Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

As resolutions and file sizes continue to grow, it’s important for storage —especially removable storage—to keep up, and with the SD Association’s new SD 8.0 spec, memory cards have just gotten a massive bump to their top-end speed. In a press release issued on Tuesday, the association announced that transfer speeds for SD Express cards will now top out at just shy of four gigabytes per second (3940 MBps to be exact)the SD 8.

Alibaba founder and Michael Jackson enthusiast, Jack Ma, is stepping down from his role on Softbank’s board just as the company is reporting the biggest losses in its history. The company announced that Ma is set to resign June 25, a departure that comes as Softbank continues to reel from its no good, very bad year from hell. Softbank on Monday reported an annual operating loss of 1.

As many of us are sheltering in place or social distancing right now, our ways of connecting with friends and family have been severely limited. One way we’re still able to connect with others, regardless of their physical distance from us, is watching a movie together on the same streaming service.

An international operation led by Spanish authorities has arrested 18 members of a drug gang in Spain, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Colombia that allegedly smuggled cocaine by embedding it in cardboard.

Per the Guardian, cops say the investigation was focused on a criminal going by the moniker “the Surgeon” (identified by the Local ES as Mauricio Vergara) who they allege was using his clinic as a front for drug negotiations. The operation involved the smuggling of cocaine by infusing cardboard boxes used to ship limes and pineapples from Colombia to Europe with small amounts of cocaine, which then had to be extracted by chemists, according to the police. It also allegedly involved the Los Castaña drug gang, which operates on Spain’s southern coast and whose kingpin Francisco Tejón was arrested in 2018. Police told the Guardian they had been clued into an adulterated shipment of over 5,000 boxes of limes and over 1,600 boxes of pineapples earlier this year.

“Small quantities of the drug – never more than 100g – were placed in each box and later extracted by complicated chemical processes in the gang’s own laboratories,” Spanish authorities said, according to the Guardian. “The gang’s chemists were then sent from Colombia to Spain, where they stayed until they were dispatched to Bulgaria and the Netherlands, where they set about extracting the cocaine. Once their job was done, they returned to Spain and then to Colombia.”

“Using international police cooperation mechanisms, Bulgarian police and prosecutors then tracked the shipment to a warehouse in Sofia where the legal and illegal imports were due to be separated, with the contaminated cardboard bound for the purpose-built lab,” police added.

A video posted by Spain’s National Police showed what appeared to be machinery used to mulch the cardboard into a fibrous mass for pressing and subsequent extraction of the cocaine.

Former soccer player Edwin Congo, who retired from the sport at the age of 33 in 2009, was among those arrested. He was released after questioning, according to the Local, and insisted that his only involvement with the gang was the emerald trade.

“I am innocent, I have absolutely nothing to do with the sale, manufacture or anything that has to do with cocaine,” Congo told Spanish TV station La Sexta on Tuesday evening, the Local wrote.

It’s staggering to think that Matthew Scott Hunter came up with a way to combine his love of clean floors and Star Wars before the marketing teams at Disney, Lucasfilm, and iRobot did. Using random household items he turned his functional robot vacuum into an Artoo unit that roams and cleans his home.

As impressive as Spider-Man’s abilities are, there’s not much that a superhero who shoots webs from his wrists can do to combat covid-19. But what if you upgraded Spidey’s web-slingers with virus-killing hand sanitizer instead? That’s the idea behind the wrist-worn PumPiX blaster.

Archivists in Australia working on the digital restoration of an incomplete travelogue from 1935 discovered that it contains the last known footage of a Tasmanian tiger. The newly restored footage, prepared by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), shows a male Tasmanian tiger pacing around in his cage.

Norma McCorvey, the previously unidentified woman known as ‘Jane Roe’ in the milestone Roe v. Wade case, makes a stunning confession in a new FX documentary about her life: She was paid by the evangelical Christian right to disingenuously further their anti-abortion agenda.

McCorvey became a pivotal fixture of the abortion rights movement after becoming a plaintiff as out-of-work, unwed, and unable to get an abortion in the state of Texas in 1969. McCorvey was an imperfect and controversial public face for the pro-choice movement. But in the mid-1990s, she seemingly flipped sides, joining the right in their anti-choice crusade after claiming to become a born-again Christian.

“This is my deathbed confession,” McCorvey says in a trailer for the forthcoming film AKA Jane Roe. In McCorvey’s own words, her public support of the anti-choice movement was “all an act,” and McCorvey describes herself in the film as “a good actress.”

“I was the big fish. I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That’s what I’d say,” she says, per the Los Angeles Times. Per the Daily Beast, the documents revealed in the documentary disclose that Roe received at least $456,911 in “benevolent gifts.”

Sweeney told the Times that the film is meant to explore how, with the extremely polarizing topic like abortion, “there can be a temptation for different players to reduce ‘Jane Roe’ to en emblem or a trophy, and behind that is a real person with a real story. Norma was incredibly complex.”

Indeed, McCorvey’s story isn’t easily unpacked. Per a Dallas Morning News obituary from when she died in 2017, McCorvey said that she lied about being raped in order to attain an abortion, which she wasn’t able to have. The film explores her troubled upbringing, alleged sexual abuse by a family member, and her relationship with longtime girlfriend Connie Gonzalez, whom she reportedly continued seeing long after her “conversion.”

Per the Times, Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who was formerly closely linked to the anti-choice cause, says in the film that what the movement “did with Norma was highly unethical. The jig is up.”

AKA Jane Roe premieres May 22 on FX, and the following day on FX on Hulu.

After some users expressed concerns that the OnePlus 8 Pro’s Photochrom camera filter could pose privacy issues, OnePlus announced that it will temporarily disable the filter while it figures out a way to address the situation.

The latest announcement from OnePlus was posted on Weibo following last week’s discovery that in somewhat specific circumstances, because of the way the OP8 Pro’s Photochrom color filter processes infrared light, it could be used to see through the outer later of certain electronics, or possibly even thin layers of clothing.

That said, after exploring the issue more in depth last week, I found that anyone worried about people using the OP8 Pro to spy or take creepy shots of others shouldn’t be all that concerned. Even in the best-case scenario, while the OP8 Pro’s Photochrom can reveal some additional details hidden behind thin clothing, the overall effect isn’t significantly different than what can be achieved with a bright camera flash, and in many typical everyday situations, the OP8 Pro’s color filter doesn’t reveal anything at all.

On the flip side, when taking pictures of electronics with tinted or smoky plastic, the OP8's color filter does allow users to see through exterior cases and housings, potentially revealing the components inside. But that generally only applies to gadgets, not people.

Still, temporarily disabling the filter while OnePlus investigates the situation more thoroughly is the prudent move. OnePlus says it hopes to re-enable the color filter sometime in the future after any privacy concerns have been addressed. The one wrinkle is that because the announcement was made on Weibo, it’s unclear how devices sold in other regions like the U.S. may be affected.

Gizmodo has reached out to OnePlus’ U.S. team for more information, we will update the story if we hear back.

Satellite images have captured the result of a lake of lava collapsing on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, revealing an enormous new lake of water.

The new lake formed as a result of the caldera, a crater called Halema’uma’u, collapsing at Kilauea’s peak. Now that the crater has filled with water, it’s possible that it may lead to even more explosive eruptions on the Hawaiian volcano.

Kilauea is a wide, 4,091-foot-tall shield volcano that erupted from 1983 until 2018. From 2010 on, Halema’uma’u filled with lava, creating a lava lake (which is exactly what it sounds like). But 2018 marked a months-long wave of activity at Kilauea, setting off a destructive eruption expelling nearly a cubic kilometer of lava that flowed through inhabited areas and into the ocean. This event was Kilauea’s largest eruption in two centuries.

Alongside the eruption came the slow, dramatic collapse of Halema’uma’u’s floor, leaving a hole over 1,500 feet deep as the lava drained out. This changed landscape of the crater, which now appears to be much deeper and is flanked by a tall cliff.

But Halema’uma’u’s story didn’t end there. Water started to collect at the bottom of the crater a year later, and today, it’s a lake at least 100 feet deep taking up an area larger than five football fields, according to the NASA Earth Observatory press release. Basically, the crater has now dipped far below the water table, or the upper limit where groundwater saturates the earth. That water has now started to fill the open pit.

This new lake could spell bad news for future Kilauea eruptions. The volcano more typically erupts explosively. If water dissolves into the magma, it could cause the build up of steam, an increase in pressure, and perhaps a more dramatic and potentially dangerous release of lava.

Volcanologists will continue to study Kilauea in order to understand what its future eruptions might be like.