Technology news

If you crave personal space but have trouble expressing it, there's a dress out there that sets physical boundaries for you. 
Fashion tech designer Anouk Wipprecht created the "Spider Dress," a garment that features claw-like plastic arms which react when someone comes close to the wearer. On her website, Wipprecht describes the dress as a combination of robotics and design. It also works well with your personal bubble. 
Her invention is both beautiful and terrifying, which is exactly

Carrie Fisher, a.k.a. Princess Leia, has rarely been shy about discussing her tumultuous private life. That continues with the upcoming publication of The Princess Diarist, Fisher's own journal entries from the Star Wars years that made her famous. 
In an extract to be published in the next People magazine, Fisher discusses the times she slept with co-star Harrison Ford, beginning a three-month affair on the set of the original Star Wars in 1976. Ford was 34 and married; Fisher was 19.
SEE

Square announced today that its chief executive, Jack Dorsey, will be selling approximately 7 percent of his stock over the next 12 months. The move is designed for “financial and tax planning purposes,” but will also allow Dorsey to invest more into his Start Small Foundation.
Established prior to Square’s IPO, the Start Small Foundation invests in artists, musicians, and local businesses in underserved communities around the world. Dorsey has previously committed to givi

As Facebook continues to roil over the idea that fake news on the social network could have had any effect on the U.S. presidential election, one Chrome extension is stepping in. 
The "B.S. Detector" Chrome extension, a new project released on Tuesday, claims to identify and flag fake news online. 
The extension identifies articles on Facebook that are from a "questionable source." The warning appears when users scroll over the article on a feed. The creator of the extension, Dani

GUEST: Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We are already seeing how computing, sensors, artificial intelligence, and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives.
As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions we have relied will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Here are six:
1. Anything that can be

LOS ANGELES — What does the future of esports hold?
That was the main question considered at the esports-centric workshop hosted by Faceit and Intel on Wednesday. A roster of representatives from Twitch, Facebook, Cloud9 and more came together to discuss where they think esports is heading.
SEE ALSO: Esports matches are easier to follow with Major League Gaming's EVE tech
One of the hottest topics of the night was virtual reality. Walter Wang, the esports boss at HTC, believes it will be s

GUEST: It seems like we’ve perennially been on the edge of major breakthroughs in AI (artificial intelligence), virtual reality, personal robots, and other such cool tech for the past two decades. The first set of science fiction imaginings came true rather rapidly — think trans-continental air travel, space stations, even drone warfare — but it appears that the emergence of next-gen tech wizardry has stalled.
But while we still can’t chat with the on-board computer on ou

The British comic series, V for Vendetta, is an exploration of the forces of anarchism against fascism. The 2006 American film adaptation, however, is a much more specific and politically charged takedown of U.S. Patriot Act politics.
But that's only the beginning. Our CineFix series, What's the Difference, vivaciously and voraciously vanquishes the veneer of various differences between the book and the film. (Verily.)
Subscribe to CineFix for more videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/cinefix Read

At an event known for honoring impressive women, the 26th annual Glamour Women of the Year Awards made sure to recognize a man: Bono. 
SEE ALSO: Everything women stand to lose to President Trump
The U2 frontman was honored with the women's magazine's first Man of the Year award Monday night in Los Angeles. The award recognized the Irish singer's work on gender equality. 
In his acceptance speech Bono said, "There is nowhere on Earth women have the same opportunity as men...And unless w

The nerfed peach butt emoji included as part of Apple’s iOS 10.2 update is gone. As spotted today by The Next Web, the third 10.2 developer beta returns the fruit to its curvaceous glory.The peach emoji is, of course, a go-to for anyone who sexts or just loves sending suggestive fruit. Fans were outraged to learn that the 10.2 update would round out the peach, effectively robbing it of its charm. You can spot the original, blessedly short change by keeping an eye on the peach emoji in the

"If it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is."
The Bangor, Maine, Police Department gave some spot-on advice to local men who may fall victim to an internet scam that's been going around recently.
According to the cops, the scam starts on Facebook when a person receives a friend request from a random attractive female. Once the request is approved, the woman engages in conversation and when things get sexual, the woman asks the man to "do things" in front of his camera.You can probably

You don’t have to spend $250 on eBay to get an NES Classic. Have some patience, and try Walmart instead.
At 2 p.m. Pacific time today and every day through November 18, Walmart.com will have a quantity of NES Classic Edition systems up for sale. That means you should have your ecommerce finger ready to go within the hour on this page if you want to snag one at the $60 price. The throwback system, which is a miniaturized version of the original 8-bit NES that comes with 30 built-in games, d

No outcome is ever truly assured, as everyone in America now knows. We can’t predict what our new president will do, or Congress, or the economy or the markets.
All that uncertainty, though, means it’s a good time to review your investments to see if they still match your goals. If so, you probably shouldn’t change the way you invest.
Ultimately, nothing will improve your financial security as much as nailing the basics so you prosper in any upturn and insulate yourself against

In an interview with the BBC, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made his first comments on the post-election fake news controversy, and admitted the company has made some mistakes.
“We will definitely work to fix it.”
"It is important to remember that we get billions of queries every day,” Pichai told the news organization. “There have been a couple of incidences where it has been pointed out and we didn't get it right. And so it is a learning moment for us and we will definitely

For the second time in as many weeks, a men's Ivy League athletic team has been suspended for making lewd comments.
Columbia University suspended its wrestling team on Monday as officials investigated a series of text messages sent by team members. Sent on GroupMe and published by independent student news site BWOG, the messages include racist, sexist and homophobic language. They span from 2014 until a few days ago. 
Columbia has "zero tolerance in its athletics programs for the group mess

Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, has filed confidentially for its initial public offering, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company is seeking to raise as much as $4 billion, which would give it a valuation of between $25 billion and $35 billion, the report states. The confidential filing — a move Twitter made in 2013 — indicates Snap Inc.’s annual revenue is under $1 billion, which is in line with expectations for the company’s advertising estimates. T

Oh Snap, indeed! The company formerly known as Snapchat is going public — at least that’s according to a report from Reuters, citing sources. The ephemeral messaging app maker turned camera company has filed confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
It’s also been reported that Snap filed papers to go public before the presidential election, with the timing estimated to take place “as early as March.”
The IPO filing had been long awaited. Last

Snapchat will soon be able to show you ads that more precisely pinpoint where you are at any given time.
Snap, the company behind the ephemeral messaging app, just reached a deal with Foursquare that will allow it to use the map-based social network's extensive library of location data to power its geofilters, the place-specific graphics that users can overlay on their photos.
That means the company will be able to target ads within more clearly delineated areas, potentially opening the door to

Seagate announced today that its popular Backup Plus Portable line of external hard drives now comes in a massive 5TB size. The company is claiming that the new 5TB capacity option is the world’s highest capacity portable hard drive, and I can’t find any evidence that it’s wrong.The new 5TB external drive uses the same technology as Seagate’s recently released 5TB BarraCuda hard drive — the world’s highest capacity 2.5-inch drive — in order to fit that m

Mozilla today launched Firefox 50 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version, which was delayed by a week to improve startup times, also includes download protection for more executable file types and new keyboard shortcuts.
Firefox 50 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play.
Mozilla doesn’t break out the exact numbers

These are things we know to be true:
Facebook is increasingly a leading news source for many Americans.
There is a crap-ton of fake and biased news on Facebook.
Here’s what people are getting wrong:
Facebook deserves all the blame.
It’s Facebook’s fault that Donald Trump is now President-Elect.
There is no defense for fake news. I hate it and lose my mind when someone shares it on social media (do you know how many times Facebookers buried Abe Vigoda or re-reported the death of

In a keynote speech during the LA Auto Show today, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said his company will spend $250 million over the next two years toward the development of autonomous vehicles. It’s a significant sum of money and a clear sign that the computer chip manufacturer is serious about playing a large role in the future of automobiles.But that doesn’t mean that Intel is about to create its own fleet of self-driving cars. After all, the process of building a car from scratch is inc

Two years ago, I was chatting with a very smart venture capitalist about an investment he was making in the drone industry. The hardware side of the drone business would be quickly commodified, he told me, and the real value would be collected by the software makers who built platforms that were used by a wide range of manufacturers.This was a reasonable assumption to make if you believed the market for drones would look something like the market for Android smartphones. Dozens of manufacturers

LOS ANGELES — Darryl "Snake Eyez" Lewis is considered one of the best Street Fighter players in America. 
He's the world's top-ranked Zangief and he participated in an esports documentary from Red Bull, the company that sponsored him last July. Most recently, he competed in the North American Capcom Pro Tour Finals on Saturday, the final step before the Capcom Cup — and it's $300,000 prize pool — in December.
Mashable got a chance to talk to Lewis before his CPT finals mat

Author Brit Bennett has a rule for writing:
"Whenever I am writing something that makes me uncomfortable, I want to go into the direction of that discomfort,' she said. "The discomfort is not a reason not to write it. It’s a reason to write it.” 
SEE ALSO: MashReads Podcast: How a professional book nerd approaches reading
It's this rule that has allowed Bennett to write her book The Mothers, a moving and beautiful novel that tackles the complex and painful themes of suicide, abo

As part of Google’s slew of artificial intelligence announcements today, the company is releasing a number of AI web experiments powered by its cloud services that anyone can go and play with. One— called Quick, Draw! — gives you a prompt to draw an image of a written word or phrase in under 20 seconds with your mouse cursor in such a way that a neural network can identify it. It’s both a hilarious and fascinating exercise with broader implications for how AI can self-lea

The boys are back.
GamesBeat Decides is starting to find its footing, and it only took us three episodes to get to that point. This week should have the best audio version yet, which you can listen to below or by subscribing to our new RSS feed. The show should hit iTunes, Google Play Music, and Stitcher soon. We’ll get it up on all of the other podcasting networks not long after that (with the exception of Spotify, which doesn’t accept submissions). As always, if you want to tell us

Microsoft launched its Azure Bot Services today to give bot creators the option to move their bots into the cloud and let Microsoft handle server and storage issues, the company announced today.
Alexa Web Service is cloud-based, but until today, none of the big three cloud providers — Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform — have provided a solution for developers to create bots in the cloud.
The service was created, wrote Microsoft FUSE Labs general man

You complained and Apple heard: The peach butt emoji is back. 
When Apple released the first beta version of iOS 10.2, it made the peach emoji look more like a normal peach and less like a butt. The tweak was coupled with other changes, but tinkering with the peach butt ruined sexting and flirting for all.noooooo they're changing the peach emoji pic.twitter.com/CmHkef9MlM
— alix 🍩 (@freckledbutt) November 1, 2016Thankfully, after some serious internet backlash, Apple appears t

Watch Dogs 2 is rated M for Mature, but it still decided to remove some adult-themed material.
Ubisoft has confirmed to GamesBeat that it is removing a texture that explicitly depicts a woman’s vagina in Watch Dogs 2. Up until this point, the open-world hacking game featured at least one nonplayer character who is not wearing any clothing over her genitals. Players are stumbling across this while playing through Watch Dogs 2. Sony even banned someone from using the PlayStation Ne

Opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline are taking to the streets in every U.S. state and in cities as far away as Tokyo and Auckland.
Around 35,000 people are expected to join in 300 actions on Tuesday to demand that the Obama administration reject the final leg of the 1,170-mile pipeline.
SEE ALSO: Dakota Access pipeline builders are 'enthusiastic' about Trump presidency
The controversial segment would run beneath Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reserv

GUEST: Having a Siri-like bot for your business will be less and less impressive as time goes on. Leading brands are now investing in bots to solve real customer issues rather than offering simple answers. Building a conversational bot is a challenge, but it is the right thing to do. We are on the verge of a new era in user experience, and you cannot afford to replicate the tedious IVR experience into your bot. You just can’t!
Bot objective and life cycle
You can deliver customer care

Activists tried to block Donald Trump with their votes — and now they’re trying to do it with their dollars
In October, technology and media marketing specialist Shannon Coulter started the hashtag #GrabYourWallet, which encourages people to actively boycott businesses that carry Trump products. That hashtag underwent something of a revival this week, when users on Twitter began to circulate a continuously updating Google doc of businesses that do business with the Trump family, as w

Watch Dogs 2 has a problem beyond its broken multiplayer features, and it's completely NSFW.
Watch Dogs 2 players have found at least one female non-player character model with a fully rendered vagina. Ubisoft has confirmed the genitalia's existence to Mashable and said it will be removed in a patch within the next few days.
SEE ALSO: 'Eagle Flight' is the best virtual reality game to date
An email from a Ubi spokesperson reads:The vagina that somehow slipped through the cracks of development wa

Boop.
Blizzard has released a new patch for Overwatch that adds Sombra, the new hacker hero, to the team-based shooter for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The update also has the new Arcade mode, which adds new types of matches, including 1-vs.-1 and 3-vs.-3 games. Overwatch already has over 20 million players since it launched in May, and new content like this will keep them around.
This update also prepares for the third season of Overwatch’s competitive mode on November 30 (Season

Edward Snowden, like many Americans, wishes he hadn't put so much faith in pre-election polls. 
Snowden showed himself to be a believer in The New York Times on Oct. 21, when the Paper of Record had Hillary Clinton's odds of winning the White House at 93%.
SEE ALSO: Edward Snowden warned us about a president like Donald Trump
Feeling confident the U.S. wasn't about to elect Clinton's rival Donald Trump, he told his American followers now was as good a time as ever to vote third party. 

As Apple’s new MacBook Pros continue to make their way out into the world, people are coming to grips with the new port situation in different ways. Some have chosen dongles. Others are relying on docks. Now, we have yet another option, the Line Dock.
The Line Dock is an Indiegogo project that mostly looks like someone took an old MacBook Pro and ripped off the screen. It offers three USB ports, HDMI, MiniDisplay Port, and of course, a USB-C port to connect it to your MacBook or MacBook Pr

At long last, the 23rd Overwatch hero has arrived.
The stealthy hacker Sombra entered the Overwatch fray on Tuesday alongside the brand new Arcade mode and Arcade-only map Ecopoint: Antarctica. All three new features were revealed at BlizzCon Nov. 4 and were available to test out on the public test region since Nov. 7.
SEE ALSO: 12 incredible 'Overwatch' cosplay photos from BlizzCon 2016
Sombra is only the second hero to join the roster since the game's release in May, but her unique skill set m

Google today said that it’s improving translations that are available through its Google Translate service for nine languages by using neural machine translation, a method that was recently implemented for translations from Chinese to English.
The improvements work for English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Google started rolling out the new system in the past couple of days, Google Translate’s product lead Barak Turovsky said during a m

Today, Google Cloud chief Diane Greene announced the company’s new push in machine learning and artificial intelligence. There’s now a new group in Greene’s division that will unify some of the disparate teams that had previously been doing machine learning work across Google’s cloud. Two women will take charge of the new team: Fei-Fei Li, who was director of AI at Stanford, and Jia Li, who was previously head of research at Snap, Inc. As Business Insider notes, Fei-Fei L

Supercell has outstanding mobile games, but it’s also known for killing off the projects that don’t work.
The Helsinki, Finland-based company is known for games such as Clash Royale, Boom Beach, Clash of Clans, and Helsinki. These games have generated more than 100 million daily active players, and that track record is why Tencent bought 84 percent of Supercell at a $10.2 billion valuation.
But Supercell has just 210 workers, and it is trying hard to recruit talented people