Technology news

Beyoncé has published an impassioned plea on her website, asking her fans to contact legislators and representatives and express their anguish about police brutality. She makes reference to Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two black men who have been shot and killed by police in the last two days. She also quotes one of the refrains of the Black Lives Matter movement: "stop killing us."
In the letter, Beyoncé writes "we're going to stand up as a community and fig

Snapchat is facing a new lawsuit over claims that Snapchat Discover routinely serves sexually explicit content to minors without warning them or their parents. The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, was filed by a 14-year-old boy and his mother in US district court this week in the central district of California. The plaintiffs filed their lawsuit after being offended by sexually explicit content in Snapchat Discover channels earlier this month, including a BuzzFeed feature named&nbs

Concussions can have a lasting impact on the structure of the brain months after the initial injury, according to new research. These changes can linger long after clinical symptoms — such as dizziness and impaired balance — have disappeared. The study could help scientist better understand the long term effects of concussion on injured athletes. However, the link between these structural changes in the brain and any long-term effect on the individual’s behavior and cognition a

 Google is getting deeper into the tech side of the video and broadcasting business. The company today announced that it has acquired Anvato, a platform for encoding, editing, publishing and distribution video across platforms. The company says Anvato will join its Cloud Platform team and that Anvato’s technology will complement its efforts “to enable scalable media processing… Read More

With its highly anticipated second season set to premiere in less than a week, Mr. Robot sent its fans into a frenzy one last time by showing off what's ostensibly a scene from the new season on the show's Facebook page. After quickly recapping the first season's climactic hack of E Corp and the ensuing chaos, a masked member of fsociety reveals himself to be none other than Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström), broadcasting from within fsociety's headquarters. As Wellick wraps up his mes

 Samsung today showed off its successor to the microSD card, the UFS – that’s Universal Flash Storage. And the specs on the removable storage look pretty impressive at first glance. With capacities running 32- to 256GB, the slim little cards are focused on the increased storage/bandwidth needs of high-res capture devices like DSLRs, VR cameras and the like. Along with the storage… Read More

Mobile dating app Bumble is now also a professional networking app. A new section called BumbleBizz, announced today, will connect people interested in building business connections when it launches this fall. While it uses the same swiping system as Bumble (or similar apps like Tinder), it will show potential matches a separate, more job-tailored profile, and it will look to match up people who may work in the same professional circles, regardless of gender. But it’s keeping the feature t

Gigabyte has spent the past few years trying to catch up to Razer and its flagship gaming laptop, the Blade. Razer practically invented the thin-and-light gaming laptop category with the Blade in 2013, and since then it’s slowly evolved into a great laptop for both productivity and gaming.
More recently, gaming laptop manufacturers have followed Razer’s lead, trying to position their computers as productivity devices that double as weekend gaming rigs. Gigabyte continues the traditio

Lara Croft is returning to theaters: Variety is reporting that the reboot of the video game adaptation will debut on March 16th, 2018, with Ex Machina star Alicia Vikander taking on the title role.
Vikander signed on to play the character in April, with Norwegian director Roar Uthaug directing. There's no word on who else will be appearing in the film.
Vikander has received considerable acclaim for her work
The film is based on the game franchise, which followed archeologist Lara Croft, as she e

A Nissan dealer in Spain just sold a car over Twitter — a first for an automotive brand in Europe, Nissan said this week. Twitter user Raul Escolano used the hashtag #compraruncocheportwitter ("Buy a car on Twitter") to challenge automakers across Spain to sell him a car solely using social networks.
Antamotor, a Nissan dealer in the Spanish city of A Coruña, used Periscope to stream video of the Nissan X-Trail, giving @escolano a personalized walkthrough of the car. He also posted

Star Trek and American Horror Story actor Zachary Quinto is planning to executive produce and star in a TV series about biohackers. Deadline reports that the hour-long drama Biopunk will be based on a 2011 book of the same name by journalist Marcus Wohlsen, chronicling the work of citizen scientists who subscribe to the movement's DIY ethos. While Wohlsen was writing nonfiction, Deadline’s description makes the show sound like The Fifth Estate crossed with Halt and Catch Fire:Biopunk

The Tiny1 is a camera from TinyMOS billing itself as the "world’s smallest astronomy camera". It uses a proprietary noise-reduction algorithm the company says will allow for improved image quality in low-light environments, and an augmented reality star map that can be overlaid on the touchscreen viewfinder to help identify stars and planets while you’re shooting. TinyMOS claims that these features will lead to better results than using your smartphone, but with a smaller form factor

Facebook is being investigated by US tax authorities over whether the company has possibly undervalued its asset transfers to its Irish subsidiary by billions of dollars. Law.com first reported the news of the investigation.
The investigation is part of an examination of Facebook's federal income tax liability in 2010. According to Law.com, the IRS says that Facebook's outside accountants valued the company's various intangibles (such as its user base and online platform) as standalone asse

The killing of Alton Sterling at the hands of police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has sparked national outrage after a video showing the incident was posted online Tuesday night. That video was the result of an organized effort by local activists, who use smartphones to monitor and record violence.
A nonprofit group in Baton Rouge, known as Stop The Killing, tracks crime through police scanner apps. The Washington Post first reported news of the organization's activities. When members of

I'm a thirty-something father of two, so even though I signed up for Snapchat a few years back, I didn't spend much time using the app. I struggled to understand it, didn't see many friends engaging with what I posted there, and more or less resigned myself to the fact that I was too old to get something out of a service that was most popular with people half my age. And then, about six months ago, that all changed.
Snapchat actually became part of my life not as a messaging service, but as a tr

A team of scientists have developed a robot that mimics the motion of a stingray by using the cardiac muscles from a rat mounted on a stingray-shaped skeleton. The robot, detailed in a study published in the journal Science, is a wonderfully weird hybrid of biological and mechanical engineering that could be the first step towards a new class of underwater robots.
This robot uses a single layer of muscle allowed for downward contraction to mimic movement. While live creatures have another l

Barclays launched three contactless payment options for its bPay mobile payments system last year, including a NFC sticker, a wristband, and a key fob. It later eventually caved and started supporting Apple Pay nine months after it launched in the UK. It’s not done with its bPay, though. Barclays just launched bPay Loop, which turns regular watches into payment systems. The Loop consists of a contactless chip encased in silicon that fits over bands up to 22mm, although Barclays is partneri

Lianne La Havas, the British singer and songwriter who was a close friend of Prince, paid perfect tribute to the late legend on Wednesday night with a cover of "Sometimes It Snows in April."
Oh, and Coldplay was there too. 
The band invited La Havas to the stage at their show in Copenhagen. 
SEE ALSO: Adele paid tribute to Prince, but not with a cover
Prince and La Havas were friends for years before his sudden death in April at age 57. The Purple One once performed at her London home

After Calvin Harris and Taylor Swift announced their split, the world knew that one way or another we would hear some music inspired by the relationship. 
Now it looks like Harris' musical take on the breakup will be the first track to hit the airwaves — and it's written from the perspective of none other than Tom Hiddleston, Swift's new beau.   
SEE ALSO: Calvin Harris speaks out on Instagram, says Taylor Swift 'controlled the media'The collaboration between Harris and Joh

Google is working on safeguarding Chrome against the potential threat of quantum computers, the company announced today. It's doing so by implementing post-quantum cryptography in an experimental version of the browser, the company announced today. While there exist hardware defenses against the vastly superior computing power of quantum machines, Google is using a new so-called post-quantum key-exchange algorithm. This software, called the New Hope algorithm, is enabled in C

A tweet posted by a self-proclaimed "wife, mother, Christian" isn't just deplorable, but also factually incorrect.
The tweet (we have blurred out the poster's identity) shows two ham sandwiches: one meant to represent the woman's daughter (who we assume from the tweet has never had sex) and the other meant to represent Taylor Swift (the implication being she has lots of sex due to her very public dating record).
SEE ALSO: Woman accidentally buys dress covered in giant vaginasImage:TwitterThere

Silver and gold Japanese characters fly across the bottom of the screen after one of the most tense and grueling seven minutes of Tetris ever played.
Kevin "KevinDDR" Birrell sits with his hands over his mouth, waiting for seven seconds that feel like 60, hoping for the roulette of words to land on a golden "pass" under the bold lettering of the elusive Grand Master title.
It hovers for a second over the silver "fail," only to be crushed by golden letters, setting off digital fireworks abo

Today in bummer facts: Women who wear makeup make more money and appear more competent to others. But in the August issue of Glamour, Mila Kunis said bye to all that nonsense and posed makeup-free on the magazine's back cover.
SEE ALSO: Alicia Keys took her no makeup pledge to the BET red carpetKunis, whose film Bad Moms hits theaters July 29, tells Glamour that makeup isn't something she prioritizes in her personal life, though she understands and appreciates that other women do

Asus has released a new all-metal convertible ultrabook called the ZenBook Flip UX360. The 13.9 mm thick laptop weighs in at 2.9lbs and employs a fanless design, which likely contributes to its stated 12 hours of battery life. Here are some more specs:
13.3-inch Full HD touchscreen
6th generation Intel Core M processor
Up to 512GB SATA3 M.2 SSD
Up to 8GB of RAM
2 USB 3.0, 1 micro HDMI, 1 USB-C, SDXC card reader
The ZenBook Flip also promises to get rid of the wobble that a lot of ultra

It's just as we suspected: Kate Middleton has been able to levitate this whole time.
Okay, it is an optical illusion. But look, everyone. It seems like she's straight up floating in this photo. Sometimes images aren't what they seem, which is another kind of magic. Right?
SEE ALSO: Princess Charlotte makes chill first appearance on Buckingham Palace balconyImage:chris radburn/pool/Getty ImagesThis particular shot, taken at a service marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, is u

Here it is — maybe the longest two minutes on the Internet.
On Wednesday, news broke that Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News Channel anchor, is suing Roger Ailes, CEO of FNC, for sexual harassment.
Her complaint details a toxic work environment and the claim that she was let go from the channel for declining the sexual advances of Ailes. Carlson also noted that other people at the channel — she names former "Fox & Friends" co-host Steve Doocy — also contributed to the pro

Lyft is launching a luxury ride service called Lyft Premier to compete with Uber Black.
Though Uber is the 800-pound gorilla in the ride-sharing world, Lyft is no slouch either. And Uber’s most luxurious offering is the original Uber Black car service. For years, Lyft hasn’t had an offering to compete, preferring to focus on building out its standard ride-sharing service.
Lyft says that 60 percent of its riders have requested an option for a more luxurious ride. The company says Prem

Like many Americans, Mischa Barton is horrified that unarmed black men continue to be shot dead by the police, who are supposed to be protecting citizens, not killing them. 
Unlike many Americans, Mischa Barton expressed this sentiment in the caption of an Instagram of herself looking pensive in a bikini on a yacht, wine glass in hand. 
SEE ALSO: 'This must be answered for': Baton Rouge demands justice after fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling"This may have been going on forever i