Technology news

The capybara is basically a giant guinea pig that can grow to up to 140 pounds on a diet of grass — and its own poop. These social, almost cow-like creatures are native to South America, where they spend their lives moving back and forth between grasslands and water. Capybara voyeur Elizabeth Congdon, a scientist at Bethune-Cookman University, tells The Verge why capybaras are fascinating to study in the wild — and why we shouldn't get one as a pet.
For the largest rod

FEATURE: As long as stretches of the Samsung Galaxy Apps store map go unrecorded by the GamesBeat Federation, I shall pilot into that dark space in search of mobile games of merit.
I am a one-man crew on these away missions, just a Samsung-provided array of phones (Galaxy S6, S6 Edge Plus) and a tablet (Galaxy Tab S2) for company. In this episode, I am inconvenienced multiple times by a robed occultist, level up an army of fantasy archetypes, and gamble more times in the space of a week than mos

I haven't yet seen Oliver Stone's Snowden at TIFF this year — though you can read Bryan Bishop's rather unfavorable review here. Luckily, I don't really have to, thanks to "The Veil," the new original song written by Peter Gabriel for the film's soundtrack, which by all reports, plays over the end credits. Thanks to Buzzfeed's Alison Willmore for the hot tip:
"There's no safe place to go / Now you've let that whistle blow"
— Alison Willmore (@alisonwillmore) September 10, 2016
T

XOXO Fest plays out like a link blog come to life. For five years, XOXO co-creator (and pioneering link-blogger) Andy Baio recruited some of the web’s most fascinating creators to the Portland festival he runs with Andy McMillan, and the result is new attention for some criminally under-viewed projects.
Nearly everything I saw this year was something I wanted to share with a friend — you can check out the entire lineup here. Below are some of my very favorite things, any on

As a filmmaker, Oliver Stone arguably built his career on the idea of questioning the establishment. Whether critiquing the way we looked at the Vietnam War (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July), the Reaganomic excesses of the ‘80s (Wall Street), or even conventional cinematic norms (the jarring, music-video inspired Natural Born Killers), Stone has always tried to push the envelope — and if that resulted in some people thinking he sounded like a crackpot conspiracy theorist (hi, JFK

GUEST: Look at the people you work with. There’s a good chance at least one of them has a Side Hustle. There’s a good chance their out-of-office hours are consumed by some sort of side-project, whether that’s writing a book, developing a new product, contributing to some philanthropic cause or some other non-9-5-related endeavor. Actually, there’s a good chance they’re working on their personal projects during 9-5 hours.
Side Hustles are becoming the rule rather tha

Tesla is preparing a significant upgrade to its autopilot technology for a future software update, the company announced today. The biggest change is in how the company uses its radar sensors. Previously, a camera and image processing system were the the primary sensors, backed up by data from the radar system to verify its findings — but going forward, the camera and radar will work side-by-side to detect obstacles. The improvements are expected in Tesla Software Update 8.0, planned

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is finally sharing the “major improvements” coming to Tesla’s Autopilot feature.
In a press call this afternoon, Elon Musk described the “massive” 8.0 Autopilot software update, which turns the existing radar system inside Tesla cars into a primary source of information for the vehicle’s self-driving features. Musk said that with “fleet learning” the update will offer “probably a thr

GUEST: The “venture recession” of 2016 is in full swing. Combined with the usual summer slowdown, some are already raising the spectre of 2001 or 2008. Recession or not, what is universal is the bewilderment of many entrepreneurs on how negative VCs have become over the past nine months after almost five years of non-stop cheerleading.
As an entrepreneur on the other side of that table many moons ago, I always wondered the same thing – how the venture investment cycle goes from

Last week, the FBI arrested a pair of Israeli teenagers who allegedly ran an online booter service called vDOS, as reported by Brian Krebs.
vDOS was an online service that helped carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against websites. The business allowed buyers to choose from various subscription options that specified how many seconds the attacks would run for. For their services, the pair reportedly earned over $600,000, chiefly through Bitcoin.
vDOS was reportedly respo

Japanese company Prodrone showed off a new drone his week called The PD6B-AW-ARM. Its main feature?  Terrifying arms. The claws can grab anything up to 44 pounds and deliver it. It is very cool and very scary looking. I’ll never own this drone because it’s for commercial use, but if I did,here’s how I’d use it.
Things I would definitely pick up with my drone:
My takeout food
My friends who live in other boroughs and never come out to see me (who weigh less than

GUEST: The bot revolution is upon us. Should we rejoice as the weight of tedious tasks is lifted off of our shoulders or should we be worried about these software applications and what they’ll be able to do? Should we even feel anything at all?
To answer that, we first need to understand what bots are, what they can do for us, and what is actually considered a bot.
What are workflows?
Workflows are static, rule-based tasks set up to save us time, avoid a tedious, repeatable task, or even p

Pretty Little Liars, the teen version of Desperate Housewives but with fewer Emmys for some reason, is coming to an end after seven seasons. "After seven seasons" is being used loosely here since every season was broken up into two half-seasons that were each 10 to 12 hours long. There are also "event" episodes every year on Halloween, Christmas, and other random holidays. Pretty Little Liars doesn’t have seasons, so much as it has had a dark, looming, lip-glossed presence for the better h

Amanda Knox found herself in the tabloids yet again this past weekend, when she arrived at the Toronto airport for TIFF, accompanied by her current boyfriend, author Christopher Robinson. Robinson was called out for his Riff Raff-esque appearance: cheetah-print pants, Terry Richardson glasses, and a beard manicured to look like he’d been mauled by a grizzly. But almost a decade after the murder of Knox’s housemate — and Knox’s subsequent arrest and repeated acquittal &mda

On Thursday, the Dutch publisher of Playboy won a major legal victory concerning photographs that had been uploaded to the internet without its permission on a file sharing site. The ruling handed down by the European Union Court of Justice could have enormous consequences for users across the internet.
Sanoma argued that the links infringed on its copyright
The case stemmed from a complaint against a Dutch website called GeenStijl, which had posted links to leaked photos from Playboy in Oc

At the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday night, two back-to-back screenings of Nate Parker’s The Birth Of A Nation were met with standing ovations from both audiences. The crowd was there to see the first festival screening of the lightning-rod film since its Sundance premiere, as well as writer-director-producer-star Nate Parker and 17 members of his cast and crew, who joined him onstage for post-film Q&A sessions.
Both the questions and the answers at the 9 p.m. show

Thrustmaster launched a flight throttle that brought back memories for me this week. The Thrust Master Weapon Control System Throttle is aimed at virtual pilots who enjoy flight simulator games.
This new throttle controls your speed and has buttons, so you can fire a variety of weapons while you control your aircraft with a joystick in your other hand. I didn’t know they were still making these things, as the flight sim market isn’t what it used to be.
The first time I saw a throttle

A philanthropist asked a racecar designer to make an all-terrain vehicle suitable for humanitarian missions in Africa. The result was the Ox, “the world’s first flatpack truck” — meaning it can be packed up into a flat box and shipped like Ikea furniture.
The truck is absurdly simple to assemble: its designers claim that three people can break it down into 60 parts in just 12 hours. (Apparently no one involved with the truck's creation has ever tried to put together the L

If the Sundance Film Festival is the germinating seed of the year in film, a place where indie films make their first stop before slowly finding their way to audiences over the ensuing months, TIFF is its polar opposite. Every year Toronto plays host to a showcase of star-studded studio films are often the rule rather than the exception, and the stage where many of the fall’s films kick off their awards season campaigns in earnest. But it's also a place for true cinephiles — where fi

GUEST: One is a mobile game app. One is a discount shopping site. For all their differences, Pokémon Go and Groupon may share a similar fate: a rocketlike takeoff that burns through fuel without a plan to keep the company aloft.
Pokémon Go and Groupon share other similarities. Both are location-based. Both popularized then-unexplored tech opportunities. Both are built on questionable business models: Apple and Google take a hefty rake of Pokémon Go’s in-app purchases,

It’s actually unfortunate that The Birth Of A Nation was received with so much enthusiasm when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016. Eight months before its intended release date, the hype machine embraced Nate Parker’s biopic as an Oscar front-runner. Its sympathetic take on American slave-revolt leader Nat Turner was touted as the triumphant fix to the Academy Awards’ diversity problem. And the film was hailed as a monumental vindication for Parker, who

For a quarter of a century, I willfully deceived myself into believing that hair care was simple. I’d used the same Pantene 2-in-1 for a decade, didn’t own a blow dryer, and until two months ago thought Drybar —a fancy salon that does "blowouts" — was a place that sold Dippin’ Dots-like ice cream. I also didn’t know what a blowout was anyway.
Then I succumbed to vanity and, inspired by the rising number of women going platinum, dyed my pixie cut blond. I&rsquo

Fire up the Bat Signal; we now have VR’s first official 3D, 360 degree comic book.
Oniride today launches the first issue of Magnetique, a new comic series for Gear VR (Oculus Store). This isn’t your traditional book simply digitized like some sort of VR e-reader. It’s a completely native experience in which each panel takes up a full 360 degrees. You flick through images just like you would a normal book, only with the action completely surrounding you just like it would in a

Fire up the Bat Signal; we now have VR’s first official 3D, 360 degree comic book.
Oniride today launches the first issue of Magnetique, a new comic series for Gear VR (Oculus Store). This isn’t your traditional book simply digitized like some sort of VR e-reader. It’s a completely native experience in which each panel takes up a full 360 degrees. You flick through images just like you would a normal book, only with the action completely surrounding you just like it would in a

Just weeks after Sports Illustrated partnered with GameOn to make a bot for the final days of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, SI announced the launch of new bots to help NFL fans stay up to date, follow their favorite teams, and, oh yes, talk trash to friends and family.
The Sports Illustrated NFL bot by GameOn is now live on Telegram, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. A Kik bot and iMessage app are also in the works, said CEO Alex Beckman.
Above: SI x GameOn NFL Bot on Telegram
SI bot

Canadian firm Electra Meccanica Vehicles is the latest to try to market a small, three-wheeled commuter vehicle.
Unveiled today, the Electra Meccanica Solo features an all-electric powertrain and seating for one person.
The company is now taking fully refundable deposits for the Solo and says it expects to deliver the first vehicles next year.
Electra Meccanica says the Solo isn’t meant to replace a conventional car but rather to handle short trips, such as commutes, as efficiently as pos

(Reuters) – California regulators moved a step closer on Friday to the first mandatory U.S. energy efficiency standards for computers and monitors, gadgets that account for 3 percent of home electric bills and 7 percent of commercial power costs in the state.
The latest draft standards issued by the California Energy Commission, marking the second revision of rules first proposed in March 2015, would save consumers an estimated $373 million annually when fully implemented, the agency said.

 Each Saturday during the college football season ESPN hosts College GameDay, an pre-game show with a bunch of football experts and hundreds of screaming college kids in the background. Today one of those screaming college kids was Sam Crowder, a student who brilliantly decided to hold up a sign with his Venmo username asking his mom to send him beer money. Cue the Internet, and instead of… Read More

If every iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus comes with Lightning EarPods and a headphone jack adapter in the box, then we’re all good, right? Well, no. Not quite.
Here’s why.
If you want to use your regular headphones while using one of these phones, you’ll always have to carry the dongle. Just like you do with your MacBook if you have one of the new MacBooks, and just like you will have to do if you buy one of the new MacBook Pros, which are rumored to have 4 USB-C ports. If you lose

GUEST: Steam rolled out of the pot, and my kitchen was filled with an intoxicating blend of scents.
I’d cooked a turkey ragu before, but as soon as I opened the pot, I knew this would be an entirely different experience.
There were the familiar, comforting notes of ground turkey and mushrooms, but there was also earthiness from the beets, the fire of serrano chile, and an unexpected brightness from the coriander seed (coriander seed!). My dinner wouldn’t have been out of place at one

GUEST: From the compromise of voting machines to the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails, you have surely heard concerns about the possible rigging of this already bizarre US election. Even Secretary Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized email server may have been compromised.
For six elections, I was a Chief Election Judge in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. What I saw gave me pause, and when I raised my concerns, I was told that the systems were completely safe and protecte

(Reuters) – A U.S. space probe was cleared for launch on Thursday to collect and return samples from an asteroid in hopes of learning more about the origins of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system, NASA said on Tuesday.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to dispatch the robot explorer Osiris-Rex on a seven-year mission.
United Launch Alliance is a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.
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