Technology news

HBO’s Westworld has a real chance to become the next Game of Thrones. It’s got high production values, a rich, twisty plot, and plenty of human depravity going for it. Of course, it’s just getting started, so it still needs to prove it can build and retain its audience. So to make sure everyone has the chance to watch, HBO has made the first episode of the series available free for non-subscribers.
Based loosely on the 1973 movie of the same name, Westworld expands on the origi

After Facebook launched its new Marketplace feature — read: Craigslist competitor — on Monday, people quickly noticed that the service wasn't exactly being put to its intended use. Rather than used furniture, bikes, and appliances being put up for sale, people posted offers purporting to sell guns, animals, and weed, among other prohibited items.
Facebook now tells the BBC that "a technical issue" stopped its review system from catching these violations. "We are workin

eBay announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Corrigon in a move to bring more image recognition into its online marketplace. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but it’ll be the third such deal eBay has made for its structured data effort.
“As we continue to evolve the eBay shopping experience, Corrigon’s technology and expertise will help buyers find the best results when shopping on eBay through experiences that were not possible a year ago, befor

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is aiming to start a Martian colony within the next decade, but another rival CEO says his company will actually be the one to put humans on the Red Planet first. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg recently answered questions at the "Whats Next" tech conference in Chicago, and when asked about the future of his company, he focused on breakthroughs in space travel. "I’m convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket," said Mui

GUEST: As the world of applications marches steadily away from visual interfaces to chat interfaces, it would seem that we need an entirely new set of axioms in designing this next generation of interfaces. After all, what is the conversational equivalent of a shiny red button beckoning the user to a call to action? As much as it is true that many of the best practices of UI/UX design will be obsolete in this brave new world of bot assistants, we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathw

At its Dreamforce conference conference in San Francisco today, customer relationship management software company Salesforce announced the launch of LiveMessage, a feature of the existing Service Cloud product that will let customer support representatives communicate with customers across multiple messaging apps.Speaking onstage during a keynote presentation, Salesforce cofounder and chief executive said LiveMessage is a way to support “conversation as a platform” — that is, s

Ubisoft doesn’t want to split all of its revenues with retailers.
The French publisher announced today that it has relaunched the Uplay Store. This makeover gives the site a new design, but it also provides a new home for exclusive collector’s editions of Ubisoft games. For example, you can get a Watch Dogs 2 Collector’s Edition with a miniature robot that you can control with your smartphone. Fans of that open-world cyberadventure series can simultaneously pick up memorabilia

The government of the state of Washington isn’t down with gamers gambling virtual items, and it has asked one of the primary companies enabling this practice to do everything it can to stop it.
The Washington State Gambling Commission is telling Valve, the owner and operator of the Steam PC-gaming platform, to “stop facilitating gambling.” In a press release that went out today, the gaming board announced that it has notified Valve that the company needs to cut off any gambling

A month ago, Bethesda announced that it was abandoning plans to add mod support to the PS4 versions of Fallout 4 and the upcoming remastered version of Skyrim. Today, however, the developer says that both games will be getting support for mods on Sony’s console.
Previously, Bethesda said that “Sony has informed us they will not approve user mods the way they should work,” hence the cancellation. The developer appears to have been able to work out those issues with Sony over the

At one of the largest hardware events in Google’s history Tuesday, all software announcements made were around its Google Assistant, the new way to complete tasks and chat with the Google search engine.
For now, Google Assistant is the only bot on Google Home or Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, but it won’t be alone for long.
Starting in early December, Actions on Google will allow businesses and the rest of the world to build bots people can access while using Google Assist

Yesterday, a very aggressive and very secret surveillance operation was abruptly made public. According to an exclusive Reuters report, Yahoo complied with a government order last year asking the company to scan all incoming emails for a specific string of characters — effectively surveilling hundreds of millions of users in search of a single phrase or snippet of code. In a statement this morning, Yahoo called the report "misleading" and emphasized that the mail-scanning system does not c

A year after it was acquired by Google, Pixate announced that it will be shuttering its mobile app development products on October 31. The team said it believes it can have a larger impact if it moved “beyond its scope.” While all of its products will be no longer supported, the company will keep its community service operational but without any “direct involvement from our team.”
Launched in 2012, this Y Combinator alumnus provides tools for designers aimed at creating m

John Carmack is enough of a rock star in virtual reality circles to fill a room at a conference, even if all he is doing is just staring into a VR headset and criticizing apps.
Carmack, an Oculus technologist who helped design a lot of the technology that’s inside Samsung’s Gear VR, has begun his live reviews of a bunch of games and apps. He’s sitting in a crowded room with hundreds of people at the beginning of the Oculus Connect event at the San Jose Convention Center in

People who used Fitbits cost their employer nearly 25 percent less in health care costs, according to a new study from Fitbit. At first blush this appears to be a tantalizing result for companies looking to save money, but a closer look shows that gains aren’t as dramatic as they appear.Here’s the claim: Fitbit says that employees at a large company cost almost $1,300 less to employers when they used a Fitbit for two years. These numbers look great, but there are flaws in how the stu

There are a lot of short films out there based on Stephen King's short stories, largely because of King's "dollar babies" program, which permits film students to pay a buck for the rights to make a non-commercial adaptation of one of King's short stories. But short films based on his novels are much rarer, because the adaptation rights are largely owned by other people. That's certainly true of The Long Walk, King's 1979 novel about a dystopic future where a popular national sport consists of a

Google today said that it’s open-sourced Cartographer, a library for mapping movement in space in both 2D and 3D. the technology works with the open source Robot Operating System (ROS), which makes the software easier to deploy in software systems for robots, self-driving cars, and drones.
Cartographer is an implementation of simultaneous localization and mapping, better known by its acronym SLAM. But it’s not the only open source SLAM library; there are plenty others, like hector_sl

Figuring out how to keep pets entertained can be quite tiring. No, you don't really feel like playing catch with your dog after a long day at work, or dangling strings in front of your cat to stop them from destroying every piece of furniture in sight. Luckily for the tinkerers among us, there is a way to keep your feline entertained for hours without you having to constantly buy new cat toys. You just need to have an affinity for assembling electronics.
La Fabrique DIY has provided a video of h

Next year, some of Netflix's original movies will have a debut home on the big screen. The streaming service just signed a deal with the theater chain iPic Entertainment that will give a same-day theater release to a portion of Netflix's films, The Wall Street Journal reports. The deal includes 10 of Netflix's upcoming movies, including The Siege of Jadotville (which will see a simultaneous release this Friday) and the Christopher Guest-directed comedy Mascots.
iPic Entertainment is a small

OPINION: Sony is making VR for the masses. To do that, the company has potentially skimped on important technology that could cause problems for a lot of people.
The PlayStation VR, which comes to the PS4 on October 13 for $500, has difficulty tracking some of its components when they are 10 feet away or more. PSVR is Sony’s virtual reality system that uses a head-mounted display, the PlayStation Camera, and PlayStation Move controllers to make players feel like they are surrounded by

If you’re looking to buy a smartwatch today, there are plenty of options. Or, you could follow in the steps of hardware hacking YouTuber Daniel Davis, and build your own. But Davis’ smartwatch isn’t just a Pebble clone or a homemade Android Wear device. Instead, Davis took a different approach, building the smartwatch out an old Nokia 1100, which already had most of the parts he’d need between the small screen and vibrating motor for notifications. Continue

By 2020, it’s estimated that more than 1.9 million jobs will be created around Salesforce. According to an IDC study commissioned by the cloud computing company, an additional 2.8 million jobs would be created in adjacencies, with $389 billion in new business revenue being generated just from cloud computing. Salesforce points to this as a reason for more people to start learning its suite of customer relationship management (CRM) products.
To encourage this, Salesforce

Southwest Airlines flight 944 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate because of a smoking Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. All passengers and crew exited the plane via the main cabin door and no injuries were reported, a Southwest Airlines spokesperson told The Verge.
More worryingly, the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung. The Verge spoke to Brian Green, owner of the Note 7, on the phone earlier

Luke Cage debuted on Netflix last week, and the reception has been warm — in some quarters, even rapturous. It’s been called ambitious, complex, and resonant. It’s a perfect and necessary follow-up to Jessica Jones, Marvel’s last great series on the streaming network. Where Jessica Jones examined abuse and trauma in the lives of women, Luke Cage gives its audience an authentic portrait of blackness in its superhero narrative.
Iron Fist is the next series Marvel has planne

Oakley and Intel’s Radar Pace training sunglasses, which were introduced at CES last year, are now available to buy. The sunglasses come with built-in earbuds that allow the sunglasses to respond to voice commands. You can ask how far you’ve traveled and your pace, and your voice assistant "coach" will respond along with encouragement to keep going. The sunglasses are also outfitted with a bunch of sensors, including an accelerometer and gyroscope. They can also apparently detect pre

The NSA has arrested a contractor as part of an investigation into the theft and disclosure of highly classified source code, according to a report in The New York Times that cites several anonymous government officials. The contractor was working for the NSA on behalf of Booz Allen, the same contracting firm that employed Edward Snowden, although no connection between the two leaks has been alleged.
According to the Times, the investigation focuses on whether the contractor "stole and disc

The NSA has arrested a contractor as part of an investigation into the theft and disclosure of highly classified source code, as first reported by The New York Times. The contractor was working for the NSA on behalf of Booz Allen, the same contracting firm that employed Edward Snowden, although no connection between the two leaks has been alleged.
A Justice Department statement identifies the contractor as Harold Thomas Martin III, a 51-year-old Maryland resident with a top secret clearance. Acc

The first uterus transplants from living donors have been attempted in the US, Time reports. Of the four transplant surgeries performed last month at Baylor University Medical Center, only one looks to be successful. But once doctors figure out a way around the complications, these surgeries could one day become a way for women without uteruses to carry a pregnancy to term.
The four women who received the uterus transplants last month had been been born without their own, due to a condition call

The former team behind the popular Runescape game has created a new startup PlayFusion and a new game Lightseekers that it hopes will represent the next generation of toys-to-life video games.
In a challenge to Activision’s $3 billion Skylanders business, Lightseekers is a connected-play video game with smart action figures, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and interactive trading cards. The company has teamed up with toy maker Tomy to make the toys, which you can wield as if th

Former designer who worked on the popular Runescape game have created a new startup PlayFusion and a new game Lightseekers that it hopes will represent the next generation of toys-to-life video games.
In a challenge to Activision’s $3 billion Skylanders business, Lightseekers is a connected-play video game with smart action figures, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and interactive trading cards. The company has teamed up with toy maker Tomy to make the toys, which you can w

The entire automotive industry is racing to build autonomous driving technology, but few teams have been working on the problem longer than the company now known as Alphabet. Seven and a half years into the project, Alphabet’s X division said today that its cars have now driven 2 million miles on public roads in fully autonomous mode. That’s a collective 300 years of driving, an X spokeswoman said, during which the cars have navigated hundreds of millions of interactions with vehicle

First Contact Entertainment has raised $5 million to make high-end virtual reality games.
The Los Angeles company has recruited a team of developers from game companies like Starbreeze, Blizzard, Treyarch and Infinity Ward. The financing will fuel the company’s ambitions to create exceptional narrative-driven content that raises the bar for quality in VR gaming with a commitment to push the limits of graphics, gameplay and storytelling. The company is one more example of the

The Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is set to be released in November, according to CNET. The smartphone is more widely known as the first device to run Tango, Google's augmented reality technology. Google's head of VR Clay Bavor confirmed the release of the device, which was supposed to be released during the summer, to the publication.
The most important thing about the Phab 2 Pro is the Tango wide-angle and depth-sensing camera that's included above the standard 16MP sensor. Tango will let users

Google today released a new statistic about the use of Chromebooks — specifically in the context of education.
Now more than 20 million students use Chromebooks “to create, collaborate and communicate,” Rajen Sheth, senior director of product management for Android and Chrome for business and education at Google, wrote in a blog post. (It’s not clear if that number includes Chromebooks that multiple students share.)
For some time now it’s been clear that Chromebooks