of Google’s home page looks far…
Netflix has settled with National Association for the Deaf and agreed to caption all its video by 2014. [Ars Technica]
One day after Firefox 16 was made available, Mozilla has had to pull the software over security fears. If you upgraded, you might want to roll back until it’s fixed. https://gizmodo.com/firefox-16-arrives-today-and-you-probably-wont-notice-5950236 Mozilla says the software is “temporarily removed” which suggests the flaw is reasonably serious. In a blog post, Mozilla explains: “The vulnerability could allow…
Avner Geller has created a series of hilarious posters that are inspired by the type of things you always see in someone’s OKCupid profile. Geller based the posters around typical responses to ‘you should message me if…’, ‘on a typical Friday night I’m…’ and ‘six things I could never do without’. What’s hilarious about the…
With some exceptions, when you think “gamers” you don’t generally think “paragons of health and fitness.” But maybe you should. There are already a lot of fitness games on the market, and they range from good to horrible, but this collaboration between Nike and Microsoft is something else. It’s something really good. Nike+ Kinect Training…
