E-Technology

Image: Amanda Edwards2021’s been a not terribly great year and taken several talented folks from us, but it threw one final gut punch with the news of Betty White’s death on New Year’s Eve. Just a few weeks ahead of her much publicized 100th birthday, the vaunted actor passed away, leaving behind a pretty lengthy…

A display of Samsung Galaxy Book S laptop computers is seen January 10, 2020 on the final day of the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo: Robyn Beck / AFP (Getty Images)Amid a wave of in-person cancellations in recent weeks from big names ranging from Microsoft to Google and a surge…

Photo: Jamie Squire (Getty Images)No one really knows how to cure a hangover, a new roundup of scientific studies has found. The review found little good evidence for any one particular hangover cure, with existing studies generally being of low quality.The review was conducted by researchers in the UK and backed by the National Institute…

Photo: Mahesh Kumar A (AP)Before I joined the cult of iPhone, of which I have happily been a member of for many years now, my first big phone purchase was a BlackBerry. Time made it as slow as a turtle, and it began its new life in a drawer in one of the many apartments…

Photo: Jared C. Tilton (Getty Images)Brandon Brown, the NASCAR driver who unintentionally helped originate the viral rightwing chant “Let’s Go Brandon” (which many people believe means “Fuck Joe Biden”), has decided to partner with a memecoin based on the slogan. LGBcoin.io, the recently launched crypto-token based on the highly partisan catchphrase, announced Thursday that it…

There are some great behind the scenes stories from No Way Home.Image: Sony PicturesFourteen years and seven years. That’s how long has passed since audiences last saw Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man characters on the big screen. Suffice to say, it’s a lot of time and if they were to ever appear on screen…

Photo: GizmodoA year after a global pandemic knocked all of us back on our heels, gadget makers are struggling to meet the demand caused by our dramatic shift in work and life routines. Coupled with an ongoing chip shortage, devices released this year were hit with delays, shipping weeks or even months behind schedule. Some…

Don’t expect to re-enter the Matrix just quite yet.Screenshot: Warner Bros.Zoe Kravitz discusses getting her claws out for The Batman. Squid Game’s Hwang Dong-Hyuk says he’s in talks for more. Plus, new looks at Star Trek: Discovery, Cobra Kai’s new season, and the debut of Peacemaker. To me, my spoilers!The Matrix 5In a new interview…

Pictured is TCL’s tri-fold conceptPhoto: Sam Rutherford/GizmodoMicrosoft hasn’t quite stuck the landing with its Surface Duo folding smartphone attempts, but the company is already eyeing the next major advancement, and it could be as simple as adding another screen.A patent discovered by Patently Apple suggests Microsoft is toying with the idea of creating a smartphone…

Horror NoirePhoto: Steve Swisher/ShudderHorror and anthologies go together like peanut butter and chocolate, knives and showers, zombies and shopping malls. While sometimes it’s worth it to commit to a single story over the course of a two-hour movie, it can also be just as scary (and just as entertaining) to watch a film that’s chopped…

‘Tis the season to binge-watch all the movies you missed in 2021, as well as all the awards hopefuls crowding streamers and theaters this time of year. But if you’ve just got a few minutes to spare, we’ve got a trio of sci-fi and horror films perfect for a little bite-sized entertainment.1) Significant OtherShared by…

Image: NetflixFor as bad as 2021 could get, pop culture provided us some bright spots. Be it pretty good movies, solid video games, or enchanting novels, there were plenty of ways to escape a year that bounced erratically back and forth between being tolerably bad and agonizingly painful.In a lot of cases, the things that…

Illustration: Chris Delmas / AFP (Getty Images)Apple’s App Store payment policy was just dealt another blow in the Netherlands, where the Authority for Consumers and Markets, or ACM, the country’s top competition regulator, determined the rules violated Dutch competition law by not allowing dating apps to offer users alternative payment options. In a decision published…

Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images)Here comes Tesla with the gift you never knew you wanted (or don’t really want but hey, you know what they say about looking a gift horse in the mouth). Last Christmas, it gave its cars the ability to fart and bleat like goats. Apparently feeling more generous this year, Tesla…

Neo and Trinity would like you to stay through the very end, please.Image: Warner Bros.Fans know to stay put through the credits on a Marvel movie, but maybe not on a Matrix movie. However, they definitely should when it comes to The Matrix Resurrections, which is now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.Resurrections is…

Some people get to count 2021 as a win, outside of making it to the end of it.Image: Netflix, NHK, and Lucasfilm.It’s been a year of highs and lows, but some—whether they were the fictional stars of our favorite stories this year, or the real-world figures behind them—made the most out of the wild times…

Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)Days after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, opened a preliminary investigation into Tesla’s “Passenger Play” feature—which allows drivers to play certain games on the car’s center touch screen while the vehicle is moving—the automaker has decided to modify the feature to prevent this incredibly dangerous and potentially fatal…

Photo: Christopher Jue (Getty Images)A group of Apple employees announced that they were staging a walkout on Christmas Eve to demand better working conditions and urged the public not to shop in stores or online on Friday.In a Twitter post on Thursday, workers in the Apple Together group, which is composed of employees in the…

Gif: Marvel StudiosThe Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the biggest entertainment franchises of all time. So of course parent company Disney is cranking out as much new content as humanly (or Inhumans-ly) possible. There are at least a dozen new movies in various stages of development, and just as many Disney+ streaming TV shows…

So many goodies!Gif: Marvel StudiosWhat started in WandaVision, got bigger in Loki, and really exploded in Spider-Man is now ready for its biggest big-screen moment. The Multiverse is on full display in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the next Marvel Studios film scheduled for release May 6, 2022. Legendary director Sam Raimi is…

Shown in this photo is the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4Photo: Victoria Song/GizmodoGoogle’s Pixel smartwatch is one of the most anticipated devices on the horizon despite not being a confirmed product, and a new report makes us even more eager to see what’s coming.The rumored Pixel Watch will apparently be powered by a Samsung Exynos chip…

Photo: VALERY HACHE/AFP (Getty Images)Researchers have discovered a total of nine software vulnerabilities in a commonly used metal detector product. If exploited, the security flaws could allow a hacker to take detectors offline, read or alter their data, or just generally mess with their functionality, the research reveals. The product in question is produced by…

The Kremlin in Moscow, Sept. 29, 2017.Photo: Ivan Sekretarev (AP)Swiss authorities in Zurich put Vladislav Klyushin, a Russian businessman widely noted for his Kremlin ties, on a flight bound for the U.S. on Saturday, ending a months-long extradition fight that cast a pall over this summer’s Putin-Biden talks in Geneva.Swiss reporters first confirmed Klyushin’s extradition…

Photo: PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP (Getty Images)The gargantuan crisis spurred by log4j isn’t over yet—not even close. Over the past week, new vulnerabilities have been discovered in the unfortunate Apache logging library (whose ubiquitous vulnerability is dubbed “Log4Shell” in the infosec world) but, according to experts, there’s no need to outright panic. Here’s a quick look at…

Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)As it turns it out, all YouTube and Disney needed was one more day (plus a few hours) to come together and be friends once more. For YouTube TV subscribers, this means you are back to paying $64.99 per month for the service, which now includes the 17 Disney-owned channels and…

Imagining Ganymede, Jupiter’s icy moon and the largest moon in our Solar System, can be quite the challenge. (I’m still at, “Whoa, that’s a big moon.”) Understanding it is a whole other story, and scientists are still working on that. Whether you’re seeking to learn more about the gigantic moon or unravel its scientific mysteries,…

Photo: Reed Saxon (AP)It looks like YouTube just won’t stop fighting with broadcasters and streaming platforms this year. YouTube’s latest squabble with Disney over YouTube TV, however, might really feel like a punch in the gut because of the amount of content it’s losing.On midnight on Saturday, YouTube announced in a blog post that it…

A general view of GMC Hummer EVs is pictured on November 17, 2021 at General Motors’ Factory ZERO electric vehicle assembly plant in Detroit, Michigan.Photo: Nic Antaya (Getty Images)More than a year after its unveiling, General Motors proudly announced that it was now delivering its Hummer EV Edition 1 Pickup, a 9,000-pound (4,082 kilograms) luxury…

Apple’s newest MacBook Pros made quite an entrance this year. While the machines were lauded for their performance and features, the small, black notch at the top of the devices received outsized attention and created waves of controversy. You may love it. You may hate it. Whatever your stance is, now you can decorate it.Developer…

Photo: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP (Getty Images)If you’re too lazy to make some of the drool worthy recipes featured on TikTok, like me, rest assured: Someone else will make the food for you and bring it to your door. Beginning in 2022, TikTok will launch “TikTok Kitchen,” a series of restaurant delivery locations that will…

Photo: Brianna Provenzano/GizmodoIt seems like it would be considerably difficult to tarnish the cool-factor of Ray-Ban—one of the most canonically hip sunglasses brands of all time, best known for its signature Wayfarer frames—but, impressively, Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) has managed to do it just by association.After a protracted hype campaign and rounds…

Blue Beetle’s taking the leap to a much bigger screen.Screenshot: Warner Bros.The long delayed next Minions movie now has another release date. Good Omens season 2 re-recruits a familiar heavenly host. Superman & Lois teases the return of Lucy Lane. Plus, get a glimpse at the King of New York’s criminal underworld in footage from…

Screenshot: Warner Bros.While filmmakers like Denis Villeneuve hated it, for those of us who spent 2021 not particularly keen on visiting the outside world, Warner Bros.’ decision to release all of its 2021 cinematic offerings in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously has been a delight. The operative words here are “has been,” because at…

The very leggy female millipede found deep in the Australian ground.Photo: Marek et al., Scientific Reports 2021For the first time, scientists have found a millipede that actually has 1,000 legs. More than 1,000, actually: Plucked from deep in a mine in Western Australia, Eumillipes persephone has an eye-popping 1,306 legs along its 3.78-inch frame.The newly…

Clint and Kate, back together.Image: Marvel StudiosLast week’s rooftop battle between Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) set Hawkeye off in a new direction. Clint realized everything had gotten way out of control and decided to stop teaming up with Kate. Yelena and Maya…

The neighborhood vigilante app Citizen is on the verge of getting a union, an outcome Citizen’s chaotic leadership very much preferred to avoid. According to the Communications Workers of America, a supermajority of analysts in Citizen’s intelligence agency-evoking “central operations department” voted to join the CWA. Those roughly 70 employees listen in on police scanners…

Photo: Sam Rutherford/GizmodoGadget makers are slowly grappling with the electronic waste created by their products, and now it looks like a more sustainable future is on the horizon. Dell’s Concept Luna aims to make the company’s laptops more environmentally friendly, and in the process will also make them more repairable. While Dell hasn’t offered a…

LG is giving us a sneak peek at what next year’s gadgets will look like with a preview of its CES 2022 announcements, which include two TVs that are designed to blend into your home’s decor by emulating stuff that’s already in your house. If you’ve ever attached your tablet to a movable stand for more…

As those of us who have watched HBO Max’s And Just Like That, the sequel to the iconic series Sex and the City, can affirm, there are some scenes involving Peloton that could cause the wrong impression. Peloton apparently thought so too, and basically decided to rewrite that part of the story.Image: GizmodoOn Sunday, Peloton…

Skaters on the ice rink at the Natural History Museum in central London on December 9, 2021. Photo: Hollie Adams / AFP (Getty Images)Roughly 40% of new covid-19 cases in London consist of the recently discovered omicron variant, according to UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who made the starling claim on Monday. The news comes…

Photo: Stephen Lam (Getty Images)As many AirPod owners probably know, Apple’s wireless headphones, while undoubtedly good devices, can have problems just like any other piece of technology. When it comes to issues with firmware, though, the devices can be a bit of a pain to fix given that there’s no manual way to update them. That’s…

Photo: Josh Edelson / AFP (Getty Images)A bug that prevented a small number of Android users from calling 911 if they had Microsoft Teams installed and were not signed in has been fixed in the latest version of the app.Google on Friday confirmed the bug after an investigation and said it had been able to…

Photo: Johannes EiseleI / AFP (Getty Images)While some people may consider gold, jewelry, art, wine, or antiques good investments in the long-term, a new study challenges that notion and presents a unique and more lucrative alternative: Lego sets.Economists from the Higher School of Economics in Russia have found that the market prices of retired Lego…

Photo: Eric Baradat / AFP (Getty Images)If you were looking for nominees for “Worst Boss of the Year,” look no further than Better.com CEO Vishal Garg, who is apparently “taking time off” in response to the backlash he’s received for behaving like trash. Garg landed in hot water earlier this month when he somehow decided…

Photo: Oli Scarff / AFP (Getty Images)A German court has ruled that a man who fell down a staircase while walking from his bedroom to his home office injured himself at work and is therefore covered under his company’s workplace accident insurance policy.In a ruling published on Wednesday, Germany’s Federal Social Court delivered a victory…

The UNSC is ready for battle.Screenshot: Paramount+We’ve seen the helmet. We know who from Halo lore is showing up, and what new faces will join them. Now it’s time to get our first proper look as the Master Chief warthogs his way to his very own streaming series.As part of the Game Awards show this…

Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / Contributor (Getty Images)Desperate to reinvent the wheel as it weathers a Senate investigation and cedes more and more of its young user base to platforms like TikTok, Instagram will once again give users the option to browse “a version” of its chronological feed after years of utilizing an algorithmically-generated one.Instagram head…

Deanna would be proud.Image: Paramount+The crew of Star Trek: Discovery have been through a hell of a lot in the last three-and-a-bit seasons of the show. We’ve gotten to the point that it’s delightful when they get moments, brief or long, to decompress from all that hell and just sit down and talk through their…

Screenshot: DreamworksIf you were intrigued by the idea of a How to Train Your Dragons series suddenly brought into the modern world, then you might want to clear out your schedule for the rest of the day. The mysteries introduced in this first trailer for Dragons: The Nine Realms abound, and about the only thing…

A crop of the cover of Dune: The Graphic Novel Part 2 by Bill SienkiewiczImage: Bill Sienkiewicz/Abrams ComicArtsYou saw the new Dune movie. You loved the new Dune movie. You want to know what happens next. In this scenario, you probably think you have two options. One: wait until 2023 to see the next movie.…

Cannabis plants at the Medical Cannabis Research and Patient Support Association (APEPI) production farm in Paty dos Alferes, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil on September 9, 2021Photo: Mauro Pimentel/AFP (Getty Images)People who regularly use cannabis may be more prone to sleep problems, new research suggests. The observational study found that self-described cannabis users were more…

An airborne white shark chasing a seal in 2010.Photo: CARL DE SOUZA/AFP (Getty Images)If you visited the Ocearch marine animal tracker in the last week, your eyes might have been drawn to the eastern seaboard of North America, where a bombardment of blue dots made it look like the coastline was being assaulted by white…

James Cameron signing Alita posters in 2019. Photo: Lintao Zhang (Getty Images)James Cameron’s Spider-Man. It’s a phrase film fans have heard and thought about for years. The idea of one of the greatest blockbuster filmmakers in history tackling one of the most popular, cinematic superheroes ever is incredibly enticing. And, in the mid-1990s, it almost…

Image: BBCHaving just brought back those Weeping Angels a few weeks ago, Doctor Who is ringing in 2022 by calling in some old(er) foes in the form of the Daleks. Having spent most of Flux out on the sidelines, that emotionless master race is back to terrorize Jodie Whitaker’s Thirteenth Doctor and company in the…

Photo: Jason Davis (Getty Images)Although some of us might forget since we’re too busy laughing, comedians, like songwriters, write content to entertain us. There’s a difference though: Songwriters get paid royalties for their written work, comedians don’t. In the age of streaming, comedians are hoping to change that, especially considering the popularity of their content on…

Image: Sony Animation/MarvelWhen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse arrived in theaters three years ago, it shattered expectations of what superhero movies, both live action and animated, could be. The follow up to Miles Morales’ big-screen debut was always going to be a big deal after the success of the first film, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse…

Although Facebook Messenger’s entry into personal finance isn’t new, I’ve never quite managed to think about it as a payments platform. It’s more an inbox that aunts, uncles, and friends from high school blow up with messages when I haven’t posted on Facebook in a while. But it’s now becoming more and more clear that…

Sweet freedom.Image: NBCSome of you may remember the quote “intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism” from Craig Ferguson’s outstanding tribute to Doctor Who on the old (and far superior) The Late Late Show. But thinking back—on what is to be my last day running io9—I think it sums up how I’ve felt about…

Photo: FeatureChina (AP)China-based ridesharing technology platform DiDi will delist from the New York Stock Exchange and pursue a listing on the Hong Kong exchange, according to multiple reports and a press release from the company.Without naming the new exchange, DiDi said existing shares “will be convertible into freely tradable shares” on another exchange, according to…

Photo: Victoria Song/GizmodoWith each successive version of watchOS, Apple has added more watch face options for your Apple Watch, but in terms of user customization there’s still not a whole lot you can play around with. One way that you can make your Apple Watch more personal is by using your own photos as watch…

Image: PublicDomainPictures – DNA/Wikimedia CommonsThe world has a data problem. Each day, we created another 2.5 million gigabytes of data, and each year, the amount of data produced globally increases exponentially. This puts us on a collision course with a serious problem: the rate at which we produce data is outpacing our ability to store…

Neo opens a whole new world in The Matrix Reloaded.Image: Warner Bros.The world’s excitement for the 2003 release of The Matrix Reloaded was quantifiable. When the original Matrix opened in 1999, it grossed a respectable $28 million on its opening weekend. Four years later, Reloaded grossed almost three times that to the tune of about…

Photo: Win McNameeAbout two weeks ago, Russian authorities conducted a massive missile test that blew up one of its own orbiting satellites, sending at least 1,500 pieces of dangerous debris showering across space and forcing both astronauts and nearby spacecraft to careen out of their path. Now, the Biden Administration is calling for a new…

Screenshot: NetflixI hope you didn’t have anything going through, uh, the entirety of 2022. That’s because Netflix isn’t going to make it easy for you to get anything done for those 365 days. The streaming giant has announced which 19 genre offerings, of the countless projects it has in the works, are slated to come…

Those Pasaana mountains sure look like Arrakis, don’t they?Image: LucasfilmAt this point, most of us can agree that Denis Villeneuve made the impossible possible. He took Frank Herbert’s legendary sci-fi book Dune and made it into popular, digestible entertainment, a feat no one thought would ever happen. And yet along the way he had multiple…

Lucy and Charlie Brown playing a game modeled after a deeply flawed healthcare system.Screenshot: AppleHeartwarming as Peanuts stories tend to be, Apple TV+’s upcoming For Auld Lang Syne animated special tells a story about just how stressful and emotionally exhausting the holiday season often ends up being. Though Lucy Van Pelt prides herself on doling…

You like me! You really like me!Image: SYFY/USA NetworkThe Chucky TV series is a hit—and the diabolical doll will return for a second season to continue his overall-clad reign of terror. USA Network and SYFY, which both run the series, announced that Chucky was one of the top two new cable series for viewers ages…

Photo: Tom Cooper (Getty Images)AMC is going all-in on the blockchain. Earlier this month, the movie theater chain announced it would begin accepting payments in cryptocurrency, and now it’s giving out NFTs as ticket pre-orders freebies for the new Spider-Man movie. On Sunday, AMC announced a joint effort with Sony Pictures to give away up…

Photo: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP (Getty Images)If you got in your car and suddenly found that Spotify’s Car View feature had mysteriously disappeared, I’m sorry to say that no, it’s not a bug. Spotify actually announced—although “whispered” would be more accurate—that it was killing Car View more than a month ago, but it looks like…

View of an antenna of the Starlink satellite internet at the Jhon F. Kennedy school in Sotomo, part of the Los Lagos Region in southern Chile, on August 8, 2021.Photo: Pablo Cozzaglio / AFP (Getty Images)The Indian government didn’t mince words in a recent message to Elon Musk’s Starlink: Get a license before offering satellite…

Image: Takara Tomy, Hot Toys, and Beast KingdomWelcome back to Toy Aisle, where you’ll find no deals today other than the deal of exchanging a large quantity of money to preorder some of the latest cool toys on the internet. This week Hot Toys swears in a new President, Transformers gets on track, and a…

Photo: Oliver Berg/picture-alliance/dpa (AP)Owlet Baby Care’s family of popular baby monitoring socks, which claim to keep an eye on infants’ oxygen level, heart rate, and hours slept, can no longer be bought in the U.S. at this time because the company did not obtain proper Food and Drug Administration approvals for the products. The company…

Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images)As Apple continues to struggle to keep its new product announcements secret until it’s ready for a big on-stage reveal, a new report has revealed some interesting details about the company’s long-rumored AR headset, including the fact that it may be a standalone product and not dependent on an iPhone.Both MacRumors…

Me after my latest crime spree following this week’s episode of Doctor Who: Flux.Image: BBCIf there’s one thing we’ve come to learn, it’s that you cannot trust the British Government to get anything right about popular culture (or anything else, really). But the latest bit of genre farce from the halls of Westminster in the…

Everything in Bebop’s world is a little crooked, ethically and… well, y’know. With that camera.Screenshot: NetflixThere’s a lot that feels off about the live-action Cowboy Bebop, a show dancing to a rhythm that’s close to, but not quite, the smooth one shared by its seminal animated inspiration. But one of the strangest moments of bad…

Timothée Chalamet as Paul in Dune.Image: Warner Bros.“I tried to see Dune in IMAX but when I went to buy tickets, all the screenings were Eternals.” I heard this several times in the past few weeks as friends headed out to see Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, only to realize all the IMAX screens had been taken…

A time-traveler ponders what she’s about to do.Screenshot: DustAfter a decade of preparation, Anna (Abigail Williams) is finally ready to travel back in time to warn a loved one of danger coming their way. But what will be the cost of her daring journey? As short film Tethers explores, sometimes walking right into a paradox…

Image: BBCThere are only two episodes left in Doctor Who’s 13th season, a single, serialized story subtitled Flux. But when it’s over, Jodie Whittaker won’t be done playing the Thirteenth Doctor quite yet. That will only happen during the last of three Who specials that will be airing over the course of 2022. As usual,…

Photo: Jan Thijs/Prime StudiosThe first three episodes of Prime Studios’ live-action adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series arrived just this past Friday, and if you haven’t read the books it can be… a bit much. There’s a lot of names to learn and places to keep track of, plus organizations, cultures, mythology,…

Lady Jessica, Chani, Stilgar, and Paul will eventually return in Dune Part Two.Image: Warner Bros.Your chance to watch Dune at home is over. For a month, the hit sci-fi spectacle from filmmaker Denis Villeneuve was both in theaters as well as streaming on HBO Max. However, that window has now closed, which means if you want…

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, gestures during his speech at the closing ceremony of the Latin Bitcoin Conference at Mizata Beach on November 20, 2021. Photo: Marvin Recinos / AFP (Getty Images)The 40-year-old right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is once again betting on bitcoin to propel the country forward. His dubious…

Rolls-Royce has announced that its all-electric plane, dubbed the “Spirit of Innovation,” is the fastest of its kind in the world after it reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 k/h) in recent flight tests. In a recent news release, the company, not to be mistaken for the car company owned by BMW, claimed…

Image: TKO PresentsThese days, it seems almost like a guarantee that a comic book will eventually become a TV show or movie. Though most of the heavy hitters are from publishers owned by big name corporations, the more independent and less flashy ones can still get a deal off the ground, and that’s what’s happening…

Photo: Eric Thayer (Getty Images)After months of mixed messages over whether they could talk about their wages, Apple has explicitly told employees they are free to talk about the money they make, their hours, or their working conditions. On Saturday, NBC News reported that the tech giant had clarified its stance around these issues in…

Image: Sony/Marvel StudiosFor better or worse, each of the different “Phases” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had a goal for its various films to strive for. The first brought our disparate heroes together, while two and three showed them fracture and eventually reassemble for a saga of infinite proportions. Because nothing could really stand…

Vials of smallpox vaccine sit on a counter before a vaccination December 16, 2002 at Mid-Florida Biologicals in Altamonte Springs, FloridaPhoto: Chris Livingston (Getty Images)Days after a Pennsylvania lab was locked down because a worker discovered vials labeled “smallpox” in a freezer, the CDC says there’s no reason to fear a viral outbreak. Late Thursday…

Michael Keaton filmed new scenes as Vulture this week.Image: Sony PicturesMichael Keaton says he strapped on the Vulture wings this week but the question is, for what? Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live Wednesday night, the actor best known for playing Beetlejuice and Batman spoke a little bit about reprising the latter for The Flash and…

Image: MediaTekMediaTek’s smartphone chips typically play second fiddle to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors, but MediaTek just announced its new flagship Dimensity 9000 system-on-chip, and it features a number of notable firsts.The Dimensity 9000 is both the first smartphone chip to be built using TSMC’s new 4nm process and the first chip to feature Arm’s new Cortex-X2…

Photo: Emmanuel Dunand (Getty Images)The S&P Dow Jones Indices is monitoring stock Twitter in real-time to see how positively people feel about 200 S&P 500 companies (Tesla) with the top sentiment scores. Today, it launched two Twitter sentiment analysis tools to measure the level of positivity toward companies (or their profit potential) via “$cashtags.” According…

Of course the monster is a close talker.Image: ShudderIt’s not that uncommon for a director or writer to also star in the movie they director or wrote. What’s less common, by far, is when writer-director also plays the horrifying monster in their movie—but that’s the case with Death Valley, Matthew Ninaber’s new sci-fi horror movie…

Photo: Olivier Douliery / AFP (Getty Images)More than a week after popular investment and trading platform Robinhood revealed that hackers had obtained access to a “limited amount” of its customers’ personal information, the company has now stated that some of the stolen information included thousands of phone numbers.In a Tuesday blog update, Robinhood said that…

Screenshot: Sony Pictures/Marvel StudiosPoor Peter Parker. All he wanted was a magical undo button of the worst day of his superheroing life—the one where his identity got exposed, not the one where his work dad died saving the world—and all he got was multiple guys he’s never even met who want him dead.Sony and Marvel…

Photo: China Photos (Getty Images)Researchers in Massachusetts say they’ve discovered a second patient who seems to have completely defeated an HIV infection without the help of antiviral treatments or a bone marrow transplant. The case of the Esperanza patient, as the woman is now being called, suggests that more people can naturally clear the viral…

Yoko Kanno conducting her music for Cowboy Bebop.Image: NetflixIf Yoko Kanno didn’t return to write the music for Netflix’s new live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, there really wouldn’t have been a reason to do it. Her jazz-infused score practically defines Cowboy Bebop as much as Spike, Faye, Jet Black, and Ein combined. Thankfully, she is…

Photo: Carl Court (Getty Images)Instagram is purportedly looking to give creators a helping hand when they do live video broadcasts on the platform and also give them an extra boost by adding another way for users to engage with stories. Leaker and reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi reports that the app is working on letting its…

Photo: Josh Edelson / AFP (Getty Images)It’s no secret that Apple can be a control freak about, well, pretty much everything. The company’s attitude apparently extends to the states it’s signed contracts with to roll out digital IDs on the Wallet app, even though you would expect governments to push back on that sort of thing.…

Photo: Johannes Eisele / AFP (Getty Images)After years of fighting it out in court, Apple Store employees in California will finally get paid for the time the company spent checking their bags for possible stolen products while they were off the clock. The payout: roughly $30 million. According to court documents filed in the Northern…

Photo: David Gannon / AFP (Getty Images)Imagine you spent more than $44,000 for a new car—and in some cases more than $58,000—only for it to arrive at your home without all its USB ports. In some cases, there are only holes where the USB ports are supposed to be. That’s purportedly what’s been happening to…

Image: Steiff, ShopDisney, and KidRobotWelcome back to toy aisle, io9’s regular round-up of the latest and greatest—and apparently, this week, fluffiest—toys around. We’ve got trips into the Spider-Verse, Lego getting very silly with some non-building buildable tools, and honestly, just lots and lots of soft things to cuddle up with, variant or otherwise. Check it…

Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)AMC, one of the biggest memestocks of them all, is embracing another meme power player: cryptocurrency. And its CEO is really excited about it.CEO Adam Aron proudly tweeted on Friday that the company would now accept a slew of cryptocurrencies for online payment. Prefacing with “drumroll, please,” Aron announced that bitcoin,…

Skywatchers in Georgia and Alabama were treated to a glorious light show this Tuesday when a rare earthgrazing meteor zoomed across the night sky.The bright fireball became visible at 6:39 p.m. ET on November 9, and it was so bright that some skywatchers were still able to see it through partially overcast skies, as NASA…

Sabrina as she appears in Archie’s Madhouse #22.Image: Dan DeCarlo Orlando Busino Bob White Vincent DeCarlo/Archie ComicsIn Riverdale’s upcoming sixth season, the long-running CW Archie adaptation is finally living up to its crossover potential by calling Kiernan Shipka’s Sabrina Spellman in for a little assistance. If you want to know more before the premiere, there’s…

It’s bad news if all of your 2021 holiday gift giving revolved around Panic’s upcoming Playdate console. Following Valve’s announcement yesterday that its Steam Deck console was being delayed two months into the new year, Panic has also revealed that it won’t get the first 10,000 preordered Playdate units out by the end of 2021…

They don’t want to set the world on fire, but they might have to to pass the time until the Fallout TV show.Screenshot: BethesdaMaking games is hard. So is making television. But there is something slightly ominous about Bethesda’s Todd Howard explaining why the TV show the studio announced with Amazon last year to bring…

Playlists will remain many, while folks you don’t want lurking will be none with Spotify’s easy blocking feature.Photo: Florence Ion / GizmodoSpotify is finally making it possible to block other users from seeing your activity. Previously, if you wanted to block someone from spying on you and your music habits, you had to contact customer…

As you do.Screenshot: FunimationIt’s been a busy day for Netflix’s anime division. Not content with releasing the first concept art of its upcoming live-action Mobile Suit Gundam movie, the streaming service has released an almost irritating amount of news about its upcoming anime projects, including the premiere date for its live-action adaptation of Yoshihiro Togashi’s…

My cat Leia’s historical doppelgänger, courtesy of the new “Pet Portraits” feature in the Google Arts & Culture app. The eyes are almost exactly the same.Screenshot: Jody Serrano / GizmodoGoogle has finally come up with a new feature that has allowed me to fulfil a lifelong goal: Getting my baby, Leia, on the blog. My…

These days, I’m not so sure which is more outlandish: the stuff tech magnate Elon Musk does or the stuff his fans do. In recent days, it seems pretty clear that Musk and his fans have come to a digital tie in this area.After creating a poll to let the public decide whether he should…

Photo: Britta Pedersen-Pool (Getty Images)Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a well-known Twitter addict, thought it would be a grand idea to let the people on the platform decide whether he should pay taxes or not, so he made a poll. Musk asked the Twitterverse whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock, saying he was…

Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP (Getty Images)In case you were fond of “Your News Update,” the feature on Google Assistant that created a personalized audio news stream based on the data the company has on you, it’s time to bid it adieu. Google unexpectedly killed it in recent days, so it is no more. The…

Image: Adult Swim/CrunchyrollAlong with its moody lighting and cyberpunk atmosphere, what defines the Blade Runner franchise are its Replicants. These androids have been the inciting incidents of both Ridley Scott’s 1982 original and Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 follow up, Blade Runner 2049. While the two movies are about Replicants, the beings are viewed primarily through the…

It is now apparently safe for all Mac users to update to macOS Monterey without the new software paralyzing their computers. Earlier this week, reports surfaced that some older Macs were bricking after updating to the company’s new operating system. As if that wasn’t bad enough, some users said updating had also messed up their…

Photo: Chris Jackson (Getty Images)Come Sunday at 2:00 a.m. EST, Daylight Saving Time is coming to an end. An hour repeats, because the 20th-century federal government decided it should. It gets dark at 4:30 p.m, and we’re Googling SAD lamps while we stare into the night from the office window. For over half a century,…

We have such sights to show you!Screenshot: ShudderBoy meets girl, girl brings boy home, boy stumbles into a very involved death ritual surrounding the girl’s ailing father, and soon becomes an unwilling and inextricable part of the eerie proceedings. That’s the set-up for Kriya, a chiller from last year made by New Delhi, India-based filmmaker…

Photo: Scott Heins (Getty Images)After experiencing massive growth at the onset of the pandemic last year, Peloton is sputtering. While there isn’t a singular cause for its woes, Peloton did single out one company for being behind some of them: Apple.The company reported a surprising loss in its latest earnings report on Thursday and cut…

Eric Adams speaks at the Mayor Elect Eric Adams Celebration Party at Zero Bond on November 2, 2021 in New York City.Photo: Eugene Gologursky (Getty Images)Eric Adams wants to be paid in bitcoin, according to a new tweet from the incoming New York mayor. But there’s one little catch: Adams says he wants just his…

This long-exposure image shows a trail of a group of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites passing over Uruguay on Feb. 7, 2021.Photo: Mariana Suarez / AFP (Getty Images)SpaceX’s Starlink will eventually have more competition in the satellite broadband business—and rural Americans will have more providers to choose from. The FCC on Wednesday gave Boeing the go-ahead to…

Cleo Smith, who was abducted for 18 days, is carried by her mother on November 4, 2021 in Carnarvon, Australia, just one day after being rescued by police. Photo: Tamati Smith (Getty Images)Australia’s Channel 7 news published photos of an innocent man on Wednesday, alleging he had abducted a young girl from a campsite last…

A crop of the poster for Last Action Hero by Drew StruzanImage: Sony Pictures“Last Action Hero is a joyless, soulless machine of a movie. An $80 million-plus mishmash of fantasy, industry in-jokes, self-referential parody, film-buff gags, and too-big action set-pieces.” That’s what the Hollywood trade Variety wrote in late 1992 just before the Arnold Schwarzenegger-led,…

Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides and Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica. Image: Warner Bros.By modifying a well-known climate model and applying it to the fictional world of Arrakis, a group of scientists has shown that Frank Herbert’s depiction of a desert planet in the book series Dune was surprisingly apt, though with some surprising differences.Arrakis—Dune—Desert…

Photo: Greg Baker (Getty Images)One of the key leaders of the growing #AppleToo movement has filed a charge with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board, claiming Apple fired her in retaliation for organizing, according to documents seen by Reuters. The charge brought by former Apple Maps program manager Janneke Parrish swells the total count of…

The Comic Book Workers United logo and the Image Comics logo.Image: Comic Book Workers United, Image ComicsIt’s long been said by countless people in and around the comic book industry that they should unionize. Finally, in 2021, workers from Image Comics have decided to do just that. Today, nine Image staffers—Ryan Brewer, Leanna Caunter, Marla…

Halloween 2021 has come and gone, but a nerdy website’s community of very clever and talented costumers is forever. At least, that’s what we’re saying to ourselves since our little round-up of the coolest costumes from this year’s festivities that io9 readers shared is being posted today, rather than, you know, on Halloween.For our costume…

Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)With its App Tracking Transparency feature launched in April, Apple overhauled its iPhone lineup’s privacy settings to give users more control over their data. The feature has cost Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an estimated $9.85 billion in lost revenue in the second half of this year, the Financial Times reports.…

Image: LegoNintendo puts the spotlight on Mario so much that when they turn their eye to his younger brother Luigi, it makes those moments shine all the brighter. So it goes with Lego: as of a couple months ago, the green plumber has his own Super Mario Starter Course, and now he’s getting some sets…

Photo: Johann Groder (Getty Images)Austria’s Klimaticket, the nation’s $3.50 per day, go-anywhere pass to combat climate change, went live this week, CNN reports. The ticket is valid for all publicly and privately operated rail, metro, and bus networks throughout the nation, and with a price tag of $1,265 (€1,095) for an annual pass, the cost…

After burying those lightsabers, Daisy Ridley will deal dreams. Image: LucasfilmDaisy Ridley’s first foray into sci-fi? Pretty good. The next one? Not so much. Hopefully the third time will be the charm for the Star Wars actor as she’s about to headline a few film called Mind Fall.Deadline reports that Rey Skywalker herself will play…

Photo: JOEL SAGET/AFP (Getty Images)The former supreme leader of 1940s Germany would appear to be alive and well, if the European Union’s digital vaccination certificate program is to be believed. Actually, he’s doing better than “well”—he’s been vaccinated for covid-19. Yeah, no, Hitler is still dead—don’t worry. But it would appear that someone has gotten…

A magnetic resonance imaging machine. MRI scans are used to customize the brain stimulation to the patient.Photo: Alain Jocard/AFP (Getty Images)Stanford researchers think they’ve devised an effective and quick-acting way to treat difficult cases of depression, by improving on an already approved form of brain stimulation. In a new trial published this week, the researchers…

Photo: Caitlin McGarry / GizmodoThe people want Apple products. While Apple would be more than happy to oblige, it can’t, because there’s a global supply chain crisis. The crunch is costing the company billions in lost sales and keeping its money machine, the iPhone, at arm’s length from buyers. Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday…

In this image from video, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Thursday, March 25, 2021.Photo: House Energy and Commerce Committee (AP)You’ve likely seen the deluge of damning news stories about Facebook everywhere this past week. Those came thanks to Facebook whistleblower Frances…

The Next Generation is here.Image: Paramount+When Star Trek: Prodigy was first revealed as a “kid-friendly” show, certain fans decried that they did not need a “dumbed-down” entry to get into Star Trek when they were young. A blessing then, that this next generation doesn’t have that either: instead, they’re offered something smart, fun, and perfect…

There are thousands of games that can be played with a simple deck of cards, but Rob Halifax has found a way to make 52 cards even more versatile with a redesign that lets you play games like chess, checkers, and even dominoes with the same deck that entertains you for hours on end with…

Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam subjecting Paul Atreides to the gom jabbar.Screenshot: Warner Bros.Though Denis Villeneuve’s Dune focuses on Paul Atreides as he and most everyone around him dance around the obvious fact that he is the long-prophesied chosen one destined to bring an end to the war between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, when we…

Image: SonyAfter leaks surfaced yesterday, Sony has officially announced its Xperia Pro-I, a smartphone with a wild camera—or a wild camera that’s also a smartphone, depending on how you look at it. The Pro-I features the world’s first 1-inch camera sensor with PDAF in a phone. Due to their size constraints, putting big image sensors…

A computer-generated view of Mars. Image: NASA/JPL-CaltechNew research details a biological solution for producing rocket fuel on Mars, but significant hurdles need to be overcome to make this intriguing idea work.With plans to visit Mars next decade, NASA is still sorting out the fuel situation; launching a rocket to the Red Planet is not the…

The rightful President of the United States, Regina Oliver (Jennifer Wigmore), plays a big role on this week’s Y.Image: FX on HuluThe secret is out. Not that Y: The Last Man won’t be picked up for season two by FX on Hulu, though that’s true too. It’s that Yorick Brown is alive and his mom,…

Photo: AppleApple’s newest batch of 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros have finally started shipping to customers with pre-orders and are expected to reach their new owners as soon as Tuesday. However, if you didn’t have a pre-order and are looking to place an order soon, be prepared to wait to receive your hardware.On Saturday, the…

An aerial image taken on October 15, 2021 shows cargo shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, California.Photo: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP (Getty Images)If you want to know what a global supply chain crisis looks like at its worst, all you have to do is check out what happened at…

Photo: John MacDougall / AFP (Getty Images)T-Mobile is delaying its planned January shutdown of Sprint’s legacy 3G network, or CDMA network, because it claims some of its partners “haven’t followed through on their responsibility” to transition their customers to new networks. In a recent passive aggressive news release, spotted by the Verge, T-Mobile said it was…

Image: 20th CenturyHave you forgotten who stars in the Kingsmen prequel The King’s Man? I wouldn’t blame you if you had, honestly. The film was originally meant to premiere in the distant prehistory of November 2019—yeah, nearly full two years ago—before getting pushed back to March of 2020, when recorded history began. The ancient scroll…

Photo: Nicholas Kamm / AFP (Getty Images)Bitcoin is one step closer to being readily available to the masses. If you have any doubts, check out your nearest Walmart. You might be able to buy Bitcoin there at a Coinstar kiosk. To be clear, Walmart itself is not offering customers a way to buy bitcoin—its partner…

It’s refreshing to see Apple correcting some of the crimes of Ives with its new MacBook Pros that ditch the Touch Bar but regain an SD card slot and HDMI. But you can never have enough ports, and Satechi’s new USB-C Hybrid Multiport Adapter has tons of ‘em with a side of extra storage too.As…

The Razer Kunai is a light-up PC fan you can use inside your case. Image: RazerThe best part of building your own gaming rig is that you can deck everything out in killer lighting. Whether you’re sporting hot pink across the board or you’re more into a subdued blue, there’s no denying that the result…

Photo: Stephanie Keith; Amazon workers strike in Staten Island to demand better covid-19 safety protocols on May Day 2020 (Getty Images)The grassroots Amazon Labor Union is finally gearing up for an election after gathering thousands of worker signatures. Organizers of the new union, all former and current Amazon workers, set up camp in April outside…

Photo: Olivier Douliery (Getty Images) At a time when American’s trust in the news media is plummeting to record lows, one recent Pew poll reported that about a third of U.S. adults say they regularly get their news fix from Facebook’s feeds—even if their own trust in Facebook itself is plummeting to new lows for,…

Photo: Wikicommons/Evan AmosJust in time for Halloween, a ransomware gang has targeted Ferrara Candy—the massive confectionary responsible for producing Brach’s well-known candy corn—the most OG of holiday treats. Ferrara, which is based in Chicago, is responsible for 85 percent of the candy corn production in the country during the Halloween season—and reportedly churns out approximately…

Look what the black cat dragged in, indeed.Gif: The CWRiverdale’s original idea of crazy was that Archie Andrews was sleeping with his teacher and Jason Blossom was very dead. Five seasons and a cult, several murders, some supernatural monsters, and two teachers randomly leaping out of the same damn window, anything goes—so at this point,…

Image: AppleApple just took the wraps off its redesigned MacBook Pros featuring new custom M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. And while I can’t help but be impressed by Apple’s lofty performance claims, folks are now wondering if this means the new MacBook Pros are suddenly good gaming laptops now. We haven’t used the new…

Photo: JIM WATSON / AFP (Getty Images)Someone hacked into and temporarily defaced the website of former President Donald Trump on Monday, weirdly embedding a YouTube video of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan onto one of the site’s pages.The defacement, which popped up on the site’s subdomain devoted to “Action,” included the following message: “Do not…

Russian space agency rescue team members help actress Yulia Peresild out from the capsule shortly after the landing of the Russian Soyuz MS-18 space capsule.Photo: Roscosmos Space Agency (AP)The Russian film crew that traveled to the International Space Station to film scenes for the first movie shot partially in space returned to Earth safely on…

Photo: Giuseppe Cacace / AFP (Getty Images)A look at Netflix’s show data, which is normally held under lock and key and not available to the public, has provided a new information on what the success of South Korean drama Squid Game means to the company. In short, buckets and buckets of money and lots of people…

A sign sits on a ticket gate equipped with a facial recognition fare payment system – Face Pay – at Turgenevskaya metro station in Moscow on September 23, 2021.Photo: Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP (Getty Images)Contactless payment systems are quickly becoming an ordinary part of our daily lives. As of this week, you can even pay…

It seems that the world’s largest oil producing countries will stop at nothing to keep drilling, despite the fact that doing so aggravates climate change and its devastating effects. Oil-producing heavyweight Saudi Arabia recently unveiled a new tactic: making oil rigs look cool. The country’s Public Investment Fund, its sovereign wealth fund, has announced a…

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)Ransomware gangs targeted multiple water facilities in the U.S. this year, a new government report claims. The news represents a frightening escalation in cybercrime—showing that hackers are increasingly willing to put people’s lives at risk for the sake of money.A joint advisory, published Thursday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,…

Illustration: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)Let me preface this by saying that I don’t dislike Tinder. I’ve used it before to chat with singles in my area and even went on a nice date with someone from the app. You know, normal dating app things. Yet, people are apparently going on Tinder with a very different…

Photo: Kenzo Tribouillard / AFP (Getty Images)If the internet is a digital Wild West, it’s time to lock your doors and close your windows. While the amount of cyber attackers and activity alone is alarming, in this episode, the featured villain is a hacker group backed by the Iranian government. In a blog post published…

File photo of Boeing’s headquarters in Chicago, Illinois.Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)A federal grand jury in the Northern District of Texas has indicted Boeing’s former chief technical pilot for allegedly lying to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) about Boeing’s 737 Max airplane, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of…

There’s an unlikely team of Guardians this time around.Image: Marvel StudiosM. Night Shyamalan is ready to tease his next project already. Jason Blum reveals plans for even more Universal Monsters reworks. David Gordon Green teases how the world of Halloween Ends is reflected by our own. Plus, a new look at The Witcher’s return, and…

Image: AstropadWith a 12.9-inch mini-LED screen boasting a resolution of 2732 x 2048 pixels, using the iPad Pro for just reading books or checking email seems like a waste of tech. The Luna Display dongle makes the iPad Pro a more valuable productivity tool by turning the tablet into a secondary touchscreen display but until…

Photo: Sajjad Hussain (Getty Images)Reuters has uncovered damning evidence about the extent to which Amazon has systematically planned to rip off its third-party sellers in India—to the extent that it’s virtually impossible for the company to keep up a years-long charade.According to documents obtained by the outlet, Amazon’s India branch employed a detailed campaign to…

Because of the precision needed to manufacture them, the more money you’re willing to spend on a camera lens, the better the product and photographic results you’re going to get. For at least one photographer, no amount of money is too much money to spend on high-quality glass, as an extremely rare Canon lens recently…

Ironically, none of these patrons are on the list.Screenshot: LucasfilmThe Mos Eisley cantina is one of the most iconic sequences in sci-fi, let alone Star Wars, for good measure: it’s a hectic, technicolor glimpse into a wild world of weird aliens that expands, in just a few minutes, our entire worldview of what the setting…

Image: Magic LeapJust when you thought Magic Leap had disappeared into the graveyard of failed AR headsets, the company announced today that it had raised another $500 million at a $2 billion valuation. Oh, and it’s working on a second version of its headset for release next year.The news came straight from Magic Leap CEO…

When Animaniacs returned with a brand new season on Hulu last year, the end result was something nostalgic, but not entirely sure who it was for. New episodes are just a month away from release, and the first look at season two may not change your mind either way.Premiering at the series’ New York Comic-Con…

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 08: Cosplayers dressed as different versions of Spider-Man during Day 2 of New York Comic Con 2021 at Jacob Javits Center on October 08, 2021 in New York City. Photo: Bennett Raglin for ReedPop (Getty Images)Pop culture fans of all ages flocked to the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan…

The cast of the CW’s 4400 reboot.Image: The CWIn CBS Paramount’s original series, The 4400, thousands of people who were abducted from across different points throughout the 21st century were suddenly returned together in the present day with no memory of where they were taken or who took them. What the 4400 do know, however,…

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)A planned rollout of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta version 10.2 to roughly 1,000 Tesla owners with “perfect” safety scores was delayed on Saturday. In explaining the delay, CEO Elon Musk stated that there were “a few last-minute concerns about the build.” Tesla owners were abuzz with excitement earlier this week when…

Photo: AppleIf you’ve got a few old Apple Watch chargers lying around and are thinking of getting in line for the new Series 7—which is available for order starting today—you better mark them with a tag or something before you bring your new watch home.There is a reason for this, dear readers. See, one of…

Photo: Eric Thayer (Getty Images)While Apple declared the outcome of its legal battle with Epic Games a “resounding victory,” it was not a complete one. The federal judge in the case ordered Apple to allow developers to link to third-party payment portals in the App Store by Dec. 9, a deadline the company seems to…

Photo: Jack Taylor (Getty Images)After considerable criticism, creators of an online game based around “fantasy startup investing” have said they plan to ditch their original plans to charge users for gameplay and will now adopt a “free-to-play” model. The company, Visionrare, had planned to sell users NFT shares in real companies for the purposes of…

Climate change deniers can no longer make money off of claiming it’s all a hoax. Photo: Florence Ion / GizmodoGoogle is cleaning house: Following last week’s move to demonetize anti-vaccine content on YouTube, the company has also added climate change denial to the list of videos that creators can no longer make money off of.Google…

Photo: Jonathan Ernst-Pool (Getty Images)The U.S. Justice Department has announced the launch of a new investigative team focused on disrupting “criminal misuse” of cryptocurrency. Dubbed the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, or NCET, for short, the team will target crooked crypto exchanges, money launderers, and other unsavory elements that occupy the dark recesses of the digital…

Photo: OLI SCARFF/AFP (Getty Images)A phone system glitch linked to Verizon made it impossible for countless customers to call their banks and other companies.On Wednesday evening, customers (including me) began contacting companies complaining that the customer service phone numbers listed on their websites would not go through, returning a “your call cannot be completed as…

The Grit X Pro is a beefy outdoor fitness watch.Image: PolarPolar’s always been a brand for the more hardcore fitness buffs among us. Case in point: When everyone was hunkering down at home last year, the company launched three new fitness smartwatches. Truly inspirational. Now, in 2021, Polar is doubling down on the fact that…

A backpack-toting woman trudges through what looks like a sun-baked field of grass, fiddling with a water bottle that’s got just a few drops left in it. Things would only seem mildly dire if she hadn’t also just passed another woman, sprawled in a heap a few feet off the trail, screaming in agony for…

Image: KoboAs excellent as the reMarkable’s writing experience is, the device is big, pricy, lacks an ebook store, and doesn’t have an illuminated screen. With its new $260 Sage, Kobo is introducing a smaller and cheaper e-note that’s still an excellent e-reader with access to the expansive Kobo ebook store and the added plus of…

A woman checks her Instagram account as she stands on a street in New York city on October 4, 2021.Photo: Ed Jones (Getty Images)Facebook, your uncle’s favorite source for information on how 5G is making everyone communist, experienced a six-hour outage Monday. And it wasn’t just Facebook—the company’s other major platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, were also…

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)Former President Donald Trump is suffering from Twitter withdrawal. With no viable way to get his fix since Twitter cut him off, Trump has turned to a federal judge to plead his case, hoping the legal system will force the company to let him tweet again (preferably in all caps and…

Screenshot: CBS News/60 MinutesLast week, the Wall Street Journal published internal research from Facebook showing that the social media company knows precisely how toxic its own product is for the people who use it. But tonight, we learned how the Journal obtained those documents: A whistleblower named Frances Haugen, who spoke with CBS News’ 60…

The weeklong soap opera starring Ozy Media came to a dramatic finish on Friday when the media outlet announced it was shutting down. Ozy’s finale unfolded in only five days and was fueled by its own lies and misrepresentations. Nonetheless, one question remains: Why did it take so long for the company’s deceptions to reach…

A space mission jointly launched by the European and Japanese space agencies has captured its first, up-close look at the planet Mercury.A pair of linked orbiters known together as BepiColombo snapped several photos on Oct. 1 during a long-awaited flyby around the innermost planet of our Solar System. The images show Mercury’s northern hemisphere and…

Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)The Biden administration plans to meet with officials from dozens of countries later this month in an effort to better coordinate a crackdown on cybercriminal gangs—particularly ransomware. “This month, the United States will bring together 30 countries to accelerate our cooperation in combatting cybercrime, improving law enforcement collaboration, stemming the illicit…

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)Flying during pandemic times just got a bit more convenient for iPhone users traveling on United Airlines. On Friday, United announced that it would allow iPhone users demonstrate they’ve been vaccinated against covid-19 using the Apple Health app. In order to take advantage of this new service, you must be running iOS…

The Slack logo appears outside its headquarters on December 1, 2020 in San Francisco, California.Photo: Stephen Lam (Getty Images)It’s not just you. Slack has been down for many people worldwide since late Thursday afternoon and some people are still struggling to access the messaging service via mobile app or even just slack.com on early Friday…

People walk their dogs in Melbourne, Australia on September 30, 2021.Photo: William West/AFP (Getty Images)Australia reported 2,417 new covid-19 cases on Thursday, the highest number of new cases in the country for any single day of the entire pandemic. The majority of cases were in the country’s second largest state of Victoria, which accounted for…

Would you swap out your new flagship smartphone for a more affordable, sustainable one?Photo: Florence Ion / GizmodoI’ve been dreaming of a modular smartphone since I first laid eyes on Google’s Project Ara. The concept made so much sense to me, a person who has built PCs before and isn’t afraid to attack a wire…

Lava reached the sea during the early hours of September 29, 2021. Image: Saul Santos (AP)The ongoing eruption of a Canary Islands volcano is raising concerns about the release of toxic clouds now that lava is actively pouring into the sea.Lava in excess of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius) is now plunging into the…

Photo: Ric Feld (AP)CNN shut down its Facebook page in Australia on Wednesday, after an Australian court ruled that media outlets are liable for defamatory user-generated comments. On the one hand: bye, Felicia. On the other, the ruling threatens to squash the lively social media discourse we all know and love. It could also stifle…

Image: AmazonNo, you’re not seeing double. The new Amazon Halo View looks almost exactly like a Fitbit Charge 5. Announced as part of Amazon’s devices and services event, the $80 tracker adds a color AMOLED display and two new fitness and nutrition modes for its Halo service.Amazon made a big deal about how the original…

A crop of the cover of The Art and Science of Arrival.Image: Titan BooksBefore he traveled to Arrakis to tell the story of Dune, and before he took on one of sci-fi’s most popular legacies with Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve tackled a genre tale that was equally epic in its ideas but far more…

The Bebop crew have got a lot of familiar faces to confront… but first, some jazz!Screenshot: NetflixWe’re just a few months away from the arrival of the live-action Cowboy Bebop adaptation on Netflix, but while we wait for November 19, the streaming service gave us a glimpse of the show’s faithful take on the anime’s…

Now you owe me a coke.Image: Riot Games/NetflixThe much-anticipated prequel series to the beyond-popular League of Legends multiplayer battle arena game is nigh! As part of its fun but miserably named Tudum event, Netflix has released an all-new trailer for Arcane, the animated TV series which will chronicle the origins of fan-favorite Champions Jinx and…

President Meryl Streep? Yes, okay.Screenshot: NetflixThe star-studded new film Don’t Look Up has a wild, completely unbelievable premise. Something totally out of the scope of reality. A plot that would never, ever, in a million years happen. It’s about a world where scientists have proof something terrible is happening…and no one believes them. Pfft. Yeah,…

Henry Cavill getting dark on The Witcher season 2.Screenshot: NetflixWe haven’t traveled that monster-strewn valley of plenty with Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) since December 2019—which feels like 10 years ago—but Netflix has been hard at work keeping The Witcher hype going. Finally, today we have a new look thanks to the Tudum event.Anime prequel…

The Witcher’s back (get it?) for season three.Image: NetflixHow was Netflix going to put an exclamation point on its three-hour barrage of weekend news called Tudum? How about the ultimate news dump for one of its biggest, most popular fantasy adaptations: The Witcher?First up, before season two’s December 17 release, Netflix has already renewed the…

Photo: Ming Yeung (Getty Images)In 2014, some very pervy creeps stole some very personal iCloud photos from some very high-profile celebs and put them on the open web, creating one very specific PR crisis for Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook. The company was about to roll out Apple Pay as part of its latest software update,…

Indya Moore attends the 2018 Glamour Women Of The Year Summit: Women Rise in New York City.Photo: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Glamour (Getty Images)Jason Momoa has making the rounds in support of Dune lately, but there’s another project on the horizon that will soon become his main talking point: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, sequel…

Photo: Joël SAGET / AFP (Getty Images)Representatives from Facebook will soon return to the hallowed halls of Congress where they will resume their favorite pastime: getting screamed at by legislators about how they’re ruining America. This time, the lucky company representative is Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, who will be facing down charges…

Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) and Father Paul (Hamish Linklater) in Midnight Mass.Photo: Eike Schroter/NetflixMidnight Mass, the latest horror series from The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor’s Mike Flanagan, arrives September 24 on Netflix. Since that is tomorrow, technically that means if you stay up until (ahem) midnight PT, you can start watching it…