Technology news

So Equifax was hacked. Like, badly. But how to tell if you, personally, are affected by the massive data breach? There's a website for that — as long as you don't mind forking over even more information to Equifax. 
The credit reporting agency announced Thursday that private identifying information on potentially 143 million US citizens was accessed by "criminals," and that the information in question could include names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and even possi

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has sold 10 million copies since March, and its astronomical success was always going to lead to imitators of both the cheap and triple-A varieties. While I find perverse joy in the iOS and Android clones, like the shameless BulletStrike: Battleground, I’m fascinated to see what bigger, established studios will do with the formula. When it comes to Rockstar Games and GTA Online, however, we already know the answer thanks to the new Motor Wars mode i

20th Century Fox has tapped the creator of Netflix’s Daredevil, and The Martian screenwriter Drew Goddard to write and direct X-Force, a spinoff film about a team of superheroes led by Deadpool and Cable, according to a report from Deadline.
Deadline describes the superhero team as a “Black Ops force of down and dirty mutant warriors,” who are more violent than their gentler X-Men counterparts. The team will be headlined by Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool, Josh Brolin’s Cab

Even the cheapest 4K projectors are still way more expensive than most top-of-the-line 4K TVs, but that’s slowly starting to change. Sony introduced a series of new 4K projectors today, and one of them — the VPL-VW285ES 4K HDR Home Theater Projector — sells for $5,000. That’s still really expensive, but it’s dramatically less expensive than most of the other 4K projectors available from Sony, which largely cost more than $10,000.
The projector offers a maximum pictu

It's rare that a small startup is able to challenge the likes of Facebook and Snapchat in a meaningful way.
But Houseparty, a teen-centric video chat app is managing to do just that. One year since launching publicly (the company spent several months in a stealthy beta), Houseparty has grown to 20 million users who together have participated in more than half a billion video calls (or "parties," to use the app's terminology).
SEE ALSO: How Sarahah became one of the most popular iPhone apps in th

Sensitive personal information of 143 million people has been stolen from Equifax, the credit reporting agency announced on Thursday. 
From mid-May through July of this year, cyber criminals where able to access the personal information of its customers, including social security numbers and drivers license numbers.
The affected number, 143 million, is equal to about 44 percent of the U.S. population. 
SEE ALSO: How to tell if you're one of the 143 million Americans affected by the Equ

Equifax announced today that 143 million US-based users had their personal information compromised this year. Attackers reportedly exploited a vulnerability on Equifax's website to steal names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver’s license numbers. Credit card numbers for approximately 209,000 people and certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 people were also accessed. Although Equifax operates in oth

The first trailer for Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s historical drama The Current War has arrived, and it shows off the first look at a really intriguing story. The story dives into an intense rivalry over the future of electrical power in the United States in the late 1800s.The trailer opens with a Prestige-like shot of Cumberbatch standing in the middle of a field surrounded by light bulbs. We’re introduced to Thomas Edison (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Westinghouse (played by

What do you get when you mix robots and ice cream? A stone cold nightmare. 
Halo Top produced a commercial in which a woman wakes up in an all-white room being forcefully-fed ice cream from a robot. The video starts with the woman liking the first taste of the ice cream. But when she begins asking questions of her whereabouts, it all goes downhill from there.
The first red flag is the robot replying to her first question with "Humans require ice cream."
When she continues to ask questions

Ash and Pikachu's relationship began in the Kanto region over 20 years ago, and you'll be able to relive it this November in theaters across the U.S.
Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You! takes the first 80 episodes of the anime series and condenses them into a feature-length movie, which will be coming to select theaters on Nov. 5 and 6 through Fathom Events. Attendees with the latest Pokémon Sun and Moon games for the 3DS can get one of six special Pikachus in their game with a uniqu

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These earbuds on Kickstarter will transform the way you listen to music. Like, literally. The Swiss Audio earbuds can actually change the way you hear your music.
Completely wireless and designed to fit snugly in your ears, Swiss Audio earbuds are completely customizable so you can create a personalized hearing experience. The companion app allows you to adjust levels of certain sounds in your

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Fairy lights have long been a staple of dorm room decorating and suburban patios, but now they’ve been elevated to wearable tech status. You can literally light up a room in a constellation skirt embedded with LED lights.
SEE ALSO: Show your support for the Rebels with this Star Wars space skirtThe Twinkling Stars Skirt from ThinkGeek is cute on its own —the blue ombre color scheme

Amazon today rolled out the ability to quickly migrate a bot made with its Lex framework to an Alexa skill. The Amazon Lex console can now export a Lex bot as a JSON file, which can be made into an Alexa skill using the Skill Builder inside the Alexa development portal.
“The JSON configuration file contains the structure of your Amazon Lex chatbot, including the intent schema with utterances, slots, prompts and slot-types. The export functionality simplifies the process of creating an

You know how real life can be more difficult for people of color? Well now you can experience that "realism" in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's next South Park game, too, I guess.
The upcoming South Park: The Fractured But Whole game correlates your character's skin color to the game's level of difficulty. Yup.
Eurogamer got its hands on The Fractured But Whole and published a video of a play-through of the beginning in the game, including the character creation process where you pick your characte

The syntax and language we use during natural disasters can have a huge impact, from communicating the severity of an approaching storm to post-disaster relief efforts, and the island of Barbuda is the latest example.
SEE ALSO: With Hurricane Irma, Miami could be facing its nightmare storm scenario
First, make no mistake: What Irma did to Barbuda was absolutely devastating. The tiny island that makes up part of the single nation of Antigua and Barbuda was slammed head-on by Hurricane Irma at its

Google wants to make it easier for people with wheelchairs to get around using Maps, so the search giant is asking its massive user base for some help.  
Maps is launching a new initiative to encourage its Local Guides community to update locations around the world with new, detailed information about accessibility. Maps users can answer five simple questions about a site (for example, "Is there a wheelchair-accessible entrance?"), and the answers will be visible in the Map results afterwar

The sun is having quite a week. 
Our nearest star has shot out three powerful solar flares in the past two days, sending bursts of hot plasma into the solar system, on a possible collision course with Earth's magnetic field. 
The most extreme of those flares — a class X9.3 flare — was the most powerful flare we've seen in more than 10 years. 
SEE ALSO: A strong solar storm may bring auroras to your backyard Wednesday
An X2.2 flare shot out just before the X9 flare on W

Magic: The Gathering fans have watched as first Hearthstone, then Hex, then Shadowverse, then Eternal, then The Elder Scrolls: Legends, and then Gwent all reinvigorated the digital card game sector, a market that research firm SuperData estimates will hit $1.4 billion this year.
But their wait will soon end as the game that invented the collectible card battler in 1993 prepares to enter the Arena.
Today, Wizards of the Coast revealed Magic: The Gathering — Arena, its answer to Hearthstone

Maybe you know her strictly from Saturday Night Live, or maybe it's her standup routine that's left you with an aching side from laughing to hard. Regardless of how you were introduced to the comedic genius that is Leslie Jones, it's safe to say the world is a better—and tremendously funnier—place because of her existence.  
It's not every day one turns 50 years old so to help her celebrate that milestone, here are literally just bunch of reasons why we love Jones. 
SEE ALS

We still don't know exactly when Black Mirror Season 4 will premiere, but luckily, Netflix has taken pity on us and released a couple of images from two of the upcoming installments so that we can occupy our time with wild speculation until the show returns.
First up is "USS Callister," the only episode of the new season that creator Charlie Brooker co-wrote, pairing again with William Bridges, whom he previously collaborated with on the Season 3 episode "Shut Up and Dance." The episode is direc

San Francisco-based virtual reality startup UploadVR, which is now going by Upload, settled a sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit yesterday with its former employee. Anonymous sources told TechCrunch that the lawsuit ended, which Upload later confirmed in a statement. No further details about the settlement were provided.
The lawsuit was filed this past May in California by Elizabeth Scott, formerly the director of digital and social media at UploadVR. The suit says that female co

New York City may be littered with gluten-loving rats and paved with chicken bone highways, but if there's one thing the city's occasionally good at, it's policy.
The city's school Chancellor Carmen Fariña recently announced that free lunch would now be available to the city's 1.1 million students, regardless of income level. Previously, free lunch was only available to low income students who qualified.
SEE ALSO: This Whole Foods map of French cheese is a crime against dairy
The city's m

Graydon Carter, longtime editor of Vanity Fair and longertime nemesis of Donald Trump, announced on Thursday that he will step down in December from his post atop the magazine industry.
We could think of no better time to review all the ways Carter and his magazine wielded words—spoken and written—as weapons against a man who became the most powerful on the planet.
SEE ALSO: Vanity Fair is riding high on its Trump feud
Here's several of Carter and Vanity Fair's most notable Trump bur

Gadot revealed in a candid conversation on The Hollywood Reporter's "Awards Chatter" podcast that she lost a lot of roles over the years simply because she wasn't famous enough for producers to think she'd carry the film — including Mad Max: Fury Road. A Wonder Woman later, and now she's one of the biggest names around.
SEE ALSO: 'Wonder Woman' has done it! Top 5 superhero movie of all time
“I had so many almosts for big, great things, but I was never big enough of a name,&

Right now, three hurricanes are spinning in the Atlantic Ocean, an unusual event that hasn't happened since 2010. Even stranger, each of them is expected to hit land on the same day: Saturday. 
First, there's record-shattering Hurricane Irma, of course, which devastated parts of the northern Leeward Islands, as well as the Caribbean, and poses a dire threat to the Southeast. It is forecast to pass over or very close to South Florida on Saturday night into Sunday as a Category 4 or 5 storm.

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Do androids dream of electric sheep? Is Data a sentient being, or property of Starfleet? How exactly did C3PO get his red arm? The answers to these questions may very well be found inside September's robot-themed Loot Crate.
If you're not familiar, here's the rundownLoot Crate is a subscription service that delivers a new mystery box of themed geek and gamer gear to your door every month. Each

GUEST: These days, it’s tough to avoid newspaper headlines warning that artificial intelligence is coming for your job. The problem is that, often, the only thing these oversimplifications get right is that there is in fact an important connection between automation and work. What’s surprising is how many examples there are of AI acting as the catalyst for new hiring, higher wages, and happier employees. But of course AI success stories aren’t as exciting as the “job-stea

Just two days after the release of Destiny 2, the game’s fervent fan community has already centered its focus on a grievance that’s threatening to tear it apart. You could call it ShaderGate. (Please don’t actually call it that.) In short, the issue stems from a critical shift in how cosmetic items in the game work, and it has players accusing developer Bungie of overstepping its boundaries and caving to corporate greed.It’s yet another entry in the ongoing love-hate rela

Postmates is known as the app where the cost of delivery could easily total more than the food you ordered. 
That's because the app will deliver from anywhere. Ordering from somewhere outside the usual delivery range, though, would send delivery fees skyrocketing into the double digits based on distance. (Orders from the core merchants on Postmates Plus, with more limited options comparable to Seamless or Grubhub, had a more standard delivery fee of $2.99.) 
Postmates is scrapping that

There is no stopping artificial intelligence, but IBM and MIT figure they can speed up its development with a healthy infusion of cash and a brand new research center.
On Thursday, IBM and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) announced a new $240 million research center called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab that's focused, at least in part, on how new  hardware can help energize and grow AI technologies.
SEE ALSO: Elon Musk and 115 other experts ask the UN to ban killer robots in ope

Songbringer is an action role-playing game that’s hoping to clear the name of procedural generation. Nathanael Weiss, who developed the game under his studio name Wizard Fu, teamed up with publisher Double Eleven, and it’s available now for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
Weiss thinks that procedural generation has gotten a bad rap when, alongside more bespoke elements, it can help create a world that’s fully realized and not just random. He created Songbringer to evoke the sa

PRESS RELEASE:Womply, one of the nation’s fastest growing merchant-focused companies, helps run the front office for local businesses in 400 industry verticals and 18,000 U.S. zip codesSAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–September 7, 2017– Womply, the leader in front office software for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced that the company now serves more than 100,000 small businesses in every corner of America. Nationwide, local merchants in more than 18,

With the NFL a day away from the kickoff of its 2017 season, a definite question has emerged: Is this the year that the NFL finally embraces athletic activism the way the NBA does?
The examples are adding up on a nearly daily basis. A week of preseason football couldn't go by without players making statements. Members of the Cleveland Browns knelt during the anthem. Michael Bennett sat out the anthem while his white teammate, Justin Britt, placed his hand on Bennett’s shoulder in a show of

The only thing that separates Florida's Turkey Point nuclear plant from the ocean is a thin squiggle of land that doesn't seem to offer much protection.
There's a reason the place is so close to the water. Such plants need loads of H2O for constant cooling. But that need also means that, periodically, you'll come across a story about a potentially catastrophic storm whirling toward Turkey Point's nuclear facilities.
Turkey Point and its northern neighbor at St. Lucie, which is also perched preca

Before you move into a new home, you need to ask yourself one question: Are there dead people here who want to destroy my sh*t?
Hunting ghosts was once the province of experts and moron football players in R.L. Stine novels. Now, thanks to an explosion of paranormal shows and app developers eager to capitalize on the craze, there are a wide range of affordable ghost-hunting apps downloadable for your iPhone.
SEE ALSO: Here are all the deportable offenses Trump's crappy children have committed
Ma

Jacob Dubé at Motherboard noticed something strange on Facebook Messenger this week. He reports that a notification popped up saying, "[Name redacted] and 15 others may want to meet up with you this week." He was then shown photos of his friends and asked if he wanted to meet up with them. His response would apparently be kept private unless both he and the other person said yes.The UI is reminiscent of a dating app, particularly Tinder, which requires both people to say they're intereste

There is a ghost who lives in Donald Trump's childhood home and for the past 71 years he's had to go to the bathroom.Skeptics, please hold your judgment. I was once, and largely remain, a person of your kind: someone who is deeply suspicious of the existence of supernatural phenomenaSo when I walked into Trump's childhood home last week with a ragtag team of amateur queer ghost hunters, I was prepared to keep my expectations low and my blood alcohol level high. I'm not someone who is afraid

Scientists have developed a “pen” that can help surgeons identify cancer cells within 10 seconds. The tool could one day be used during surgeries to quickly determine what tissue should be cut in order to remove tumors completely.
The device, called MasSpec Pen, isn’t perfect yet, however; it can distinguish between cancerous and healthy tissue with about 96 percent accuracy. But the team behind the device, described this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, hope

The Federal Trade Commission today sent warning letters to 21 influential Instagram users to tell them to disclose their business interests when sharing paid posts about brands or advertisers. Letters sent today cite specific posts by Instagram influencers the FTC believes may violate its Endorsement Guides. FTC complaints can come with a fine of about $40,000.
“The letters ask that the recipients advise FTC staff as to whether they have material connections to the brands in the ident

PRESS RELEASE:Early Zynga Investor Brad Feld and Paul Allen’s Vulcan back latest Pioneer Square Labs spinout in fast-growing esports marketSEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–September 7, 2017– Esports startup Taunt announced today that it has closed a $1.75 million seed financing round, led by Foundry Group. Taunt is the fifth spinout of Pioneer Square Labs (“PSL”), whose founders, Geoff Entress, Greg Gottesman and Mike Galgon participated in the round. In addition to Fo

Touch ID won’t be part of the redesigned iPhone that Apple introduces next week, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Rumors that Apple will ditch the fingerprint sensor, which it first popularized on smartphones in 2013, have been popping up for months now. Bloomberg said in July that Apple was hoping to replace the fingerprint sensor with facial recognition, but it wasn’t a sure thing just yet. That same day, an industry analyst went further and said the phone likely won’t i

ANALYSIS: Amazon sent Heartland cities scrambling on Thursday morning with the announcement that it is looking to secure a location for what it calls HQ2 — a second office in North America that the company claims will be “fully equal” to its Seattle headquarters, which employs more than 25,000 people. Amazon says that its second headquarters — HQ2 for short — will employ up to 50,000 people, and will cost around $5 billion to construct.
The move comes as the ecommer