Technology news

A 91-year-old woman in Germany had an itch she needed to scratch; a hole she needed to fill; a blank crossword she needed to finish. According the The Telegraph, the unnamed woman was wandering the Neues Museum in Nuremburg, blending in with the other visitors, when she came across a piece by Arthur Køpcke. Titled "Reading-work-piece," the work of Fluxus art is a crossword puzzle layered over an inky-black background. Alongside the work, a sign reads "insert words." For roughly sixty

Half the fun of Pokémon Go is tracking down new creatures. But a bug has made that really difficult over the past few days, with the game's Nearby feature seemingly breaking down. Fortunately, someone's come up with a solution — one that some may call cheating, but also makes finding pokémon insanely easy: it's a Google Map that displays the location of every pokémon around you. Continue reading…

Microsoft posted its fourth quarter earnings today, reporting revenue of $22.6 billion and net income of $5.48 billion. The most important data point was that revenue from the company's Azure cloud division was up significantly, climbing over 100 percent year over year, as usage more than doubled. That gain helped to offset losses in the Personal Computing division, which was down 4 percent, dragged by a 70 percent decline in revenue from mobile phones.
"This past year was pivotal in both our ow

As we’ve previously documented, the pettier a conflict, the further Donald Trump and those around him will go to defend it in the most nonsensical ways possible. When Melania Trump apparently plagiarized first lady Michelle Obama in a speech at yesterday’s Republican National Convention, for example, she could probably have brushed it aside with a quiet non-statement. But in its trademark fashion, the campaign has responded with a series of increasingly belligerent justifications, pr

 Google has been working to create a faster news reading experience through its Accelerated Mobile Pages project. Now it’s bringing something similar to online ads. AMP is an open framework for creating articles that load more quickly, particularly on mobile. (They also can be sped up by loading from Google’s cache.) At the time the program was announced, Google said it would… Read More

 Think back on your college experience and you may recall the presence of an on-campus residence set aside for international students. The fact that there was likely only one house for all the students probably made you think your school didn’t have a large international contingent. Now consider the fact that nearly 1 million foreign students attend colleges and universities across the U.S. Read More

 Hyperloop One filed a countersuit against co-founder and former CTO Brogan BamBrogan today, claiming he was part of a group of four employees engaged in misconduct and abusive behavior.
The transportation startup developing a high-speed shuttle is suing the plaintiffs for at least $250 million in the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County.
Hyperloop One’s countersuit says… Read More

I've had a PocketChip in my possession for over a month, and I still don't know what I say about it. I can't really recommend anyone buy this thing, and yet I wish everyone owned one. Does that make any sense? It's not "practical" in the sense that it's not "practical" for an English major to take advanced mathematics courses, except for the fact that non-practical people like that are some of my favorite people.
PocketChip is like a just-for-fun weekend software project that ends up on GitHub b

Poodlecorp (yes, you read that right) has threatened to take the über popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go offline August 1 through a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the game’s already fragile servers. “We take the servers offline because it is popular right now and nobody can stop us,” @xotehpoodle (a member of the Poodlecorp group) said. “We do it because we can, nobody can stop us and we just like to cause chaos. We chose Aug

Kesha's legal issues with former producer Dr. Luke haven't yet been resolved, but that isn't keeping the singer from embarking on a tour of the US and Canada that's kicking off in Las Vegas this Saturday. The Fuck the World tour is covering 17 dates between July and October, all of which are currently being sold on Kesha's website, and she's performing with a new band called the Creepies. It's her first extended string of tour dates since suing Dr. Luke for alleged sexual assault in October

The Furbo has new competition. Petcube is launching two pet-centric cameras on Kickstarter today that let users monitor their pets when they’re not home. The Petcube Bites and Petcube Play come with 1080p video cameras that use night vision and can stream live. The devices connect through Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and rely on a companion iOS and Android app.
The Petcube Bites lets users toss their dog or cat treats to reward them for good behavior, and the Petcube Play comes with a laser toy tha

The last time Herman Cain and Pokémon shared headlines was 2011, when the politician, announcing the termination of his campaign for Republican presidential nominee, quoted an entire stanza of the theme to Pokémon 2000. Five years and another botched presidential campaign have passed without so much as a comment on the series from Cain, but today the silence ends. Thanks to the popularity of Pokémon Go — and the cold fact that time itself is just an interminable feelin

App logging for Swift apps can now be done natively on a Mac. SwiftyBeaver, a popular GitHub project, has come out of its private beta and is now available to the world. Logging is important to any app development process, but it’s typically done via a cloud-based service. The process allows a developer (or team) to better understand what’s going on with an app as it runs so that problems can be addressed. SwiftyBeaver is completely native, but allows you to save your logs to the cl

Today the International Olympic Committee delayed its decision to ban Russia from this summer's Olympic games. The announcement followed a report released Monday that confirmed the country ran a state-sponsored doping regime during the last two Olympics.
The IOC has assembled a five-person committee that will explore legal options for punishing Russia. That committee is also charged with reinvestigating the World Anti-Doping Agency's report, issued yesterday, as well as determining how

Deezer, the French music-streaming service, has officially launched in the US. For the second time. The service initially became available in the states last year, but only if you owned Sonos and signed up for its $20 a month Hi-Fi service, Deezer Elite. But today anyone in the US can sign up for the $10 a month all-you-can-listen service.
Deezer's Premium+ service isn't any different to what you'll get from Spotify Apple Music, or Tidal's paid offerings; 40 million songs, unlimited on-demand li

The legal drama surrounding Hyperloop One is reaching terminal velocity. A week after co-founder Brogan BamBrogan filed an explosive lawsuit against the startup, his former partners are hitting back by filing a countersuit claiming BamBrogan attempted to sabotage the futuristic transportation company.
even going so far as to register the domain name “Hyperloop Two”According to court documents, Shervin Pishevar, co-founder of Hyperloop One, and Rob Lloyd, CEO, accuse BamBrogan, the fo

Twitter today announced a new process for those seeking verified accounts. “We want to make it even easier for people to find creators and influencers on Twitter so it makes sense for us to let people apply for verification,” said Tina Bhatnagar, Twitter’s vice president of User Services. “We hope opening up this application process results in more people finding great, high-quality accounts to follow, and for these creators and influencers to connect with a broader audi

Twitter is opening the blue checkmark to everyone. Starting today, the company will let users request a verified account on its website by filling out a form with a verified phone number and email address, a profile photo, and additional information regarding why verification is required or helpful. In defining who will get approved, Twitter says "an account may be verified if it is determined to be of public interest." Prior to today, Twitter tended only to verify public figures, brands, a

Nickelodeon is preparing to make history this week. Variety reports that the network's newest show, The Loud House, will feature the channel's first biracial same-sex married couple this week. The couple, Harold and Howard McBride, will be voiced by Wayne Brady and Michael McDonald, respectively, as the pair readies their son Clyde for a sleepover with series star Lincoln Loud.
An excerpt from the episode, "Overnight Success," shows the couple doting on Clyde at the Loud household. It's inc

While most of us don’t want ads at all, Google has found a way to deliver them faster. Using its AMP technology meant for stripped-down, fast-loading webpages, Google hopes that it can “significantly improve both page load time and mitigate effects of the ads on the user experience.” Here’s how Google phrased it in a blog post: AMP’s original goal was to lift up the user experience across as much web content as possible. This meant we couldn’t just build some

A Brazilian judge has ordered an indefinite blackout of the WhatsApp messaging service, following months of legal efforts by the country’s law enforcement agencies. First reported by O Globo, the order comes after temporary blackouts issued in December and May, both of which were overturned by higher courts in a matter of days. The order is valid for the entire nation of Brazil.
Unlike previous orders, today’s blackout has no set expiration period, and is intended to continue until t

Seagate introduced three new 10TB hard drive products today that it’s billing as the "broadest 10TB portfolio." There's a hard drive for storing surveillance cam footage and one for NAS servers. The real sell of the collection, though, is the BarraCuda Pro, which is designed for personal desktop PC use and performs at 7200RPM. How do you fill this much space? Both the BarraCuda Pro and the IronWolf, which is for NAS servers, are now available for $534.99 and $469.99, respectively. The SkyH

Amazon wants Kindle to be a destination for all types of writing, and that now includes older non-fiction and short-form stories that may have otherwise been lost to time. Today, the company is launching Singles Classics, a program to resell old stories and essays from celebrated non-fiction authors and magazine writers, including Norman Mailer, Susan Orlean, and Gloria Steinheim. It is an extension of an existing program called Kindle Singles, which was launched in 2011 and focused on long

Whoops! What with all this frenzy to "catch 'em all" and make 'em fight and beat Team Mystic and — if you have time —not get hit by the B-44 bus, it seems like you may have been so distracted by Pokémon Go that you completely forgot about your Neko Atsume cats. This is why your parents never let you get an actual kitten! It's the Tamigotchi / Neopets / Webkinz debacle all over again.
Please stop abandoning your old fake pets in deference to new fake pets. It is very heartless,

Making a Murderer, the breakout true crime documentary from Netflix, is set to return for a second season. “We are extremely grateful for the tremendous response to, and support of, the series. The viewers’ interest and attention has ensured that the story is not over, and we are fully committed to continuing to document events as they unfold” said creators, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos. In case you missed the first, a team of documentary film makers followed Wisconsin resi

Ask a fan when San Diego Comic-Con International started to go off the rails, and you’ll get a lot of different answers. Some will point to the Twilight saga as the reason waiting in line for a 90-minute panel became an overnight activity; others may cite Harry Potter or the influx of mainstream TV shows. But strip away the franchise allegiances, and it all basically comes down to the same thing: Comic-Con is an overstuffed, oversaturated mess, and it’s all Hollywood’s fault.Bu

In Drake Doremus’ chilly new science fiction film Equals, Silas (Nicholas Hoult) and Nia (Kristen Stewart) star as star-crossed lovers with a familiar problem: they live in a future world that’s supposedly fixed all its problems by eradicating emotion. Their society has found a biological trigger to shut down human feeling, creating cold, placid, orderly communities where the people resemble mildly judgmental robots. Unfortunately for Silas and Nia, they both have “switched-on

Apple’s Safari browser included with iOS 10 and macOS Sierra is testing WebP, Google’s own technology for getting webpages to load quickly. WebP was built into Chrome back at build 32 (2013!), so it’s not unproven. It’s also used by Facebook due to its image compression underpinnings, and is in use across many Google properties, including YouTube. According to CNET, the lone holdout for WebP is Microsoft, which never included in in Internet Explorer and ha

Ghostbusters is finally here, after months and months of slobbering internet protesters behaving like entitled children and normal people being a little bit nervous because the trailer was "meh." As promised, it stars four women who are great at their jobs both on and off-screen. As promised, it is a broad appeal summer blockbuster. But does it fulfill all the other promises of its lengthy marketing campaign, let alone the unspoken wishes we had for it? What better way to discuss the incidentall

Pokémon Go had a week unlike any video game I’ve covered before in my career.Here’s a collection of the posts we penned last week, ranging from players finding dead bodies to Craigslist entrepreneurs selling preplayed accounts.
My friend and former boss Chris Grant wrote about the staggering demand for coverage at our sister-site Polygon. In "Some thoughts on Nintendo’s big week," Grant contextualized the game within Nintendo’s unusual year. And he noted how Pok&ea

Making a Murderer, Netflix's popular true crime documentary series, will return for a second season. The show followed the arrest, trial, and conviction of Steven Avery, a man from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who was found guilty of murdering Teresa Halbach, a local photographer. Avery's nephew Brendan Dassey was also convicted as an accessory to murder.
Netflix says the new episodes will give viewers insight into Avery's life post-conviction, as well as input from Avery and Dassey's new legal

Google has just revamped its Arts & Culture app to be a lot more useful. As a recap, you can search through a huge database (which Google has been building for a while), including anything from ancient tools to contemporary abstract art. Clearly, the company has been putting that Gigapixel camera to work. But today’s update makes discovery an important element. You can search for specific types of art (shoes, gold, etc), scroll through art by time period, and browse by color

The attorneys general of several US states are suing Volkswagen for violating state environmental regulations with its diesel emissions cheating scandal, even as federal regulators and many of those same states have agreed to a $14.7 billion settlement forviolating consumer protection and EPA and California state environmental regulations.
Coordinated lawsuits were filed today by New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland, alleging violation of various state environmental and anti-fraud statutes. All