Technology news

Nearly a week after the US presidential election, Facebook continues to be roundly criticized for its role in spreading misinformation. In the wake of a close contest, some have said Facebook’s lax attitude toward hoaxes swung the election to Donald Trump. The controversy has renewed calls for the company to take its fake news problem more seriously.
Today Gizmodo published a much-discussed story reporting that Facebook had built and abandoned a tool to reduce the spread of fake news stori

The FBI has a new view into what’s happening on Twitter. Last week, the bureau hired Dataminr, a Twitter-linked analytics firm, to provide an “advanced alerting tool” to over 200 users. Twitter owns a 5 percent stake in Dataminr and provides it with exclusive access to the full “firehose” of live tweets, making it a valuable resource for anyone looking for illegal activity on the service.
“Twitter is used extensively by terrorist organizations and other crimin

Samsung Pay is launching a rewards program that will give you points on every purchase you make using the service, in an attempt to incentivize customers to use its mobile payment product. Users can accrue points for every purchase made through Samsung Pay, and if you have a credit card with its own reward system, you can essentially double up on points with each transaction.
The Samsung Rewards program — which will live inside the Samsung Pay app — will let you redeem points for gif

And now, some regularly scheduled climate news: This year will almost certainly be the hottest year on record.
If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because the last hottest year on record was long-ago 2015, and we’re now continuing a trend. To be fair, the proclamation isn’t definitive yet because we don’t have all the data, but it is "very likely."
The World Meteorological Organization reports that temperatures from January until September this year were 1.58 degrees F

As I watch a sandwich secrete sweet goop, I am reminded of a website I love. The fun (but crudely named) This is why you’re fat used to collate the most outrageous food combinations that humans splice together. McDonald’s latest dessert, available only in Italy, is called the Sweety con Nutella, and has the shape and soft buns of a regular burger, but instead of a uniform slab of beef in the middle, it has a big gooey center of Nutella hazelnut and cocoa spread.This carb-heavy feast

The first rumors of the price for the upcoming Nintendo Switch have begun swirling today, with TechnoBuffalo reporting a unverified starting price of $250, along with a higher storage option for $300. And while we’ll have to wait until January 12th, 2017 for Nintendo to actually announce the final price of the Switch, it got us thinking: how much should the Nintendo Switch actually cost?
Obviously, it’s important to consider the price of the Switch’s competitors for home consol

Nike is releasing the consumer version of its self-lacing sneakers, the HyperAdapt 1.0, on December 1st for $720, says says Jacques Slade, a YouTube personality most known for his sneaker channel. The shoes were first introduced in March after the company created its limited edition Air Mags. Only 89 Air Mags were created and sold to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research.Like the Air Mags, the HyperAdapts will automatically tighten their laces when a wearer’s heel

Kim Kardashian loves her LuMee phone case. Or maybe she’s paid by the company to love it? Regardless, Kim left social media after she was robbed at gunpoint in her Paris hotel room, so now LuMee needs someone else or something else with a major public profile to sell its phone case. To fill that void, the company is releasing its new LuMee 2 phone case today in coordination with the supermoon.
For those of you who aren’t up on LuMee, it’s a company that designs phone cases that

HBO’s Westworld, currently one of the networks biggest shows, will be returning for a second season, according to Variety. The series will return alongside Insecure and Divorce, though a premiere date hasn’t been announced.
Based off of the 1973 Michael Crichton movie of the same name, Westworld takes fans to a technologically advanced, Western-themed park where its guests can indulge their every whim. The series is a clear hit; viewers have taken to pulling apart the show’s my

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?
Put a point on the board: Bernard Lowe is a host after all.
The only folks who didn’t predict this twist, I suppose, were the folks who figured it was too obvious. And yet, theorists be damned, the reveal still worked. Not since Titanic ended with a boat wreck has a turn been so expected, and yet so

Amazon is continuing to expand beyond playing the role of the online store that sells every physical goods you can think of. Over a year after launching Home Services in the US — a marketplace where its users can purchase everything from home cleaning to lawn mowing — the e-commerce giant is expanding its availability to 20 new US metro areas, the company announced in a statement.
Since the service launched in March 2015, it has widened its reach to include 50 metro areas in the US.

The transition of power between president Barack Obama and president-elect Donald Trump has appeared to be amicable, if not slightly awkward. For many of the people Trump will soon lead, acceptance has been rockier. Those seeking to balance those facts are turning to a familiar fountain of joy: Vice President Joe Biden.Obama’s political grace guarantees that his final days in office will be full of restraint and olive branches, but it’s Biden who is providing Trump skeptics some smal

A new report says Facebook shelved an update that would have suppressed fake news from going viral on the social network. According to Gizmodo, high-ranking Facebook executives were briefed on an update that identified fake news and hoaxes, but the tool was never released in fears of “upsetting conservatives.”
The tool, which heavily affected right-wing media, was reportedly killed following revelations that the company’s human-curated Trending Topics team often favored liberal

All PC monitors aren’t created equal. The regular black Dell or HP monitors that the rest of us usually use at our office desks for writing and spreadsheets don’t quite make the cut for professional gamers looking to get the highest performance out of their screens.e-sport displays are designed for speed and accuracy
That’s where e-sports-focused displays like BenQ’s new Zowie XL2540, with its super-fast 240Hz refresh rate, come in. Rather than focus on things like resolu

AMC’s The Walking Dead has an uncanny knack for manipulating its audience, but this year’s hyper-violent season premiere went too far. 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, we’ll be finding something to highlight. It might be a subtle change in character, a great action scene, or a new development

Last week, Facebook faced criticism that the platform’s habit for surfacing fake news contributed to the election of Donald Trump — a claim Mark Zuckerberg denied. This week, Google faces a similar problem, as its search algorithm surfaces fake election results.
As Mediaite’s Dan Abrams first reported, when you search “final election numbers” or “final vote count 2016,” the first result in Google’s “in the news” box is from a scrappy-lo

Last week, Facebook faced criticism that the platform’s habit for surfacing fake news contributed to the election of Donald Trump — a claim Mark Zuckerberg denied. This week, Google faces a similar problem, as its search algorithm surfaces fake election results.
As Mediaite’s Dan Abrams first reported, when you search “final election numbers” or “final vote count 2016,” the first result in Google’s “in the news” box is from a scrappy-lo

The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to Donald Trump.
It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government giv

As consumer virtual reality headsets hit the shelves, experiences that were once limited to film festivals and tech shows are becoming at least a little bit more widely available. And the latest to do so is a tie-in project for Ridley Scott’s 2015 film The Martian, which will appear tomorrow on the HTC Vive and Sony’s PlayStation VR.
The Martian VR Experience is executive produced by Scott and directed by Maleficent’s Robert Stromberg. It’s an interactive take on The Mart

Disney’s live-action retelling of Beauty and the Beast finally has a full trailer, and it promises everything we saw in the 1991 original, but on a far grander scale. Here, we see Belle’s father Maurice (Kevin Kline) waylaid by the Beast (Dan Stevens) at the latter’s castle. Belle (Emma Watson) gives herself up for Maurice’s sake, but soon learns that the Beast is far kinder than he appears. Meanwhile, Gaston (Luke Evans) is riling the townsfolk up in order to launch an a

A little over a decade ago, a Russian design studio unveiled a concept keyboard that, as much as any gadget ever can, rocked the tech blogging world. It was called the Optimus, and it was the most interesting keyboard you'd ever seen: a standard QWERTY design, but with a screen on every key that could change in an instant, giving each app its own perfect layout.
The keyboard eventually shipped, and some other incarnations followed, but they never did make a dent in the real world — they w

Is this the year you’ll finally buy a drone? If you’re thinking about it then you’ll want to check out our picks later this week in our updated drone installment of This Is My Next. I’ve already got a hunch who Ben Popper will pick.
On October 27th, Apple said that its new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and Touch ID would be shipping in "two to three weeks." That was two to three weeks ago which means we should start seeing the first in-depth reviews any day now.In gaming we&

Microsoft has announced it’s launching its primary coding interface, Visual Studio, on Mac computers. The news may sound uninteresting, but it’s been a long time coming, and is a big shakeup for the company, which has previously preferred to lock developers into its platform by keeping coding tools Windows-only.
The change comes as Microsoft shifts its focus to its money-making cloud operation. While programming tasks in the past might have been carried out on local servers, they&rsq

US game developers Telltale — the makers of a number of well-received video game adaptations of popular movie and TV franchises — seems to be working on a Guardians of the Galaxy title. The news comes via a document of in-development games circulated by SAG-AFTRA, the voice actors’ union. The union is currently on strike, but members are still allowed to work on titles currently in production. A list of these games was circulated online, and includes one titled "Guardians Of Th

Volkswagen has confirmed that some Audi cars are equipped with software that can distort carbon dioxide emissions test results, as authorities in Europe and the US open investigations into the German automaker. As Reuters reports, the software installed on automatic transmission Audis allows the cars to behave differently during testing, resulting in inaccurate emissions test results.
German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported last week that the California Air Resources Board discovered

Volkswagen has confirmed that some Audi cars are equipped with software that can distort carbon dioxide emissions test results, as authorities in Europe and the US open investigations into the German automaker. As Reuters reports, the software installed on automatic transmission Audis allows the cars to behave differently during testing, resulting in inaccurate emissions test results.
German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported last week that the California Air Resources Board discovered

Amazon is launching its on-demand music streaming service, Amazon Unlimited Music, in the UK. The service was unveiled in the US last month, and offers 40 million tracks, Android and iOS mobile apps, and both hand-picked and algorithmically-generated playlists. But, it's not to be confused with Prime Music — a comparatively limited music-streaming service that Amazon bundles in for free with a Prime yearly subscription.
In the UK, Amazon Unlimited Music will cost £9.99 a month for no

Samsung has announced this morning it’s buying US audio company Harman in an all-cash deal worth $8 billion. The acquisition is Samsung’s largest ever, and places the electronics company in the vanguard of the automotive industry — which Harman supplies with infotainment technology. This space has become of increasing interest to tech companies in recent years as cars become more connected.
Samsung says its expertise in displays, user interfaces, and semiconductor technology wo

Google’s approach to software increasingly centers around personalized recommendations and assistance. It will filter your email and surface only the messages you need to see, pop up alerts if your train line goes out of service, and even chat with you about the latest scores and trades from your favorite sports team. Today that same approach comes to Google’s music service, Google Play, which is being revamped to focus on contextual recommendations.
Using machine learning and c

China's state-run newspaper says the government would respond with "countermeasures" if President-elect Donald Trump starts a trade war against the country, warning that the sales of iPhones and US cars would suffer a "setback." In an editorial published on Sunday, the Global Times said it would be "naive" for Trump to follow through on his campaign promises to implement a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the US and to declare the country a currency manipulator.
Trump repeatedly

Two-thirds of the world's internet users live under regimes of government censorship, according to a report released today. The report from Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, finds that internet freedom across the globe declined for a sixth consecutive year in 2016, as governments cracked down on social media services and messaging apps.
The findings are based on an analysis of web freedom in 65 countries, covering 88 percent of the world's online population. Freedom House ranked Ch