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PepsiCo will bring into production a drink to help people ease stress and sleep better during These Uncertain Times, the company announced today. They’ve decided to name this “enhanced water beverage” Driftwell. While my colleague Matt Novak described the name as indicative of “the dystopia we were promised,” I find it uninspiring—a sort of over-focus-grouped…
While Apple gears up to announce of bunch of new stuff tomorrow, Google has a launch event of its own scheduled for the end of September. Google’s Launch Nite In event on Sept. 30, which will kick off at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, is expected to show off a new Chromecast, smart speaker, and…
There’s a good chance that Apple will drop its next-gen Series 6 smartwatch during the company’s Tuesday event. We already know a lot of what’s coming to the Apple Watch with this fall’s watchOS 7 software upgrade, but a few things are still a mystery. The most whispered about rumor is that while there may…
For a lot of folks, records (in the year of our dark lord 2020) are one of those things you either “get” or just don’t. While its resurgence has spawned its fair share of hate-fueled rants asking why we’re falling for the greatest scam ever played on us at the hands of the music industry,…
After weeks of rumors, Nvidia announced last night that it was ready to plop down $40 billion to acquire Arm Limited, better known as that company that designs Arm architecture behind CPUs in practically every gadget you use on a day-to-day basis. That tracks with reports from the past few months. In late July, Bloomberg…
It’s official: After a monthslong race against time, Oracle, a very American and very Trump-friendly company, has beat out Microsoft and WalMart to as the likely winner of the US portion of TikTok, CNBC reported. “Oracle confirms Secretary Mnuchin’s statement that it is part of the proposal submitted by ByteDance to the Treasury Department over…
Between the Surface Duo, ZTE Axon 20, Galaxy Z Flip, and others, we’ve seen a lot of phones with unusual designs in 2020, but the new LG Wing might be the boldest and wackiest of them all. Sporting a swiveling 6.8-inch primary OLED display, the LG Wing sort of seems like a modern interpretation of…
As the pandemic has forced us to spend more time at home than we did previously, many of us have invested in making these spaces—which are now our offices, daycares, cafeterias, and entertainment hubs—a little more conducive to an always-home lifestyle. This has presented a unique opportunity for electronics makers, who’ve been making a killing…
It is the rare person who—logging off after a long day’s scrolling—thinks, “I need much more of that in my life.” Because the thing about the internet is, it’s awful. Even the good parts suck, because the good parts are swirled in with the bad—you can’t access one without wading through the other. Often, the…
Oracle, one of President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters in Silicon Valley, beat out Microsoft for TikTok’s U.S. operations on Sunday, multiple media outlets reported. Nonetheless, after weeks of talking about a sale, it is not clear that the deal will involve one. According to the Washington Post, Bytedance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, will announce that Oracle…
If you saw a new popup message when you opened Facebook recently, don’t worry: It’s not a hoax. In a bid to make up for, eh, letting the Russians run rampant on its platform before the last presidential election, Facebook has launched a poll worker recruitment drive this weekend. The measure is part of the…
As emergency responders in Oregon struggle to contain a record 900,000 acres of wildfires across the state, local police have been fighting to contain a torrent of bogus rumors spreading online. Throughout Thursday and Friday, tens of thousands of users shared posts blaming extremists on both sides of the aisle (but mostly antifa) for setting…
Since the very beginning of time, which has lost all meaning at this point, almost every September has delivered a new iPhone. It’s possible that Apple’s event next week will also deliver a new iPhone, but for the first time in many moons, we may not see a phone. Rumor has it that, due to…
One of the internet’s largest hub of Qanon conspiracy theorists, QMap, abruptly went dark this week after a fact-checking group uncovered the identity of the developer behind it, Bloomberg reported Friday. An investigation by Logically.ai identified Jason Gelinas, a financial information security analyst based in New Jersey, as the “developer and mouthpiece” for the site,…
The international game of chicken between China and the Trump administration over TikTok is starting to feel like an episode of “The Bachelor” at this point, with suitors like Microsoft, Twitter, and Walmart competing for the app’s U.S. assets in the face of a possible ban. Apparently, though, China would rather choose option d) None…
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for Congress in Georgia’s 14th district, was already more than heavily favored to win. Now it’s a virtual guarantee that she’ll walk into Congress next year with the dropout of her Democratic opponent in the race. Per the New York…
Reader, if I may, can I bend your ear for a moment? In the two years I’ve worked for Gizmodo, I have struggled to identify a workstation more sadistic, more unhinged than the 18-million-pixel Craigslist rig that my colleague Tom McKay once reviewed (and for which Gizmodo paid real, actual money—a fact I frankly still…
Amazon Japan will pay around 1,400 suppliers a collective 2 billion yen, or about $18.85 million, for pushing the costs of discounts onto suppliers, the Japan Times reported yesterday. If you’re excited that Amazon had to cough up a couple million, so is Amazon, which arguably got off very easy. According to the report, the…
By Thursday evening, more than 10 percent of Oregon’s 4.2 million residents were under an evacuation order, according to state estimates. Uncontained wildfires fueled by sustained global heating and extreme winds have burnt enormous swaths of land to a crisp, leaving the state’s air quality on par with some of the most prolifically polluted cities…
Earlier today, Apple posted an update to its guidelines for the App Store including new language regarding game streaming that makes it appear as if game streaming services are technically allowed. However, in practice that doesn’t seem to be true. Aside from the recent spat between Apple and Epic after Fortnite got booted from the…