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Symantec has been scrabbling around trying address a security breach from 2006 that came to light recently. But the fact that the company wasn’t sure its was hacked in the first place doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. https://gizmodo.com/hackers-threaten-to-dump-norton-antivirus-source-code-t-5876683 Symantec originally said that the worst case scenario was that hackers had stolen some five-year-old versions of some…
Yesterday the web was abuzz thanks to a New York Times story that claimed Apple’s Chinese factories were dangerous and exploitative. That made Tim Cook sad, so he sent a very long email to his employees to set the record straight. https://gizmodo.com/how-ipad-demand-led-to-last-years-deadly-foxconn-explos-5879532 You can read the email in full over at 9to5mac, but the gist…
X-47B, all ice, no man. The deadliest drone in the US arsenal, a stealth killer. I have seen dozens of photos. Videos too, of its first test and its cruise test. But I’ve never seen it from the top. https://gizmodo.com/all-ice-no-man-5502342 It’s a beautiful machine from this angle, with its markings and all the surface detail.…
What does one do with an extra $590 million burning a hole in his pocket? Well, if one is Chelsea boss and multi-kagillionaire Roman Abramovich, one commissions the construction of a floating pleasure island replete with early-warning missile detection. The only thing it’s missing are those cute mini-giraffes. The yacht, christened the M/Y Eclipse, is…
The Hobbit being shot 48 fps? Pathetic. MIT’s trillion fps camera? Pokey at best. Just wait until you see the video a team of German researchers have created. It’s two frames long, lasts just 50 femtoseconds, and doesn’t star Nic Cage. https://gizmodo.com/unbelievable-trillion-frames-per-second-camera-captures-5867562 The film, which runs 800 billion times faster per second than a conventional…
When Chinese audiences tuned in to Big-Show last night to celebrate the start of the Year of the Dragon, they were treated to this 14-member all-robot dance troupe. Why yes, they are dancing to a remix of the Tetris theme. [Technabob]
Well that didn’t take long. Pirate Parties International is assembling a list of users who had lost data in MU’s shutdown last week as it builds a case for an upcoming lawsuit against the Feds. The gist of the lawsuit is that users who had been using the file-storage service of legitimate reasons were unfairly…
Bungee jumping is already the scariest thing in the world, so how does one make it EVEN SCARIER? By going the homemade, DIY-route. These guys just tied a few knots, used a few carabiners and then just jumped off a freaking bridge. That’s it. Watch it, you’ll be stunned at how flimsy the entire set…
Remember a while back when you uploaded all that audio to Google Music? Good news! You can download those tunes now. Google just pushed a new version of Music Manager that allows you to download previously uploaded and purchased tracks. The music files are downloaded as 320kbps mp3s. The Music Manager also features an interesting…
These jeans look like any other pair of denim you’d see on a fashionable twentysomething. Dark, slim fit and cut perfectly, heck, I wouldn’t mind buying these myself. But unlike other jeans, this pair is made with scratch ‘n sniff raspberry scented denim. Yes. Scratch and sniff. On your freaking jeans! This is awesome. Made…
One drawback from Google Earth has always been that if you pull the view back far enough, the terrain begins to look like a scene from Minecraft. Well, no longer! With the version 6.2 update, Google Earth looks even more like the real thing. Google Earth’s imagery is built from an amalagamation of satellite and…
We like Spotify as more than friends, but man, it’s been doing nothing but losing money for a while now. So it’s pretty good—and really surprising—news that it’s now got three million people paying for its service. That three million figure is actually more impressive because it’s 20 percent of everyone using Spotify, which is…
The problem with a multi-user tabletop computer is that it’s difficult for the software to keep track of who’s using it. Unless you strap a Kinect sensor to the underside that lets it make note of their footwear choices. https://gizmodo.com/plug-a-kinect-into-your-windows-pc-from-1-february-for-5874697 Developed by the Human-Computer Interaction group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Germany, Bootstrapper uses a Microsoft…
Erin Brockovich has already started an investigation of the causes for the rare syndrome that seems to be mysteriously spreading among New York State teens. She already has a prime suspect. https://gizmodo.com/rare-syndrome-mysteriously-spreading-among-new-york-sta-5879524 Brockovich, the environmental activist popularized by Julia Roberts in the 2000 movie of the same name, started to investigate last week following a…
The iPhone camera is pretty spectacular. I have a few point-and-shoots in my house and they all suck compared to the iPhone. But they do have one thing the iPhone’s native camera app lacks: the focus-lock shutter control found in fancier point and shoots. Mattebox fixes that. What’s it do? Mattebox’s wonderfully minimalist controls are…
Nokia bet the farm on its Windows Phone partnership with Microsoft, but so far it’s been mum on potential Windows 8 tablets. That changed a bit today when CEO Stephen Elop implied it might be time. During Nokia’s earnings call, Elop said that while Nokia isn’t announcing anything, there are tons of opportunities for other…
I’m constantly floored by what people choose to make with Legos. Why craft a life-sized Halo sniper rifle or a Saturn V and not something else? I’ve got plans of my own, and now Moleskine’s got the perfect, fanboy-ready notebook to document them in. https://gizmodo.com/even-at-minifig-scale-this-lego-saturn-v-rocket-is-gin-5875735 If you love Lego, this Moleskine probably makes you your…
Phone-size.com is a useful little website that compares the size of phones against each other. Can your weeny hands handle a gargantuan Galaxy Nexus? Are your skinny jeans too tight for a Nokia Lumia 800? You’ll find out!. Phone-size.com’s phone selection is pretty impressive so if you’re looking to buy any phone, it’s probably good…
Time travel is tricky. Will you destroy your present by going back in time and changing something? But what if your present is dictated by what you did when you went back in time? Paradoxes are fun. While you try to figure out why the plot of Terminator shouldn’t work, save some dough on a…
In a slight change in policy, Twitter has enabled the ability “to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country—while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” Basically, if a tweet is illegal in a certain country, it will be censored in that country. In the rest of the world, it’ll still…
