It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago.
There are few things on this planet I hate more than bottled water. Just the crinkling sound of someone wrapping their mouth around one of those squeaky garbage accordions fills me with rage. I stopped drinking it a long time ago—and you should stop drinking it, too.
For most of us, the sight of blue lights and yellow lines outside an airplane's window is the cue to turn our phones back on. For pilots, it's more like a secret language—a language that is vitally important to safety and, increasingly, embedded with emerging technology.
No one seemed to notice him: A dark figure who often came to stand at the edge of London's Hammersmith Bridge on nights in 1916. No one seemed to notice, either, that during his visits he was dropping something into the River Thames. Something heavy.
I bought the Apple Watch a year ago. I stopped wearing it two months ago, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever wear it again. That’s because it doesn’t really do anything that anyone needs, and even when it does, it doesn’t always work like it’s supposed to.
In real life, in the natural course of conversation, it is not uncommon to talk about a person you may know.
Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook, however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of “People You May Know,” the social network’s roster of potential new online friends for me.
Experts say it’s not a matter of if, but when a global scale pandemic will wipe out millions of people. And we are grossly unprepared for the next major outbreak.
Goodbye Big FiveReporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Here’s what happened.
My grandfather was caramel-skinned with black eyes and thick, dark hair, and until he discovered that he was adopted, he had no reason to suspect that he was not the son of two poor Mexicans as he’d always been told.
Too much of a good thing can be definitely bad for us. But a new study published Friday in JAMA Network Open suggests that exercise is a clear exception. It found that any level of cardiovascular fitness—including the kind you’d see from elite athletes—is linked to staying alive longer.
Two things became apparent after the end of the Spring 2016 Smartphone Glut. One: Android is still a second-class citizen when it comes to gaming, and two: smartphones are in a ridiculously boring place.
My own personal Amazon Prime day is in two weeks. It’s not the day that Amazon puts a lot of random crap on sale. (That’s in approximately three weeks.) My day is when Amazon will charge me $120 for another year of membership.
A massive memory leak from web services and security company Cloudflare may have exposed user data for thousands of sites. In other words: it’s time to change your passwords. Have you heard? A tiny bug in Cloudflare’s code has led an unknown quantity of data—including…
Update 8/5/17 7:25pm ET: Google’s new Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance Danielle Brown has issued her own memo to Google employees in response to the now-viral memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.
When former DARPA chief Regina Dugan announced on stage last month that Facebook planned to build a brain computer interface to allow users to send their thoughts directly to the social network without a keyboard intermediary, it had all the Silicon Valley swagger of Facebook circa “move fast and
The World Wide Web is officially old enough for us judge what it’s produced. That’s right, it’s time for the world to start building a canon of the most significant websites of all time, and the Gizmodo staff has opinions.
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.
Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something.
Three years ago, we said the Echo was “the most innovative device Amazon’s made in years.” That’s still true. But you shouldn’t buy one. You shouldn’t buy one for your family. You definitely should not buy one for your friends.
Apple has been steadily positioning itself as the anti-Facebook for a while now, and between verbal jabs aimed at the social media giant and privacy-focused product decisions, the patient goodwill campaign seems to be working.
Over thirty thousand runners began the Boston Marathon this morning in Hopkinton, MA, some having trained and run for years to get to this point. Their completion medals will be well-earned.
In December, I converted my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a “smart home.
I know that you want to get healthy this year, because it’s the most popular New Year’s resolution. Plenty of people want to help you, too, with everything from diet tips to exercise suggestions.
Monika Glennon has lived in Huntsville, Alabama, for the last 12 years. Other than a strong Polish accent, she fits a certain stereotype of the All-American life. She’s blonde. Her husband is a veteran Marine. Her two children, a boy and a girl, joined the military as adults.
The price of bitcoin plunged on Friday, continuing a steady downward spiral that’s lasted all week. True believers are shrugging it off, but with its newfound notoriety, a lot of latecomers are feeling some pain. All but two of the top 100 cryptocurrencies were significantly down this morning.
The history of inoculation may sound a little dry, but it’s really an epic tale of human trafficking, semi-illicit experimentation, and high explosives. It’s a globe-hopping story that stars harem girls, noblewomen, prisoners, princesses, slaves, and even a witch hunter.
Today, half of America’s internet shut down when hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host.
What will happen if robots steal our jobs? It’s a question that’s been on the minds of both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie since the advent of artificial intelligence.
Josiah Zayner took a swig from his beer and squinted into the spotlight. He was already kind of drunk. He also hadn’t bothered to write a speech. Tattooed and heavily pierced with a shock of blue-gray hair, he shuffled around uneasily on stage.
On December 14th, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote to replace current rules enforcing net neutrality. Nothing short of an extinction-level event will prevent it.
There's never been anything like Beats By Dre. The bulky rainbow headphones are a gaudy staple of malls, planes, clubs, and sidewalks everywhere: as mammoth, beloved, and expensive as their namesake. But Dr.
I turn 30 this month, and it feels like I am one of the few people my age who watches cable TV and is willing to pay for it. Truth is, I hate watching shows on my computer—or worse, my phone. Give me new episodes in real-time, on a real TV.
Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week, and the social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution.
Giz AsksIn this Gizmodo series, we ask questions about everything from space to butts and get answers from a variety of experts. Wrangle up the right studies and you can make anything look deadly.
Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook that was targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how privacy works on social networks and had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways.
Calculators are awesome, but they’re not always handy. More to the point, no one wants to be seen reaching for the calculator on their mobile phone when it’s time to figure out a 15 percent gratuity. Here are ten tips to help you crunch numbers in your head.
Another year, another couple thousand new apps for you to wade through in a befuddled haze.
Sure, smartphones and smartphone apps can waste our time and bring out the worst in people, but they can most definitely also be a force for good: They can educate, inform, and inspire.
Your smartphone is a minor miracle, a pocket-sized computer that can fulfill almost every whim. But none of its superpowers matter a bit if it runs out of juice. With removable batteries becoming more and more rare, you've got to take good care of the one you got.
Who delivers Amazon orders? Increasingly, it’s plainclothes contractors with few labor protections, driving their own cars, competing for shifts on the company’s own Uber-like platform.
Earlier this week, Verizon shocked us by resurrecting its unlimited data plan, albeit with some caveats. It turns out that if you use a lot of data, the plan is a pretty good deal.
The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group.
Get ready for the next generation of wifi technology: Wi-fi 6 (for so it is named) is going to be appearing on devices from next year.
When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926.
Even in a world of face unlocking and fingerprint scanning, we still haven’t escaped the password just yet. They’re still a necessity and they’re still annoying to remember.
Every day, you hear about security flaws, viruses, and evil hacker gangs that could leave you destitute — or, worse, bring your country to its knees. But what’s the truth about these digital dangers? We asked computer security experts to separate the myths from the facts.
If you’re like me, you’ve got hundreds of gigabytes of digital media files, everything from movies, to music, to TV shows, stored across portable hard drives, old laptops, and various PCs.
At the beating heart of Amazon’s unstoppable ecommerce expansion is a very basic promise: jobs. When a Fulfillment Center opens, the expectation is that anywhere from 1,000 to 2,200 positions will become available overnight, each providing 40 hours of work per week at a minimum.
Amazon, the country’s second-largest employer, has so far remained immune to any attempts by U.S. workers to form a union. With rumblings of employee organization at Whole Foods—which Amazon bought for $13.
While your iPhone's new operating system comes with plenty of advantages, iOS 7's not without its drawbacks. Battery life just ain't quite what you'd want it to be, but we've got some tips to squeeze the most out of that sucker and stay juiced all day long.
When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number.
Autonomous vehicles were supposed to make driving safer, and they may yet—some of the more optimistic research indicates self-driving cars could save tens of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. alone.
Remember when we all switched from Firefox to Chrome? Chrome was stripped down, simple but fast as hell. It was like browsing the web on a whole new computer. These days Chrome is bloated, slow, and constantly crashing on me. I've finally reached the breaking point.
Earlier this week, we asked you to share with us that one, special Chrome extension that you just can't bear to live without. As it turns out, for most of you, that one is actually more like eight. So to help, we've pared it down to the absolute cream of the Chrome extension crop.
My mother is untrainable. At least, as far as voicemail is concerned. We'd repeat the same song and dance over and over. Me: Stop leaving me voicemails. Her: I don't understand. This went on for years, until I figured out she was right all along.
FeudsIt's Feud Week at Gizmodo. We're exploring spats, gripes, and fights in tech, science, and entertainment. We humans are masters of resentment—a characteristic that can be traced back the beginnings of recorded history.
Being a notepad and pen replacement is just one of the roles that smartphones fill for us now—alongside being a digital camera, a musical jukebox, an address book, and an ever-expanding encyclopedia. Not all the options are created equal, though.
Commuting affects your mental health, your physical health, and even the way you think about other people. And these changes are more profound than you might think. The average commuter spends about an hour a day heading to and from work, but plenty spend as much as three hours commuting.
John Coster-Mullen was driving his truck to a warehouse in Oshkosh, Wisconsin when he told me that he owns uranium.
Martha Lillard spends half of every day with her body encapsulated in a half-century old machine that forces her to breathe. Only her head sticks out of the end of the antique iron lung.
One of the weirdest aspects of quantum mechanics is entanglement, because two entangled particles affecting each other across vast distances seems to violate a fundamental principle of physics called locality: things that happen at a particular point in space can only influence the points closest to
Chromebooks have surpassed sales of Mac laptops in the United States for the first time ever. And that doesn’t surprise me. Because roughly a year ago I made the same switch. Formerly a lifelong Mac user, I bought my first PC ever in the form of a Chromebook. And I’m never looking back.
The visitors started coming in 2013. The first one who came and refused to leave until he was let inside was a private investigator named Roderick. He was looking for an abducted girl, and he was convinced she was in the house. John S.
If you’re an Android user, grab your phone, pull up Google’s Search app or Google Assistant, and type “the1975..com” into the search bar to see a bizarre and recently discovered bug that will show your most recent text messages.
For the past 11 years, an eternity in internet time, Reddit has touted itself—repeatedly, and loudly—as the place to have “authentic conversations” online. For a variety of reasons, that sentiment has always rang hollow.
Over the past few years I've invested a lot into Apple's products and services. If you come by my house, you'd find four of the latest Apple TVs, two iMacs, the latest MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro, more than five AirPort Express stations and Apple's Time Capsule.
We recently showed you just how badly some of Apple's retail elite behave when no one's watching, but surely they were taught better, right? You bet they were: Apple tells its new recruits exactly what what to think and say.
Goodbye Big FiveReporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Here’s what happened.
Everybody’s MacBook breaks. At some point or another, the hard drive will shudder to a stop; the display hinge won’t hold up anymore; the logic board will cease to function. It’s only a matter of time. Fortunately, you can fix most of it yourself. Here’s how.
In 2012, designer John Collins constructed a paper airplane that flew an astonishing 226 feet, establishing a distance record that still stands. A new video demonstrates the steps required to fold your own version of this record-setting paper-based aircraft.
Yes, 2017's biggest tech story was probably about the ways in which social media forced us to rehash old culture wars and question who was guiding our political discourse.
If you think cam girls—those flirty naked characters that plague porn site pop-up ads—are raking in easy money, you're right. If you think cam girls are bleakly stripping online out of desperation, you're also right.
“And so it begins … ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police,” blared the headline on the Conservative Post; “with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed”.
Here’s a crazy one. In the progression of gadgets to crawl from the primordial pool, Microsoft’s ambitious Surface Book feels like a punctuation mark.
I tingle just thinking about the full-body sensation accompanying a Q-tip exploring the inside of my ear canal.
If you’re daydreaming about buying a home or need to lower the payment on the one you already have, you might pay a visit to the Quicken Loans mortgage calculator.
Digital security and its discontents—from Hillary Clinton’s emails to ransomware to Tor hacks—is in many ways one of the chief concerns of the contemporary FBI. So it makes sense that the bureau’s director, James Comey, would dip his toe into the digital torrent with a Twitter account.
Have you heard? A tiny bug in Cloudflare’s code has led an unknown quantity of data—including passwords, personal information, messages, cookies, and more—to leak all over the internet. If you haven’t heard of the so-called Cloudbleed vulnerability, keep reading. This is a scary big deal.
If your growing weariness of being constantly tethered to the internet has become overwhelming, it might be time to scrub yourself from the social media sphere altogether. Here's how you can become a ghost on the Internet, by tracking down and eliminating your digital past.
In 2006, then-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg issued an executive order establishing the Office of Special Enforcement, a citywide agency responsible for enforcing “quality of life” regulations—a nebulous, ideologically charged concept that refers to anything from music venues with too m
Internet connections get faster but websites get more complex—and that means we often still have to wait an age for pages to load. Now, a new technique from MIT that helps browsers gather files more efficiently could change that.
When I give the dating app LoveFlutter my Twitter handle, it rewards me with a 28-axis breakdown of my personality: I’m an analytic Type A who’s unsettlingly sex-focused and neurotic (99th percentile).
A quick internet search will yield countless claims of ways to remove the unwanted fat from around your mid-section. From over-hyped diet pills promising to reduce levels of cortisol to cutting-edge workouts.
Saving money is fun! Just kidding, it’s honestly pretty annoying since it requires a delicate amount of personal control and the temporary surrendering of your cash. But don’t worry. Your computerphone can help.
Physical realism is the view that the physical world we see is real and exists by itself, alone. Most people think this is self-evident, but physical realism has been struggling with the facts of physics for some time now.
You're going to read this, and you're going to say, how is this about tech? I'm gonna head you off at that pass: This is a message from Internet, the generation that became the voice that set the tone for everything you love about the Net. And it's pissed. -Editor
This absolutely amazing and terrifying prank, where a girl with telekinetic powers appears to freak out in a coffee shop, is actually a publicity stunt for the upcoming remake of the film Carrie. But that doesn't make it any less entertaining or awesome.
Dropbox is a robust independent file syncing tool (which Apple once tried to buy) that recently hit the 100m user milestone. It's arguably the most popular cloud service around, and for good reason.
People are putting butter in their coffee. And hey, if you're just craving a new flavor experience, more power to you.
On a recent trip to Disney World, I had an unusual experience. I rode a ride. It broke. We were evacuated, and a few minutes later, I got a picture on my phone. It was an empty raft sliding down Splash Mountain, taken at precisely the moment I was walking down the emergency stairwell. It was weird.
Ken M has lurked since 2011, masterfully trolling comment sections across digital media. As his legend grows, let’s look at Ken M’s greatest hits and find out who is behind the comments. Ken M has achieved what few trolls can dare to dream of.
A week after the iPhone 6 launch, I found myself drunk, eligible for a contract phone upgrade, and holding my finger perilously close to the checkout. $200 for Apple's latest seemed like a no-brainer. Two months of less-than-blissful life with the 6 later, and I'm switching back.
You don't need to be Bond to get your own spy gadgets. You've already got the ultimate spy tool in your pocket: a smartphone.
Back in 2004, Gmail rewrote the rules for Web-based email. It had a fast, clean interface, and a jaw-dropping 1GB of free storage. Today, it comes with ten times the amount of space, and boasts many millions of users across the globe.
There’s no shortage of data breaches these days, but this one should make you sit up and pay attention. The newly discovered “Collection #1" is the largest public data breach by volume, with 772,904,991 unique emails and 21,222,975 unique passwords exposed.
Here’s a fun fact: Every time you do a voice search, Google records it. And if you’re an Android user, every time you say “Ok Google,” the company records that, too. Don’t freak out, though, because Google lets you hear (and delete) these recordings. Here’s how.