Technology news

The initial list of companies supporting Apple’s new single sign-on feature for iOS was pretty lacking. But one day after launch, an old and important ally is jumping on board: ABC / Disney. Both the Watch ABC and Watch Disney apps for Apple TV and iOS will now automatically log you in if you’ve entered your cable or satellite credentials into the new settings menu.This works on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV; some apps only support single sign-on with certain devices at the moment. ESPN

If you live in Canada and are still, somehow, for some ridiculous reason, hanging onto a Galaxy Note 7, your days of using the phone for pretty much anything will soon be over.
Samsung plans to make the Note 7 effectively unusable in Canada from next week forward. The phone will still turn on, but it won’t be able to connect to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or any cellular networks. So if you were planning to do anything like browse the internet or even make a phone call on the device, you’re go

Sony announced that it's offering the Uncharted 4 PlayStation 4 Slim bundle for $249.99 — $50 off its usual $299.99 price tag — from December 11th through December 24th. So if you missed out on buying a PlayStation 4 during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals, there's still time to pick one up at a lower price than usual.Sony hasn't said which retailers will offer the deal, but it's safe to assume that the usual suspects of Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and GameStop (among others) are

Apple wants to high-priced early movie rentals to its users, reports Bloomberg, and is in talks with film studios to make that happen. Sources say that the company is pushing to make movies that are still in theaters available for on iTunes. The move would seriously disrupt the already tense relationship studios have with theater chains, but it’s clear at this point that this is the direction the industry will go in years ahead.
Movies could hit home audiences after just two weeks
Accordin

AT&T and Time Warner were called before Congress today to defend their upcoming $85 billion merger and they played all of the antitrust bingo words in the book. We heard a lot about “investment,” “competition,” and “innovation” in the two-hour session — but no reasons to believe that this merger is a necessary path to producing any of those things. And bizarrely, AT&T and Time Warner seem to have unwittingly argued against their need to merge.Tes

This past Sunday, a man fired a rifle into Comet Ping Pong, the Washington, DC pizza place at the center of an internet conspiracy theory dubbed Pizzagate that claims, in part, that the restaurant is a haven for a child abuse ring. The gunman surrendered to police after he realized there were no children being illegally harbored in the restaurant. What should have been an end to one of the internet’s strangest conspiracy theories appears to be just another moment in its convoluted timeline

President-elect Donald Trump will tap Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Reuters reports. Trump’s pick is seen as a step toward gutting an agency that the president-elect threatened to eliminate during his campaign.Pruitt enjoys a cozy relationship with energy companies
Pruitt is a climate change skeptic who has a close relationship with the fossil fuel industry. In a recent editorial in the National Review, he argued that the reality of hum

Microsoft has announced that its annual Build developer conference will be taking place on May 10th–12th, 2017. In a change from previous years, Build 2017 is planned to take place in downtown Seattle, instead of its usual San Fransisco venue from years past.
The Build conference typically serves as an event for Microsoft to show off the future of its software to developers ahead of consumer release. Build 2017 will likely see the unveiling of the next version of Windows following the rele

As if holiday travels aren’t stressful enough already, United Airlines will somehow make it even more annoying to head home. Earlier this month, it announced a new pricing tier, Basic Economy, that’ll let you snag cheaper air fares. Great! The downside? Starting in 2017, any carry-on or personal items you bring that can’t fit under your seat are subjected to a fee.
This has got many consumers understandably bugging out, and even New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s calling fo

People Products took the idea of a speaker to its most minimalist conclusion in 2012with the Transparent Speaker, a glass-enclosed speaker that let you see exactly how the drivers wire together to create sound. The only downside (aside from dust accumulation) was the $849 price tag.
Now, the company is back with a new smaller version of the Transparent Speaker, fittingly called the Small Transparent Speaker, that also comes with a much smaller $250 price tag. Like its larger cousin, it's also cr

Today, Mars One announced a five-year delay to its projected timeline for starting a human colony on Mars, claiming it will now send the first crews to the planet in 2031; its previous target date was 2026. The Dutch-based venture, which promises people a chance to live out their remaining days on the Red Planet, said its roadmap had to be adjusted in order to give the venture more time to raise money, as well as push the “large expenses associated with the mission hardware back in time,&r

American tractor manufacturer John Deere has pulled the wraps off of its first fully electric tractor in a new video published this week. The tractor project is called Sustainable Energy Supply for Agricultural Machinery, or SESAM, and John Deere plans to officially unveil it at the Paris International Agribusiness Show in early 2017.Until then, we only know a few things about the SESAM tractor. As Jalopnik points out, it has an absolutely massive 150kW battery pack — bigger than what you

Verizon is beginning its $300 million FiOS rollout in the Boston area, eight months after it announced that it was building a fiber optic platform. The rollout is expected to take place over the next six months and the company has already installed more than 160 miles of fiber optic wiring.
Verizon expects 25,000 addresses will able to connect to FiOS by the end of December
In a statement, Verizon’s consumer landline business lead Ken Dixon said FiOS service will be offered to more than 25

As we head into the final weeks of 2016, the inevitable nostalgia for six to 11 months ago is kicking in across the pop culture universe. Everyone’s surveying the most significant films, books, music videos, memes, celebrity shade-offs, and what have you from the past year, and deciding what was most important for them in 2016. But while the hype cycle operates in tidy annual waves, our lives don’t. We’ll be getting into some of the best of 2016 on the site shortly, but we figu

It looks like hit mobile game Alto’s Adventure is getting a sequel: the mobile game’s developer Built by Snowman announced follow-up Alto’s Odyssey today, teasing it as “the next adventure” for the popular snowboarding endless runner.
Built by Snowman released Alto’s Adventureback in 2015, and it remains one of the best games ever made for mobile platforms. The gameplay consists of a player chasing runaway llamas down a mountain rendered in beautiful scenery.

Hyundai is gearing up to mass-produce electric buses, according to a report from South Korea’s ET News. The buses would be powered by two 51kWh batteries, and capable of traveling around 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) on a single charge. The South Korean automaker reportedly plans to ramp up development in 2017 with a goal of working the buses into fleets in the company’s homeland as well as in China.The batteries in Hyundai’s buses will likely come from LG, according to ET Ne

By now, it’s clear that the Russian government was involved in this summer’s public leak of emails from the DNC. Experts from across the industry have pointed to the country as the most likely culprit, and in October, the intelligence community confirmed it with an official attribution, saying “only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
It’s a unique incident, raising profound questions about the robustness of Western democracy and

The space under Donald Trump’s tweets tends to be a cesspool of not only users arguing over his many wild claims but bots vying to reply first. Now, Twitter seems to be moving in to clean up the mess. According to Motherboard, the social network has suspended a number of accounts that automatically respond to the president-elect’s tweets, many of which having garnered thousands of followers by just appearing under his words.
The most prominent of these accounts is reportedly Patrioti

T-Mobile just revealed its answer to AT&T’s NumberSync technology, which lets customers use one phone number across all their connected devices. T-Mobile’s version is called Digits and it will launch in a limited, opt-in customer beta beginning today before rolling out to everyone early next year.“You can make and take calls and texts on whatever device is most convenient,” the company said in its press release. “Just log in and, bam, your call history, messages

Pokémon Go players jonesing for more pokéstops, gyms, and a trip to their local Sprint stores are in luck. Pokémon Go developer Niantic announced today that Sprint will be the first US partner it takes on, meaning that 10,500 Sprint, Boost Mobile, and Sprint at RadioShack spots will become places of interest for players.Pokéstops are a place for players to stock up on crucial in-game items such as pokéballs. In the case of these Sprint locations, players will a

As Facebook works on new tools to stop the spread of misinformation on its network, it’s seeking to patent technology that could be used for that purpose. This month the US Trademark and Patent Office published Facebook’s application for Patent 0350675: “systems and methods to identify objectionable content.” The application, which was filed in June 2015, describes a sophisticated system for identifying inappropriate text and images and removing them from the network.
As

VSCO, the folks behind that app that’s basically Instagram but for people who know how to take pictures, is releasing a new membership pass that’ll give mobile photographers access to exclusive filters, including an interactive set that you can manipulate within live capture.
Film X is an attempt to recreate film photography by offering users more controlCalled VSCO X, the invite-only membership grants paid users the entire library of currently available presets and a new genre calle

Team communication startup Slack has always billed itself as more than just a chat app. The company sees its software as a the hub of workplace productivity, with the spokes of the wheel being third-party integrations to any number of products and services customers rely on day in and day out. Now, Slack is dialing up one of those partnerships — its integrations with Google Drive — to make its app that much more useful for completing tasks without having to jump in and out of differe

Shinola announced today that it's getting into the audio business with its new Runwell Turntable. The turntable marks the first release from the new Shinola Audio division of the Detroit-based company, which is typically known for its leatherwear products, bicycles, and watches.
The driving force behind the Runwell Turntable is Alexander Rosson, the former CEO of noted headphone manufacturer Audeze, who left the company to join Shinola last year. In keeping with the brand's "Made in America" ide

After 20 years of traveling through space, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is taking a close look at Saturn before plunging into the planet in September 2017. And it’s finally sending us some of its first pictures back.
The final stretch of Cassini’s mission will allow us to learn more about the particles and gas molecules that linger near Saturn’s rings. Cassini began its new mission phase on November 30th, which NASA calls Ring-Grazing Orbits. Twenty of these weeklong orbits

Today, the United Launch Alliance is set to launch one of its Delta IV rockets — the bigger sibling to the company’s more prolific Atlas V. The vehicle is tasked with carrying a communication satellite into a super high orbit for the US Air Force.The Boeing-built satellite is the eighth of the military’s Wideband Global SATCOM constellation — a series of probes that together provide extremely high-bandwidth communication. In order to provide this capability, today’s

Over the next year, we’re going to start seeing devices with Bluetooth connections that are faster and work over much longer ranges than what can currently be achieved.
That should all happen thanks to the changes in Bluetooth 5, a new standard that’s launching today. Companies are now able to begin building and certifying devices that work with Bluetooth 5, the first round of which are expected to begin rolling out in the next two to six months and could include major products by th

After targeting a return-to-flight mission on December 16th, SpaceX now says it’s next Falcon 9 flight will occur sometime in early January. The launch will still send a series of 10 small satellites into orbit for Iridium Communications, which was also the plan for the December mission. However, the date change will slightly prolong the company’s hiatus from spaceflight, which was sparked when one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a launchpad in September.
The investigation into t

In the last week, my Twitter feed has been filling up en masse with photos of my friends from 2006. It’s part of #2006vs2016 — a hashtag you pair with a photo of yourself from a decade ago and another of how you look today. The trend is both an easy commiseration over our past lives and peak navel gazing.The tag itself is not new. People have used the hashtag since January, making this current revival its own sort of throwback. Whether Twitter users choose to directly comment on thei

Ever since Damien Chazelle’s La La Land premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, it’s been hailed as the presumptive front-runner for half of this year’s Academy Awards, especially in the music, visual, acting, and directing categories. The New York Critics Circle and the Washington DC Critics Association have already declared it the best film of the year. And it doesn’t even arrive in theaters until Friday, December 9th.Chazelle’s follow-up to his breakout

A few minutes with Steep, Ubisoft’s perplexing open-world snowboarding game, could inspire any number of questions. It’s quirky and messy, beautiful to look at, occasionally irritating to hold. And yet, when friends see I’m playing Steep, the first question is always the same: is it like SSX?For those who’ve come to video games in the last couple years, the SSX snowboarding franchise was a thing in the 2000s, a shrewd mix of colorful extreme sports culture of the new mill

As we get closer to the next major Nintendo Switch unveiling in January, details about the new console continue to trickle out. The latest is a report from Eurogamer that claims that the Nintendo Switch will be adding GameCube Virtual Console support to the upcoming console.
Eurogamer's sources claim that Nintendo already has Super Mario Sunshine, Luigi's Mansion, and Super Smash Bros. Melee working in an emulated form on the Switch. Animal Crossing is slated to be next.
While Nintendo has inclu

To get to the Panoptic Studio at Carnegie Mellon University, you take an elevator down four flights to a dingy sub-basement. Inside room B510, a series of metal cross beams enclose a massive, otherworldly structure: a geodesic dome. Each of the wooden dome’s hexagonal panels is covered with a tangle of wires, cameras, and connectors, and a steady thrum emanates from the rows of computers that surround the hulking structure. At the bottom of the dome, a single panel is missing and bright li

Alonzo Knowles, a 24-year-old hacker who pleaded guilty to phishing celebrities for unpublished TV scripts and explicit videos, has been sentenced to five years in prison at a New York City federal court today. The sentence is nearly double the amount of years suggested by the federal guidelines, The New York Times reports, despite a plea deal where Knowles handed over unreleased songs, scripts, and $1,900 in cash.
Although Knowles said he was apologetic for his actions when he pleaded guilty, J

If you’re looking for some distractions over the coming Christmas holiday, you could doa lot worse than checking out Apple’s annual best-of lists. Each year the company names its favorite apps, games, music, movies, and more. This year’s top pick in the category is AI-powered art filter Prisma, with Supercell’s card-based battler Clash Royale taking best game. (Pokémon Go gets a nod as “breakout hit” of the year, but nothing more than that — perha

Digital health and fitness-tracking company Fitbit has just officially announced that it is buying key assets from smartwatch startup Pebble, after reports emerged last week that a deal between the two was close to being completed.Fitbit co-founder and CEO James Park said in a release that the company “sees an opportunity to build on our strengths and extend our leadership position in the wearables category.”
“With this acquisition, we’re well positioned to accelerate the

Almost exactly fifteen years ago, in October of 2001, a major consumer tech product appeared that struck a nearly perfect balance between form and function, between beautiful design and practical engineering. It was the original iPod.
The little music player held 1,000 songs. Its sound, its battery life, its ability to sync rapidly with computers, were all unparalleled at the time. And its design and ease of use were awe-inspiring. It was the size of a deck of cards. It had an amazing scroll whe