Technology news

On Saturday in Rio, Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszu crushed the world record in the women's 400-meter individual medley by more than two seconds on her way to winning a gold medal.
SEE ALSO: The NBC Olympics coverage is a total, commercial-filled nightmareBut, aside from the astounding athletic performance, a lot of the focus from people watching the United States was on NBC commentator Dan Hicks, who faced criticism for implying Hosszu's success was due to her husband/coach, Shane Tusup. 

It’s a bit alarming to think that there are millions (yes, millions) of apps available for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows phone, and others, according to this smartphone study. Yet the same study found that smartphone users spend about 80 percent of their time on just five apps.
It will come as no surprise that one of those apps is Facebook. The other most common apps — which we all know from stats about user counts — include WhatsApp and Snapchat.
Messaging is immediat

Reporter's note: This post accompanies a longform piece about sexual harassment allegations made against YouTubers. 
LOS ANGELES — Over the last few years, dozens of have come forward to share stories of digital influencers who have had inappropriate relationships with those who see them as bona fide celebrities.
Here are some of their stories:
Rosianna Halse Rojas 
on Alex Carpenter
“He charms you, properly charms you, and makes you feel stupid for thinking he likes anyone

Reporter's note: This Q&A was conducted for a longform piece about sexual harassment allegations made against YouTubers. It was a phone interview conducted on June 21, 2016. It has been edited and condensed for publication.
LOS ANGELES — When he was first asked to be interviewed, YouTuber Alex Day politely declined.
"It's always tempting to talk about what happened but I feel like I've said everything I need to about this," he wrote in an email to Mashable in mid-June. "I'm trying to r

It only took one interaction for April Fletcher to get sucked in.It was at the E3 conference in 2011, and Fletcher was there for work. At the time, she didn’t really know what YouTube was. Still, YouTuber Toby Turner, she recalled, had a goofy grin and a knack for enchanting large crowds. His demeanor was almost annoyingThey exchanged numbers. They Facetimed. They texted. She eventually even moved to L.A.It was all normal – until one day, she realized it wasn’t.She sa

One of the greatest sounds you can hear as an Olympian is the roar of the crowd cheering you on.
Sadly, some athletes were denied that experience on Saturday when lines formed for several blocks outside an arena in Rio de Janeiro as spectators were forced to endure long security checks. Security officials cited shootings and bombs threats outside the stadium. As lines became hours long and crowds grew restless from the sweltering heat, inside, gymnasts performed to an empty arena.
SEE ALSO: We a

GUEST: It’s true that risk-taking is necessary to entrepreneurial achievement and failure can be instructive. But somehow those simple truths have morphed into something dangerous: a blind belief in the positive power of failure. It happened the way meanings get changed in a game of telephone. The words are passed from lip to ear, from ear to lip, and from lip to ear, changing a little each time, until the idea no longer resembles its original.
The first company I founded with my three bus

Kittens are beautiful creatures, but they're not exactly built for the open sea.
Recently in Marsala, Italy, the coast guard was notified about a motionless kitten near the beach by some children. Upon seeing the creature, one of the coast guard members dove in and brought the cat on board, where it was given CPR.
While most coast guard members are trained in human CPR, not kitten CPR, the little guy was ultimately resuscitated and brought to a local coast guard office, where it was dried. Afte

The United States Cyber Command is sub-unified command in the US Department of Defense, responsible for cyberspace operations and protecting US militarynetworks. According to Reuers, the Obama administration is getting ready to elevate the organization to a unified command, which would put it on par with the other nine combat commands.
The elevation of the unit signifies a recognition of the importance of cyber warfare in the years to come. Cyber operations have grown in recent years, with the c

GUEST: Whenever I feel uncomfortable writing about a topic, that’s when I know I should write about it. So here goes. This article is about how a new way of designing apps changed my life. But to explain the power of this trend, I need to tell you about poop. That’s the uncomfortable part.
For the past five years or so, I’ve struggled with intestinal discomfort. (I’ll spare you the gory details.) I spent countless hours crawling the web searching for a possible diagnosis

Image: Des Moines RegisterOn the morning of Sunday, September 5, 1982, 12-year-old Johnny Gosch left his home in the suburb of West Des Moines, Iowa, on his newspaper delivery route.Around 7 a.m., his parents, Noreen and John, began receiving calls from neighbors complaining that their papers had not been delivered.John found his son's wagon full of papers abandoned on the sidewalk a block and a half away. Johnny was gone.Johnny Gosch on his paper route.Image: Noreen GoschNoreen and John immedia

GUEST: In the sage words of Marc Andreessen, “Data is eating the world.” Er, something like that. Big data has been and continues to be one of the hottest areas in tech, constantly covered in the news. According to CB Insights, it’s also an exciting area for venture funding, with almost $8 billion in funding last year, a number that decreased recently but had been steadily growing since 2011 (around 20% year over year). Yet despite the popularity, most companies seem to agree o

A lot of people are playing No Man's Sky after multiple stores sold it early, but the game that launches on Aug. 9 will be a lot different than the one being played now.
That's thanks to the upcoming "1.03 update," which is set to go live on Monday as media outlets receive their review copies of the game. Project lead and Hello Games founder Sean Murray lays out the extensive changes in a new post on the No Man's Sky website.
SEE ALSO: Naming planets in 'No Man's Sky' will probably be like this

Leslie Jones can be hilarious on Twitter, especially when she is live-tweeting shows like Game of Thrones. She’s started doing the same thing for the Rio Olympics with hilarious results, which prompted Jim Bell, NBC’s Executive Producer for the games to invite her down to help out.
First, let’s take a look at some of Jones’ funniest tweets (so far!):
IS YALL READY FOR THEM OLYMPICS MANE!!! #GoTeamUSA pic.twitter.com/7UhxzNY5Ep
— Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) August 5, 20

To win a Purple Heart takes courage, strength and, sometimes, a GoFundMe campaign. 
Cameron Kerr is a decorated Army veteran who isn't too pleased with Trump's recent comments about America's veterans. After a veteran handed his Purple Heart to Trump at a rally on Tuesday, Trump came under fire for saying, "I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier."
Kerr decided to set up a GoFundMe page to give Trump a chance to win a Purple Heart the old-fashioned way: by going to a w

One of the best meteor showers of the year will grace skies around the world this week, culminating in a potential "outburst" of shooting stars during the overnight hours between August 11 to August 12. 
The Perseid meteor shower is bound to impress people lucky enough to watch the meteor display from very dark skies this year. 
SEE ALSO: Next week's Perseid meteor shower could be like no other
Some forecasts are predicting that during its peak, meteor rates could be double the traditi

The war over which series is superior — Star Trek or Star Wars — is older than the internet itself, but Lucasfilm's stories from a galaxy far, far away just found an unlikely ally: William Shatner.
He dropped the truth bomb on attendees in typically dramatic fashion during his talk at the 15th annual official Star Trek convention in Las Vegas on Saturday.
SEE ALSO: How 'Star Trek Beyond' reveals the final frontier for the old version of the franchise
"First of all," the Captain Kirk

As the Olympic Games have begun in Rio, the International Paralympic Committee has announced that it has suspended the Russian Paralympic Committee due to concerns over a state-backed doping scheme. As a result, the Russian team will not be permitted to compete in this year’s Paralympics in September.
The IPC began its suspension proceedings shortly after the release of the McLaren Report at the end of July. The report uncovered a state-sponsored doping scheme following the 2014 Stochi Win

GUEST: European startups raise more money and grow faster when backed by American venture capital dollars, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Technology hubs have cropped up all over Europe that are kindling exciting new companies. However, despite the abundance of innovative and talented entrepreneurs, raising substantial capital from local investors remains a challenge relative to more established markets like Silicon Valley.
There are a number of reasons for this disparity. The Wall Street

Roy Taylor works as corporate vice president of alliances at Advanced Micro Devices, a chip maker that creates processors and graphics chips for personal computers. But he cares just as much about software as he does about hardware.
That’s because new virtual reality applications will fuel demand for graphics hardware, such as AMD’s new family of Radeon graphics processing units (GPUs). So Taylor has been busy creating alliances with Hollywood entertainment companies, VR startups, an

FEATURE: In the competitive field of trading card games, few stick around long enough to make any sort of lasting impression, especially those that spawned from existing entertainment franchises. And continuing to thrive in 2016 means competing with far more affordable electronic card games like Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, which leads a $1.2 billion market.
Despite these challenges, the Pokémon TCG managed to stay among the most popular hits in the genre for more than 10 years,

Tesla has come under fire for its Autopilot feature after a fatal traffic accident earlier this year. The same feature might have just saved the life of a Missouri man who suffered a pulmonary embolism by driving him to a local hospital.
In late July, Joshua Neally left work and began to drive home in his week-old Tesla Model X, activating the Autopilot feature when he entered the highway. Miles down the road, he felt "the most excruciating pain [he’s] ever had," in his chest, and after ca

Gadget Thirst Trap rounds up the weirdest gadgets of the week that made us thirsty for more. Be sure to follow The Verge on Snapchat for the video edition.A tattooing robot
The first thing that grabs my attention about this GIF of a robot tattooing a human is the duct tape. That leg is strapped down with no hope of movement. Looks like an enjoyable experience! While I do think an integral part of getting a tattoo is the time spent bonding with another person over art, I struggle to trust someone

Following a court order, the Obama administration has unveiled the documents that guide its decisions to capture or kill individuals who are involved in terrorist activities around the world. The documents provide a new look at the infrastructure that supports drone operations across the Middle East.
The redacted, eighteen page Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) was drafted in 2013, and provides crucial insight into how the administration will take direct action against individuals who represent

GUEST:For as long as I’ve owned a car, I’ve always been interested in extracting data from it.
One of my earliest experiments involved using a paperclip to complete a connection between a red wire and a green wire beneath my dashboard so that diagnostic error codes would flash on the dashboard of my ‘91 Honda.
Nowadays, we have a variety of OBD-II dongles that plug into the diagnostics port of every car sold in the U.S. since 1996. (OBD refers to “onboard diagnostics.&rdq

(Reuters) – As more and more sick patients are going online and using social media to search for answers about their health, it’s raising a lot of thorny ethical questions for doctors.
“The internet and ready access to vast amounts of information are now permanent aspects of how we live our lives, including how we think about and deal with our health problems,” Dr. Chris Feudtner, director of medical ethics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said by email.

Virtual reality experiences have done everything from sticking users into mechanical bird rigs to locking them inside treadmills, but it wasn’t until Saturday that I was able to complete the ultimate challenge: racing a tricycle. At this year’s VRLA Summer Expo, Russia-based Interactive Lab was showing off its latest demo, a wild (and slightly terrifying) race game that let players use an actual, physical tricycle to navigate their way through a neon world pulled straight from T

The hospitality industry is as old as the hills – but has it kept pace with new technologies and big data?
Berlin-based SnapShot understands that hotels are dealing with a huge amount of data but need the right tools to make sense of it all. The company started with the goal of solving a simple problem in the hotel sector.
“We recognized that the amount of time that was spent on data collection rather than data analysis was the first big pain,” explained David Turnbull, Sn

Sony and Microsoft are both trying to push console gaming into 4K, and the latest revision of the Xbox is doing that the right way for the current television market.
Earlier this week, Microsoft released the Xbox One S. This is a slimmer Xbox One that can upscale game content to 4K and can play 4K video like Ultra HD Blu-ray films. It starts at $300 for a 500GB model — although the $400 2TB version is the only one on store shelves right now. I’ve already reviewed it, and I think it&r

The Ozlo chatbot is an invaluable tool for finding restaurants in your area. I’ve tested it for a couple of weeks, and it has already helped me discover a few hidden gems. The company has promised to keep adding features to the bot, and it recently rolled out a feature that helps you play Pokémon Go. As with any bot, this one has the advantage of running as an ancillary tool — it finds PokéStops and Pokémon Gyms in your area — and you don’t even need

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has 50 million registered players, making it the biggest hit in which players on PC and mobile are playing each other in the same game (this will eventually come to certain versions of Minecraft, which has 100 million in sales). But how do you make a user interface work for a game where you have people playing it on a powerful PC and a cramped iPhone screen — and against each other?
Jason Chayes is about to show us how.
The production director for Heart