Technology news

On Thursday, the U.S. government formally retaliated against Russia for allegedly interfering with the U.S. presidential election. The Obama administration's actions represent a historically aggressive response to a cyberattack in America (or elsewhere).
SEE ALSO: President Obama sanctions Russia for hacking
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint report formally accusing Russian intelligence operatives of gaining access to a “U.S. political party"—presumably the D

I’m about to head off to CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas next week. But before I did, I thought I would try out one of the funny products from CES 2016. The Clever Pet billed itself as a video game console for dogs and cats.
The CleverPet Hub debuted for $300 this year as an automated pet feeder and trainer. Your pet — dogs or maybe really smart cats — can do some real work to get their treats or meals. They do so by pawing the lights on the Hub. It’s akin

GUEST: Ben Fox Rubin had a great post in CNET’s CES blog that discussed whether voice assistants were equipped to provide health and emotional support. He starts out by citing a JAMA study from early 2016 that found voice assistants mostly lacking when asked about some basic physical and mental health situations. This highlights two interesting points:
What is the purpose of voice assistants?
How will services break down between general purpose and specialist voice

Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant behind Apple’s iPhone and numerous other major electronics devices, aims to automate away a vast majority of its human employees, according to a report from DigiTimes. Dai Jia-peng, the general manager of Foxconn’s automation committee, says the company has a three-phase plan in place to automate its Chinese factories using software and in-house robotics units, known as Foxbots.Foxconn produces 10,000 Foxbots a year for automation purposes
T

Unless you've been living under a rock, everyone knows that 2016 has been the hottest of absolute hot trash. That said? There've been a handful of people who actually did have a pretty decent 2016—who are not Donald Trump—who collectively, we can genuinely be happy for. 
In no particular order, they are: 
1. Gucci Mane 
The Atlanta rapper and East Atlanta Santa got out of jail this year looking great—if not different enough to inspire a conspiracy theory that he

Math can be difficult. Just ask Facebook. 
That being so, Uber has a gift for you this New Year's Eve. No, it's not free rides. The holiday is one of Uber's busiest, and therefore most-lucrative, nights of the year. 
Instead, as part of Uber's annual tip sheet to attempt to ease the onslaught of hate on surge pricing via social media, Uber recounted that the app's "upfront fares" feature will offer you "no surprises." 
Expect to see less tweets with screenshots like this:9.9x Uber

Another year, another declaration of resolutions. From getting healthy to volunteering more, people use the new year as a reason to start over or just plain start doing something. In fact, 45 percent of Americans usually make at least one resolution. Sadly, only a whopping eight percent will actually be successful in making said changes. TNW is no different – in both making resolutions and failing at them. Remember those ‘what we’re reading’ posts? No? Exactly. But that

Yesterday, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey launched an interesting experiment, asking his nearly four million followers to send him what they want to see the company improve or create.The replies ranged from basic design gripes to extinguishing national socialism, but today Dorsey boiled the responses down to four basic themes. The result is a kind of New Year’s resolution list for a company that’s coming off a very rough year. It’s not everything that came up, but it&rs

Donald Trump is back to fanning the flames of his love affair with Russian president Vladimir Putin. 
In a tweet (with no spelling mistakes!), Trump praised Putin's decision to wait on expelling any U.S. diplomats from Russia in retaliation to President Barack Obama's sanctions announced Thursday.Great move on delay (by V. Putin) - I always knew he was very smart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016The Russian foreign minister had made it very clear the country woul

(Reuters) — U.S. stocks fell on the last trading day of 2016, eating into gains for the year, as Apple led a decline in technology stocks.
The S&P 500 technology sector’s 0.72 percent drop put the broader index on track for its third straight day of declines, its longest losing streak since Nov. 4.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was set for its first weekly decline since the U.S. election. The rally had pushed the index to within 13 points of 20,000 last week, but after three s

Open Whisper Systems, the company that makes the Signal encrypted messaging app and that contributed to the encryption in Facebook-owned WhatsApp, today updated its Signal app for Android with the ability to avoid being censored in two more countries: Cuba and Oman.
Last week the company did something similar in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates after learning that people in those countries had problems using the app. People need to have country codes enabled to access this feature.
Signal uses

A BuzzFeed News analysis has identified the 50 fake news stories that attracted the most engagement on Facebook this year. Together they totaled 21.5 million likes, comments, and shares. Of these stories, 23 were about US politics, two were about women using their vaginas as murder weapons, and one was about a clown doll that actually was a person the whole time.BuzzFeed News defined “fake news” as news that was verifiably “100 percent false” and drawn from a list of 96 w

Earlier this week, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey issued a public call for feedback on what his company could be doing better. And it went pretty much how you’d expect it to go. On Friday, he shared four “clear themes” that people have told him what they want from the service: handling abuse, editing tweets, following topics and interests, and better managing conversations.
Not surprisingly, abuse was immediately one of the hot things requested by users. People have grown

We did it. We picked the 10 best games of 2016, and you better agree with us (because we don’t even agree with us).
After hours of consideration, the GamesBeat crew has chosen its Game of the Year and its overall top 10. This is separate from our personal lists, which you can find here. This list represents our staff as a whole. To come up with this top 10, we didn’t vote — we argued and deliberated, and you can listen to our conversation to see how we came up with ou

GUEST: A lot of my waking (and dreaming) life is spent thinking, studying, and reading about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and bots. A common theme that comes up is the need to make the technology seem more human. Well, it’s going to happen, and probably sooner than most of us realize. But what will human-seeming bots mean for humanity?
As the CEO of a company pushing hard in the field of machine learning for AI purposes, I think it’s imperative that we address the socia

Massachusetts transportation officials have approved self-driving startup nuTonomy’s application to test autonomous cars in Boston. Now that it has the go ahead, NuTonomy — which was originally spun out of MIT — will start testing on January 3rd.
“We are ready to go, basically could have been testing any time over the last couple of weeks, we were just waiting for this final approval,” nuTonomy CEO Karl Iagnemma told the Boston Herald.Simple tests, to start
NuTonomy

Apple will be decreasing the production of the iPhone by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2017, according to a new report.
The move will affect the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, which were introduced in September, Nikkei said today, citing its own calculations based on data that it has seen.
A year ago, Nikkei reported that Apple had chosen to cut production of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus by 30 percent.
Declines in production could mean sales of the phones are not as high as Apple had expected. Lower iPh

PRESS RELEASE: LAKE FOREST, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–December 30, 2016– NaviGate Cardiac Structures Inc. (“NCSI”) announced today that a novel valved stent that can capture the enlarged annulus in patients suffering from functional tricuspid regurgitation (FTR) was implanted in a patient presenting with massive incompetence of the tricuspid valve. The patient, a 64-year-old female with an extensive history of severe tricuspid regurgitation (TR 4+) that invariably resu

 Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday our daily guided tour of the biggest tech stories from the past 24 hours will appear here on TechCrunch.com. To get The Daily Crunch in your inbox every day of the week, sign up here. Russia gets a parting gift from Obama, SpaceX wants to move back to more controlled explosions, plus internet matrimony. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for December… Read More

We all experience moments in our lives where we wish we could stop or slow down time. It could be as simple as when your phone slips out of your grasp, or as heart-stopping as when an accident is about to happen. It’s like you’re watching things happen in slow motion, and yet you can’t make your body respond fast enough to do anything about it.
A similar thing happens in photography. Because with photography you’re not just fighting human reaction time, you’re also

For the last two years, we have examined how Apple, Google, and Microsoft develop apps for each others’ competing platforms. It’s time to take another look at their strategies, which of course align with their respective business models.
Apple last year released its first three Android apps for Google Play: Move to iOS, Beats Pill+, and Apple Music. This number didn’t change in 2016, and neither did the fact that Apple continues to ignore the Windows Store. On its own platform,

It’s been more than three years since I moved to Silicon Valley, and so far everything they say is true: it’s a place driven by optimism, hope, and high-priced electric vehicles. It’s a place where innovation thrives, and where failure is not only forgiven, but sometimes even lauded as part of a larger narrative. Those are the upsides.The downsides can be less obvious, but 2016 brought them to light in cruel and unusual ways, as Fortune writer Erin Griffith points out in a rece

CyberConnect2 has been making games for two decades, growing from a tiny company in Fukuoka, Japan, to more than 200 developers today. It has worked on big titles such as the licensed Naruto games and the .hack// original series. And now the company has been entrusted with the development of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Remake.
But CyberConnect2 is barely recognizable on the global stage. While it is well known to Japanese gamers, it has a way to go before it has solid name recognition

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! As 2017 approaches, it’s time for us to pick our favorite games of the year. You can find our individual lists and our video podcast choosing GamesBeat’s overall pick for 2016’s best game below.
Have a happy New Year, everyone! We’ll see you in 2017!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: What to expect from the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show
What was the best gaming company in 2016? GamesBeat Decides
How I became

In the earliest scenes of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, we see a young Jyn Erso make a last moment escape from her family farm. With imperial soldiers landing in her front yard, she shoves some supplies and toys into her backpack. One of the toys left behind is a stormtrooper doll, which appears in a couple of the film’s promotional photos. Now, you can buy one of these toys, thanks to an enterprising maker on Etsy.Jyn called the doll Stormy, according to the novelization, and abandoned it

Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds will premiere at 8PM ET on January 7th, HBO announced in a press release this morning.The announcement comes after the unexpected deaths of both stars this week. Legendary Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher died on Tuesday, following a heart attack aboard an airplane on Christmas Day. Her mother, Hollywood icon Debbie Reynolds, died the next day following a stroke.Bright Lights debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May to positive reviews,

OPINION: Facebook didn’t flood 2016 with mind-blowing announcements, let’s be honest. In 2015, the company inched closer to making our world a much smaller place, thanks to the promotion of Free Basics, Oculus virtual reality, and more. But this year Facebook charted a different course, one that enabled its 1.8 billion monthly active users to be more vocal about their lives.
And, well, it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing.
Instead of giant leaps into extraordina

Getting faster phones, better cameras, and marginally less functional laptops each year isn't the only way technology transforms our lives. Our habits around that technology grow and evolve right alongside those gigabytes and gigaflops. So we decided to rank some of our favorite and favorite-to-hate-on tech rituals of this year and see what's dying out, what might be sticking around, and what's new on the horizon of weird ways humans approach technology.
DownswingTyping the letter "f" in chrome

I spend most of the year laser-focused on games. But next week, I’m going to expand my horizons beyond games to the entire tech industry.
I’ll be attending CES 2017, the big tech trade show next week in Las Vegas. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve made it to this show, but I still feel it’s important to attend to see what’s coming next. I’m going with VentureBeat’s Ken Yeung and John Brandon, and our stories will be dropping as early as today. I&

Last year, the debate over Pluto’s planet status temporarily resurfaced when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by the tiny world at the edge of the Solar System. Once considered the ninth planet, Pluto was famously demoted a decade ago to a dwarf planet — a new kind of classification for objects in our cosmic neighborhood. It was a change that some didn’t take very well, and 10 years later, a few still believe that Pluto’s status should never have been altered.
Te

A horror movie parody of 2016 is not funny to me, broadly speaking, because lots of people really did die, and as many have already pointed out, calling 2016 “the worst year ever” is a feeble accusation when almost everything that went wrong was our own fault. Also, ooooh baby, the next four years will be much, much worse.2016 as the worst year ever is an overplayed meme, and was never a fun one. So I did not expect to find 2016: The Movie, a parody horror movie trailer made by Frien

2016 was a year of highs and lows for the drone industry. DJI led the way with Mavic Pro, a gadget that made huge improvements on the size and simplicity of a powerful camera drone. It fits into a jacket pocket while delivering four miles of range and advanced autonomous features.While DJI was climbing to new heights, a lot of its competition stumbled
Unfortunately, while DJI was climbing to new heights, a lot of its competition stumbled badly. 3D Robotics, which last year seemed like the most p

Probably the best thing you can say about 2016 is that it sets up 2017 to be an awesome improvement no matter what happens. Then again, 2016 itself started on a highly optimistic note, having succeeded the bland 2015 and started with the traditional gala event of the tech calendar that was the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CES 2016 was the January harbinger of what was to come: we thought it'd be a fresh dose of techno optimism, with a shot or two of smarter cars and homes, but it ende

During a political season in which fact checking became a central part of the cultural conversation, somehow facts seemed to matter less than ever to the outcome.
This was one of the more puzzling contradictions of this tumultuous election season for me, and honestly, a bit dispiriting as a journalist. So much effort was mustered by so many journalistic organizations, so much information was available, and so many voters claimed they were hungry for it.
Yet, in the end, all the fact ch

In 2016, Tesla started to move into adulthood. Though the company hasn't been a startup for years (Tesla was founded in 2003), it's still a small fish in the world of car manufacturers. But it's getting bigger, and as it grows, Tesla is becoming a large company with consequential responsibilities.
Grown-up companies can no longer blame problems on youth and inexperience. While Tesla has been experiencing some growing pains, especially around the rollout of the Model X, overall things seem to be

Humans filled waterways, landfills, and streets with trash, so it’s no surprise the same thing happened in Earth’s orbital neighborhood. Now our species will finally take a crack at cleaning up.Some missions focus on dead satellites, aiming to catch them with robotic arms, spear them with harpoons, or slow them with sails or tethers. Others aim for smaller pieces with lasers or stick to them with adhesive. It’s all an effort to keeping low-Earth orbit, the region up to 1,200 mi

In 2010, it was Angry Birds. In 2014, it was Candy Crush Saga. And in 2016, Pokémon Go was the standout mobile game. The game first launched on July 6 in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. It didn’t take long for the game’s servers to crumble under the strain of millions of nostalgic millennials, eager for a taste of their childhood, plus the occasional DDoS attack. It took only two months for it to hit $500 million in revenue. And while Pokémon Go isn