From Stranger Things to Barbie, Disney fairytales, and a Halloweentown of your own—various creative destinations have undertaken the task of transporting guests into their own movie moments. This includes the pink-on-pink mid-century vibes at Palm Springs’ Trixie Motel, and thethemed rooms at Disney Parks’Disneyland…
Sabina Graves
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James Whitbrook
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From the moment I heard about tech billionaires’ weird plans to create a bustling new city in the heart of California’s Solano County, I was preoccupied with one basic question: Who is actually going to run this thing?
Libertarian dreams of creating a new community from scratch are all well and good but, at the end of the day, you can’t operate a municipality of any real size without a team of boring, dysfunctional bureaucrats to decide what the local zoning laws are and how to spend the tax dollars. Bulldozers and construction workers could, hypothetically, build a bunch of new buildings, sure, but it wasn’t immediately apparent—at least not from the statements made by the project’s backers—who would be in charge of the city once it was actually built.
Early on, California Forever made it known that they had some pretty radical ideas about how to run a city. Developers let it slip that they wanted to fund the community entirely through private sector money and that the whole urban project was viewed, more or less, as a business opportunity. From these statements, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that the city would be some terrible, dystopian version of Disney’s Storyliving, where a company effectively called the shots and residents were just passive prisoners inside its overly priced walls. The question of how the city would be run was an open one, with more than a few unappealing answers.
Now, however, it appears that this pivotal question has been answered: California Forever’s new city will not have a local government at all. Instead, the developers plan to keep their new urban hub as an unincorporated area and leave the governing to the pre-existing county government that already controls the region. In a recent interview with YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard” ), an online outlet that promotes development in the Bay Area, California Forever’s Head of Planning, Gabriel Metcalf, revealed that there would be no local government to regulate the activity within the city’s borders:
YIMBY: So, there won’t be any kind of local government that runs this city apart from the county government?
Gabriel Metcalf: Yes, our intention is to remain part of unincorporated Solano County. So, the political body that will have jurisdiction is the county board of Supervisors. We’ll have a very close cooperative working relationship with the county to provide police and fire services, all the services, and work on economic development projects together. I expect we’ll be very close partners.
This is interesting—and not unprecedented. There are a lot of unincorporated territories throughout the U.S. Many of them are small, impoverished communities, though there are a number of large and thriving metropolitan areas that are unincorporated and that, similar to California Forever’s hypothetical city, rely on the county government for regulation.
Yet if there is some precedent to the new city’s proposed governmental organization, it does beg a lot of questions about how the project will actually function. If the Solano County government is suddenly beset with vast new responsibilities and has to help regulate every part of a blossoming (and, likely, chaotic) city-building process, how will the extant bureaucracy handle that? And, as the city develops and becomes populated, won’t the county’s resources be stretched thin—particularly in how it relates to essential services, like police and firefighters—with a special preference for the new community?
In his interview with YIMBY, Metcalf revealed another interesting aspect of the project, which is that residents of the new city (and Solano County writ large) don’t really have much of a say in the direction of the new community. When asked about how county voters would be able to maintain some kind of “checks and balances” over the new development, which is expected to take 40 years to effectively mature, Metcalf replied:
There are two primary ways that voters in Solano County maintain democratic oversight. One is the terms of the voter initiative themselves, which are legally binding. Those have been developed through intense consultation with the people and elected leaders in the county. It includes funding commitments, a zoning envelope, and a development footprint. So, all of that is locked in by a vote of the people.
In other words, whatever is inside the ballot initiative (which voters will vote on in November) is what will come to pass. But Metcalf had more to say:
The second main way voters in the count will exert control is through the terms of the development agreement. After our process and the voter initiative, we do a full EIR (Environmental Impact Report) and then negotiate a development agreement with the county board of supervisors. A development agreement is a voluntary contract in which both parties can agree to whatever they choose.
In other words, voters won’t really have that much control over this development at all. If county residents vote for it, they will get whatever is in the ballot initiative. The development agreement, meanwhile, will be hashed out between the county board of supervisors and the company. A lot of the rest of this scenario—and the way everyday people fit into it—remains something of an open question.
Lucas Ropek
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Welcome back to the Connected States, the project that involves me living in a van for a year, driving around and telling stories. After going live last week I was absolutely overwhelmed by the positive response. I received so many tips, well-wishes, and offers of help that I haven’t been able to respond to them all yet. It was truly moving,
When we last left off I was in Iowa City, Iowa, which is not a very creative name for a city, so I moved on. By that point, though I’d left myself very little time. I needed to be in Detroit by 9:30am the next day so I could finally do my TSA Pre-check interview, and Detroit was 490 miles away. I drove until I got very tired, whereupon I pulled into yet another Walmart parking lot and slept for 2.5 hours, and then kept going. My dad had recommended The Burning Room, a book by Michael Connelly, so I downloaded it on Audible and that did a good job of keeping me alert.
The real reason I was heading to Michigan was to see one of my oldest and best friends get married. David and I go back to 7th grade, but many of the guests would be people we had gone to high school with. It’s still a pretty tight-knit crew, as, for various reasons, many of us had left our small California town for Brooklyn during the last decade, and so we’d formed a sort of “I miss real burritos” support group. Anyway, the wedding would be a couple hours north but first we decided to explore Detroit proper a little. We met up with David’s old roommate Blair who grew up in the area and had since returned, prodigal son style.
If I had to pick one word to describe Detroit it would be “powder keg,” which is two words, so I would have lost that game. But that’s what it is. There is so much potential energy in that city, and it’s just waiting for something to set it off. It’s also volatile as hell. I’ve never seen a place that had been so obviously fucked by a single industry. Big auto burned these people, and these people are pissed.
Much of what you see on the news is true. There are rows upon rows of abandoned houses. Some houses—and not just a couple—have been burned to the ground. Everywhere you go you see desperate people. But Detroit is on the cusp of major changes. Real estate is so cheap that a lot of rich, white tech-industry type folks are buying up massive amounts of property, just because it’s cheap and they can. The artists have already moved in, and just like in any other city, once the artists move in they yuppies aren’t far behind.
And so you see the original Detroiters in a hard spot. They want Detroit to keep its identity and so change is fearsome, but they also realize that what the city needs more than anything is jobs. And so there’s a precarious acceptance of the new wave pushing in. Tech is being welcomed in, as long as it doesn’t overstep its bounds. But it will. It always does. And I don’t know what the aftermath to that will be.
What I found to be most inspiring, though, is the creative response Detroit has had to all of this change. Take, for example, Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project on the East Side, which has been around for 29 years now. It takes found objects, rubble, and abandoned houses and transforms them into something beautiful and inspiring.
[More from the Heidelberg Project]
[Gabby in front of the MBAD African Bead Museum]
The same could be said of MBAD African Bead Museum. Not only does this shop, inside of a highly decorated but otherwise unassuming house, have the most amazing collection of beads I’ve ever seen, but it serves as a conduit for the community. There I spoke with a woman named Gabby, of the Detroit Poetry Society, whose greeting for everyone was “Peace,” a sort of mantra she hoped would come true. She talked of the changes she’s seen, and of the importance of finding common ground among all people, which isn’t so unlike the goal of Connected States.
The area around the MBAD Museum hosts an incredible array of open-air art, similar to the Heidelberg Project, but this is mostly made by the artist Olayami Dabls, who owns the museum as well. It’s at once breathtaking and heartbreaking.
[Wedding backdrop]
But Michigan isn’t just Detroit. We left the city for Saginaw, a couple hours north, where my friend Leila, the bride, grew up. I kept my van (Ashley, “The Beast”) parked either at her parents beautiful home, where the wedding took place, or in the hotel parking lot where some other weddings guests were staying. The wedding was a three-day Bangladeshi affair, but I stayed for five. I think I needed the peace and quiet, and I’ll forever be grateful for the hospitality Leila’s family showed me.
[Late night hangs in the van with some of my favorite people in the world.]
I have to say, taking the van to a wedding is kind of the best. This is the third one I’ve brought it to, and aside from the fact that you don’t have to pay for a potentially expensive hotel room, you can park it pretty much wherever you want and set up camp. It ended up being a sweet spot for after-partying, but it served an even more useful purpose.
Just before the wedding was set to begin, the sky opened up and the rain came pouring down in buckets. This was just before the groom’s family and friends were supposed to parade to the house and strike a deal to gain entry (a really fun tradition). There were dozens of us standing in a field and getting absolutely soaked. So we piled into the van. Not everyone, of course, but we managed to get 14 people in there, including the groom, who stayed dry for the 15 or so minutes before the storm passed. It was clutch. I even broadcast my first Periscope video from the middle of the chaos.
Saginaw hosted another first for me. The bride’s family had an old Sea-Doo jet ski in the garage, and we busted it out on the small lake there. We tied a rope to the back of it and I pulled my trusty surfboard out of the trunk, a 5’ 8” Rusty DWART made with Varial foam. Making the transition from prone to standing was extremely tricky. You have to get dragged on your belly fast enough so the board starts planing. Then you wedge your back foot against the traction pad, and slide your front knee up underneath you. Then you need to take the rope with your back hand, so you’re reaching across your body, and use your front hand to stabilize the nose of the board as you pop up.
It took about six tries before I got it, but once I did, it was unbelievably satisfying. I’ve never gone anywhere near that fast on a surfboard, and the lake was so glassy it was like carving through a mirror. Also, falling really hurts at that speed. I had a good bellyflop dismount and it felt like the entire lake punched me in the gut.
Leaving Saginaw, I stopped to get an oil change, and then I just sat there for an hour, unsure of which way to go. This was the first time this trip that I could really pick any direction I wanted. I’d originally thought I’d head back through Detroit and spend some time with friends and family in Chicago, but people kept speaking with reverence of the Upper Peninsula (“the UP”) of Michigan. So I put the question to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. It was time to see if the social experiment part of this project had any legs.
Within half an hour I had almost 50 responses, most of them saying to go north, citing reasons like they’ve seen Chicago a million times, and they wanted something less explored. I took this all in. I knew there would be better opportunities for tech stories in Detroit and Chicago, but I’d probably be passing through that way in the early fall anyway… Screw it, I’m going north!
A gentleman named Ben pointed me toward the Traverse City Film Festival, which is Michael Moore’s baby. I got word that the opening night party would be that night, so I quickly reached out to them, said I was with Gizmodo, and could I have press credentials. Five minutes later I was set and driving thataway.
[Top of the Park Place Hotel, with an abomination of a “Manhattan”]
Nick didn’t live in TC, but he had a friend there named Phil who he linked me up with. Phil recommended I check out the Park Place Hotel which would provide a view of the whole town. It was beautiful up there, but I ordered a Manhattan and it was served on the rocks, so the whole place should probably be burnt to the ground. I did meet a lovely woman named Wendy who was there with her whole family. She’d lived in Traverse City most of her life, and made me feel very welcome.
From there, Phil advised me to check out a Cider House. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the best cider I’ve ever had in my life. It was so perfectly balanced and it didn’t have any of that cloying sweetness. The lavender and elderberry were especially good. Really nice and dry. I spoke to Karen who runs and/or owns the place (forgive me for being unsure, but I was drinking cider), who told me all about their organic process. I highly recommend quaffing it out if you can find it.
[These people randomly came up to me and insisted on taking a photo together.]
From there I found the the Traverse City Film Festival party. An open-air deal that took over two city blocks. It was there that I finally met Phil, who was there with his friends. We gorged on the local foods on offer, which were absolutely amazing. The whole food scene in Traverse City is insane. I’ve never seen a U.S. town so small with so much good grub. Definitely a foodie haven. We spend the rest of the party listening to the lyrical stylings of Rick Chyme, which I really enjoyed.
[Rick Chyme on the mic]
It turned out that Phil’s girlfriend Emily is good friends with Karen, so we ended up after-partying in the closed-up pub. The after-after party was in the van, where Phil, Rick, and I ended up lounging as I made maple old fashioneds and sazeracs.
In the morning, Phil came through and showed me the project he’s been working on, a book for the 50th anniversary of the Super Bowl. The foreword was by Dwight Clark, so I was sold. I flipped through the book and said I’d get one for my dad for Christmas, which is true. You can check it out here. Plug alert over.
Basically, I couldn’t imagine a better beginning to the social experiment element of this trip. The very first try found me good people, good food, good cider, and good times in a place I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. Truly incredible.
Today I’ll be continuing north to the Upper Peninsula. Maybe to Pictured Rocks, which I hear is incredible. Giz’s Andrew Liszewski made me promise I’d eat some fudge in Mackinac, and well, a promise is a promise. If you’ve got good people or places or things up north, let me know, would you? I hope to be updating from the road more regularly, so I hope you’ll follow along. You can find more photos from this leg in a gallery at ConnectedStates.com. Thanks for reading.
-Brent Rose 7.30.15 Traverse City, MI
Connected States is a new series from Brent Rose in collaboration with Gizmodo about living a truly mobile life. Brent will be traveling the U.S. in a high-tech van, telling stories from the road. New episodes will appear every week on Gizmodo, with more content being released in between. He is currently soliciting ideas for places to go, things to see, and people to talk to. Follow him on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and ConnectedStates.com
All photos in this entry were taken with a Sony A7s. The video was shot with a GoPro Hero4 Black, and the Instagram shots came from my LG G4.
Brent Rose
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Super Bowl XVIII was jam-packed with celebrities, love stories, angry outbursts, and even some football. Many of us watched the Super Bowl on TV with our own two eyes, but Gizmodo set out to learn what the big game would have looked like through the eyes of an AI image generator.
Gizmodo used Midjourney to create visual representations of some of the Super Bowl’s biggest moments. AI deepfakes are slowly becoming a central component of our society, so we figured we might as well get ahead of the curve, and just make these before someone else does. Some are surprisingly accurate while others are painfully wrong. Maybe in the future, we won’t even need a real Super Bowl. We can just AI deepfake the whole thing.
Maxwell Zeff
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John Krasinski and Paramount aren’t just bringing sound-seeking aliens to the theater this year. In May, the actor is directing (and writing) his first kiddie movie, the Ryan Reynolds-starring IF, which came to the Super Bowl with a new trailer on hand.
The upcoming film, cheekily introduced here by “Krasinski” himself—definitely not Randall Park—stars Cailey Fleming as Bea, a kid who realizes that she can see imaginary friends, a trait she also shares with her neighbor (Reynolds). As he explains it, there’s a whole secret world of imaginary friends (or IFs), ranging from talking marshmallows on fire to more conventional ones, like a bear (voiced by Lou Gossett Jr.) or Steve Carrell’s big, fluffy purple guy Blue. It eventually falls to the two humans to find new children for IFs, since their original creators have all gotten older and forgotten or abandoned them.
If you watched Cartoon Network in the 2000s, this is going to be very familiar and likely remind you of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. And like that show, this is probably going to hit hard with the younger crowd who probably haven’t seen much (or anything) focused on imaginary friends, and in quite this way. For the older crowd… who knows, movies like these live and die on the chemistry and humor. It’s got a sizable cast, which includes reliably funny people like Emily Blunt, Maya Rudolph, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Bobby Moynihan. It’s easy to imagine a movie with this premise and cast comes together fairly well, right?
We’ll know for sure when IF comes to theaters May 17.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Justin Carter
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Since 2013, Warner Bros.’ Conjuring movies has been going along with mainline installments and spinoffs for various villains of the Warren family. But all scary things must come to some kind of end, and the upcoming The Conjuring 4 is aiming to bring the mothership series to some kind of close.
Per the Hollywood Reporter, Michael Chaves has been brought on to direct the new film. All his previous films have been Conjuring offshoots such as The Curse of La Llorona and The Nun II, along with the previous mainline film, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. This new film, subtitled Last Rites, will once again feature Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren as they deal with another supernatural problem only they can solve. Filming is expected to take place in the summer over in Atlanta.
Interestingly, THR notes that Conjuring 4 will be the final entry in the main series. What that means for the remainder of the Conjuring universe is up in the air: James Wan, a key creative for the whole enterprise, has taken his Atomic Monster banner over to Blumhouse. (Fellow collaborators like Gary Dauberman, David F. Sandberg, and Akela Cooper have either joined Wan or are focusing on their own projects.) A Conjuring TV show was announced back in April 2023, but it’s entirely possible that WB quietly gave it the axe between then and now. It’s doubtful Last Rites will mark the complete end of The Conjuring altogether, but it would allow WB to take a few years off and retool the franchise with some new creative staff on hand.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Justin Carter
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Flying from Tokyo, Japan back to the U.S. to get to the Super Bowl and watch her boyfriend Travis Kelce play was very important to pop superstar Taylor Swift—so important that she apparently had a second private jet on standby.
The existence of a second private jet for Swift, who was in Tokyo giving a series of concerts, was reported on Saturday by FlightRadar24, a global flight tracking service, and aptly named “Backup Quarterback” on its website. Jason Rabinowitz, co-host of FlightRadar24’s AvTalk podcast, added that private jet operator VistaJet had mechanics on standby at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in case something went wrong.
“The logistics of flying #TaylorSwift across the planet to a football game is quite a production,” Rabinowitz said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “I’m told @vistajet didn’t just have mechanics at HND [the Haneda Airport code] in case anything broke, it had a whole second jet there on standby. Basically, a private Air Force One.”
Rabinowitz told Gizmodo he was told about the second jet, a Bombardier Global 6000 with call sign VTJ968, from friends in the private jet industry who have access to the information, but he declined to be more specific. Gizmodo reached out to Swift’s team and VistaJet for comment on the purported second jet but did not receive a response.
Luckily, there was nothing wrong with the first jet, also a Bombardier Global 6000 with call sign VJT993, which FlightRadar24 named “The Football Era.” But how can we be sure this was Swift’s flight? Ian Petchenik, FlightRadar24’s communications director, told Gizmodo in an email that while they couldn’t confirm whether she boarded the plane, the team had a “high degree of confidence” that this was her flight based on the information they had received.
VJT993 departed Tokyo at 11:36 p.m. local time and is set to arrive in Los Angeles at 3:27 p.m. local time Saturday, giving her plenty of time to get to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl on Sunday. An average of 6,000 people monitored Swift’s 9-hour flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles on Saturday at any given moment, Petchenik said. In the final hour of the flight, Gizmodo confirmed that were there more than 10,400 people monitoring the flight live.
As for the “Backup Quarterback,” also known as VTJ968, it appeared to take off in the opposite direction after Swift’s flight took off.
If a second jet for Swift was indeed on-site in Tokyo, that would take her carbon footprint to an entirely new level. It’s one thing to lend out your private plane to your friends or use it to go see your boyfriend, but it’s another thing entirely to have a second plane fly out just in case the first one breaks and then send it back empty.
Jody Serrano
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This week, Tucker Carlson conducted an interview with Vladimir Putin for his show on X. The interview, which is over two hours long, was ostensibly an attempt to interview the Russian leader about the war in Ukraine but seemed, more or less, like an excuse to criticize the Biden administration. Instead of doing that immediately, however, Putin launched into a lengthy digression about his own version of Russian history before razzing Carlson to his face.
I’ll say this: This interview is easily the funniest thing I’ve seen all year. Granted, it’s only been six weeks since the start of 2024, but Carlson’s awkward, weird talk with Russia’s autocrat had me doubled over laughing multiple times.
There are multiple layers to the humor. For one thing, Carlson was forced to fly to the Kremlin to conduct this interview. This, in and of itself, is funny. Tucker is summoned to his interview subject’s royal palace, hoping, I’m sure, for an informative and exciting discussion that would lend itself well to his alternative/rightwing/infotainment style of web content. What he got, instead, was a comically boring history lesson about national borders and an ongoing stream of insults. The dumbfounded look of confusion on Carlson’s face as Putin droned on incessantly is truly something to be savored:
That said, Tucker tried his darnedest to get something commercially viable out of his chat. At almost every turn, however, Putin undermined those attempts, opting instead to mock Carlson and make him look like an idiot.
One of the more memorable examples of this was when Putin told Carlson that he obviously wasn’t cut out for a job at the CIA (which Carlson ironically attempted to get prior to becoming an anti-Deep State shill):
At another juncture, Carlson asked Putin if he saw God’s design in world political affairs. With a bored look that seemed to imply he was talking to someone with a below average IQ, Putin merely said “no” before explaining that international laws governed world events, not a deity.
There are obviously plenty of things you can say about Vladimir Putin but that he is unintelligent is not one of them. Putin’s demeanor throughout much of the interview with Carlson is more or less that of a man trying to explain algebra to a goat.
The memes inspired by the episode have been plentiful and hilarious. I liked this one:
And this one:
And this one:
That Carlson wanted to interview an influential world leader who is currently engaged in a brutal war is commendable, though it’s difficult not to feel that Carlson’s content is always beholden to a broader ideological narrative designed to rile up viewers without giving them a lot of context. I’d like to see a good interview with Putin, although this wasn’t it. It made me laugh though.
Lucas Ropek
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Great news for fans of the Predator franchise, particularly standalone prequel entry Prey: the director of that 2022 film, Dan Trachtenberg (who also made 10 Cloverfield Lane), is returning to the universe. While Prey 2 still might happen, that’s not what this new project is; rather, it’s another standlone titled Badlands.
As Deadline reports, Badlands is a direct result of Prey’s success; despite being a straight-to-Hulu release in a time when theaters where still reopening after the height of the pandemic, it was a critical and audience smash. There’s no word yet if Badlands will get a theatrical release, but it seems like a good possibility; the trade writes that the project is “high prority” for 20th Century, with the lead role currently being cast and shooting due to start later in 2024.
There are no specific plot details yet, but we can absolutely assume the story will involve an alien hunter coming to Earth with all manner of ridiculous weaponry, hoping to add more victims to their kill count. Purely speculating here, but the title Badlands evokes the Wild West era; if Trachtenberg is going for another period piece in the vein of Prey, perhaps we’ll see some sharpshooting outlaws in the mix.
Are you excited for a new Predator movie that follows Prey’s blueprint for success? Let us know in the comments below.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Cheryl Eddy
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The answer is: No, but you’d be forgiven for having believed that was the case since a viral news story made the rounds earlier this week claiming it was so.
The story in question was published by a Swiss newspaper, Aargauer Zeitung, and claimed that three million electric toothbrushes had been tied into a botnet, which was then used by cybercriminals to carry out a financially damaging DDoS attack on a Swiss company’s website. The source of the story were researchers from Fortinet, a well-known security company based in California.
This story, which sounded just crazy enough to be true, was subsequently recycled by numerous English-speaking outlets, including Tom’s Hardware, ZDNet, and others. There was a certain logic to it. Cybercriminals can be very creative when it comes to using smart hardware to build malicious networks; the Mirai cybercriminals notably used over 100,000 smart devices to build one of the most notorious botnets ever. Why not use a smart toothbrush or two?
The problem, however, is that not all smart devices are built alike. The toothbrush story unraveled after security experts on X began chiming in about the ridiculousness of this scenario. Some said that it was basically impossible, given that smart toothbrushes connect to Bluetooth, not the internet. A story from 404 Media cited skeptical security experts, who called into question the validity of the narrative.
Now, the story has been officially deemed false. According to Fortinet, the Swiss journalists who initially spread the story misinterpreted their researchers during an interview, which then caused U.S. outlets to uncritically pick up the false narrative and further circulate it. In a statement shared with ZDNet, Fortinet clarified that the toothbrush incident had not actually happened, and was more of a thought experiment than anything:
“To clarify, the topic of toothbrushes being used for DDoS attacks was presented during an interview as an illustration of a given type of attack, and it is not based on research from Fortinet or FortiGuard Labs. It appears that due to translations the narrative on this topic has been stretched to the point where hypothetical and actual scenarios are blurred.
Covering cybersecurity as a journalist can be tricky. Many stories are pitched as research by security companies, and those companies are incentivized to elaborate a bit in their research findings to get more attention for their business. Indeed, the Swiss newspaper at the center of the toothbrush drama has now come out and blamed Fortinet for falsely claiming that the story was real. The paper claims, in a statement posted to its website, that the excuse of a “translation error” is, itself, made up:
[Translated from German by Google Translate] What the Fortinet headquarters in California is now calling a “translation problem” sounded completely different during the research: Swiss Fortinet representatives described the toothbrush case as a real DDoS at a meeting that discussed current threats…
Fortinet provided specific details: information about how long the attack took down a Swiss company’s website; an order of magnitude of how great the damage was. Fortinet did not want to reveal which company it was out of consideration for its customers.
The text was submitted to Fortinet for verification before publication. The statement that this was a real case that really happened was not objected to.
Gizmodo reached out to Fortinet for more information on how this tall tale got so much circulation and will update our story if it responds.
Lucas Ropek
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Southwestern Iceland has been a world transformed over the last few months, as initial tremors gave way to a full-throated volcanic eruption. The fishing village of Grindavík was evacuated in November, along with popular tourist destinations like the country’s Blue Lagoon, as residents held their breath for a potential eruption.
And lo, a little later than expected, in December 2023, a large crack in the ground made by the initial quakes began to spew molten rock, captured in some remarkable photos. Another eruption happened last month, and now, a resurgence in volcanic activity forced lava across the snow-covered landscape in southwestern Iceland. The recent eruption—the third in as many months—started around 6 a.m. local time Thursday.
“The power of the eruption has decreased. Now it is erupting mainly in three places on the crater that opened this morning,” Iceland’s meteorological office reported at 2 p.m. local time. “This is not unlike what was seen in the December 18 eruption, when the activity shifted to individual craters a few hours after eruption.”
The lava flows and cooled rock from the recent activity have blanketed swaths of the region, as you’ll see in the following photos.
Isaac Schultz
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