Gizmodo

This world is not what it seems. Lurking beneath the sloppy mess and noise of our interconnected world lies something deeper, something secret—a maze of everlasting mysteries one can only hope to solve in this lifetime. Either that or it’s all just really, really dumb. If only we had a sign... DOJ’s Amber Alert Website Redirected Visitors to Hardcore Porn A website run by the US Justice Department and used to gather information about missing and abducted children redirected visitors to porn sites with names such as “schoolgirl porn” and “ungrateful huge boobs Indian wife being a slut,” Gizmodo has discovered. Meet the Woman Who Leads NightWatch, Google’s Internal Privacy Strike Force Lea Kissner is back at her alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, armed with a crisp gray blazer, a slide deck, and a laptop with a ‘My Other Car Is A Pynchon Novel’ sticker on it. Since graduating in 2002, she’s … [Read more...] about Westworld Returns, Amazon’s Food Stamp Problem, and DOJ Porn: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week

With winter fading into the distance, Avengers: Infinity War now in theaters, and the truth about Amazon’s logo finally out in the open, we can take a big breath of fresh air and remember what makes us excited about life in the first place. But we’ll probably just endlessly scroll through Twitter until we feel satisfactorily terrible, decide that we should all probably just become farmers, and forget any of this ever happened. Since that sounds exhausting, however, may I suggest reading some of the best stories Gizmodo has to offer from the past week—they’ll help you build up your energy stores, I swear. Inside AMD’s Quest to Build Chips That Can Beat Intel There are few gambles in the tech world as big as spending billions to build a new computer processor from scratch. Former AMD board member Robert Palmer supposedly compared it to Russian roulette: “You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew … [Read more...] about Avengers: Infinity War, AMD vs. Intel, and Killer Animals: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week

On the internet, a week is a lifetime—especially when it’s the opening week of Avengers: Infinity War. Unlike seemingly everyone else, I’ve yet to see the Marvel blockbuster, an admission that is likely enough to inspire my colleagues at io9 to greet me at my desk in the morning with pitchforks. It also means running from anything that even smells like a spoiler. So I can tell you right now—nothing in this post is an Infinity War spoiler. If, instead, the drama you’re still getting caught up on is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, well, I have some bad news. Cambridge Analytica Is Shutting Down On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica employees learned that its parent company, the SCL Group, was shuttering the business, with American-based workers directed to return their keycards immediately, according to documentation reviewed by Gizmodo. The news was announced during a conference call led by Julian Wheatland, the current chairman of the SCL Group who was … [Read more...] about iPhone X at Six Months, Janelle Monáe’s Odyssey, and Cat DNA: The Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week

Gizmodo is launching its first podcast next week, on May 30. The Gateway is a six-part series about Teal Swan, a new brand of spiritual guru, who draws in followers with her hypnotic self-help YouTube videos aimed at people who are struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. Some followers move to Teal’s healing center—a spiritual startup in Atenas, Costa Rica—where they produce content and manage social media accounts. Teal insists her therapy saves lives, but her critics say Teal’s death-focused dogma is dangerous. Here’s a short preview: The Gateway is available wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, iHeart Radio, or TuneIn. Subscribe now so you can hear the first episode as soon as it premieres. You can also listen to new episodes one week early and ad-free on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of listening, go to stitcherpremium.com/gateway and use promo code ‘GATEWAY’. Video … [Read more...] about Watch the Eerie Trailer for Gizmodo’s New Investigative Podcast, The Gateway

As Elon Musk’s ongoing campaign to piss off every journalist continued to make headlines, you may have missed a key bit of news: His secretive company Neuralink is funding primate research at the University of California as it pursues its quest to create brain-computer interfaces. So when, at some point in our weird inevitable future, you’re blasting around through tunnels on Mars in your mind-controlled Tesla, just remember how you got there. Pray for the Souls of the People Sucked Into This Dating Site Hell Earlier this year, the media got very excited about Trump.dating, a site for the pro-Donald set that promised to “make dating great again.” Much of the media coverage was critical: The site only allowed users to conduct heterosexual searches; the male-half of the couple originally featured on the homepage had a child sex conviction; and its creator didn’t seem to actually exist. Despite all this, the site attracted over 250,000 … [Read more...] about Elon Musk’s Monkey Tests, Dating Site Hell, and Alexa Nightmares: The Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week

It was an exciting week here at Gizmodo, where senior editor Jennings Brown launched our first investigative podcast—a deep dive into one of the darkest spiritual movements on the internet—and senior reporter Kate Conger capped off nearly three months of reporting on Google’s work on Project Maven, a Pentagon program that aims to supercharge analysis of images captured by military drones with the help of artificial intelligence. But those are just two of the many excellent developments from the past week. Here’s a rundown of the best stories Gizmodo has to offer, from YouTube Music’s struggles to the iPhone X’s biggest flaw, to the real problems with Ambien that have nothing to do with Roseanne Barr. Google Plans Not to Renew Its Contract for Project Maven, a Controversial Pentagon Drone AI Imaging Program Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for … [Read more...] about Google’s Big Reversal, Solo’s Big Cameo, and iPhone X’s Big Flaw: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week