Technology news

Thanks to the emergence of Web-based tools and services, most of us work primarily in the browser these days, and that means it’s our main productivity center. Google Chrome is far and away the most popular browser around and it supports a huge number of extensions, which are essentially plugins that add functionality to your browser. There are a ton of them that can help you get more work done in short order, while consuming less system resources than standalone apps and integrating more

Twitter is bringing live 360-degree video streams to Periscope.
The feature is launching immediately — you can already watch the “first ever #Periscope360” stream right here. But while everyone can watch in 360 degrees, only “select partners” are able to stream in 360 degrees at launch.
360 Sunset in Florida. First ever #Periscope360 with @Brandee_Anthony https://t.co/AZWbnnT15S— Alex Pettitt (@Alexpettitt) December 28, 2016The implementation is pretty typical

Long-distance relationships are difficult because not only is your lover completely removed from your day-to-day life, but you have absolutely zero possibility of tangible physical intimacy. This is sad. Researchers from the Imagineering Lab at City University London think they can solve this problem, however, with their new Kissenger gadget. The device mimics a real kiss using pressure sensors and actuators. It’s purely for regular pecks on the cheek or mouth — no tongue simulation

Tim Cook wandered into the New York Stock Exchange this morning and started taking questions about his holiday plans, product sales, and AirPods. His responses raised some big questions — Why isn’t he at NASDAQ, where AAPL is traded? Does he really think the NYSE will be a fun trip for his nephew? — but the biggest question he left unanswered is around the initial success of AirPods.
In response to a comment about the AirPods selling after their launch this month, Cook said tha

Gaming on Windows 10 might be getting even better. A report from UberGizmo cites Twitter user @h0x0d, who found a new "gamemode.dll" in the latest Windows 10 developer build. The feature appears to allow Windows 10 to adjust CPU and GPU resources when running a game to allocate more power for the game that's running instead of toward any background apps..@h0x0d 14997 has a new dll "gamemode.dll", so it looks like Game Mode is a thing— WalkingCat (@h0x0d) December 28, 2016It's a move that e

Docks are finally getting their chance to shine after Apple nixed all the ports on its new MacBooks Pros and instead opted for only Thunderbolt. Suddenly, we love our ports. Don’t take our ports! Luckily for us, the wheels of capitalism have already started turning to satisfy our port needs. There’s OWC’s Thunderbolt 3 dock, for instance, and something called the Line Dock on Indiegogo. Now, Lenovo, too,is getting into the game with its Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C docks that it int

Ford has pulled the wraps off of its second-generation driverless Fusion Hybrid just one week before the company is scheduled to show the car off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The most notable difference with the new generation is cosmetic — Ford has ditched the pipe organ-style suite of sensors on the roof in favor of a more streamlined look. Ford’s first autonomous car was undeniably alien, but from most angles the new version could easily be mistaken for just anot

She may not be real, but Hatsune Miku is a bonafide star. The holographic pop singer started life as a promotional vehicle for Japanese music software, but has since parlayed that into a career that most real musicians would be envious of. She’s appeared on late night talk shows and toured the world, and thanks to a partnership with Sega, she has her own line of rhythm games. With the release of PlayStation VR back in October, she took the next logical step: virtual reality.
Hatsune Miku:

A few days ago, PopSugar’s food blog shared a Facebook video recipe for “Wine and Cheese Shots.” It sounds bad even before you know the worst part: the shot glasses are made of cheese. All you do is melt a bunch of cheddar cheese, scoop the gooey mess into a shot glass mold, and then just let the mold sit for half an hour until the melted cheese coagulates into something resembling a solid. Finally, you pour wine into your warm cheesy vessels. Enjoy!
As Vanity Fair reporter May

Epic Games is still working on its first full-length virtual reality game: an arcade shooter called Robo Recall for the Oculus Rift. But the studio best known for Unreal Tournament and Gears of War has already made a huge impact on VR through its popular Unreal Engine, which is being used to create games like space simulator Adrift and Myst successor Obduction.
Last year, Epic CEO and co-founder Tim Sweeney predicted that between three and five million VR headsets would be sold in 2016, calling

Disney films like Mulan, Pocahontas, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and many more are now available to stream on Hulu. The company announced a multi-year licensing agreement with Disney that gives the service exclusive subscription video on-demand rights to a specific slate of films.
Hulu’s Disney play is largely family focused. Other available titles include Hercules, Sister Act, and Air Bud, while movies such as Lilo & Stitch, Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove, Muppet Treasure Island

Disney films like Mulan, Pocahontas, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and many more are now available to stream on Hulu. The company announced a multi-year licensing agreement with Disney that gives the service exclusive subscription video on-demand rights to a specific slate of films.
Hulu’s Disney play is largely family focused. Other available titles include Hercules, Sister Act, and Air Bud, while movies such as Lilo & Stitch, Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove, Muppet Treasure Island

For years, there was a rhythm to the annual release of the world’s best-selling video game series. Publisher Activision would announce the latest Call of Duty with a trailer in the commercial break of a big sporting event, pad the following months with incremental reveals about flashy single-player stories and increasingly elaborate multiplayer modes, host a blowout launch party, and the next day, celebrate with a press release announcing the latest record-breaking sales figures.In the pas

Whenever a beloved celebrity dies, there’s a bit of a Twitter arms race to pull out the most obscure and / or poignant piece of minutiae about them. It can be a nice, comforting way to collectively mourn, but it’s also bound to result in some viral mistakes.Right now, a page of The Empire Strikes Back’s 1980 screenplay with handwritten notes is being circulated as proof of the late Carrie Fisher’s prowess as a script doctor, and her massive impact on the Star Wars franchi

Samsung has been making robot vacuum cleaners for a while now, and while they haven't quite gotten to the level of popularity as iRobot's Roomba line has, it seems that enough people buy them for Samsung to keep making them.Up to 20 watts of suction power
With that in mind we have the latest model of Powerbot vacuum cleaners, the Powerbot VR7000, which Samsung announced this week ahead of CES 2017. The new vacuum is less than 4 inches tall — Samsung claims it's 28 percent thinner than the

Here in the final week of 2016, the inevitable nostalgia for six to 11 months ago has reached its height in the pop-culture universe. This week, we look back on some of the best entertainment experiences we had in 2016 — the things that made our jobs and our lives worth it.
Don’t miss our previous best-ofs:
The pre-2016 entertainment that got us through 2016
The weirdest pop-culture of 2016
The worst pop-culture of 2016Drinking the lemonade: Seeing Beyoncé live!
We almost didn

Republican lawmakers have proposed fining Congressional representatives who stream live video or post photos from the House floor, in an apparent attempt to stop a repeat of last year’s Democratic live-streamed sit-in protest. NBC News reports that the new policy would fine representatives $500 for the first offense of broadcasting video, audio, or photos, and rise to $2,500 thereafter. In order to take effect, the proposal would need to be approved by the House when its next session start

We’re living in a world that looks increasingly like science fiction, so I find myself looking to the genre not for predictions of what the future holds but for some guidance for dealing with this strange and changing world. 2016 was a difficult year, but a bounty of fantastic science fiction and fantasy novels were helpful in not simply escaping the present, but confronting it.
Here’s the best of what the year had to offer.
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
All the Bir

It’s hard to admit you are wrong, especially on the internet where any mistake gets deluged so quickly by the next thing to read, watch, or otherwise consume. But I have to confess my folly in enthusiastically endorsing the Technics T700 during January’s CES. They’re a pair of high-end, $1,200 headphones with premium design and exceptional engineering, but their sound just doesn’t sustain the delightful first impression over the course of long-term use.Continue reading&he

Another 12 months have flown by. As we look back at this year in tech, The Verge staff members are grading each major company and product category in the industry on how they fared in 2016.
From years of watching E3 and knowing deep down that every cool game being demoed from Nintendo won’t be released for at least another year (or two,) the company was a refreshing surprise this year. By capitalizing on nostalgia, Nintendo made 2016 the year it truly got our inner kids excited again -- ev

I think it’s safe to say that we’re all looking forward to 2016 dancing itself right off the stage of history and ushering in a new year where hopefully everything isn’t the most terrible thing, ever. But despite the promise and potential that a new year brings, it’s also worth keeping an eye on what new movies and TV shows you might want to watch — because no matter what’s going on in the world, sometimes you just want to keep your head down and glued to your

Last week, Dutch regulators ordered T-Mobile to stop its Data-free Music service because the "zero rating" offering violates net neutrality rules in The Netherlands. The service is similar to T-Mobile's Binge On plan offered in the US where the legality of zero-rating services has yet to be challenged.
"Free data does not exist: other services will be more expensive," said Henk Don in a statement by the Dutch regulatory authority.
“Free data does not exist”
As a reminder, zero-rating

Another 12 months have flown by. As we look back at this year in tech, The Verge staff members are grading each major company and product category in the industry on how they fared in 2016.
It hasn’t been a stellar 12 months for Twitter. The company went public three years ago to a $25 billion valuation and the promise of growth that would launch it into the upper echelon of social networks. That vision hasn’t panned out, and 2016 furthered Twitter’s fate as a struggling Silico

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions because I'm of the belief that if something is wrong you should fix it, not put it off until some arbitrary date. Thus, the timing of my "New Year's resolution" is coincidence, really, after watching This is Water again over the weekend. It's a video adaptation of a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in 2005. Here, have a look for yourselves when you can dedicate nine minutes of your day to fully appreciate it:DFW's speech is about choi

Every company flirts with some variation of talking about the future in its promo materials, but Samsung has decided to be more direct by announcing it’s bringing "the future of audio" to CES 2017. The Korean company has developed a proprietary audio upscaling technology, which it is calling Ultra-high Quality Sound, or UHQ. It’s supposed to take 8-bit to 24-bit audio signals and convert them up to 32-bit for "delivering sound that brings each note to life with incredible clarity." N

There's still a week to go until CES kicks off, but LG is getting the jump on its competitors when it comes to weird-ass gadgets. The company's latest announcement is the LG Tone Studio: a vibrating plastic neckband that blasts surround sound up at the wearer's ears and looks like a sci-fi horseshoe. At the same time, it's also shown off the LG Tone Free, a wireless set of neckbuds that can store and charge earbuds when you're not using them.Of the two devices, the LG Tone Free makes a certain k

Lenovo said today that it was updating its line of ThinkPad laptops in 2017 to include newer processors, more authentication features, and improved trackpads — something that has been a point of weakness with previous iterations of ThinkPad laptops.
Several new laptops, including the ThinkPad X270, the ThinkPad Yoga 370, four new ThinkPad T Ultrabook models, and the less expensive ThinkPad 13, will include support for Microsoft’s Windows Precision Touchpad, a new-ish set of drivers a

Thousands of games came out on iOS and Android in 2016, and no one could play them all. But that’s not going to stop us from picking the 5 best.
As part of the GamesBeat Decides podcast, the crew argued over which games should make the cut. As you might expect, a few big-name apps ended up in the top five, but a certain Italian plumber almost missed out. You can check out our full top 5 below, or you can listen to our discussion in the video above or by hitting play on the podcast rig

GUEST: Artificial intelligence may be the hot trend of 2016, but the term itself opens up a debate. Some praise AI, while others believe reliance on AI is fraught with danger. Others worry about the demise of humans at the hands of our AI masters. Yet whether it is the Internet of Things or health care, AI is only beginning to have an effect. The next big opportunity, in terms of both impact and technology, is cybersecurity.
For now, it’s humans vs. humans
Cyber attacks are

Today, the US Food and Drug Administration released its recommendations for how medical device manufacturers should maintain the security of internet-connected devices, even after they’ve entered hospitals, patient homes, or patient bodies. Unsecured devices can allow hackers to tamper with how much medication is delivered by the device — with potentially deadly results.
The recommendations are largely toothless
First issued in draft form last January, this guidance is more than a ye

Celebrating a decade of promoting diversity, Girls in Tech leader Adriana Gascoigne rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange today.
Started a decade ago, the nonprofit group now has more than 50,000 members across 60 chapters around the world.
Gascoigne started Girls in Tech in San Francisco in 2007 during the tech boom that saw an explosion of new technologies from the iPhone to Facebook.
“It’s a tremendous honor to be chosen as one of the few non-profits to ring the NYS

A lot of gaming trends rose to prominence in 2016, but here at GamesBeat, we’ve focused on the one trend we saw again and again as we look back on the year.
Lootboxes were the biggest gaming trend of 2016. These are the boxes that players open up to get special goodies in games like Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and more. Sometimes lootboxes look like digital boxes and sometimes they come in the form of card packs. They occasionally feature hat