Technology news

At Fort Leavenworth tomorrow, Chelsea Manning will face an administrative disciplinary board to defend herself against charges stemming from her suicide attempt earlier this year. Because of the closed nature of prison disciplinary hearings, she will face the board without legal assistance or guaranteed communication with the outside. If the board upholds the charges, the result could be immediate solitary confinement for Manning.
Manning’s representatives have posted a lengthy summary of

Today, I got hyped on a printer. HP’s new pocket-sized Sprocket printer made me smile; it made me laugh; and it became my favorite distraction. Sure, my interest in it is already waning, but wow a real laugh. That’s more excitement than most gadgets have inspired in me lately.
The Sprocket is HP’s answer to portable instant printers that print photos from your phone. These have existed for a while, and HP’s printer doesn’t create as high of quality prints as other p

 Whether you’re a high school student or an NFL team owner, everybody texts. ReplyBuy, a finalist in the 1st and Future competition, wants to use the text message to get you tickets for sporting events. 1st and Future is a sports-centric startup competition produced as a joint effort between the NFL, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and TechCrunch. The current version… Read More

We know that tens of thousands of years ago, humans migrated out of Africa — but the question is, when, and how many times? By sequencing the genomes of nearly 800 people from more than 270 population groups around the world, three massive teams of scientists have collected the most comprehensive genetic evidence yet of a single wave of people out of Africa less than 100,000 years ago. But the three teams disagree somewhat about how ancient human populations shifted and changed before and

 A few weeks ago, True Ventures closed its newest, early-stage fund with $310 million, which is just a slight step up from its last, $295 million fund, despite some enormous wins like Fitbit, whose first check came from True. (As you likely recall, the wearable device maker staged a highly successful public offering last year.) We weren’t able to catch up with firm co-founders Phil… Read More

Yesterday, the first photo from the set of the new Jumanji movie was unveiled on Instagram. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson originally claimed that the plot would explain Karen Gillans’ "jungle wardrobe." Before Johnson changed the caption, we set about making some guesses as to what plot might demand Gillans interesting outfit.
Our best guess was that the new version of the eponymous board game cursed losing players by making them forget water bottles and pant legs when preparing for a hike in

The Battle.net name is no more. Today Blizzard announced that it’s moving away from using the Battle.net moniker when referring to its online services. “Battle.net technology will continue to serve as the central nervous system for Blizzard games — nothing is changing in that regard,” the company wrote in a forum post. “We’ll just be referring to it as Blizzard tech instead.”
Battle.net originally debuted way back in 1996 alongside the original Diablo, a

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is already on the way for its February theatrical debut, but the people behind the film are also working on a companion TV series. Entertainment Weekly reports that, for King’s 69th birthday, production company MRC and Sony Pictures have revealed that they’re developing a spinoff series that will flesh out the film’s mythology. A prequel, the show will explore the backstory of the gunslinger Roland Deschain, played by Idris Elba — Elba

The philanthropic initiative founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, will spend $3 billion over the next decade in an effort to cure and manage all human diseases. The Chan Zuckerberg's latest effort will begin with a $600 million investment in a project called Biohub, a new center at the University of California at San Francisco that will work on developing new tools to measure and treat disease. Continue reading…

Google is holding an event on October 4th where it's widely expected to unveil its latest smartphones. Somewhat unusually for the company, it's also engaging in a bit of guerilla marketing — we've seen more than one building-sized advert trailing the event, as well as pictures of a statue in Brooklyn Bridge Park shared by Redditor dolan313.
Both adverts and statue look just like the original video teaser released by Google this week, showing a plain white rounded rectangle alongside t

According to two newspaper reports, Apple is interested in buying McLaren. McLaren flatly denied that any talks were underway, but it’s worth a look at why Apple could be interested in the small British carmaker.
An acquisition would give Apple a small but significant carmaker that has enormous amounts of technological expertise in building drivetrains, vehicle control systems, and navigating complicated supplier-OEM relationships. McLaren also has significant experience working with advan

What defines Tom Cruise as an actor? Is it the boyish smile and the hint of sociopathic calculation behind that smile? The ongoing defense of Scientology? The massive wealth and success? Or is it just the running? It's probably just the running. Tom Cruise running is such a perversely common element in his movies that it's spawned a wide series of memes, GIFs, video compilations, video analysis (set to Soul Asylum's "Runaway Train," no less), and even the inevitable weak Family Guy joke. Even To

YouTube has a new plan to start turning around its famously bad comments: get the community involved in moderating them. It launched a new program this week called YouTube Heroes, which rewards people for reporting bad comments, writing accurate subtitles, and answering forum questions.
These so-called Heroes won’t actually have direct power over the site. So it’s not like someone will be able to go around removing comments at will or adding profane subtitles to others’ videos.

Apple’s search for partners with experience making cars is heating up. The Financial Times first reported that the Silicon Valley giant has been negotiating with McLaren and now The New York Times confirmed that it’s also in talks with Lit Motors, a Bay Area startup that manufactures self-balancing motorcycles.
According to The New York Times, Apple has already hired away “several” former Lit Motors engineers. The company — its motto stating “We are creating t

Formula E is going to race in Brooklyn next summer. The all-electric series will wrap up its third season with races on back-to-back days in July of 2017. Series CEO Alejandro Agag made the announcement today alongside city officials at the Brooklyn Cruise Ship Terminal in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the race will take place. Exact dates have yet to be determined.
“Today is one of the biggest days for Formula E,” Agag said. “Many people say that climate change

To mark the occasion of his new Super PAC, Save the Day, Joss Whedon enlisted about a zillion of his celebrity buddies to help him make a pro-voter registration / anti-Trump PSA.
Unlike most celebrity PSAs, this one involves all of the celebrities acknowledging the cliche of celebrity PSAs. They promise that if you go out and vote, Mark Ruffalo will do a nude scene in his next movie. They also point out that the most famous person gets to be on screen last (it's Robert Downey Jr., but I wou

Since 2009, Atlas Obscura has been one of my favorite internet rabbit holes. I sometimes spend hours on the site, which collects curiosities from across the globe, bouncing from enchanted forests to Russian space-age monuments. Now, the site’s founders have turned their website’s broad array of knowledge into a book that compiles some of their best finds.Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders, written by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton

China’s space station Tiangong-1 is expected to fall to Earth and burn up in the planet’s atmosphere sometime in late 2017, The Guardian reports. The news was announced last week and seems to confirm rumors that China has lost control of the 8-ton unmanned space lab because of some mechanical or technical failure.
"Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling," the deputy director of the manned space engineering office, Wu Ping, was q

Samsung is back with a new version of its PCIe-based 950 Pro SSDs with the announcement of new 960 Pro and 960 Evo models. Both drives feature 3D NAND (which Samsung refers to as V-NAND) to offer more storage capacity than a traditional 2D NAND methodology would allow. While companies like Intel are releasing their first batches of SDDs with the new technology this year, Samsung has been using 3D NAND for consumer hardware since the release of the popular 850 Pro and 850 Evo SSDs back

Photokina is the big, but shrinking, stage for presenting the future of photography. The 2016 edition of the biennial camera show has lost some of its luster and techie momentum with Samsung’s silent retreat from the market, and the news that’s emerged here in Cologne just hasn’t been as impactful as in previous years. The reason, I’d venture to suggest, is that digital camera development has plateaued. Much like PC makers constantly having to nudge people to upgrade PCs

Yi has released a new mirrorless camera called the M1 that will appeal to Leica lovers who may not want to spend Leica money. The M1, which is clearly inspired by the Leica T, features a 20MP Sony IMX269 Micro Four Thirds sensor, and comes with a 12-40mm zoom lens with an f/2.5-5.6 aperture for $330. No, that isn't a typo.The M1 can shoot in RAW up to an ISO of 25,600, film in 4K, and has an optional 42.5mm f/1.8 aperture fixed lens, which will cost you an extra $120. It even comes with a m

The most interesting piece of photographic equipment announced at the biennial Photokina trade show this week is Fujifilm’s GFX 50S. A brand-new medium-format camera system, the GFX 50S takes the best attributes of Fujifilm’s smaller X-series camera and pairs them with a massive sensor capable of much higher resolution and image quality.
Fujifilm says the new camera, which will launch early next year for "a price well below $10,000," satisfies the needs of professional commercia

HTC is rumored to be releasing a new phone called the Bolt on Sprint later this year. Evan Blass leaked an image of what that phone might look like, and from what we can tell, it’s relatively similar to the HTC 10 with the same antenna lines and centered camera. The new phone likely won’t come with a headphone jack and will instead rely on USB-C.
Here’s the HTC 10:HTCHere’s what Blass says the Bolt will look like:
HTC Bolt in silver. pic.twitter.com/vAFVInwnbc
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter just now to announce the "gradual" rollout of the electric car company’s new Autopilot 8.0. It is the first update to the semi-autonomous software since a Tesla driver was killed while using Autopilot in May.
V8.0 starts downloading tonight. Release will be gradual to make sure there aren't small regressions. Many car configs, many environments.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2016This is an over-the-air software update, though, not the hardw

Apple approached British supercar-maker McLaren to discuss an acquisition or a strategic investment in the firm, reports the Financial Times. The talks are said to have been in progress for several months.
McLaren is best known for its Formula One racing team and, a few months ago, rumors surfaced that Apple was considering an acquisition of the Formula One racing league itself. McLaren also has a fast-growing road cars division that started less than a decade ago but has received great praise f

Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft have been Silicon Valley’s big disruptive success story of the last five years. They upended the market, beat the policymakers, won over consumers, and saved democracy. Or at least that’s the story Uber and Lyft are selling, especially as they pivot to the next big thing: self-driving cars.But the ride-hail industry is still at loggerheads with state governments across the US over a number of sticky issues. After winning a series of legislativ

Lookouts opens with a mad rush through a forest as an unseen narrator demands: "Now tell me: what is a basilisk?" What follows is a brilliant short film about a troop of boys and their confrontation with a mythical creature. If you’ve been looking for something to watch after Stranger Things, you may be sated — at least for the next 12 minutes.Directed by David Bousquet, the film is a condensed fantasy epic that drops the viewer right into its moody world with monsters. The story hop

Mark Rubin worked on Call of Duty games for nearly a decade. He was in charge of Infinity Ward, the creator of games like Call of Duty: Ghosts, until early 2015. After he left, he experienced that surreal feeling of shifting from being the head of a 260-person game studio to being a fan.
He suddenly went from having no time to play games to playing games all the way through to completion. Rubin is still a heavy-duty gamer, playing games like Marvel Heroes 2016 and spending a lot of money in the

DirecTV's upcoming streaming service will launch before the end of the year with "very, very aggressive price points," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said at an investor conference today, according to CNET. The company is planning on releasing DirecTV Now, its over-the-top service which will feature over 100 premium channels, once it wraps up the remaining content deals. Stephenson said deals with Disney and HBO are already complete.
AT&T is targeting the 20 million households in

There's a new Dishonored on the way, which means a new world to explore, further revelations into the lives of Emily Kaldwin and Corvo Attano, and, of course, more crazy abilities with which to kill bad guys. Dishonored 2 will let you do things like link enemies together, or pull them from afar with what looks like a magical beam of light, or create a disposable doppelgänger of yourself. The really exciting part, though, comes from combining all of these various powers, and the game's lates