Technology news

Do you love GoPros? Are GoPros your thing? GoPro knows you love GoPros, so today it announced a new backpack called the Seeker. It's for you, GoPro fan. It fits five GoPros inside. Five. It also comes with space for a bag of water, with its having a 16-liter compartment. But really, anyone buying this bag is doing so for the GoPro aspect. So, in addition to those five cameras you can stuff inside the Seeker's dedicated GoPro section, the backpack also comes with three mounting options: two over-

Adnan Syed, the subject of This American Life's 2014 Serial podcast, has been granted a new trial, The Baltimore Sun reports. Syed was convicted in 2000 of first-degree murder when he was just 19 years old.
In 1999, Syed's ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee was found dead in a Baltimore park. In order to reach a conviction, the prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of a single witness who claimed to be with Syed when he committed the murder. Serial painted the prosecutor's timeline of the even

The driver killed in the first known fatal crash of a Tesla vehicle in the semi-autonomous Autopilot mode had previously posted a viral video of his Model S avoiding an accident with Autopilot engaged. Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old Ohio man who regularly posted Tesla videos to his YouTube account, received more than 1.7 million views to a dash cam video of his Model S avoiding a collision on a highway.
The video even garnered a tweet and a link from Elon Musk.
Owner v

A Tesla Model S with the Autopilot system activated was involved in a fatal crash, the first known fatality in a Tesla where Autopilot was active. The company revealed the crash in a blog post and says it informed the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the incident and said NHTSA is investigating.
The accident occurred on a divided highway, when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S. Neither the driver, who is ultimately responsible

HTC is probably going to manufacture two new Nexus devices this year, which Google has reportedly codenamed Marlin and Sailfish. Last week, we got a preview of the specs for the Sailfish with no hint of Marlin. Now, it’s Marlin’s turn. Android Police published what we can supposedly expect to see on the bigger Nexus:
Quad-core Qualcomm processor
5.5-inch QHD AMOLED display
USB-C port
12-megapixel rear camera, 8-megapixel front camera
Rear fingerprint scanner
4GB RAM
3450mAh

Terrence Malick's first IMAX film, Voyage of Time, hits theaters October 7th and you can watch a trailer for it right now.
Voyage of Time is about the birth of the universe. If you're thinking "wasn't there a lot of 'birth of the universe' stuff in Malick's 2011 film The Tree of Life?" you are correct, and Malick has said that much of this film is pulled from the same pile of footage. (Honestly, it is truly fascinating what it takes to be considered a genius auteur director these days.)
The trai

If you're old enough to have had an AOL Instant Messenger account, then you may remember Jill020306, a curious teenager who kept getting creepy phone calls she couldn't resist answering. As part of the marketing campaign for the 2006 horror flick When A Stranger Calls, the ad agency Universal McCann built a chatbot that would play the part of Jill Johnson in an AOL Instant Messenger conversation. What's old is new again and today Sequel, "the chatbot platform that enables creators and

Facebook is shutting down Paper, a bold reimagining of the company's flagship app for iOS that impressed critics but failed to attract a large audience, the company said today. The app transformed the core Facebook experience into a kind of newsreader, with customizable sections for politics, technology, food, and other subjects. Visitors to the app received a message saying the app would no longer function after July 29th. Continue reading…

Tesla is readying a significant software update for its cars, including a smarter version of Autopilot and a user interface update, reports Electrek. The update, said to be version 8.0, is currently in beta testing. In a statement to The Verge, Tesla said it would have more to share about the update "in the coming weeks."
The report says the update will give Tesla’s autopilot semi-autonomous driving system the ability to take an off-ramp exit on the highway by activating the turn signal. C

True story: back when I worked for Engadget it was always my dream to cover a Steve Jobs keynote. I knew how to liveblog, I knew how to do photos for a liveblog. I was capable. But I'm also a walking embodiment of Murphy's Law. Everything that can go wrong with technology, will go wrong in my hands. What if I can't connect to the internet? What if my camera's not working? What if I forget a cable, or an SD card reader? I was too obviously cursed with unreliability to earn a spot at a Stevenote.

After traveling 3.5 billion miles, the DAWN spacecraft has reached the end of its primary mission over Ceres, a dwarf planet that sits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Since departing in 2007, DAWN became the first vehicle to orbit two separate objects, and the first to visit our Solar System’s asteroid belt for detailed study.
Powered by a breakthrough ion thruster, DAWN arrived at its first destination, asteroid 4 Vesta, on July 16th, 2011, where it spent over a year mappin

Dell is planning to discontinue its Venue line of Android tablets and cease issuing OS updates. The move to get out of the Android market, at least for the immediate future, will allow Dell to focus on its Windows 2-in-1 devices.
"The slate tablet market is oversaturated and is experiencing declining demand from consumers, so we’ve decided to discontinue the Android-based Venue tablet line," a Dell spokesman told The Verge. The spokesman continued to say its 2-in-1 products are better

My 1.5-year-old son has Coxsackie disease, which is very funny to say, but very unpleasant to have. He woke up this morning at 4.30AM. I didn't want to stay cooped up in the house, so after breakfast we went to the park. We were the only people there at daybreak, but the playground was teeming with birds and squirrels making a meal of the food scraps humans had left behind.
I spotted a squirrel perched on a garbage can. He was up to his waist in a paper bag that had been wedged halfway into the

Google wants the entirety of the internet to be explorable in virtual reality, and it's started using its mobile Chrome browser to make that happen. The latest beta and developer versions of Chrome for Android include support for the open source WebVR standard, reports Road to VR. The dev version also makes mention of a "VR Shell" feature that, in the future, will enable mobile device headsets to browse any website regardless of whether it uses WebVR.
WebVR is a JavaScript API that hel

The ozone hole over the Antarctic has begun to heal, according to a new study, more than 30 years after its discovery. The findings suggest that global efforts to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals have been effective, though scientists still aren't entirely sure about what's driving the ozone hole's recovery.
The study, published in the journal Science, combines data gathered from balloons and satellites to measure the area of the ozone layer over Antarctica from 2000 to 2015. Since 2000, the

Karma is a company that’s built a business model around sharing internet access with others, even strangers, through its hotspot service. But today it’s announcing something that takes sharing out of the equation, a new feature that finally lets you use a private Wi-Fi network with Karma’s mobile hotspot.
If you’re not familiar with how Karma works, it’s helpful to back up a few steps. Karma sells a small, mobile hotspot device called the Go that customers subs

In Daniels’ music videos and short films, things change rapidly and explosively. The filmmaking team — Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who became collaborators shortly after meeting in an animation class at Boston’s Emerson College — specializes in fast-moving, creatively daring, and often downright weird short pieces full of changes and reversals. In their video for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down For What,” a crazy beat gets into a man’s pant

 There is a lot of noise in the privacy space, says serial entrepreneur and Digi.me founder Julian Ranger. And cutting through that noise is one of the big challenges he reckons stands in the way of his current startup. But the concept behind Digi.me is so intriguing that you really have to hope the team manages to make themselves heard. Today the UK startup is announcing a £4.2… Read More

A Belgian court has overturned a ruling that would have forced Facebook to stop tracking non-users who had visited its pages, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. A Brussels appeals court found that the Belgian Privacy Commission, which brought a case against Facebook last year, does not have jurisdiction over the company’s Ireland-based European headquarters. As The Guardian reports, it also rejected a claim that the case was urgent and needed to be expedited.
This reverses a decis

Disney just announced a sequel to 2012's animated movie, Wreck-It Ralph. Directors Rich Moore and Phil Johnston will return to helm the sequel, along with John C. Reilly. The news was unveiled in a Facebook Live video, during which Reilly kept interrupting Moore and Johnston as they attempted to make the announcement.
Wreck it again Ralph
"Are we getting liked right now?" Reilly asks, after he's told they're being recorded live. Then, when Moore and Johnston tell him they're trying to annou

Spotify says Apple is making it harder for the streaming music company to compete, by blocking a new version of its iPhone app.In a letter sent this week to Apple’s top lawyer, Spotify says Apple is “causing grave harm to Spotify and its customers,” by rejecting an update to Spotify’s iOS app.The letter says Apple turned down a new version of the app while citing “business model rules,” and demanding that Spotify use Apple’s billing system if “Spot

On June 17, someone stole $53 million from the DAO, an experimental investment bank built in the Ethereum cryptocurrency system — and the developers have spent the last two weeks trying to get it back.
The DAO’s withdrawal system froze the money for 27 days, and rather than let the money slip away permanently, Ethereum's coders have decided to stop the theft by changing the basic code that the currency runs on. But making those changes is delicate and complex — and if nothing c

The Hubble Space Telescope is capturing amazing photographs of Jupiter’s auroras, which look like sparkly swirls at the planet’s poles.
The vivid glows are created when charged particles enter the gas giant’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles; the collision with atoms and molecules in the atmosphere produce the light. While on Earth the biggest auroras are caused by solar storms — when high energy particles ejected from the Sun rain down on our planet — auroras on

LG has released a new app called VPInput that allows you to control your LG smartphone from your Mac or PC. The app, which works with the LG G5, G4, and V10, will let you use your mouse and keyboard to remotely operate your phone. You can input text, send screenshots from your computer directly to your phone, and share clipboard text between the devices.
Although this won't be useful for everyone, it could come in handy in certain cases, as it operates over Bluetooth and doesn't r

N stands for Nougat. The next version of Google’s mobile operating system and the successor to Android Marshmallow will be Android Nougat, slated for release later this summer.
To pick the name for Android N, Google for the first time asked the public to weigh in. At the company’s I/O 2016 developer conference, Dave Burke, vice president of engineering for Android, said Google would take name suggestions at android.com/n. But he added that Google reserves the right to choose the fina

Google announced on Snapchat today that Android N, the latest version of Android, will now go by Android Nougat. The announcement comes after the company said at I/O last month that users could submit suggestions for the name online.
Nougat is the latest dessert-themed version of Android, due out later this summer. The release, initially announced in March and currently on its second (and mostly stable) beta, brings new features like an improved notification shade and split-screen multitask

As we increasingly communicate with each other over tools like Slack, GitHub, and HipChat, there’s a growing need for specialization, especially for those who work with lots of moving parts, like designers. Chris Kalani discovered this while working as an early product designer at Facebook, and he went on to create Wake, which is geared toward the visual medium and enables feedback about new products during the design phase.
The company, which launched last year, is now launching

On Friday, the European Union will implement new rules for electronic signatures, replacing existing regulations that had made the use of digital authentication difficult across the economic bloc.
Starting on July 1st, the eIDAS Regulation goes into effect, allowing individuals and businesses across the European Union to take advantage of a new series of digital signatures, seals, time stamps, registered delivery, and website authentication across national borders. These electronic sig

iRobot makes the Roomba. It also makes a mopping robot, a bot to help clean gutters, and one to clean pools. Now, the company might be nearing the release of a lawn mowing robot called Terra, according to patent filings released earlier this month. The company wrote in its application that Terra would be used for "robotic lawnmowers; structural and replacement parts and fittings for robotic lawnmowers."
The FCC approved iRobot’s work on a lawn mowing robot last year. At the time, Reut

Virtual reality is one of the big breakout trends of 2016. And now sports fans will be able to sample some of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in VR thanks to a tie-up between NBC and Samsung.
Kicking off in August, the two-week long event will see millions of people around the world tune in on TV, computers, mobile devices, and now VR headsets. NBC has revealed that the NBC Sports app will work in conjunction with Samsung Galaxy devices and the Samsung Gear VR to broadcast 85 hours of virtual reality

As the rumors about the disappearing headphone jack continue to surface, Walt reviews new earphones that still take advantage of this classic technology but adds a new twist. This sparks a new conversation about the powered audio jack and how it benefits existing technology.
We love your feedback and suggestions on how to make our show better and more fun — you can tweet at Walt at @waltmossberg and Nilay at @reckless. And of course, we'd love it if you subscribed in iT

There's a new Furby, and nothing is safe or sacred. It has hell eyes, made of cursed LCDs. It speaks 1,000 phrases, all adorably designed to destroy your soul probably. Its ears are kind of like arms! It connects to an app via Bluetooth, "allowing users to frequently engage in fresh entertainment content." Also there are virtual "Furblings" in the app, so that's confusing because I thought Furby was a meatspace thing?
Oh, I just remembered something kind of related: 666.
Here's an excerpt from t

Boston radio host Howie Carr wrote a breathless piece about how he’s not a racist, but is friends with Donald Trump. At least one of those things appears to be true.
The story, at the Boston Herald, is a messy and defensive non-apology about Carr’s decision to mock Senator Elizabeth Warren with a "war whoop." More importantly, the rant culminates with one of the strangest "compliments" of the 2016 election cycle.
After making a "joke" about how anti-Trump protestors don’t have

A man chooses. A slave obeys. A gamer buys remastered versions of titles they already own.
2K today announced that the rumored BioShock collection is real. It will come out on September 13 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The bundle includes the original BioShock, BioShock 2, BioShock: Infinite, and all of the single-player downloadable content released for the games. They will all run in 1080p and in 60 frames per second.Collections like these have become common in the industry, w

EXCLUSIVE: Location-aware displays haven’t exactly set the world on fire. In fact, they’re downright ridiculed in Terry Gilliam’s “The Zero Theorem,” where the ads always drive a dramatically incorrect message to passers-by, never pushing the right product to the fleeting target.
Today, NewAer is launching Kiosk — a proximity-based, beacon-free solution that turns an iPad, 4th generation Apple TV, or Raspberry Pi 3 into a fully customizable marketing portal &m

NASA is celebrating Independence Day this year by putting a spacecraft into orbit around Jupiter. The space agency’s Juno mission is slated to arrive at the massive planet on the night of July 4th, after having traveled across more than 1.7 billion miles of space over the past five years. Once Juno arrives, the probe’s main engine will fire, slowing the spacecraft down and placing it into orbit around Jupiter. It’s an important event for the mission, especially since NASA

You know the story by now. Apple is supposedly going to get rid of the headphone jack on its next iPhone and force users to either buy Bluetooth headphones or ones that plug into the Lightning port. There's going to be a big market for those Lightning headphones, and savvy manufacturers are going to need to start developing their designs, like, now. Today, Cirrus Logic announced a a MFi (Made for iPhone) development kit for Lightning headphones to show how great those future headphones will be a

The video for Rihanna's contribution to the upcoming Star Trek Beyond soundtrack premiered this morning in IMAX theaters. It's the first music video to be shot entirely with IMAX cameras, and it features Rihanna hanging out in space, performing magic. Near the end she turns into some kind of celestial god. It's cool!
The Starship Enterprise also makes an appearance in the clip, which is directed by frequent David Bowie and Katy Perry collaborator Floria Sigismondi. "Sledgehammer," a rueful