Technology news

The United States needs to keep its nukes but put an end to nuclear weapons tests worldwide. That’s the advice that Ernest Moniz, the outgoing US secretary of energy, has for the upcoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.It’s possible to test nuclear weapons without exploding them
In an editorial published today in the journal Science, Moniz argues that the US should finally ratify a 20-year-old international treaty that would ban nations from exploding nuclear weapons

As anyone knows, the pinnacle achievement for any vehicle is to be a sick Lambo. Whether a motorized arm chair, or an amphibious faux-Lamborghini Countach, any car can be a "sick Lambo" if it has enough spirit, drive, and confidence.
But did you know that speakers can also be sick Lambos? I refer you to the Ixoost EsaVox speaker, which embraces the Lamborghini brand like no other gadget ever has.Speakers can also be sick Lambos
Sure, you can get Porsche Design convertible laptops and keyboards i

GUEST: Every White House leadership change causes speculation about what pre-existing initiatives the incoming administration will embrace or eliminate. I encourage President-elect Trump and his appointees to start their term ready to ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) gives our economy the competitive edge it needs.
The Obama administration recently released its recommended approach for how the U.S. should promote AI research and development. It published balanced suggestions to guide pub

If you’re like me, you take any opportunity to spruce up your phone’s UI a bit, including keyboard themes. Now SwiftKey, one of the best keyboards on both iOS and Android, is making all of its themes free. I mean, it wasn’t exactly much to pay a dollar for the old themes, but the update makes it easy to try out multiple designs without the cash adding up quickly. On Android, trying out the themes means clicking on the ‘hamburger’ button on the top left of the keybo

 Two key things we learned during a Motorola press event in Chicago this week: 1) The company’s bullish on modular phones and 2) Not so much with smartwatches. The Lenovo-owned smartphone maker’s head of global product development Shakil Barkat told the audience that, “We don’t see enough pull from the market at this point to put out a new product,” when speaking… Read More

The publisher of World of Tanks further pushing into mobile gaming with the acquisition of the one of the studios that spun out of Angry Birds developer Rovio.
Wargaming announced today that it is scooping up mobile game studio Boomlagoon. The two companies did not announce the terms of the agreement. The Helsinki-based Boomlagoon started in 2012, and it has spent the last year working on digital-card game Spirit Hunter for iOS and Android. Now, the studio will lend its expertise toward bolsteri

It’s time to transform and roll out … to fight a battle to save the multiverse.
Kabam announced Transformers: Forged to Fight today. It’s a new “action-fighting” game for mobile, and it features characters from TV, films, comics, and the toy line (that’s a varied bunch, pointing at a mix of Generation 1 characters that folks love from the original cartoons, the “Bayformers” of the movies, and updated designs from publisher IDW’s comic b

The Oculus Rift’s motion controllers come out on December 6th, and Oculus just announced the list of over 50 Touch-compatible games and apps that will be available on the Oculus Store at launch.There are 53 launch titles in all, ranging from smaller indie games to major studio productions. Some of these titles were already in the store and are just getting updated with Touch support, while others are completely new and specifically designed to take advantage of the motion controllers.Addit

Starting today, Google’s Daydream View VR headset comes in two new colors: crimson (dark red) and snow (white). Both are available for immediate purchase from the company’s online store, are scheduled to ship by December 8th, and are priced at $79 — same as the gray/slate version that’s been on sale for a few weeks.Google unveiled all three colors together back when we got our first look at the Daydream View headset, but these two weren’t quite ready for launch. Now

Oculus is about to release the motion controllers for its VR headset, and the company announced it will have 53 games that support the device during what it is calling the “launch window.”
Oculus Touch, which is a set of controllers that track the position of your hands in 3D space as well as the placement of your fingers, launches December 6 for $200. This will give Oculus input parity with the competing HTC Vive that runs on Steam VR — and it will also enable you to play any

Google’s humanoid robot, Atlas, finds new ways to amaze us with each update. In its latest lesson, Atlas learned how to walk over uneven terrain. Over a series of trial-and-error sessions, engineers managed to teach Atlas a skill that few robots, and even fewer humans, have mastered: walking over obstacles without falling on your face. To accomplish this using human-like feet, the team trained Atlas to ‘feel’ for a point on an uneven surface and to begin shifting its weight ac

(Reuters) — Facebook is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin Candela, the company’s director of applied machine learning.
The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on i

The Wavestation synth was released in 1990 for around $2,000. It’s a classic device, but one that was never exactly affordable. Now Korg, the company behind Wavestation, is packing everything the synth offers into an iOS app called iWavestation. That app costs only $19.99, so yeah, it’s way more accessible. Korg had already released Wavestation as a Windows and Mac application for $99.99, but now you can go completely mobile.Original synth fans will likely appreciate that the app rec

The holidays are a minefield of social obligation. It’s hard to balance the need to get everyone a gift with the need to throw shade at the most annoying relatives. Luckily, the beloved Hubble Space Telescope is here to help. Hubble is offering free holiday cards (some beautiful, some strange) that you can print and give to the people you know and occasionally love.But there are so many options, how to choose who gets what? Here are five suggestions:This is for Uncle Luke, who started doin

Automattic wants everyone to know that it’s taking steps to ensure that the services you use are secure. The company behind the WordPress blogging and content management platform announced on Thursday that in 2017, it’ll be investing heavily in SSL security technology. This means that initially it will only promote hosting providers that provide an SSL certificate by default in their accounts. In the future, it plans on extending such scrutiny to features, making them avail

 If Snap’s Spectacles are really about sharing your life with the world, we need a solution for capturing the majority of our lives that occur boxed inside buildings. This solution could come in the form of replacement lenses or in the form of an entirely new device. Niche lens manufacturer Rochester Optical gave us the first one today with replacement lenses for Spectacles that… Read More

Final Fantasy XV has returned the franchise to the top both with its critical reception and sales.
Publisher Square Enix confirmed today that it has shipped 5 million copies of the action role-playing game in the United States, when you combine digital sales and physical retail. That officially makes FFXV the fastest-selling game in the history of the Final Fantasy series in the U.S. (it debuted here in 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System). That is huge for Square Enix, which has spent a d

As we all know, content that takes forever to load will increase your site’s bounce rates, decrease your conversions, and undeniably scar your bottom line. And by “forever” I mean more than a few seconds. A recent study by KISS Metrics found that page abandonment rates increase drastically after a load time of just four seconds or more.
The greater the physical distance between your users and the host servers where the content is stored, the more likely it is they’ll expe

Moto today confirmed that it will not be releasing a new smartwatch for the launch of Android Wear 2.0, due early next year. The company had earlier said it would not be releasing a new smartwatch in 2016, but it is now saying that it doesn’t plan to put out a new device timed to the arrival of Google’s newest wearable platform, either.
Shakil Barkat, head of global product development at Moto, said the company doesn’t “see enough pull in the market to put [a new smartwat

GUEST: It’s been seven months since we launched Kik’s Bot Shop, and we’ve seen more than 20,000 bots created in that time. We’ve also approved more than 150 bots to be featured in the Bot Shop, following strict standards to ensure a high-quality experience for our users. To date, Kik users have exchanged about two billion messages with bots.
Based on this experience, we’re sharing our insights to help developers build the best bots and increase their chances of

Plex, a media server company that helps customers access files on a range of devices, is expanding its cloud service well beyond Amazon. Now, users of Plex Cloud can use Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft’s OneDrive to store media and other files. That way, you pay any one of those companies for storage — and pony up $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year for a Plex Pass account — to access Plex’s app library to manage files and play media. The company’s software works

Bot creation platform Motion.ai now allows people to create bots with Node.js modules that can be used to do things like call on APIs or interact with databases.
Motion.ai utilizes the cloud-based AWS Lambda service to bring Node.js to its platform. The integration was announced today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas.
“Up until today, users looking to manipulate their Motion AI bots outside of our platform configured their own web servers to listen to and respond to webhooks,&r

Squarespace is giving businesses a new way to accept payments today: PayPal. It’s a small but welcome update for small businesses on the platform. PayPal is often preferred by international users because it removes some of the verification hassles with standard payments methods, plus it’s just easier to use an email and password than taking out your credit card. It also adds a bit of flexibility with PayPal Credit for installment payments and PayPal One Touch for 

In some of the most unexpected App Store news of the year, Tiny Wings — the classic iPhone game originally released in 2011 — has been updated, with new levels and support for the larger resolutions of Apple's newer iPhone 6 and 6 Plus screens.
Additionally, developer Andreas Illiger announced a separate $2.99 Apple TV version of the game, Tiny Wings TV, that's also out today. It allows for the same iconic hill-sliding gameplay on a larger screen. It also permits two-player split-scr

Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today talked about Blox software that it has open-sourced to let developers create custom schedulers for use inside AWS’ EC2 Container Service (ECS).
The first two components of the Blox software, a “reference scheduler” and a service for capturing data on clusters that can then be queried, are available now on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license.
Developers “really want to have more control over their own sche

In this blog series, we shed some light on our marketing approach at The Next Web through Web analytics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), social media, and more. During MeasureCamp London a few months ago I shared parts of our set up and promised to blog more about the custom data that we save. In a previous blog post I talked more about the 24 calculated metrics that we’re using. But it’s about time I do that as well for the 59+ c

CBS and the National Football League have reached an agreement to let subscribers of the network's $6-per-month All Access service stream live NFL games that appear on CBS TV. The multiyear deal goes into effect on Sunday, so this week's games on CBS will be the first that All Access customers get to watch. Future Thursday Night Football games will also be included. CBS boss Les Moonves said in September that a deal to put the NFL on All Access, which previously blocked games with the ugly messa

Jyn Erso and Orson Krennic fight as heroes for the Rebellion and Empire, respectively, in the Rogue One: Scarif add-on for Star Wars: Battlefront.
This new trailer highlights some of what you can expect from the new location's jungle-and-beachside action. It's a welcome sneak preview of the battleground featured in the Dec. 16 movie.
The map pack comes to the game on Dec. 6 for Season Pass holders, or anyone that owns the recently released "Ultimate Edition" of Battlefront (which includes the s

When you least expect it, the internet will provide. Today it has done so in the form of a “Gyllenhall” — a never-ending hallway covered in photos of Jake Gyllenhaal, down which the Brokeback Mountain line “I wish I knew how to quit you,” echoes for all eternity.The included photos of Jake Gyllenhaal range from photos of Jake looking incredible in a sweater, to photos of Jake looking incredible in a beard, to photos of Jake looking incredible in a white T-shirt, to

Minecraft: Pocket Edition came out five years ago, but it is actually only about to turn 1.0.
Mojang is preparing to roll out the Ender Update to Pocket Edition, which will finally complete the full-game loop that players on PC and console have had for years now. This 1.0 patch will essentially make Pocket Edition equivalent to the 1.0 version of the original Java version of Minecraft for the PC, but it will also introduce new features, such as support for Oculus’s VR Touch controllers on

At its re:Invent user conference in Las Vegas today, public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of AWS Batch, a service for automating the deployment of batch processing jobs.
In the past decade or so, people have relied on the Hadoop open-source big data software to do batch processing, and AWS and other public clouds have come up with managed versions of Hadoop and additional services that cater to batch and streaming workloads. Now AWS is trying to mor

At a time when the major studios have glutted the market with superhero movies, it’s hard to find smaller projects that can compete with the hype. Sleight manages to rise above the crowd. The trailer makes it look like a promising antidote to the usual Marvel and DC epics.
The movie, which debuted earlier this year at Sundance, follows Bo (Black Nativity star Jacob Latimore), a gifted Los Angeles street magician who uses a powerful electromagnetic device to do levitation tricks as a way of

 There’s something strangely comforting in watching Boston Dynamics’ 330-pound bipedal humanoid robot cautiously attempt to navigate a field of uneven surfaces. Something…humanizing, if that’s the right world, as the faceless ‘bot gingerly tests its footholds, slowly and with an abundance of caution, before shifting its full weight to the next block. The IHMC… Read More

Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao is still a Reddit user, and she just took her successor down a couple notches with pretty much the sickest burn I have ever seen on the site. Reddit co-founder and current CEO Steve Huffman recently “fucked up” (his own words) by editing comments on the site that were critical of him. When a Reddit user called out an ArsTechnica piece comparing his behavior to Pao’s disciplined approach in the role, Huffman first responded by questioning her expertis

Some hopeful news for those who can’t remember new people’s names: stimulating the brain with a magnetic pulse can bring back forgotten short-term memories, as long as we know that we’ll need that information later.Scientists used to think that we had to keep consciously thinking about something, like a new name, to remember it short-term. From the point of view of a brain scan, this means that all the neurons, or brain cells, involved in remembering that name would fire contin

At its re:Invent user conference in Las Vegas today, public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced support for the C# programming language in its Lambda event-driven computing service, as well as a new capability called Lambda@Edge, which makes it possible to run Lambda functions at edge locations where customers store media content around the world on its CloudFront content distribution network (CDN).
There is also a new capability called AWS Step Functions, which wil

You want to cut the cord. You hate your cable company. You hate their calls, their promotional offers, their bills, their service reps. And the option to get away from them, in the form of the future: Streaming. A little digital river for you to dip into, and find yourself, outside of the traditional means of getting you're favorite TV and movies. You're on your own. Your in the wild. The future is yours, and it's cordless. Except for one, single problem: The fact remains that in 2016, cable rem