Technology news

Tesla has begun to share some information from the investigation the May crash of a Model S with Autopilot active. In its blog post yesterday, the company said that the Autopilot system failed to differentiate the white side of a tractor trailer that was crossing in front of the vehicle from the bright sky behind it.
"Tesla’s autopilot system was designed in-house and uses a fusion of dozens of internally- and externally-developed component technologies to determine the proper course of ac

We’re investigating the nature of these Innovation Engines in a series of What to Think podcasts, sponsored by Pivotal Tracker, and columns by VentureBeat editor at large Dylan Tweney. Tune in here to learn the secrets behind the tech world’s most successful platforms.
In this week’s episode, we sit down with Ashish Kuthiala, a senior director for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), overseeing the organization’s devops portfolio.
Above: Ashish Kuthiala, HP Enterprise
We tal

Florida Highway Patrol found a portable DVD player inside the Tesla Model S that collided with a tractor trailer on Wednesday, according to reports. The driver was killed when both he and the Autopilot system failed to see the truck crossing the highway.
The driver of the truck involved the crash, Frank Baressi, said a Harry Potter movie was still being displayed on the DVD player, a Reuters report said.
SEE ALSO: What the fatal Tesla Autopilot crash means for driverless cars
Baressi could not

GUEST: In just eight years, the smartphone has changed how people interact with the world and with businesses, from customer service to commerce to content and beyond. And more change is coming. Every company that has a mobile app or call center is going to have to interact with customers through myriad channels.
Today, those channels are primarily via social media, but that trend obscures the bigger change: messaging.
Messaging will become the primary path for customer interaction over the

Ordinarily, businesses in South Florida would be preparing for a swarm of tourists this holiday weekend. This year, they're worried the only living thing on their beaches come the Fourth of July might be some putrid blue-green algae.
The algae, which the Washington Post compared to "thick, furry mold," "chunky guacamole," or a "festering, infected sore," has been coating waterways in four counties since late May, when algae in Lake Okeechobee tested positive for high levels of a toxin that targe

Give milk a break and try dipping your cookies in hummus.
While the combination of cookies and hummus would normally sound pretty unappetizing, Delighted By has taken chick peas to a whole new level by creating an intriguing line of dessert hummus.
SEE ALSO: Sushi donuts food trend sprinkles the Internet with culinary delight
On the Delighted By website, founder Makenzie Marzluff describes this dessert hummus as "a totally new invention that is making the world fall in love with great

In a bizarre twist of fate, the first known fatality involved with a Tesla Model S with Autopilot engaged was the same man who posted a video to YouTube back in early April showing what he described as the semi-autonomous driving system avoiding a collision.
SEE ALSO: What the fatal Tesla Autopilot crash means for driverless cars
Joshua Brown, the man the Florida Highway Patrol identified as the victim of the fatal Tesla Model S crash on Wednesday, had previously posted a video of his Model S na

Remember One Laptop Per Child? They distributed a few million cheap, brightly-colored XO laptops running a weird version of Linux called "Sugar OS," and then... what happened?
Well, I'm not sure actually. But OLPC Australia is carrying the torch, sort of. This offshoot now calls itself "One Education," and has just announced the Infinity:One. Gone are the weird bulk orders required to get your hands on an OLPC in recent years, now you can just straight pre-order a laptop for $230, which should s

Ben Chestnut remembers when he first heard the promo spot that would end up with MailChimp getting a shoutout on Saturday Night Live.
The CEO of MailChimp told Mashable's Biz Please that the company had first dibs on "Serial," the podcast that would become a cultural phenomenon, thanks to a pre-existing sponsorship that actually didn't go so well.
"Serial" more than made up for it.
As for the famous "Mail Kimp" line, that was a bit of providence.
"When we got the recording, our head of marketin

"I'm better sleeping on my own," crooned Justin Bieber in "Love Yourself" and he means it.
The singer, who was most recently linked to actress and billionaire's daughter Nicola Peltz, participated in the celebrity hobby du jour — posting emotional screenshots of iPhone notes on their social media accounts —  to stand firmly by the lyrics.
SEE ALSO: Justin Bieber's latest cry for help is wearing khaki shorts over his jeans
First, he discussed his faith.And then, he either extoll

Is it life imitating art, or art imitating life? I can’t ever be sure, but one thing is for certain: what was once satire is now becoming eerily accurate representations of real-world occurrences. Silicon Valley, for example, was once just HBO’s way of poking fun at the tech world, but some now believe it might be the most accurate portrayal of the community ever aired. It’s not just television either. The Onion, an online satire rag has actually nailed some rather unbeli

Huawei's MateBook will draw the inevitable copycat comments from fans of both the Microsoft Surface Pro and the iPad Pro.
But really, who copied who? Everyone copied Microsoft. The original Surface, as big a flop as it was, had the new portable-PC concept right from the start.
SEE ALSO: Huawei's P9 and P9 Plus flagships come with dual Leica cameras
The idea then and today remains the same: a tablet that transforms into a laptop with a detachable keyboard. Tablets — iPads in particula

Today, New Horizons team received official confirmation that they will get extra funding from NASA to continue doing science with their faraway spacecraft, which visited Pluto in the summer of 2015. During this extension, which will last to 2021, New Horizons will conduct another flyby of an object at the Solar System's edge, as well as collect data on dozens of other deep space objects along the way. Continue reading…

When Angus the French bulldog found a long stick, little did he know he would be teaching us all a lesson in persistence.
The puppy tried to bring his new toy into the house but was stopped by a doorframe that was just too small for his liking.
SEE ALSO: Dog interrupts human's yoga with a downward dog of his ownAfter multiple attempts and some shrewd maneuvers, Angus' stick failed to make it through. 
One day, pup! We'll be cheering for ya. Read more...
More about Cute Animal Videos, Cute

Between 64 and 116 civilians were killed by drone strikes outside conventional warzones during the Obama administration by the end of 2015, according to figures released Friday.
A report from the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said Friday that somewhere between 2372 and 2581 combatants were killed, and that 473 airstrikes were carried out outside "areas of active hostilities." 
Those strikes took place between Jan. 20, 2009 (the day of the President's

Why gift a dozen roses when you can give hundreds?
Brad Bousquet's wife Alissa just completed her last round of chemotherapy at Methodist Estabrook Cancer Center in Omaha, Nebraska. To celebrate the milestone, Brad presented her with 500 — yes, 500 — roses in a whopping 36 vases.
Alissa's reaction? A lot of "holy moly."
Brad wrote in a Facebook post that to gather the blooms, he arranged for a local flower shop to take rose orders from friends and family. 
The shop sold each ros

Construction on Apple’s massive new campus is nearing completion. The ‘spaceship’ or ‘mothership’ as some are calling it is set to open some time next year. The circular building is massive in scale and includes a 100,000 square-foot fitness center, 11,000-car parking garage topped with solar panels the building will need to produce some 20-megawatts (enough to power 3,000 homes) of power and a massive auditorium that could play host to future Apple events, li

Facebook just moved one step closer toward making its bot ambitions a reality.
Just months after introducing the first bots for Facebook Messenger at F8, the social network now counts more than 11,000 bots on its platform, the company announced. The milestone comes alongside some major improvements to how the bots work inside of Messenger.
SEE ALSO: How to play Facebook Messenger's hidden soccer minigame
The updates add more functionality — like the ability to use GIFs and other media wit

Sharpen up your pocket swords, because it’s time to strike down countless waves of random enemies on the go.
Project Dynasty Warriors is a new free-to-play mobile game that brings the enormous battles and melee combat of the console Dynasty Warriors games to iOS and Android for the first time in “late 2016.” Fast-growing mobile publisher Nexon Korea is producing the app, and it is working with Dynasty Warriors publisher Koei Tecmo and developer XPEC Entertainment. Unlike s

Flipping water bottles is the best sport in the world, and that is a fact.
Back in May, a high schooler blew minds with his talent show flip. Before that, a kid proved that long range and short range bottle flips were very different beasts, and he was a master of both.
Now, the trend officially has competitors in Australia, with this compilation by the How Ridiculous channel.
So what do you say, Olympic committee? Do we have to fill out paperwork or something? 
News flash: June 2016's news

American girl dolls may differ by race and class and lunch pail, but many come with the same kind of hair.
Recently, however, Meredith Bailey was shopping with her daughter at an American Girl Dolls store in Natick, Massachusetts when she noticed that one of the dolls on display had no hair at all. 
Bailey's own daughter, Morgan, has alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss. It was empowering for Morgan to see a doll that looked like her on display, her mother wrote on Facebook.
SEE ALS

GUEST: Facebook’s Messenger client runs on mobile devices, has built-in chatbots, and could support native ads. Sound familiar? Maybe the monolith of social media is building a WeChat clone after all.
There’s been a steady proliferation of mobile users in places like Japan and Singapore, and the apps (most notably WeChat) tend to be a constant companion. Users stay within the app to communicate, make purchases, make phone calls, and hold video chats. Messenger could su

This week, Eye-Fi announced that it would be discontinuing services for its older Wi-Fi-connected SD cards. The X1 and X2 SD cards were designed to bring Wi-Fi connectivity to older cameras that lacked it, and worked with a mobile or desktop app for transferring images. Eye-Fi says it started phasing out the X2 cards in 2012 and ceased selling them in authorized channels in March, 2015. The company currently sells (and supports) the Mobi line of SD cards, which were launched in April, 2014.
Eye-

The US government has released numbers estimating that targeted air strikes have killed 64 to 116 civilians outside war zones since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The New York Times reports that 473 strikes, mostly carried out by drones, also resulted in between 2,372 and 2,581 "combatant" deaths. The statistics offer a rare official look at casualties from the drone program, albeit one that is significantly lower than unofficial estimates.
The report doesn’t count deaths in A

1916French troops prepare to move on German positions.Image: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty ImagesOn July 1, 1916, the first shots were fired in what would become one of the bloodiest engagements in human history, the 141-day Battle of the Somme.It was nearly two years into what was then being called the Great War, and what was once expected to be a quick skirmish had turned into a mechanized war of attrition, in which dozens of trains a day ferried men and materiel into a maw of bullet

We live in a brave new world, ladies. 
A woman is on the brink of capturing a major party's presidential nomination for the first time in history and the Supreme Court just definitively ruled to protect abortion rights. 
SEE ALSO: Serena Williams takes down hecklers for all of womankind
Yet, if it seems that gender equality is within our collective grasp, consider the surprising results from a JAMA Dermatology study released Thursday. 
A nationally representative survey of 3,316

Echo has gotten better with every passing update, but Amazon’s been surprisingly slow to implement some pretty obvious features. Case in point: you can actually place new orders from, you know, Amazon. To be clear, you could previously only re-order things you’d already bought –  a feature that was introduced last May. Then in May this year, Amazon added the ability to track your Amazon orders. This is the first time you could actually place completely new orders. As

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest public cloud currently available, today announced that it’s adding on-premises and multi-cloud support to its EC2 Run Command feature, which lets users run shell scripts and other managerial jobs on multiple machines. Until now the service only let users do this for multiple EC2 instances, or virtual slices of physical servers in Amazon’s data centers.
“Many AWS customers also have some servers on-premises or on another cloud, and have bee

UPDATED July 1 4:20 p.m. PT
A group of gunmen attacked a restaurant popular with foreigners in a diplomatic zone of Dhaka in Bangladesh Friday night local time, taking hostages and exchanging gunfire with security forces, local media reports.
A worker at the restaurant, the Holey Artisan Bakery in the city's Gulshan area, told reporters that the attackers were armed with firearms and bombs and stormed the building at around 9:20 p.m. local time.
SEE ALSO: LGBT magazine editor hacked to death in

After news broke yesterday of Spotify accusing Apple of attempting to “exclude and diminish” its competition through rather shady business practices, it took Apple less than 24 hours to fire back. “We find it troubling that you are asking for exemptions to the rules we apply to all developers and are publicly resorting to rumors and half-truths about our service.” Spotify had alleged Apple was flexing its muscle in an attempt to drive competitors out of the market t

Kanye West's music video for "Famous," which The Verge's T.C. Sottek called "damn genius clickbait," was — until now — damn genius clickbait that was exclusive to Tidal. Now, it's available to watch on YouTube.
It's still, however, the same NSFW video, so you'll have to click a disclaimer to watch and make sure no prying eyes are hoping to catch a glimpse of your screen — even though, given the public reaction to this video, I'm pretty sure they'd know what you were watching. T

Television commercials didn't always dominate the airwaves.
For the first years of the medium's existence, TV advertising was actually banned by the federal government (not that it stopped a few bold broadcasters from experimenting illegally).
SEE ALSO: The ad man behind the world's most famous commercial dies
The American public wasn't introduced to the first legal TV ad until June 1, 1941 — exactly 75 years ago — when the Bulova Watch Co. interrupted a game between the Brooklyn Do

If you're keeping track of the best tweets of 2016, get out your notepad and jot this one down near the top.
Staples Canada, delivered a piping hot burn to Kris Jenner, the one and only matron of the Kardashian establishment. 
SEE ALSO: Kim Kardashian displays how to respond to sexy Kim Kardashian photos
Jenner promoted the latest addition to her Kris Jenner Signature Collection, her line of jewelry on Twitter Tuesday. The necklace, available for $175, may be made of sterling silver, diamo

LONDON — A week after the UK's vote to leave the European Union, things don't seem quite as bad as they first looked.
Global stock markets have rebounded after they fell off a cliff after the shocking results emerged. Even the FTSE 100 has bounced back after two days of record losses, hitting its highest level since August. The pound stabilised after hitting a 31-year low against the dollar. 
SEE ALSO: The UK can clean up its Brexit mess by asking a new question
That might be a false

The fact that a driver was killed in a crash inside his Tesla on Wednesday while the semi-autonomous Autopilot system was engaged is tragic. However, the collision will have ripple effects across Tesla and the rest of the automotive industry.
That's because it brings into question people's trust in self-driving systems. While it's fair for people to feel wary of Tesla Autopilot and other semi-autonomous driving systems, it's important people don't conflate it with truly autonomous cars, or use

Facebook's Trending Topics has been a major source of controversy in recent months because of allegations that some of its editors had been downplaying conservative news outlets.
The revelation that humans were involved in selecting what subjects and media outlets showed up in the section caught some by surprise. Those who watch Facebook closely knew that there was a human element to the system, but the company had seemed to be trying to downplay that as much as possible.
SEE ALSO: Faceboo

We’re delighted to announce another four speakers for GamesBeat 2016 to address what it takes to succeed in the near-term with virtual reality games. Check out the new agenda here.
You can register for the event here.
Above: Stewart Rogers, analyst at VB Insight.
This breakout session will be moderated by Stewart Rogers, director of marketing technology at VentureBeat’s VB Insight. Rogers is crafting a new report based on his latest VR marketplace research and he’ll be tal

Family reunions are usually horrible. You’re either repeating the same conversation 27 times or eating a potato salad that’s been sitting out in the sun all day
The most redeemable aspect has nothing to do with family at all. The best moments are the few coveted minutes you spend alone in the bathroom, ignoring knocks from Aunt Darlene who’s trying to fix her lipstick to impress her ex-husband.
SEE ALSO: The definitive ranking of picnic food
While it’s never going to be