Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Remember how smartwatches were supposed to be the next big thing? About that... The market intelligence firm IDC reported on Monday that smartwatch shipments are down 51.6 percent year-over-year for the third quarter of 2016. This is bad news for all smartwatch vendors (except maybe Garmin), but it’s especially bad for Apple, which saw shipments drop 71.6 percent, according to the IDC report Apple is still the overall smartwatch market leader, with an estimated 41.

When it gave the Tesla Model S an unprecedented 103 out of 100 score last August, Consumer Reports looked like it might try to marry Elon Musk’s company and have its little electric car babies. But after a year of disappointments, trust violations and janky-ass door handles, it seems the magazine can no longer advocate true love.

NASA’s New Horizons space probe is currently speeding towards a mysterious Kuiper Belt Object known as MU69. Recent observations of the distant object indicate a very reddish surface—possibly even redder than the splotches found on Pluto. This small Kuiper Belt object (KBO), which measures about 20-30 miles (30-45 km) in diameter, is located 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion km) beyond Pluto. By the time New Horizons gets there on January 1, 2019, it’ll be about 43.

After continued reports of the phones catching on fire when charged, Samsung finally put the Galaxy Note 7 out of its misery two weeks ago. But 2.5 million recalled devices and $2.3 billion in projected losses later, the company is apparently no closer to identifying what killed its flagship smartphone.

Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning. This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related. Domain Name Servers (DNS) act as the Internet’s phone book. Basically, they facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place.

Since Wells Fargo’s practice of opening bogus accounts in customers’ names was first exposed, reports of the boiler room-like sales culture that led to the scheme have leaked out of the bank. In recent weeks, that trickle has turned into a flood as more and more bankers have come forward, including one former employee who says she drank “at least a bottle” of hand sanitizer each day to deal with the pressure.

Apple is reportedly working with on a new keyboard for its laptops that will dynamically change what characters appear on the keys, depending on what apps are being used. That means your MacBook keys could soon transform into emoji on command, thanks to e-ink.

This week, an emergency room in the Pacific Northwest was briefly quarantined after five people—including two police officers and a hospital worker—experienced mysterious hallucinations from an unidentified illness believed to be spread by touch. According to Oregon Live, the enigmatic incident began early Wednesday morning when a 54-year-old caregiver in North Bend, Oregon, called police to report seven or eight people “trying to take the roof off her vehicle.

Tonight, millions of East Coasters have a rare opportunity to see a rocket zip off to the International Space Station—right from their backyards. Following a series of delays due a major Atlantic hurricane and a faulty ground support cable, Orbital ATK’s upgraded Antares rocket is on its launch pad and ready to rock at Wallops flight facility in Virginia.

Under the Fourth Amendment, Americans are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, but according to one group of federal prosecutors, just being in the wrong house at the wrong time is cause enough to make every single person inside provide their fingerprints and unlock their phones. Back in 2014, a Virginia Circuit Court ruled that while suspects cannot be forced to provide phone passcodes, biometric data like fingerprints doesn’t have the same constitutional protection.