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After temporarily pausing its nationwide ban on political advertisements to allow campaign messages about the Georgia senate runoffs, Facebook abruptly reversed course on Tuesday, announcing in a blog post that the ban would resume following the election’s conclusion on Wednesday. “Starting early January 6, 2021, we will no longer allow ads about the Georgia runoff…
Twitter’s track record of eyebrow-raising product decisions continues, as this week, Twitter engineering executive Michael Montano announced the company would be acquiring the 4-year-old “social podcasting” app Breaker in an attempt to flesh out its Clubhouse-esque Spaces product. If you have no idea what social podcasting is, well, join the club. As the homepage for Breaker’s…
When it comes to the rules of the internet, you can always count on two things to be true: crowdsourced projects will fly off the rails, and YouTube commenters are the worst. Despite these foundational principles, YouTuber Sean Hodgins has thrown caution to the wind and hacked together a little experiment that allows people like…
The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently warned that ransomware attacks on K-12 entities had risen dramatically during the 2nd half of 2020 and that these and other cyberattacks are likely to continue over the next year. This makes a lot of sense, given that—with remote learning now the status quo—cybercriminals…
While millions of gamers are still struggling to find a retailer that have an Xbox Series X in stock, those who already have their hands on the device may have noticed that their controllers aren’t staying connected to their consoles. Microsoft is now acknowledging the problem and is promising to fix it. For many Xbox Series…
As of January 4, 2021, Intel has started phasing out its 300-series chipsets. The company recently published a Product Change Notification detailing the end-of-life timeline for its chipsets that supports 8th and 9th generation Intel processors, and by the end of January 2022, the chipsets will be silicon history. The 2020 release of Intel’s 10th-gen…
Yesterday, 250 Googlers announced that they’ve taken the plunge and formed a union, and, after a torrent of news coverage, they ended the day over 400-strong. The effort is unique in that it’s aimed at uniting all workers, from maintenance to full-time developers to perma-temps. In the tech industry, it’s undeniably a bold and important…
To kick off 2021, Dell just announced what it claims is the world’s first 40-inch curved 5K2K display, and judging by its specs, it might be the ideal high-end display for working from home (maybe make your office pay for it though). Starting at $2,100, the new Dell UltraSharp U4021QW ain’t cheap, but when compared…
Two researchers at Penn State have created a new system for five-axis additive 3D-printing that reduces the amount and density of support materials needed for making printed objects. In a paper entitled “Process planning for five-axis support free additive manufacturing,” doctoral candidates Xinyi Xiaoa and Sanjay Joshi proposed using a 3D printer with a movable…
This week, the UK’s Royal Mint announced five new commemorative coins honoring figures like the Queen(!) and Sir Walter Scott. It would’ve been a standard beginning of the new year for the mint, but this year’s edition of collectibles has proven to be controversial as the coin honoring H.G. Wells seems to lack a certain…
Generally, you expect earbuds to go in your ear canal. Because, you know, that’s what earbuds do. But today, Bose is announcing its latest truly wireless earbuds—the Bose Sport Open Earbuds—and the company claims they don’t go in, over, or on your ears at all. Well then, where the hell do they go? According to…
When it comes to the perfect accompaniment to 2021, there can be nothing better than the RoboTrombo, a project by iSax Laboratories whose primary goal was to create a MIDI-controlled brass instrument “that could play any song.” It didn’t work. “When a human trombone player produces a tone it is a combination of lip tension,…
When Fitness+ dropped a few weeks ago, we were pretty impressed by the launch, but the service isn’t perfect. One of our gripes was that you could only filter workouts by music, length, and trainer—those of us hoping to browse by goal (i.e., run a 5K, working your way to a pull-up, etc.) or intensity…
Hulu’s live TV offering is getting more than a dozen new channels through a multi-year deal with ViacomCBS. The deal will bring Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, VH1, MTV, MTV2, MTV Classic, CMT, TV Land, BET, BET Her, Nick Jr., NickToons, and TeenNick to the service—though a ViacomCBS spokesperson told Gizmodo that it isn’t sharing…
One of the biggest issues with 5G is the impact it has on phone prices, often increasing the cost of current handsets by around $100 or more compared to standard 4G phones. But with the introduction of its new Snapdragon 480 chip, Qualcomm is looking to make 5G phones much more affordable. Despite being part…
Today, former Trump legal representative L. Lin Wood shared some supposedly earth-shattering information about a cabal of intelligence officers from “10 of the world’s most well-known & ‘elite’ agencies” [sic] whose alleged mission is to blackmail powerful people by forcing them to have sex with children at gunpoint. In Wood’s telling, they film the activity…
Adobe Flash, the multimedia software platform that powered so many pre-YouTube animated videos like Homestar Runner, is officially ancient technology. As of December 31, 2020, Adobe stopped supporting the software, and now Microsoft is telling every Windows 10 user it’s time to ditch it if they haven’t already. A new Windows 10 update from Microsoft,…
Verizon customers can snag up to 12 months of the brand new Discovery+ streaming service for free. Here’s how to get it. The new streaming service—home to content from HGTV, the History Channel, TLC, Discovery Channel, Food Netflix, A&E, and BBC’s natural history programming like Planet Earth and Blue Planet—officially launches today with more than…
After weeks of rumors, Samsung has finally announced its next Galaxy Unpacked Event scheduled for January 14, and it couldn’t have come at a better time because recently a number of new leaks have spilled the beans on what we’re expecting to see at Samsung’s next big product showcase. Perhaps the biggest new leak comes…
We are using the term emoji quite loosely here, because you can’t actually hack into the official Unicode list.
