Technology news

Ever since I learned about the annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in New York City, I knew I would have to make it my life's mission to go someday. That dream finally came true for me when I moved to New York last year, and the parade, as expected, did not disappoint. How could you go wrong with hundreds of dogs in adorable costumes? That's right, you can't.
Halloween costume choices for humans and dogs alike are telling of the trends and events of that year. Last year's parade saw meme

AT&T is now on its way to acquiring Time Warner for more than $80 billion. The deal promises to have a massive impact on the tech and entertainment industries. But seeds of this merger were planted almost 30 years ago. Back in 1987, AT&T did a deal with DC Comics (which is now held by Time Warner) to have an animated Clark Kent and Lois Lane appear in a Super Bowl spot promoting the AT&T Card. And none other than Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder are voicing the characters!
Can we

Near Death, a first-person survival game released this summer, is easiest to describe in terms of the things it’s not. Taking place in an abandoned Antarctic research base in the 1980s, Near Death shares a setting with John Carpenter’s The Thing — but it’s not a sci-fi or horror game. Its main mechanic is avoiding death by crafting and scavenging, but it’s not a survival simulator. It’s made by Orthogonal Games, creator of character-driven indie project The No

The Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T has reached a deal to acquire Time Warner for more than $80 billion. News of the merger first surfaced on Friday, when Reuters and Bloomberg reported that the deal could top $85 billion. If successful, AT&T will gain control of huge entertainment and news brands including HBO, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and CNN, and resembles efforts by competing ISPs in recent years to create enormous media conglomerates.
Since one of Time Warner's holdings is

In a speech today about his first 100 days in the White House, Donald Trump got more specific about how the universe is allegedly rigged against him. Trump, who has routinely called journalists nasty liars for bringing up his own record, blasted the media by turning his ire toward Comcast / NBC Universal. Saying the merged company is "trying to poison the mind of the American voter," Trump said that the now-five-year-old deal should never have been approved in the first place, and that it's bad

Toyota announced today that it will start selling buses that run on hydrogen fuel-cells in Tokyo next year in advance of the 2020 Summer Olympics. That news (first reported by Endgadget) in-and-of-itself isn’t that interesting — many cities across the globe have fleets of hydrogen-powered buses — but Toyota’s bus a nifty secret power: in an emergency situation, it can also operate as a high-powered external power generator.“The Toyota Group considers the use of hydr

Audiences associate the word "horror" with scary movies or terrifying novels. But over the past half-decade, live theater and haunted house exhibits have merged, bringing new life to the genre with interactive, real-world experiences that let audiences step through the screen and into their own personal tales of terror. In The Future of Fear, we’re talking to the creators of some of the most striking, immersive horror experiences to see how they’re taking the genre in directions it&r

When I first heard that Battlefield 1 was going to be set in World War I, I shook my head. I thought that the multiplayer combat would be very slow paced. The weapons would be very unsatisfying and mostly ineffective. And the sessions would involve a lot of walking and running to get to the action.
Thankfully, I was wrong. The 64-player Conquest Mode in multiplayer is a crazy battle, where 32 players fight 32 from the other side. Everywhere you go, even in a big map, you run into comba

Black Mirror is out on Netflix today. Should I tell you the twist about [REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED]? Just kidding, I don't know all the twists but I'm sure they have something to do with our collective impending doom. Luckily we can pass the time until the apocalypse hits with Jake Gyllenhaal movies and high-def footage of all of the Earth's most beautiful places that we haven't yet destroyed with our human-ness.Continue reading…

GUEST: In the first presidential debate of 2016, Secretary Clinton pointed to innovation as a key to economic prosperity saying, “I want us to invest in you. I want us to invest in your future. That means jobs in infrastructure, in advanced manufacturing, innovation and technology, clean, renewable energy, and small business, because most of the new jobs will come from small business.” Her remarks highlighted that the U.S. needs technology innovation beyond the classic hubs

We’ve featured some great offers from TNW Deals this week, and compiled the best of them in one place. Check out a pair of great Bluetooth earbuds, a storage boost for your iOS device, a powerful VPN, and a lifetime cloud storage solution. iKlips Dual-Interface Drive — 20% off Adding storage to your iOS devices is usually a hassle (and pricey), but the iKlips drive neatly solves that issue. Simply plug the iKlips’ Lightning connector to your iOS device, and you’ll easily

Amazon has begun shipping its latest Fire TV stick, and along with the new hardware the company announced its biggest update to the Fire TVs user interface since its launch in 2014 is on the way. Amazon describes the new user interface as a "cinematic experience" and says that it will show trailers and screenshots without the need to jump in and out of apps. The new interface also supports a customizable apps list on the home page, which should make it easier to quickly access the games and apps

EXCLUSIVE: The launch of Chinese electronics powerhouse Huawei’s upcoming flagship smartphones is fast approaching, and VentureBeat has learned that the curved-screen variant codenamed Long Island will come to market as the Mate 9 Pro. VentureBeat recently reported its existence, and published the first (small) renders.
Continuing the New York-themed pre-release naming scheme, the standard Mate 9 is codenamed Manhattan.
These are 5.9-inch handsets powered by HiSilicon Kirin 960 systems-on-

(Reuters) – A federal grand jury in California has indicted a Russian man for hacking computers belonging to LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.
Yevgeniy Nikulin was arrested on Oct. 5 by officials in the Czech Republic and remains in custody in Prague, the Justice Department said in a news release.
LinkedIn said at the time of his arrest that it was related to a 2012 breach at the social networking company that may have compromised credentials of

If you just received your Google Pixel or Pixel XL this week and rushed to activate it — as I did — you may or may not have noticed a quirky detail on the hardware itself.
The SIM tray for each phone is detailed with the address of Google headquarters, a.k.a. the Googleplex — 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, in Mountain View, California — as noted today by Android Police. The Parkway part is left out, and the Mountain part is abbreviated as Mtn, presumably for lack of space.
It

Facebook is all-in on live video. It should come as no surprise that it’s bring its gung-ho approach to one of its most value acquisitions. According to a report from Russian news site T Journal, Instagram is testing live video in its ‘Stories’ feature. The Snapchat-esque service allows users to post images and video as part of a story, which then disappears after 24 hours. Users taking advantage of the live video streaming appear at the top of the page with a &

Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, here's an unbelievable price for a gorgeous 29″ 2560 X 1080 UltraSharp HD panoramic monitor. In addition to top-notch visuals this deal comes with a bonus $100 Dell gift card good for discounts on computers, laptops, accessories, and any content you'll need to complete your media library. Best of […] The post Snag an Ultra-Wide Dell Display Plus a $100 Gift Card for $292 appeared first on WIRED.

Razer went all-out with the design of its new 17-inch Razer Blade Pro gaming laptop. I went to the Razer office in San Francisco to get a hands-on look at the machine that the company calls the “desktop in your laptop.”
Desktop replacements are popular now with the availability of the Nvidia Pascal-based graphics chips, which have performance on-par with bigger machines and low power consumption as well. Razer is reaching for the no-compromise laptop, on

AT&T is nearing a deal to acquire Time Warner for $110 per share, a price tag to the tune of $85 billion for the telecom. According to Reuters, AT&T has reached an agreement in principle, which is a kind of stepping stone on the path to a formal contract. It essentially puts in place the terms of a future contract, but it is not an indication of a closed deal.
However, a finalized deal could be approved as soon as Sunday and may be announced on Monday, according to Bloomberg, which earli

After a large-scale distributed denial of service attack took down large portions of the internet today, Dyn reported our connected devices could be responsible for the attack. Here’s how it works: A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack uses multiple machines to attack a central server. These server requests choke the network and allow few, if any, legitimate requests to get through. When a user attempts to access this server, they’re met with a message that it&rsqu

Nintendo revealed its new Switch console yesterday, but much the new device remains a mystery.
The console/portable hybrid is coming next March, which seems awfully soon considering how little we know about it here. It’s not a lot. Don’t get us wrong, we’re intrigued by the base ideas of the Switch. But these days, we expect a lot features from our consoles. Just look at the competition, which offers suites of online features for playing with friends, sharing gam

Razer has spent much of the last few years trying to dispel the notion that you need a super bulky laptop for serious gaming chops, and made waves with its svelte Blade and Blade Stealth. Now the company is giving its largest laptop line, the 17-inch Blade Pro, a big jolt of life by cramming a desktop-class Nvidia 1080 – one of the most powerful graphics cards around – into a chassis not much thicker than a Retina MacBook Pro, at 0.88 inches vs 0.71. Just look at the things crammed

GUEST: Three years ago I started a mobile app business. At that time, apps were a novelty and smartphone owners tried out new apps on a regular basis.
Today, the market is oversaturated with new apps, and to make things worse, many smartphone users have simply stopped downloading new apps altogether. To validate this, ask yourself when was the last time you downloaded a new app? Exactly…
Mobile apps are deep in the trough of disillusionment.Messenger apps are destined to repeat histo