The spat between Gizmodo and Apple over Gizmodo’s mysterious acquisition of an iPhone 4G months before its release has proven to be an endlessly engrossing spectacle for the techies out there. Well, last night, Gizmodo got a very high-profile and consumer friendly supporter: Jon Stewart

Well, this gives the lie to the theory that Gizmodo’s bombshell article about the leaked iPhone 4G a. was an Apple plant and b. would have no legal repercussions. Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor who authored the piece and took apart the iPhone, had his house raided by California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, who he says seized four of his computers and two servers, made him stand outside of his own house with his hands on his head, and tried to dredge up the source of the leaked iPhone.

By now, you’re surely aware that tomorrow is Tax Day. If not: uh-oh. What you may not be as aware of is that in 1943, none other than Donald Duck was enlisted by the U.S. Department of Treasury to encourage Americans to pay their income taxes. [N.B. Tax Day was moved from March 15 to [...]

Yesterday afternoon, we watched with interest as Apple finally released details on the long-awaited iPhone OS 4.0. While there are some definite cons associated with this major upgrade to the iPhone OS, there are plenty of pros: It looks like Steve Jobs and company will unleash lots of new features and APIs that will redefine iPhone and iPod Touch users’ experience when OS 4 is released this summer.

Nick Levasseur, a Democratic State Representative from New Hampshire, managed to simultaneously offend anime fans, people of Japanese descent, and general decency with the following joke: “Anime is a prime example of why two nukes wasn’t enough,” which he posted on Facebook. See the video at Geekosystem.

It’s been reported that since progressive radio network Air America filed for bankruptcy on January 25th, 2010, everything has been for sale in the companywide liquidation that’s followed. The auction began today at 11:00 EDT.While there may be something poignant about that for fans of the network, there’s one thing on the auction block that’s likely to bother them more than the broadcast equipment and cubicles: Their e-mail mailing list, which auctioneers are billing at “intellectual property.”

Google gave everyone fair warning, and earlier today the search giant did it. Google.cn, the Chinese portal of Google.com, now redirects to the entirely uncensored search engine Google.com.hk, the Google of Hong Kong.

After trying its hand at countless desktop, mobile, and web apps and products, Google has ambitions towards shaking up yet another, historically difficult frontier: television. According to the New York Times, Google is partnering up with Intel and Sony to develop Google TV, a new, Android OS-based platform with a Chrome browser (currently not supported by Android) and aspirations towards “mak[ing] it as easy for TV users to navigate Web applications … as it is to change the channel.” They’ve tapped Logitech to work on the peripherals.

Today in frightening science news: researchers at UC Santa Cruz and Los Alamos National Laboratory have determined that if a giant asteroid is headed towards Earth, even detonating a small nuclear bomb may not be enough to stop it. The reason? If the blast isn’t powerful enough, the asteroid fragments’ own gravity could pull all [...]

When everyone suddenly started noticing Chatroulette a month or so ago, a lot of the early, excitable commentary centered around how the anonymous, ADD blitz of introductions brought us back to the Wild West days of the ’90s Internet, when chatrooms reigned supreme, strangers could really be strangers and no one knew you were a [...]

The clock has struck eleven, and Cisco has unveiled its plan to “forever change the Internet,” as we know it: the Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System. This upgrade to Cisco’s existing CRS-1 routing system is not a glamorous consumer gadget, to be sure, but its impact could still be significant: Cisco claims that the new core [...]

As buzzy and new media coverage-friendly as Facebook campaigns can be, their track record for bringing about actual change is rather spotty: The online world tends to be set in its ways (see: the myriad as-yet unsuccessful Facebook campaigns to add an official “Unlike” button), but the outside world is slow to respond to Facebook petitions. [...]

In a controlled simulation, UN terrorism and explosives adviser Dr. John Wyatt recreated the Christmas Day terror attack on Detroit-bound Flight 253 in order to determine how much damage the Boeing 747 would have sustained, had bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab been successful.  The results were surprising, even to Dr. Wyatt:

We knew there was going to be an Avatar moment at the Oscars sooner or later, and Ben Stiller gave it to us: Appearing in full Na’vi regalia, he clicked and hissed his love for James Cameron and presented the Oscar for Best Makeup — which Avatar wasn’t actually in the running for. (Star Trek [...]

Avatar and District 9 are both in the running for Best Picture this year, but they’ve got decades of geeky history to thank for that. What were the ten geekiest movies to grace the silver screen and get the Academy’s attention? See the full list at Geekosystem.

This past Friday, German paper Der Spiegel ran the first-ever in-depth profile of Andrey Ternovskiy, the creator of Chatroulette. It’s a fascinating read — and all of today’s Chatroulette trend piece writers should make a note of Ternovskiy’s stated long-term goal of “keeping the ‘freaks and f***ers,’ as he calls them, off the site.” The [...]

…and it’s called MyOuterSpace.com. Yesterday, William Shatner casually tweeted that he’s created his own social network. Now, before we discuss the questionable logic behind naming a new social network service by using a pun on an old social network service that itself feels like an aging dinosaur from 2005, let me give you the basic rundown on what [...]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has posted a striking visualization of the energy dissipated by the earthquake in Chile. As you can see from the picture, almost the entire Pacific Ocean felt some effects from the quake. Note that the red reappears on coastlines as far as Alaska’s.

Only nine years after the original Zoolander made orange mocha frappuccinos, Mugatu, and centers for children who can’t read good household phrases in a select number of households, it sounds like the Zoolander sequel that Ben Stiller has been dropping hints about on and off for the past few years just may see the light [...]

In the wake of yesterday’s tragic killing of an experienced Sea World trainer, Dawn Brancheau, by a killer whale named Tilikum, Sea World has suspended the “light-hearted,” “quirky”  Twitter account for Shamu that they set up about a year ago.

After loads of speculation about Apple‘s sudden, sweeping ban of more than 5,000 sexually suggestive iPhone apps — ranging from pornography to pictures of women in bikinis — the company’s head of worldwide product marketing, Philip W. Schiller, has explained where Apple is coming from. In an interview with the New York Times, Schiller says [...]

According to a recent analysis by a team of Harvard researchers, Google may make as many as $500 million each year on typos. The reason for this: many of the “typosquatting” domain names that get most or all of their traffic from people incorrectly typing the names of the places they want to go — [...]

We’ve been meaning to mention Please Rob Me, the site that aggregates publicly available, geolocated Twitter messages of the “I am at X bar” variety, as passed on by Google Buzz and Foursquare, uses them to determine who is and isn’t at their homes, and passes on all of the empty house “opportunities” that are [...]

Last night, LOST fans had an embarrassment of riches to deal with: first, a new episode, “The Substitute,” and later, a great Jimmy Kimmel Live! interview with Michael Emerson, a.k.a. LOST‘s charming, conflicted sociopath Ben Linus. Jimmy Kimmel seems like a bit of a LOST superfan himself: you may recall that two weeks ago, he [...]

Just a week after its launch, Google Buzz is already being inundated with spam, web security outfit Websense reports. After a mere two days, the company detected Buzzing spammers (or spamming Buzzers, take your pick): “in an indictment of how rapidly spammers are learning to abuse social networks, it took only two days before they [...]