Technology news

It’s not been a great week over at JavaScript repository NPM after a trademark battle erupted between a longtime contributor and messaging app Kik, resulting in the former pulling his code and crashing thousands of websites. But, as always in the tech community, a solution is never too far away. GitHub user Andrea Parodi has created a simple tool to check if your NPM project name is trademarked. You can run it across the entire site, or check out specific users. It’s

Artificial Intelligence continues to surprise and shock us. Last week, we saw that AI can be better than us at playing Go. This week, Microsoft’s chatbot TayTweets showed us that machine learning can even produce AI’s that are better at hate speech than we are. Microsoft promptly hit the killswitch on that one. Whoops, maybe we ought to stick with non-interactive AI for now. Incidentally, since the beginning of 2016, 39 companies in the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning s

As I sit down to do some work at my neighborhood coffee shop, I overhear an awkward introduction between two people at a table behind me. It’s a job interview. I take a sip of my americano misto and only put in one of my headphones. This is a ride that I want to come along for. It’s not every day that you get to be a fly on the wall for a situation that triggers feelings of  both optimism and disgust for all who participate. Unfortunately, the interviewer – let&

Dangling precariously from a Flirtey drone is a package that represents the future. The Australian startup is celebrating what it believes is the first fully-autonomous and legal US drone delivery in an urban area made to an address in Reno, Nevada, earlier this month. The flight was signed off by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) – and although a pilot and bystander were on hand, the GPS map worked just fine to get the drone to the correct address. Interestingly,&n

Microsoft research manager Shahram Izadi is showing off the company’s latest innovation using HoloLens: ‘holoportation,’ enabling him to appear as if he’s there in real-time, anywhere in the world. His image is captured in 3D by cameras placed around the room. This is then stitched together, compressed and transmitted so someone else can see, hear and interact with him as though he’s right there with them. You can even playback previous interactions, as t

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Interoperability is one of the key things that the Internet of Things lives or dies by – and so Nest and Amazon have gone live with a partnership that just makes sense for the future of smart things. You can now control your Nest from Amazon Echo, Fire TV, Echo Dot and Amazon Tap using Alexa voice commands. There’s no need for you to get up and adjust the heat. Simply say something like: “Alexa, set my Living Room temperature to 68 degrees.” Here&rsqu