Technology news

NASA used satellite measurements of carbon dioxide to create a startling new 3D video that shows how the greenhouse gas moves through Earth’s atmosphere. In a little over a minute, you can see CO2 concentrations swirling around, up into the sky, and engulfing the Northern Hemisphere.The data comes from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite, which was launched in 2014 to measure atmospheric CO2 at the regional scale. The observations — which cover one year, from

FBI Director James Comey today threw his weight behind a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election. According to CIA Director John Brennan: Earlier this week, I met separately with (Director) FBI James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election. The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this i

Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the availability of an enterprise tier of its Amazon QuickSight cloud software for business intelligence (BI). AWS launched QuickSight out of preview last month after introducing it a year ago.
The new Enterprise Edition stands out from the Standard Edition in a few important ways. It lets organizations connect it with Microsoft’s Active Directory identity management software, whether it’s running on AWS o

Rats can’t talk, but researchers say there is one easy way to tell if they’re happy: look at their ears.A group of Swiss scientists tickled rats to make them happy for science, in a delightful study published recently in the journal PLoS One. The researchers took photos of the happy rats and compared them to photos of the same rats when they were forced to listen to unpleasant noise. (Poor things!) And just as we smile and frown, happy rats do look a little different from miserable o

GUEST: The Consumer Electronics Show is just around the corner and is expecting over 165,000 attendees and more than 3,800 product demos. But as exciting as CES always is, the changes we’ll see there will be incremental.
What would really blow our collective 2016 minds is a look a bit further into the future at CES 2025. So my team at SapientRazorfish immersed ourselves in macro trends in technology and consumer behavior to imagine several announcements we could all very well hear at CES i

The copyright violation notice is every pirate’s worst nightmare, a clear legal sign that a major copyright holder knows what you’ve been torrenting and is ready to make you pay for your crimes.But according to an indictment filed today in Minnesota federal court, that system has also opened the door to some very creative forms of fraud. The indictment alleges that two lawyers — Paul R. Hansmeier and John L. Steele — used the copyright system to extort roughly $6 million

GUEST: Everyone seems to be talking about artificial intelligence these days, and you’re probably wondering why it’s suddenly such a hot topic. Is it the prospect of creating autonomous robots and self-driving cars? Or is it about exploring new frontiers of science and outer space?
Those sci-fi aspirations are definitely generating some buzz — but they’re slow-moving projects that aren’t going to change our day-to-day lives just yet. What really gets businesses

Yesterday, an anonymous Twitter user targeted Vanity Fair contributing editor Kurt Eichenwald with a tweet meant to trigger a seizure, the writer revealed this morning. Eichenwald has epilepsy, and the tweeted strobe successfully caused him to seize. Now, he’ll be coordinating with police and Twitter to unmask the tweeter. Eichenwald also says he’s taking a much-needed break from the social network. See below:
Last night, for the second time, a deplorable aware I have epilepsy tweete

Often before a new mobile game comes out, people who use an Android smartphone or tablet can get the game early by scouring the internet for Android install files known as APKs. These are like .exe files on Windows, and they enable you to install software on your device without having to go through the Google Play Store.
Naturally, with Nintendo launching Super Mario Run exclusively for iOS systems yesterday, Android owners are desperate to play the game. Since it’s not on Google Play

4chan users on the “Politically Incorrect” /pol/ board are attempting to shut down DIY venues and art spaces in the wake of Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire, Vice’s Thump reports.
Thump quotes one 4chan user who, in a thread that has since expired, asked others to report spaces like Ghost Ship to police and fire departments. The idea is that some of these spaces — as was the case with Ghost Ship — will be in violation of building codes and can be shut down as safety

With Verizon’s $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo in danger of being cancelled after two major hacking incidents, analysts are starting to look at what else the telecom giant could do to bolster its digital advertising strategy.
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam is trying to build an online ad business to be the third-largest player behind Google and Facebook. The drive comes as growth in Verizon’s traditional wired and wireless telecom units is slowing and the company is looking for new busi

Ask Google Assistant or Cortana something like “What’s 4 +4?” today and you’re likely to hear “8.” Ask a more difficult question, like “What did the ancient Greeks eat?” and chances are, instead of answering the question directly, you will likely get pointed toward a website for you to sift through to find an answer to your question.
Microsoft Machine Reading Comprehension (MS MARCO), a dataset of 100,000 questions and answers m

Last year, Pinterest set a series of public goals for its diversity hiring. It announced its intention to hire women for at least 30 percent of the full-time engineering roles that were available in 2016. This week the company announced it missed that target — women only made up 22 percent of the engineer hires —and then decided to lower its hiring goal for 2017.Sure, why not? It’s still 2016, let’s just continue to lower our expectations for everything. We’re on a

Industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails today announced that it will release a new five-track EP, Not the Actual Events, at 12:01 a.m. Pacific on December 23. Fans can now preorder a one-sided vinyl and a “digital + physical component version” of the album through the band’s website.
“It’s an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make,” frontman Trent Reznor is quoted as saying in a statement. “It’s an EP because that ended up being

Major League Baseball’s streaming technology division, known as BAMTech, has struck a deal with Riot Games to stream League of Legends tournaments, according to The Wall Street Journal. The deal, expected to be announced later today, will have BAMTech paying Riot, which is a subsidiary of Chinese media giant Tencent, a minimum of $300 million through 2023. As part of the deal, BAMTech will help Riot launch a dedicated streaming app next year and will handle distribution and monetization of

The maker of the EpiPen announced today it will start selling a generic of its live-saving allergy treatment for $300 for a two-pack, according to Reuters. Mylan NV has been highly criticized recently for spiking the price of its drug to more than $600 from $100 in 2008.
The EpiPen, which is sold in two-packs due to federal guidelines, delivers a hormone called epinephrine that ends potentially life-threatening allergy attacks. There’s actually less than $1 worth of epinephrine in each Epi

While you collect coins as Mario on your iPhone, Nintendo is collecting fat stacks on cash.
Super Mario Run has generated approximately $5 million in in revenues after five million downloads in its first 24 hours, according to intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That’s a far bigger download number than competing data firm Apptopia reported earlier today, but it’s in line with data from app-market-tracking company App Annie, which estimates 4.7 million downloads in the United States

Honor officially launched its Honor Magic phone in China this week and is billing it as a device from the future. I’ve got to say: it does look pretty future, but maybe it’s just the space background Honor used that’s making me think that.HonorHonorI don’t read Chinese, but if you do and feel like navigating the Magic’s dedicated page, feel free. Instead, I’m going to rely on Android Authority to translate for me. The phone has a:
5-inch AMOLED screen
12-megap

Twitter today provided an update on the shutdown of Vine, which the company first announced in late October. The biggest news in the blog post is that the Vine app won’t be going away when Vine the service does. Vine’s mobile apps will be rebranded Vine Camera and will still be able to record looping 6.5-second video clips. You’ll just have to either post those to Twitter or save them directly to your phone’s camera roll. According to Twitter’s FAQ, “you will

For 90 minutes, the inaugural flight of Facebook's drone Aquila had been a success. The remote-operated dolly that carried Aquila down the runway had generated sufficient speed to launch it. The drone rose to its intended test altitude of 2,150 feet, and flew steadily over the Yuma Proving Ground in southwestern Arizona. With every minute it spent in the air, Aquila generated reams of new data for Facebook engineers to analyze. Elated, they decided to keep it aloft three times longer than planne

GUEST: Sometimes you go out hard and party like the cool kids. Other times, your Saturday night plans are … less than spectacular. For times like those, here are the 6 best ways to get entertainment out of your Amazon Echo when you’re bored and lonely, or just sick of other people. After all, your friends may judge you, but Alexa never will.
You can either read this whole article, or watch our entertaining video coverage where we make fools out of ourselves in the attempt

FBI director James Comey has signed on to a previously reported CIA assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin directly intervened in the US presidential election in aid of Donald Trump, according to an internal CIA memo obtained by the Associated Press and Washington Post. The report has also been endorsed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, giving it the unanimous support of US intelligence agencies.
The assessment focuses on the digital theft and subsequent publicati

Twitter may have announced it’s shutting down Vine, but that’s not entirely true. On Friday, the company revealed that in January, it will launch a pared-down version that continues to let you to create six-second looping videos. Also, for those who fear the worst for their creations, Twitter now lets you download your videos through the Vine app and website.
In a blog post, the company said that it has been “working closely with creators to find out what’s important

 In October, Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine, its app that let users create and share 6-second looping videos. Today, the company says it won’t actually pull the Vine app from the app store as it had earlier implied, but will rather transition to a new, low-maintenance app called Vine Camera. From this new app, you’ll still be able to record Vine videos, but the larger… Read More

Woody Harrelson is making a movie inspired by one night he ended up in a London jail. On its face, that’s not a very interesting premise, but lucky for anyone who roots for Woody Harrelson, that’s not all: the film, Lost in London, will be live-streamed in theaters at the same time it’s being shot.
As Entertainment Weekly reports, this will mark the first time a film (not a stage play) has been live-streamed into theaters. The 100-minute movie will differ from a play in that it

Disney’s first standalone Star Wars film, set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, is finally here. Rogue One’s sort-of-prequel status allows it to tie in with other Star Wars stories, from the core series to spinoffs like Rebels, giving eagle-eyed fans plenty to search for throughout the film.Director Gareth Edwards noted that he had decided to throw a ton of Easter eggs into the film, enough that he decided to limit himself so as not to overdo it. Despite that limitation the

Microsoft’s premium controller is seeing a surge leading into the gift-giving holidays.
The Xbox One Elite Controller saw its sales in November increase by almost half in a year-over-year comparison, according to industry-tracking firm The NPD Group. The Elite Controller debuted in October 2015, and it sells for $150. Microsoft justifies that price by using high-quality components and including a variety of exchangeable parts and a carrying case. Controllers are a significant chunk of

News broke today that a Chinese warship had seized an underwater drone belonging to the US Navy. The move is sure to escalate tensions around the South China Sea, a contested area where China has increasingly been flexing its muscle. We cover a lot of drones at The Verge, but they are typically small, consumer-facing aircraft that would be very unhappy if you got them wet.
So what is an underwater drone? It’s basically a miniature submarine without any people inside. Because it’s muc

Most people don’t think about the process of assembling the interior of an aircraft when they’re flying. Instead, passengers focus on more immediate concerns like peanuts and tight legroom. But installing the inside of an aircraft is hugely important for airlines: they must make decisions about balancing that legroom with the number of seats, as well as making sufficient room for things like bathrooms and galleys.
Because installing the aircraft interior is such a labor-intensive (an

Finding shortcuts can be a blessing sometimes, especially if you’re a developer. Instead of having to manually code something that simply replicates functionality you’d find on Twitter, LinkedIn, Nest devices, Apple products, and anything else technological, you can use software development kits (SDKs). But while it seems every company offers one for their service, which ones are the best to use?
According to a report from mobile app intelligence service MightySignal, Google, Adobe,