Technology news

One of the best games of the year is getting a little better.
Bethesda has released a free update for its first-person shooter Doom, which came out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC back in May, that adds new modes for single-player and multiplayer. New content can encourage people who already bought a game to keep playing, while potentially attracting those who haven’t bought it yet. And we think you should check out Doom, as our review praises the shooter for its refreshing,

If you're like me, maybe you were planning on walking into your local Verizon Wireless store tomorrow morning to purchase a 128GB Google Pixel XL. Well, I've got rather unfortunate news, friends. Jeffrey Nelson, who works for Verizon's communications team, just tweeted out that initial inventory of the 128GB Pixel XL is already sold out and will not be at the carrier's retail stores tomorrow. Shipping estimates for the XL model have slipped back to November 18th on Verizon's website. C

GUEST: Every weekend new bots are emerging, particularly in the entertainment arena. Built in a weekend and released to the world, they’re usually either purely meant to be funny or are solving a “problem” no one really has. After the initial influx of users from PR, retention drops off a cliff and they fade into obscurity. This has led to many arguing that bots are gimmicky and useless, just another fad that will be gone within six months.
But can you really deny that mes

LeEco’s flagship Le Pro3 smartphone isn’t trying to compete with the Google Pixel, which puts modern Google services in front of a stock Android backdrop. After playing with the Le Pro3 at the company’s U.S. launch event in San Francisco today, I’m left feeling that it’s an easy, low-cost way to get the full experience of LeEco’s applications.
There are proprietary LeEco utility tools like the browser, email, calendar, messages, notes, and phone apps, alo

Two major earthquake-generating faults in California’s Bay Area may be connected. That means that the next temblor to shake the Bay’s 7 million or so residents could be much stronger — and much more destructive — than seismologists anticipated, new research shows.
A longer fault can produce a bigger magnitude quake
The study, published today in the journal Science Advances, shows that earthquake forecasts for the Bay Area could be underestimating the magnitude of a future

NASA’s Juno spacecraft went into safe mode last night, 13 hours before it swung close by the surface of Jupiter. Since July 4th, Juno has been in a highly elliptical orbit around the gas giant, swinging close by Jupiter every 53 days to take scientific measurements of the planet and its insides. But since Juno was in safe mode, all of the vehicle’s instruments were automatically turned off and were unable to collect any data during this most recent pass by the planet. Conti

YouTube’s rumored TV service just got a major new partner. According to reports in The Wall Street Journal and Variety, CBS has signed a deal with Google to provide content to a new TV subscription service that will launch in early 2017. That service, first reported by Bloomberg News earlier this year, would launch under the YouTube brand and include access to a number of channels for a single flat fee.
According to Variety, Google is also close to a deal with Fox, which would also include

Confirming an earlier report, Apple sent out media invitations today for an October 27 event with a classically vague tagline.
“Hello again,” the invite reads, like a nod to a dusty, long-neglected product line.
Apple’s MacBook Pros haven’t received a major update in years, but they’re expected to star in the last-minute October event. Bloomberg reports that the MacBook Pro line will undergo significant cha

Earlier today, Chinese tech company LeEco unveiled its grand plans to take the US market by storm with a series of new gadgets — well, ones that were new to US customers, but that the company had already been making for the Chinese market. This included a new flagship smartphone, the LePro 3.
Yes, all of the new products start with "Le." Let's get that out of the way.
I was skeptical that the $399 LePro 3 would feel like a premium smartphone, given its price point and also the fact th

The number of cases of sexually transmitted infections (STI) reported in the US in 2015 is at an all-time high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s because budget cuts to state and local STI programs have left fewer people with access to testing and treatment, the agency says.
"We’re very concerned about these unprecedented high number of cases of STIs in the United States," Gail Bolan, the director of the CDC's Division of Sexually Transmitted D

I just took LeEco's new "Super Bike" for a spin — or at least I spun the wheels in place. It's an electric bicycle that's coming to the US soon, though on the ground here LeEco's representatives were cagey about when that might be. It may take a minute, though, because the thing is absolutely littered with gadgetry that will need to be tuned and tested. There are laser running lights, turn signals, buttons for taking photos, adjusting the headlight, and much more. It's powered by a large b

As expected, Apple just sent out invites for an event in Cupertino next week on October 27th. The tagline on the invite, "hello again," is a clear reference to the Mac, which was originally introduced with the word "hello" in 1984. The event will be streamed live starting at 10AM PT / 1PM ET — and if an endless string of speculation is true, we’ll finally be seeing some new MacBook Pros. (If there’s ever a time for finally to be appropriate, it’s now — the Reti

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is about to tell us more about the company’s upcoming Model 3 vehicle. The announcement will “go live” at 8PM ET / 5PM PT and will be all about the Model 3, according to a tweet from Musk.
Earlier this year, he said that a “part 2” announcement regarding the Model 3 would take “things to another level,” and then at Recode’s Code Conference in May, Musk teased that there'd be a "big" event for the Model 3 toward the end of the ye

Airbnb is making a last-minute attempt to appease regulators in anticipation of pending legislation. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is currently contemplating a bill that would make it illegal for landlords to list their empty homes or apartment on the home-sharing site for less than 30 days. The bill was passed by the New York State Senate earlier in June, and the governor is due to make the final decision on its fate by October 29th.
Airbnb's proposed policy would limit hosts from making

 Ritual, a Disrupt Battlefield startup with a focus on women’s nutrition, officially launched today. We first told you about the company aiming to make a better vitamin for women last spring when Ritual’s founder Kat Schneider came onstage to present her business model. She made it to the final rounds for the idea, ultimately losing out to an interactive gaming network that was… Read More

The grand unveiling of the LeEco LeSEE Pro electric car didn't go exactly as planned. After a long shaggy dog story involving a card accident, sleepless nights, and Michael Bay, it turns out the car made it to LeEco's grand event. Which meant I had a chance to fight through a literal mob of people to get a front row spot to see the tarp pulled off.
It looks like a concept car whose sole purpose is to scream at you: "I AM FROM THE FUTURE" — even though you might not believe it. Behind the f

Legalizing medical marijuana doesn’t make more teens into stoners, researchers say. Though more people over 25 were likely to ingest marijuana if their home states approved it for medical purposes, there was no effect on anyone younger.The study, which was published online in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, found that people over 25 were slightly more likely to have used marijuana in the past month after their state legalized it for medical purposes. That number grew to 7.15 perce

Like many iPhone owners, I don't find myself using the device's 3D Touch feature often. But one of the most clever uses that Apple devised for 3D Touch (and the thing that probably keeps me from forgetting about it) is a super convenient way of moving around the cursor in iOS. When you're using Apple's default keyboard, you can press down anywhere on the keyboard and, still holding down, move your finger around the keyboard to quickly relocate the text cursor. Once you've done it a few times, it

EXCLUSIVE: Pornography is an inextricable feature of new technologies, and that includes even Sony’s PlayStation VR.
Pornhub has revealed to GamesBeat that its VR category is compatible with the PSVR head-mounted display. The process to get down in first-person, however, is complicated and missing some features compared to competing headsets, according to the adult-film website. Analysts predict that VR could generate as much as $40 billion in revenues by 2020, and the XXX industry could g

 The idea of ownership in the American economy has changed so much in recent years that it’s easy to forget the once high level of importance placed on it. If we think back, most of us can remember at-least one conversation with our parents about Uber or Airbnb that resulted in a lecture about the dangers of using other people’s things. Ajith Mohan Karimpana, the founder and CEO… Read More

GUEST: If you haven’t yet moved most of your internal communication to Slack, it might be time to give it serious consideration. Tens of thousands of organisations have adopted Slack as their go-to communication platform. Thinking of Slack as an email replacement is underselling it. It is a manifestation of a new paradigm of workplaces built on speed, transparency, and collaboration.
Beyond collaboration, I think Slack offers much more to a workplace. It has the potential of brin

The European Space Agency still does not know the fate of its Schiaparelli lander, the ExoMars spacecraft that attempted to land on surface of Mars this morning. Signals from the lander cut out just before it reached the ground, and ESA has yet to reestablish communication with the vehicle. Its abrupt silence sparks fears that it did not survive its high-speed fall to Mars — what ESA referred to as "six minutes of terror." Schiaparelli was equipped with a heat shield, a supersonic parachut

Yahoo revealed on Wednesday that it has submitted a letter to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper demanding transparency involving national security orders issued to tech companies around obtaining user data. The move is intended to provide citizens insight about what the U.S. government is looking for.
The company acknowledged that while its communication makes “specific reference to recent allegations” levied against it, “it is intended to set a stronger

Peter Thiel's donation of $1.25 million to Donald Trump's presidential campaign continues to rattle Silicon Valley. A day after a nonprofit stopped working with startup incubator Y Combinator for keeping Thiel on as a part-time partner, Mark Zuckerberg defended Thiel's status as a Facebook board member in a message to employees. "We can't create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate," Zuckerberg wrote.

LeSEE Pro, LeEco’s self-driving, completely electric concept car, was supposed to make its US debut on stage today at an event in San Francisco. But thinks to an accident causing “serious damage” to the high-concept hypecar, as well as intervention by Transofrmers director Michael Bay, the car couldn’t make its expected appearance, explained the company’s chairman Jia Yueting.The company’s executives explained that the car was in London for filming of Bay&rsqu

LeEco is bringing many of its existing products over from China as it launches in the US today, but one of the new services the US gets is a new streaming platform that comes with an extensive list of launch partners. The video platform will launch with content from Showtime, Lionsgate, MGM, Sling, Vice, The Travel Channel, and Awesomeness TV, just to name a few.
It won't be an easy road for LeEco's new service, which is missing some major players like HBO, Amazon Video, Hulu, ESPN, and apps fro

At its U.S. launch event in San Francisco today, LeEco announced that some LeEco smart TVs and mobile devices and its streaming video service are becoming available in the U.S.
The lineup includes the 5.5-inch brushed metal $399 Le Pro3 Android phone, which features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chip, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and 4,070 mAh battery. There’s also the $249 Le S3 phone with a Snapdragon 652 chip, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. LeEco also showed off a $4,999 85-inch uMax

At its first major US event, the Chinese tech giant LeEco showed off an entire ecosystem of products: from TVs to phones to cars to bicycles. As part of its ecosystem of connected devices and on demand entertainment, the company also showed off a mobile VR headset it calls ExploreVR.
The device will be be powered by the Qualcomm's Snapdragon 821 inside LeEco's new smartphone, the Le Pro 3. For comfort it promises "premium memory foam lining," that molds to the contours of your head. It uses

LeEco, the Chinese tech giant, said today that its Android-enabled “super bike” will soon be available in the US. The bike has a 30-speed shift, on-board lighting, a fingerprint-scanner, built-in alarm and location tracker, and other nifty bells and whistles your average Schwinn bicycle probably lacks.A 4-inch display touchscreen is nestled in between the handlebars, which is enabled with Google’s Android software. It’s part of LeEco’s suite of televisions, smartpho

Samsung apparently doesn't see much humor in a Grand Theft Auto V mod that turns the recalled, hazardous Galaxy Note 7 into an in-game weapon. In fact, the company is trying to erase it from the internet completely. Samsung has issued a DMCA takedown targeting a YouTube video that showcased the mod, which gives the Note 7 explosive, grenade-like capabilities. It was a pretty great way of poking fun at Samsung's ongoing PR crisis — and now the company is responding in a terrible way: r

LeEco made its US debut today with the announcement of two new phones: the flagship LePro 3 and the mid-tier Le S3. Both Android phones will be available in the US. Here's what we know about the Le S3's specs:
Snapdragon 652 processor
32GB of storage
3GB of RAM
USB-C
3,000mAh battery
5.5-inch Full HD display
Quick Charge 3.0
16-megapixel rear camera, 8-megapixel front-facing camera
Fingerprint scanner
$249
It's available in grey, rose gold, and gold. It'll be available on November

REVIEW: Whenever your character dies in Battlefield 1, you see a memorial message with the character’s full name, birth year, and the year of death. It is a solemn reminder that real soldiers can’t be reborn and save the world like they do in so many video games. In the prologue, those soldiers don’t come back. And that creates a touching remembrance for the “lost generation” of World War I. Millions of fans will experience this kind of feeling when they play this f

Valve is not backing down in a squabble with the state of Washington.
Earlier this month, the Washington State Gambling Commission gave the Steam operator until October 14 to explain how it is going to end its alleged facilitation of online wagering in its games. In response to those accusations, Valve has sent a letter that attempts to refute the commission. This follows months of increased scrutiny surrounding a practice known as “skin gambling” in Valve games like military sh

Tonight marks the final presidential debate of the 2016 campaign trail, with only a couple of weeks left until election day. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers have been rising, but she’s faced scrutiny over leaked emails from campaign chair John Podesta. Trump has continued to deal with the fallout from describing sexually assaulting women in a 2005 tape, while asserting that the election is being rigged against him.
Like previous ones, the third debate will start a

PRESS RELEASE:Cem Tanyel Joins Leading Enterprise Mobility CompanyAUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–October 19, 2016– Kony, Inc., the leading enterprise mobility company, today announced the appointment of Cem Tanyel as executive vice president and general manager of Global Services. Tanyel will ensure Kony delivers the highest level of value and service to its growing base of leading global customers.
This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: ht

The production of sharp stone tools for cutting has long been thought to be one of the features that separated early humans from the rest of the animal world — until now. It turns out wild bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil produce sharp-edged stone flakes similar to those made by early Stone Age human ancestors. There’s one big difference: the human ancestors made their tools on purpose.
These capuchin monkeys smashed rocks into each other, producing the sharp stone flakes. However,