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Everybody knows that online disinformation is a huge problem—one that has arguably torn communities apart, manipulated elections, and caused certain segments of the global population to lose their minds. Of course, nobody seems particularly concerned about actually fixing this problem. In fact, the institutions most...

Lonely on Valentine’s Day? AI can help. At least, that’s what a number of companies hawking “romantic” chatbots will tell you. But as your robot love story unfolds, there’s a tradeoff you may not realize you’re making. According to a new study from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project, AI girlfriends and boyfrien...

An unspecified defect in early model Starlink satellites has prompted SpaceX to preemptively deorbit the units before they potentially fail and become hazards in low Earth orbit. While the company remains confident that the deorbiting of these problematic units will prevent any issues, this incident underscores the ...

The Flipper Zero is having a bit of a moment: it’s by no means a new device, but it is now grabbing more headlines than ever, thanks to its ability to brick iPhones, potentially get you into cars, and plenty more.It’s essentially a multi-functional hardware hacking tool, with support for various popular radio protoc...

The creators behind the popular Flipper Zero multi-tool device have teamed up with computing renegade Raspberry Pi to create a video game integration that will turn your Flipper into a low-key game controller.On Tuesday, Flipper Devices announced the release of its new Video Game Module, an integration that is power...

The Federal Trade Commission isn’t happy with the outcome of Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, telling a court on Wednesday that Microsoft’s recent layoffs contradict promises it made to get the merger approved. In a letter to the clerk of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the FTC criti...

Tinder can be a hard place to find love, especially without an AI assistant.When Aleksandr Zhadan got out of his last relationship in 2021, he started looking for a girlfriend in Moscow the old-fashioned way: swiping through Tinder. He sank hours into sending out likes, messaging, and going on dates which all went n...

At the beginning of 2023, TikTok was one of the weirdest and most delightful places on the internet. An app with a reputation for memes and 30-second dances had become the front page of the internet, and it seemed TikTok was only getting better as the platform matured. A year later, TikTok’s growth finally appears t...

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your free time, you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and engage with local politics. Overnight shipping, advertising, and private jets no longer exist,...

OpenAI released a study the company conducted on GPT-4’s effectiveness in creating a bioweapon on Wednesday. The company found that its AI poses “at most” a slight risk in helping someone produce a biological threat. There’s a lot of talk about AI accelerating our impending doom, but OpenAI wants you to know that yo...

Your manager may suggest that returning to the office is imperative for the company’s success, workplace culture, and overall productivity. However, there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that’s bullshit. New research out of the University of Pittsburgh examined 137 of America’s largest corporations and found...

iPhone apps including Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X/Twitter are skirting Apple’s privacy rules to collect user data through notifications, according to tests by security researchers at Mysk Inc., an app development company. Users sometimes close apps to stop them from collecting data in the background, but this ...

The Hugo Awards are no stranger to controversy. In recent years, the annual celebration of sci-fi and fantasy authors in media including novels, short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting (among others) has come under fire for a questionable sponsorship (defense contractor Raytheon Technologies), an anti-diver...

Welcome to AI This Week, Gizmodo’s weekly deep dive on what’s been happening in artificial intelligence.For months, I’ve been harping on a particular point, which is that artificial intelligence tools—as they’re currently being deployed—are mostly good at one thing: Replacing human employees. The “AI revolution” has...

Gizmodo is 20 years old! To celebrate the anniversary, we’re looking back at some of the most significant ways our lives have been thrown for a loop by our digital tools.In the early aughts, my wheezing dialup connection often operated as if it were perpetually out of breath. Thus, unlike my childhood friends, it wa...

California Forever, the quixotic, billionaire-backed project to build a new city in the Bay Area, is chugging along. Despite the fact that locals seem to hate it, the Silicon Valley dreamers behind the project remain undeterred. The team planning the city released more details about their proposed development this w...

Don’t ring the funeral bells just yet, but the self-checkout kiosk horror show could be nearing its end. So far, the grand experiment in robot cashiers is an abject failure. Stores across the country are reversing course on the machines, and consensus is growing among analysts and insiders that self-checkout has bee...

The right-to-repair movement continues to gain steam as another big tech company shows its support for letting people fix their own broken devices. Google endorsed an Oregon right-to-repair legislation Thursday calling it a “common sense repair bill” and saying it would be a “win for consumers.” This marks the first...

One week ago today, Google disabled tracking cookies for 30 million Chrome users, amounting to just 1% of the 3 billion people who use the internet’s most popular browser. By the end of the year, Google will block these cookies entirely and replace them with a new tracking system that’s a bit more private called “Pr...

The Security and Exchange Commission’s X account was hacked on Tuesday afternoon, sending an untrue tweet that the Bitcoin ETF was approved. Chairman Gary Gensler quickly tweeted from his personal account that the tweet was false and the result of a hack. In the following 15 minutes, the price of Bitcoin shot up to ...

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web back in 1989, he probably didn’t imagine that his new system would be the repository for all of humanity’s worst impulses, but here we are. The latest example from the internet horror show comes from YouTube, where the company was forced to update its policies to say ...

Update, 1:12 p.m.: Shortly after this article was published, Musk responded to a question about the issue from far-right influencer Jackson Hinkle. Musk promised to investigate, and the accounts went back up soon after. Musk later blamed the “mistake” on X’s spam algorithms. The Hamas account is still suspended. X, ...

After around 30 years of existence, WordPad is finally saying goodbye. In the Windows 11 Build 26020 Insider Preview’s Canary Channel, Microsoft announced that WordPad will not be auto-installed after installing the new OS build and will officially be removed in the future update. It clarified that the text editor w...

On Monday, January 8, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur is scheduled for its inaugural flight, a mission that will send a wide range of payloads to the Moon. Although not as advanced as SpaceX’s rockets, this expendable rocket boasts features that could make it a cornerstone vehicle in the industry.The 202-foo...