Hasta La Gadget!

The character’s temporary makeover threatens to destroy “fabrics of our society,” the right-wing media mouth said.

Days after he was permanently banned from YouTube, Dan Bongino has also lost his ability to earn revenue from Google ads. On Friday, the Bongino Report Twitter account sent out a tweet suggesting Google had revoked the pundit’s AdSense account. Later that same day, Tech Policy Press confirmed the suspension with Google. The company told the outlet Bongino’s website had violated its AdSense publisher policies.

“We have strict publisher policies in place that explicitly prohibit misleading and harmful content around the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrably false claims about our elections,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget. “When publishers persistently breach our policies we stop serving Google ads on their sites. Publishers can always appeal a decision once they have addressed any violating content.”

Bogino’s YouTube ban came down from Google after the Fox News host attempted to evade a prior suspension related to the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. He posted a video to one of his accounts questioning the effectiveness of masks against the coronavirus. At that point, YouTube temporarily suspended Bogino. It then permanently banned him after he attempted to post that same video to another channel, thereby violating the platform’s terms of service.

On an episode of his podcast titled “I’m Daring YouTube to Do This,” Bogino said before the initial suspension he would continue to post videos about his claims on masks until the company took action. And while it appears he actively courted Google to ban him in both instances, the loss of AdSense revenue has the potential to hurt Bongino more than losing access to YouTube. On Twitter, Claire Atkin, the co-founder of Check My Ads, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting disinformation in the digital advertising industry, said the Gateway Pundit, a website that spread COVID-19 and election misinformation, lost $1.1 million in annual revenue after Google revoked its AdSense account.

If you’re also someone who’s waited in line for hours to get a COVID test—or faced similar frustrations trying to buy them at your local drugstore—then you’re in luck. A group of scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara say they’ve developed a new kind of COVID-testing system that only involves some…

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Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9’s regular round up of the latest and coolest toy news on the internet. This week, Hasbro goes ‘90s with a trio of animated X-Men icons, MAFEX swings between the worlds of DC Comics and the Terminator, and Hot Toys returns to The Mandalorian for a few more Nite Owls. Check it out!

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One of the largest online marketplaces for non-fungible tokens is once again the center of controversy. Mere months after one of its employees resigned for using insider information to profit on NFT drops, OpenSea caused a stir among its users this week when it abruptly announced it was putting a restriction on its free minting tool. The feature allows individuals to create and list an NFT without first paying a “gas price,” the fee that crypto miners charge to write new data to a blockchain.

On Thursday, OpenSea said it would add a 50 item limit to the tool. Predictably, the announcement wasn’t popular among OpenSea users, and the company quickly reversed course. But in doing so, it provided some context about the feature. In a Twitter thread spotted by Vice News, the company said more than 80 percent of the NFTs recently created through its free minting tool involved either plagiarized work or spam.

It’s a staggering number, but one that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Artists and photographers have complained for months that the company hasn’t done enough to prevent scammers and bots from profiting from their work. In fact, there’s an entire Twitter account dedicated to documenting NFT thefts.

“Every decision we make, we make with our creators in mind. We originally built our shared storefront contract to make it easy for creators to onboard into the space,” OpenSea said on Twitter. “We didn’t make this decision lightly. We made the change to address feedback we were receiving from our entire community.”

OpenSea added it was working on several “solutions” it hoped would appease users while deterring bad actors. Moving forward, the company promised it would preview those changes before rolling them out broadly.