Technology news

Nintendo’s NES Classic is, at its core essence, a Nintendo-approved NES emulator that comes with 30 ROMs. It feels very similar to the sort of thing people have been building for ages by running Linux on a Raspberry Pi — with the main difference from a conceptual standpoint being that the NES Classic is considerably less legally questionable.Unless you want to desolder flash memory from the motherboard, looks like it's impossible to add new games to NES Classic. pic.twitter.com/jc99W

Brave Software, the company behind the open source Brave web browser with native ad-blocking capability, today released version 0.12.8 for Mac and Windows, and the update lets you easily turn on a new extension: the Pocket tool for saving articles to read later.
To turn on the feature, you’ll want to update to the latest version, and then you’ll want to go to Settings in the hamburger menu, select Advanced, and click “enable Pocket.” (On Mac you’ll select Preference

Vine may live on with a new owner, according to a new report. TechCrunch says Twitter is now evaluating multiple offers for the short-form video service, which it announced it was shutting down last month. Some of the offers are for less than $10 million, according to the report — less than it reportedly cost Twitter to run Vine for a single month. (The company declined to comment.)
Still, a sale could ensure that the huge archive of Vines remains online at a time when their current host,

A lot of us made up our minds a long time ago. The choice for president between front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is between two very different people with very different visions of the United States.
But if you are still undecided or still have unanswered questions about two of the least popular presidential candidates in U.S. history, chatting with these bots can help you make a final decision.
1. An Alexa-powered fact-checker
The experimental Share the Facts Alexa skill

One of the most important elections in history has finally arrived. This year, the number of millennial voters has caught up to baby boomers in the electorate, each accounting for roughly 31 percent of the voting-eligible population. Politicians have looked to social media as a method of attracting young voters’ attention, but if you’re hoping to encourage young folks to vote by sharing your ballot selfie, take pause.
In many states, taking a selfie or a photo at a polling place is c

The Xbox One can now play every game in the sci-fi series that helped define the last generation of consoles.
Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 all now work on Xbox One thanks to that system’s backward compatibility with the Xbox 360. This means you can play through the adventures of Commander Shepard as long as you own the disc or downloadable copies of the Mass Effect games. The trilogy is also available in the EA Access Vault, which is a collection of games that anyone who s

In an attempt to make a big splash with its upcoming DirecTV Now service, AT&T will reportedly give away Apple TVs to customers who agree to pay for three months of the service, according to a report from Variety. According to customer support documents obtained by the publication, AT&T’s over-the-top offering — which will cost $35 a month — will also give out free Amazon Fire TV sticks to customers who sign up for one month of the service.
The tactic isn’t new, a

PRESS RELEASE: DAVIS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–November 7, 2016– BioConsortia, Inc., innovator of microbial solutions for natural plant trait enhancement and crop yield improvement, announced that it has raised this year a total of $12 million for future growth. Last week, BioConsortia closed an $8 million equity round of investment financed by existing investors, Khosla Ventures and Otter Capital, and earlier in the year raised $4 million of venture debt from Square 1 Bank, a di

Any Amazon Echo Dot owners feeling a little envious of the new Google Home — with its fancy swappable metal and fabric magnetic bases — can take solace in the fact that they can now have decor-matching cases of their own.Amazon has started selling cases for the Echo Dot in a variety of colors and materials, freeing owners from having to tolerate the now-bland black and white options on offer. The cases are only designed to fit the second-generation Echo Dot, and will still allow acce

Final Fantasy XV is getting perhaps its most surprising spinoff yet. It’s a new game developed by the company behind ubiquitous mobile games Game of War and Mobile Strike.
Few details on the game are available just yet, but Square Enix says that it will be a mobile massively multiplayer online game set in the ever-growing FFXV universe, featuring “the characters, storyline, and soundtrack” of the game. FFXV launches later this month, but the game’s world has already been

Cleveland, Ohio’s squad of Uber drivers includes a minor celebrity for those of us who grew up using AOL: Elwood Edwards, the voice behind “you’ve got mail!”
This weekend, former Facebook PR head and The Pramana Collective co-founder Brandee Barker took a $6.21 UberX ride with Edwards. She posted this video of him giving a repeat performance:
OMG OMG my @Uber driver in Ohio was the You've Got Mail voice Elwood Edwards!!! I made him say it in this video #GOTVforHRC pic.twi

GUEST: As someone whose obsession with all things bot and AI related borders on unhealthy, I struggle to keep up with the ever-growing universe of bot platforms, bot building services, and NLP services.
I fancy myself something of an expert on the subject, yet when asked by someone considering building a bot which platform is right for them, I am often at a loss for words. Perhaps my terrible memory is partly to blame — I do routinely walk into rooms having fully forgotten what compelled m

Volkswagen could face renewed wrath from investors and the public after regulators in California found emissions-cheating software in some of the company’s Audi models. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) found evidence of emissions testing tampering in both diesel and gasoline engines, according to The Wall Street Journal. The software obscured accurate levels of carbon dioxide emissions, an environmentally harmful greenhouse gas.
VW found itself embroiled in a global emissions

Almost all the world’s illegal ivory comes from elephants that have been recently killed, researchers say. The new study shows that seized ivory isn’t coming from old stockpiles, but from African elephants that have been poached less than three years before the tusks were seized. That means that poaching — one of the biggest threats to elephants — is widespread and may be a bigger problem than we think.Poachers kill elephants for their valuable tusks — a single poun

Back in 2013, when Marvel Studios first confirmed that a Doctor Strange movie would be part of Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe story, fans reacted with the usual mix of celebration and cynicism about whether the Sorcerer this movSupreme would work on film. Plans for a Doctor Strange movie have been kicking around since at least the mid-1980s, but the various rights-holders couldn’t figure out how to make the character work on-screen. And no wonder. There are fantastical elemen

You can now play one of the more interesting-sounding role-playing games in some time.
Developer Pixelmage Games has released its open-world action RPG Hero’s Song on Steam Early Access. That means that even though it’s not finished, you can still buy it for $20 and start playing while the developer continues work on this game.
Hero’s Song has a 2D, pixelated art style. Its hooks is how it gives players a say in the creation of the game world by le

Publicly traded digital radio company Pandora today announced new commitments for diversity.
Most significantly, the company intends to raise the percentage of U.S. employees of color — that is, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, American Indians and Alaska natives, blacks and African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, and native Hawaiians — from 35 percent to 45 percent by 2020.
The idea is to “reflect the evolving makeup of our local workforce,” Kristen Robinson, Pan

As the massive Web Summit tech conference gears up in Lisbon this week, Portugal’s government is hoping to use this moment to ignite its own startup scene.
In remarks at the Venture Summit today, an investor-focused event that drew more than 600 venture capitalists from around the world, Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa announced the government had created a new public fund of $220 million that will match venture capital invested in the country’s startup

Voters in California will make an unprecedented decision on Tuesday about whether to deputize themselves as condom police. The ballot measure is called Proposition 60, and if it passes it will require adult performers to wear condoms in scenes with “vaginal or anal penetration by a penis.” If they don’t, adult film producers, distributors, and anyone with a financial stake in the film could be fined, or even sued by California residents.
The measure reflects years of work by Mi

A new Android version has arrived, and that means we can start watching paint dry. Per Google’s Platform Versions page, the latest and greatest version of the company’s mobile operating system took more than two months to hit a whopping 0.3 percent adoption.
Google started rolling out Android 7.0 Nougat to Nexus devices in August. To be fair, the company’s new Pixel phones, which ship with Android 7.1, haven’t been on sale for a month yet. Still, the latest major version

Mass Effect is finally getting its Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Trek (2009) sequel/reboot treatment, and a new trailer is giving fans the first decent taste of what that’s going to look and feel like.
Publisher Electronic Arts and developer BioWare released the “cinematic reveal” for Mass Effect: Andromeda this morning. The video established its extragalactic setting while also teasing a fresh cast of characters and a new threat. Andromeda launches in th

After halting production of Soylent Powder and Soylent Bars in October due to consumer complaints of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, Soylent thinks it has finally found the culprit: algal flour.Since its inception in 2013, the Los Angeles-based meal-replacement startup has gained a strong following among Silicon Valley circles. However, just as the company was basking in its early success with the launch of its new coffee drink, reports surfaced about consumers who experienced unpleasant side ef

PRESS RELEASE:#FlipMyFunnel and Sales Hacker are joining forces to present Revenue Summit, an event dedicated to bridging the gap between marketing and sales, hosted in San FranciscoATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–November 7, 2016– #FlipMyFunnel, a vendor-agnostic community dedicated to challenging the status quo of B2B marketing, sales, and customer success, today announced it will partner with Sales Hacker, an organization focused on shaping the future with educational and actionable

NASA is preparing for Juno to stick around Jupiter a lot longer than it had originally planned. The probe — which has been orbiting the gas giant since July — is going to stay in its 53-day orbit around the planet for a while, with no definitive plans at the moment to put the vehicle in a shorter orbit. Originally, NASA had hoped to have Juno in a two-week orbit by now, but ongoing engine troubles are delaying that move. Continue reading…

Music video service Vevo announced today a new feature that lets users turn any 5-second clip of a music video into an animated GIF.
The GIF-making tool is available only on desktop for the moment, but will be soon available on the company’s revamped mobile app. The new feature is the latest step in Vevo’s strategy to make itself more of a destination for users and create more independence from the network of YouTube channels that were the source of its initial success.
Earlier

MZ (formerly Machine Zone) has partnered with Square Enix to make a massively multiplayer online mobile game based on Final Fantasy XV.
The alliance is a combination of powerhouses that says a lot about how mobile gaming is changing. Mobile game fans, just like console and PC gamers, are gravitating to well-known game brands, and you can find plenty of evidence of that in the top ranks of the $36 billion mobile game industry. Branded titles such as Pokémon Go, Marvel Contest of

Cyan, the legendary studio that released Myst and Riven in the 1990s, launched its Obduction game on the PC in August, and it debuted on the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset last week. Now, Cyan is announcing that Obduction is also going to debut on the Sony PlayStation 4, the PlayStation VR headset, and the HTC Vive VR headset as well.
That will help Cyan reach a wider audience for a mysterious puzzle game that is like a spiritual successor to Myst and Riven.
“We’re going al

Lip reading is a tricky business. Test results vary, but on average, most people recognize just one in 10 words when watching someone’s lips, and the accuracy of self-proclaimed experts tends to vary — there are certainly no lip-reading savants. Now, though, some researchers claim that AI techniques like deep learning could help solve this problem. After all, AI methods that focus on crunching large amounts of data to find common patterns have helped improve audio speech recogni

Every week, I swing for the fences with one massive theory about the future of Westworld. Am I wrong? Am I right? We probably won’t know for sure for years, so why not enjoy the present?
For weeks, our Westworld predictions have been safe, quite frankly. They’ve been supported by bountiful evidence, and conversations across Reddit and on countless podcasts. Yes, Bernard probably is a robot. The story is almost certainly composed of multiple timelines. And we now know for a fact that

Apple is bringing in help to boost its News app. Apple is going to hand over ad sales for the app to Comcast’s NBCUniversal in an exclusive deal that starts in January.Publishers who put content on the app can still sell their own ads and will keep 100 percent of the revenue from any ads they sell. The new deal means that NBCUniversal, instead of Apple, will sell any remaining ad inventory.As before, publishers will keep 70 percent of those sales. In a note to her staff, NBCUniversal sales

The end is nigh for the 2016 presidential election. We have but one hurdle left: the outcome.If, like us, you plan to spend your election night in a dark living room hunched over your laptop, we’d like to make the experience a little easier. Here’s how to follow along with the election results at home. We’d recommend pairing your sense of dread with a fine wine, or if you aren’t of a legal drinking age, we suppose La Croix will have to suffice.
The options:
Google
Google

A new treatment that protects the babies of pregnant mice infected with Zika could help us create a similar therapy for humans.The mosquito-borne Zika virus has “spread explosively” through the Americas, leading to health and travel advisories in many countries. The virus can cause a severe neurological disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome. It is especially dangerous for pregnant women whose children could be born with very small heads, a condition called microcephaly. The

It’s hard to make an original wristwatch these days. But hard doesn’t have to mean impossible, as evidenced by the Swiss-made Klokers Klok-01 that I’ve had the pleasure of testing over the past few weeks. This watch, funded on Kickstarter and costing a hefty €399 ($445) today, stands out with its eye-catching mechanism for telling the time. Instead of rotating hands pointing at the time on a circular dial, the Klok-01 inverts the whole process and rotates the dials around

PRESS RELEASE:For the second time in three years, firm recognized globally for consistently producing top net returns
TORONTO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–November 7, 2016– Wellington Financial LP, a privately-held specialty finance firm, today announced the firm was named to U.K.-based Preqin’s Most Consistent Top Performing Private Debt Fund Managers list for 2016. This is the second time in three years that Preqin has named Wellington Financial as a “Most Consistent Top Perfo

YouTube today added support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos. This means you can now watch YouTube videos in HDR on supported devices, including HDR TVs with the Chromecast Ultra and soon on all 2016 Samsung SUHD and UHD TVs.
HDR videos have higher color contrast as well as more detailed shadows and highlights. The technology supports a wider range than the conventional gamma curve, mimicking what the human eye sees in the real world thanks to clearer and more vibrant colors. YouTube chief bu

Microsoft is announcing today a few updates to its Azure public cloud lineup. Most significantly, the company is introducing a new Azure Container Registry service that will let developers host container images for applications they want to run on the Azure infrastructure. Containers are lightweight alternatives to virtual machines (VMs) that have become popular in the past few years.
The service will become available in preview on November 14, Corey Sanders, director of compute for Microsoft Az

President Obama warned that democracy is on the ballot this year, but there’s even more at stake — Americans could also be voting to protect the future of our entire planet. Climate change is the biggest story in science policy, and this year we’re faced with a stark choice. On one hand, in Hillary Clinton, we have someone who considers climate change an “urgent threat” and wants to invest in clean energy.
And then there’s Donald Trump, who called climate chan

Patrick Bach, general manager of DICE, the Electronic Arts game studio that makes the Battlefield series, has left the company.
EA confirmed the departure of Bach, who worked at DICE in various jobs at the Stockholm, Sweden studio that just shipped Battlefield 1.
“I’ve had an epic ride at DICE and EA, filled with amazingly creative and passionate people, and unforgettable experiences with our player community,” Bach said to PlayStation Lifestyle, which first reported the n

AMC’s The Walking Dead has always had a knack for manipulating its audience, but this year’s hyper-violent season premiere went too far. In fact, it went so far that we canceled our ongoing series The Walking Dead Quitter’s Club, with co-author Bryan Bishop swearing off the show entirely.Now, Nick Statt is trying to change his mind. Instead of tearing the show down, Nick will be finding something to highlight. It might be a subtle change in character, a great action scene, or a

During Google’s annual developers conference this past spring, the company teased a version of its Android Auto software that would run entirely on an Android phone and not require a new car or aftermarket dashboard display. Now the company is starting to roll this software out to Android phone owners.
The new Android Auto app, which is an updated version of the existing app, offers a completely streamlined, easy-to-navigate phone interface for when you’re driving in a car. It also l

Insect bites on fossilized leaves have finally helped us solve a long-standing mystery around the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. For years, scientists thought that the meteor hurt North America more, making South America a refuge for the species that survived. But by analyzing insect damage, we now know that the meteor hurt both hemispheres badly — it’s just that the Southern Hemisphere recovered much more quickly.Insect damage on leaves is one common

The New Nintendo 3DS is getting its cheapest price yet on Black Friday.
Nintendo will be releasing two new limited edition versions of the handheld — one black, one white — which will both be available on November 25th for $99.99. That makes it just slightly more expensive than the $79.99 Nintendo 2DS, which is missing features like glasses-free 3D visuals, and half the price of the larger New Nintendo 3DS XL. Both of the new limited edition variants feature a slick and subtle Mushro