Technology news

The Army Corps of Engineers has announced that it would not approve permits for the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline under a reservoir on the Missouri River called Lake Oahe, according to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The announcement comes after months of intense protests and just days after protesters were ordered to leave.
The Corps said that it is looking at possible alternative routes. "The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes

The Army Corps of Engineers has announced that it would not approve permits for the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline under a reservoir on the Missouri River called Lake Oahe, according to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The announcement comes after months of intense protests and just days after protesters were ordered to leave.
The Corps said that it is looking at possible alternative routes. "The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes

It’s still early December, which means you might not be quite ready to watch a movie that centers squarely on the holidays. There will be plenty of that later: plenty of Tuesday nights watching A Charlie Brown Christmas on one of the four channels you get with rabbit ears; plenty of begrudgingly sitting through Bad Santa 2 at the mall movie theater while your parents finish up a third hour at Williams-Sonoma; plenty of struggling to figure out how a horror movie like The Polar Express woun

During a press conference today at Skywalker Ranch, the cast and crew of Rogue One answered questions about the upcoming film. During the Q&A, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy was asked about her earlier remarks about female directors — and pushed back on the idea that the company was excluding female directors.“We have every intention of giving someone an opportunity,” Kennedy said, arguing that her original remarks were taken out of context. The company’s requir

Marvel took to Twitter today to announce that Netflix has renewed Luke Cage for a second season. The announcement comes after the first season premiered earlier this fall to extremely positive reviews about its take on the character.
Luke Cage starred Mike Colter as the titular hero with unbreakable skin, who faces down a gangster, Cottonmouth, in Harlem.Always forward. #LukeCage pic.twitter.com/8M1UQVFkYE
— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) December 4, 2016There’s no word on when

Since the days of the Dash Kickstarter, the folks at Bragi have promised that they would improve the performance and features of their futuristic wireless earbuds with regular firmware updates. But the biggest problem I (and many others) have had with them is that it’s hard to keep a solid Bluetooth connection between the earbuds and the phone. As Bragi released versions 2.0 and 2.1 of that software earlier this year, the company added features like the ability to save workouts and improve

Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo, went on its first free flight on Friday, performing an unpowered glide over the Mojave Desert. The vehicle, named VSS Unity, was dropped from its carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo, and flew for 10 minutes on its own before landing successfully at the Mojave Air and Space Port.The flight comes more than two years after the company’s first SpaceShipTwo experienced a failure mid-flight — killing its pilot and injuring its co-pilot. It marks

One of the most basic facts of horror writing is that real terror requires isolation. It’s nearly impossible to keep characters in scary situations if there’s easy help right around the corner, or plenty of sympathetic people to consult about the problem. Horror stories find different ways to isolate the victims, by setting stories in desolate, out-of-the-way places (like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Psycho), or by putting characters in situations where other people won’t be

For chimpanzees, it’s all about the butt. You won’t find a female chimp going “My eyes are up here,” as it turns out that chimps often tell each other apart based on their behinds. Their brains even process butts in the same way that we process faces.For a study published this week in the journal PLoS One (delightfully titled “Getting to the Bottom of Face Processing”), Dutch researchers recruited both humans and chimpanzees to match photos of various body par

GoPro is giving users a new way to capture footage. Starting today, the company is selling the Karma stabilizer grip — which was originally bundled with the now-recalled Karma drone — on its own for $299. The grip will be immediately compatible with the Hero 5 Black out of the box, but Hero 4 Black and Silver users will have to cough up an extra $29 for a harness that fits those cameras. Hero 5 Session users will have to wait until “Q2 2017” for a harness for that camera.

Leah Reich was one of the first internet advice columnists. Her column "Ask Leah" ran on IGN, where she gave advice to gamers for two and a half years. During the day, Leah is Slack’s user researcher, but her views here do not represent her employer. How to be Human runs every other Sunday. You can write to her at [email protected] and read more How to be Human here.
Hi Leah,
I’m a 21-year-old gay male who lives in the Pacific Northwest. I’m out to those close to me, but I&r

Microsoft is planning to build a HomeHub feature into future Windows 10 updates to better compete against devices like Google Home and Amazon’s Echo. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the feature is currently in the planning stages, and the software maker is expected to introduce a “HomeHub” in updates due in 2017 and 2018, and not the upcoming Creators Update.Windows Central reports that the feature will “crush” Google Home and Amazo

 Great news, Potter fans: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is no longer the only place in the world where you can find a working Marauder’s Map, the magical piece of parchment that let Harry Potter and others track the movements of people as they went around the Hogwarts campus and its many public and secret passageways. This weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt… Read More

When Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election, it quickly became clear that Alec Baldwin would have steady work on Saturday Night Live for his portrayal of the President-elect. The show lampooned Trump on last night’s show, drawing a quick response from him on his favorite medium, Twitter.
Last night’s cold open sketch was pretty funny, mocking Trump’s propensity for retweeting random followers. Baldwin’s Trump can’t seem to get through a security briefing wi

You probably caught video a few weeks back of Alexa speaking through Big Mouth Billy Bass, a singing fish that got popular in the late 1990s.
If you haven’t seen it yet, take a moment to watch and enjoy.The animatronic fish is a good reminder that Amazon’s Alexa does not just come in speakers like Amazon Echo or Echo Dot.
The Alexa Voice Service (AVS) can be used to put Alexa inside a wide range of devices, and since it’s in the cloud, Alexa can operate

In the history of video games, there have been many titles that have tried to encapsulate the raw and brutal reality that is war. From giant, AAA first-person shooters like the Battlefield or Call of Duty series that put you in the boots of a single solider on the ground, to real-time strategy games like StarCraft or Total War giving a more top-down overview of conflicts, to small indie titles like like Valiant Hearts: The Great War and This War of Mine that show the more personal and emotional

(Reuters) – Airbnb and New York City said on Friday they had resolved a lawsuit brought by the company challenging a law it argued could expose it to significant penalties for advertising short-term apartment rentals.
Airbnb filed the suit in October after New York state enacted a law imposing fines of up to $7,500 on hosts who advertise illegal short-term rentals on platforms like Airbnb.
Airbnb had contended that the law’s ambiguous wording could allow New York authorities to apply

 Andrew Greenstein, an app developer from San Francisco, started journaling a few months ago. He tries to write for five minutes every day, but it’s challenging to set aside the time. Still, he’s read that journaling reduces stress and can help with goal-setting, so he’s trying to make it a habit. At the Disrupt London Hackathon, Greenstein and his team built The Emotion… Read More

The British energy supplier Ovo has put some very well-spent hours into a comprehensive calculation of the operating costs of the Death Star, which will return to the spotlight in the December 16th movie Rogue One. They conclude that operating the planet-destroying starbase would cost 6.2 octillion British pounds, or $7.8 octillion, per day—that’s $7,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
To put that absurdly large number in perspective, $7.8 octillion is more than 100 trillion times t

The Infinity Stones are the most powerful objects in the Marvel universe, and now Mega Man is about to get his hands on them.
Capcom announced that it will release Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in 2017 at the PlayStation Experience fan event this morning. Now, as part of the Capcom Pro Tour fighting-game finals, the publisher has finally showed off the game in action. You can catch the trailer above, which demonstrates the hyperkinetic character-swapping action o

(Reuters) — Online credit companies and paperless lenders would be able to get federal charters to do business nationwide under a plan outlined on Friday by a U.S. banking regulator.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the main regulator for federal banks, said it hoped offering a charter for “fintech” companies would spur banking sector innovation.
“Technology-based products and services are the future of banking and the economy,” OCC director Thom

 Early-stage venture firm Network Society Ventures has snagged TechShop’s former CEO and co-founder Mark Hatch as general partner.
Hatch is recognized as a pioneer of the maker movement, is a current entrepreneur in residence at UC Berkeley, and is a former Green Beret.
For those who don’t know it, TechShop bills itself as “a membership-based DIY… Read More

After raising almost $7 million to fund a recount in three principle battleground states, Green Party-backed voters have dropped a court case that would have forced a state-wide recount in Pennsylvania, citing their inability to pay a court-ordered bond.
A court hearing had been scheduled for Monday. The Green Party-backed voters who brought the suit indicated that they "are regular citizens of ordinary means", and as a result could not afford to pay the $1 million bond as ordered by the court b

GUEST: Bots are hot. Bots are coming. However, there are two distinct species both referred to as “bots.”
1. Intelligent virtual agents with conversational UI
2. No-smarts menu-driven programs with graphics UI that rely on on-screen buttons
The first article of this series argued the latter have a number of serious disadvantages that make them virtually unacceptable. They face problems with deep linking, discoverability, and lack of bot-to-bot communication protocols.
Intel

Ever since Netflix renewed Sense8 for a second season in 2015, there’s been little news about the series. Netflix finally dropped the news via Twitter earlier this afternoon, announcing the premiere date of the next season, as well as a Christmas special, which will air later this month.Sense8: A Christmas Special will begin streaming on Friday, December 23rd, while the show’s second season will premiere on May 5th, 2017.Our story continues.
A Christmas Special: December 23.
10 new e

GUEST: As consumers, we’re familiar with — if not yet wholly invested in — the term “artificial intelligence,” whether it’s by way of self-driving cars or voice-enabled search like Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Artificial intelligence is on course to drastically change the enterprise, with big implications for productivity, and possibly even larger ramifications for the economy.
Business intelligence is providing companies with an overabundance of d

Marvel just released a new teaser trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and it’s packed with plenty of action, humor, and classic rock.
We got our first brief look at the movie back in October, but this new trailer gives us a great look at the entire gang: Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), and even Baby Groot (Vin Diesel). The trailer opens with Drax jumping at a huge alien creature, while Rocket gives baby

GUEST: Let’s start with the good stuff: All the big players  —  Facebook, Slack, Kik, WeChat —  are getting in on the bot action, which must mean that everyone believes there’s something there worth investing in. Bots are being touted as a replacement for apps, and with good reason.
Apps can be cumbersome, frustrating, and are sometimes a waste of precious phone space. Bots are a quick and easy solution to that problem, allowing a comfortable c