Technology news

You may have read or seen on social media a Washington Post story published Friday which claimed that Russian hackers had hacked the U.S. power system via an electrical grid in Vermont.
SEE ALSO: What we do and don't know about Russia's interference in thepresidential election
That’s not what happened and the incident is not necessarily connected to the alleged Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee.
The Washington Post has since amended its story:What actually happened is that

Twitter’s seemingly endless line of executive departures continues as the company’s managing director in China, Kathy Chen, announced her departure. Though she said it was the “right time” for her to move on, she had only joined Twitter in April. Chen did not disclose her future plans, except to say in a tweet that she will “take some time off to recharge, study about different cultures and then pursue more international business opportunities.”

January 2017 will start off unusually cold across the entire lower 48 states, in an unusually expansive and intense cold snap. The frigid weather, with possibly as many as 15 states seeing below-zero Fahrenheit temperatures at times, will start in the Pacific Northwest, northern Plains and Upper Midwest, and then creep eastward like a slow motion weather train wreck.
Temperatures will be 10 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit below average for this time of year starting around Jan. 5, with the hardest hit

If they have an army, but you have a Hulk, can you save the world from Loki? Find out in this 8-bit (and 16-bit) reimagining of Joss Whedon's The Avengers as an old video game, inspired by classic action games like Megaman. 
Our CineFix series, 8-bit Cinema, "gamifies" your favorite Hollywood blockbusters into '80s arcade- and NES-inspired animations. 
Subscribe to CineFix for more videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/cinefix Read more...More about Mashable Video, Marvel, Avengers, 8 Bit

If you released an album this year and thought you could slide by without bringing your A-Game, well, as Chance the Rapper would put it, "Uhahua!"
2016 was stacked with great music. Many of the world's biggest artist's put out the best work of their careers, legends blessing us with swan-songs that make saying goodbye even rougher and fresh acts achieving household name status in record speed. 
Here are 10 albums that got us through the rough times, stopped the world and reminded us that jo

Debbie Reynolds, who died Dec. 28 at the age of 84, will forever be remembered for her role in the 1952 classic film, "Singing in the Rain." But for younger viewers today, she is known as Aggie Cromwell, the wise and magic-loving grandmother in the Disney Halloweentown films. 
The first of this series premiered on television 1998, with the fourth in 2006. 
Reynolds' Halloweentown costars responded to her death on social media and in media interviews this week. 
SEE ALSO: From 'Sin

If there is one thing to celebrate from 2016, a year that has been very objectively and very scientifically determined to be a large, blazing garbage fire, it's all of the great books that have been published.
With moving fiction, experimental short stories, heartfelt poetry collections and insightful memoirs, 2016 introduced us all to a bevy of great authors and literature.
SEE ALSO: MashReads Podcast: Here are our favorite books of 2016
It's these authors and words that inspired us, lifted us,

GUEST: Will you still be doing your job in 5-10 years or will a robot do it for you?
This is a question knowledge workers have started asking themselves as AI is becoming more capable and widely adopted. Atlassian cofounder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes has said AI will play a major role in the future of team productivity. Well, here is why.
AI’s immense growth
Bank of America and Merrill Lynch predicts that AI will have a $9 trillion impact on knowledge work over the com

2016 was the Gregorian calendar’s version of venereal disease. Dropping a glorified disco ball and shouting ‘Happy New Year’ will ease the symptoms, but like VD you’ll never shake the feeling that fewer bad decisions could have kept it from happening in the first place. Unfortunately, they don’t make prophylactics for a bad year. If they had, though, we might have prevented the stinging piss that accompanied this one. It didn’t come w

Snapchat is insanely powerful. Not only has it changed Facebook (for better or worse), it has popularized the term "vomiting rainbow" and transformed selfies. 
Just over a year ago, Snapchat introduced lenses, a feature that recognizes objects such as faces and overlays them with animated filters. It's one of the app's most addictive features in part because the options change daily. 
SEE ALSO: Snapchat pushing for more AR with latest reported purchase
More than 150 million people ever

The virtual reality smorgasbord set to hit CES is just a few days away, but standout companies are already popping up, including one with a unique HMD solution.
Atlanta-based KwikVR is promising a wireless VR headset device that works perfectly with both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. 
Weighing less than one pound, the device can be attached to your belt and features two USB ports and an HDMI port. The company claims that the device delivers low latency and "guaranteed native resolution

Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, sales of sparkling wines spike, as humans celebrate the holidays — especially the New Year — with champagne toasts. Since it’s about time to pop open that bottle of bubbly, here are a few things you should know:The bubbles are basically yeast fartsWe have yeast to thank for alcohol, and we should thank it twice for alcohol with bubbles. These microscopic fungi extract energy from sugar using a process called fermentation, and produce a

Carrie Fisher, the world famous actress best known for her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise, will be buried together with her mother, the iconic actress Debbie Reynolds, according to Reynold's son Todd Fisher. 
The two renowned actresses died one day apart, on Dec. 27 and 28. 
A date for the funeral has not been set, but the joint funeral will be private, according to Reynolds' son. The two actresses will be interred at Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, where

GUEST: 2016 taught us a lot about drones and their potential to deliver benefits for consumers, communities, and businesses alike. Google and Chipotle tested burrito delivery on the campus of Virginia Tech, while cities nationwide turned to drones to help first responders, inspect bridges and roads, and monitor construction sites. We witnessed the launch of innovative products from Intel, Yuneec, DJI, Sensefly, and others — not to mention GoPro’s first drone. Through it all, we exper

Longer range. Smaller batteries. Sleeker, more integrated designs. These are things you can expect to hear touted in 2017 by the companies that make what we at The Verge call electric rideables — an imperfect catch-all term that covers everything from electric skateboards to hoverboards to whatever the hell this is.Some of those features are starting to hit the streets, and smart connectivity is making these things more than just boards with wheels and motors. That brings us to a point whe

After more than a year of anticipation, the fate of the most famous UFC fighter to date, Ronda Rousey, was decided in just 48 seconds on Friday. 
Brazilian fighter Amanda Nunes defended her women's bantamweight champion title by dispatching Rousey with a vicious flurry of strikes in the first round, leaving no doubt about the end of Rousey's long reign as the UFC's top female fighter.  
SEE ALSO: Dana White Explains the UFC's Social Media Choke Hold
The defeat followed weeks of promoti

I go to California for the holidays, and when it comes time to return to the Northeast always ask myself how I’m going to make it through the upcoming winter months. I’ve wondered this of others, too — friends from Chicago, friends who live in Norway, the Inuit who live in Greenland. A new study might have an answer: the Inuit, at least, seem to have a gene variation passed down from our ancestors that helps them produce more heat.In a study published this week in the journal M

I go to California for the holidays, and when it comes time to return to the Northeast always ask myself how I’m going to make it through the upcoming winter months. I’ve wondered this of others, too — friends from Chicago, friends who live in Norway, Inuit who live in Greenland. A new study might have an answer: Inuit, at least, seem to have a gene variation passed down from our ancestors that helps them produce more heat.In a study published this week in the journal Molecular

China, the world's largest market for ivory, announced this week that it will shut down its trade in such goods by the end of 2017. This will close down the world's largest commercial ivory market, and could help elephant populations stabilize and recover in Africa.
The decision to close down its domestic commercial elephant ivory trade is being hailed as a potentially transformative step toward protecting Africa's elephants, which are being slaughtered for their valuable tusks that are made of

I’ve survived more than 20 Consumer Electronics Shows. This year, I’m going to walk miles and miles of exhibits again at CES 2017, the gigantic tech trade show in Las Vegas next week. If you’re a newcomer or even a veteran who needs reminders, please heed some advice to avoid nightmares and hangovers.
Just like last year, the survival tips are affected by bag restrictions and entrance searches at all of the big venues. The threat of terrorism has put a damper on the wanton

I go to the movies pretty regularly, which means I end up watching a lot of trailers over and over again (even more so since I write this roundup each week). Most of the time it doesn't bother me, but one trailer really started to get on my nerves this year: the one for Zootopia.
The entire trailer is just one long, slow — very, very, very slow — joke. Based on the reaction it got in theaters every time, I get the sense that I'm the only person who didn't find it hilarious. But after

For a lot of us, famous and normals alike, 2016 was a narrative we would like to be excluded from and that we never asked to be a part of. 
But if nothing else, it was a great year for celebrity gossip. Thanks to social media, egos and impulse control had a banner year — for better and most certainly for worse. Here are the best celebrity feuds of a very petty year.
6. Selena Gomez vs. Justin BieberImage:darren calabres/APJelena is over, but the wounds haven't healed.
Gomez defended B

How many problems can one man try to solve in a year? What if the problems aren’t your garden variety problems – like a broken faucet − but rather the earth’s most serious and existential problems? Maybe one? What if the problems are fossil fuel dependence, global warming, the future of artificial intelligence, and the colonization of other worlds? Maybe none? In 2016 Elon Musk took on all of these problems.  It was his incredible ambition to change the world in 201

2016 was “Year Zero” for the current wave of consumerization of virtual reality and augmented reality, devices are finally shipping, consumers are buying, and applications are earning. Consider what “Year Zero” was for the PC or the mobile waves of technology adoption, and look at where we are today. 2017 is shaping up to be an early and fantastically productive year for the virtual reality & augmented reality industries.
Having spent the better part of 2016 diving in

Consumer VR has yet to establish itself as a viable commercial product or mass-market artistic medium, and it’s still possible that it never will. But there’s no denying that 2016 was a huge turning point, both socially and technologically. VR didn’t exactly soar this year — but it didn’t crash and burn, either.
At the beginning of 2016, virtual reality was almost purely the province of developers, artists, and the lucky few who got to see their work. Concepts were

Physical contact? On one hand, it's a vital form of human communication. On the other, it's terrible.
Touching other people is one of humankind's greatest fallacies. We all know touching people exposes us to germs, maybe diseases and definitely weird sweat, but we do it anyway. This is f*cking ridiculous.
SEE ALSO: 10 very dangerous activities you should avoid at all costs
Well, it's time to slip on your latex gloves and take a stand. Your gross body is your own, and it doesn't have to touch oth

President-elect Donald Trump tweeted his New Year's wishes on Saturday morning, and they do not disappoint. Choosing to steer clear of a neutral, hopeful message for the future, Trump instead sent a tauntingly boastful signal to his enemies.
Presumably the tweet was also directed at his vanquished rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote by nearly 3 million but lost in the Electoral College.
SEE ALSO: What we do and don't know about Russia's interference in thepresiden

This has been a queer year for headphones. Two groundbreaking pairs of cans were introduced by an unlikely suspect, but with each of them commanding a four-figure price, those breakthroughs might as well not have happened for most people. Apple catalyzed the move toward wireless technology with its omission of a headphone jack in the iPhone 7, while a bunch of smaller players launched terrific wired options that fit into most people’s budgets. So just as it starts to seem like headphones a

It’s easy to get sort of jaded about New Year’s resolutions, but we all believe that with some hard work, we can become a better person, and a new year tends to bring that out in people.
Just about everyone wants to get rid of bad habits, improve their career, work out more, or save money. Here’s a series of bots that can help you reach each of these goals.
More suggestions? Ping @kharijohnson on Twitter.
Make good habits, dump bad ones
First on the good habits list i

Whether personal or professional, change is hard. And the cumulative data is not on our side. 
Take something obviously detrimental, like smoking. A mere 4% to 7% of people successfully quit without the aid of medication or outside help. Even experiencing a traumatic event — like the death of a loved one or being diagnosed with cancer — only leads to a 20% success rate. 
Not to be a killjoy, but as the Washington Post found, roughly 25% of New Year resolutions fall apart wi

Each year, our phones, social media accounts, laptops, smart assistants, fitness trackers and other tech somehow swallow up even more of our time. 
For the new year, here are a handful of resolutions that aim to improve our relationship to the technology that rules our lives:Image:DUSTIN DRANKOSKI/MASHABLE1. Start taking cybersecurity seriously
2016 was the year personal cybersecurity came to the forefront. In what was described as the worst hack ever, more than 500 million Yahoo email acco

Cameras
Two things immediately struck me when I walked onto the show floor at this year’s Photo Plus Expo. Nikon’s booth was all about the company’s new line of action cameras, including the one that shoots 360-degree photos and videos. Just across the way, Canon’s booth was covered in imagery of the M5, the company’s most serious attempt at making a mirrorless camera. These two companies put out fantastic flagship DSLRs in 2016 — Nikon with the D5, Canon with

In June, House Democrats live streamed a sit-in to protest the Republican majority's inaction on gun control. 
But to the general public, the House floor footage was only available on social media, with even CSPAN broadcasting Periscope feeds.
That moment in itself was yet another indicator that live streaming is the future. The genre has grown in popularity over the last year, with many increasingly jumping in the space in hopes of becoming the go-to platform for live programming.
Digital

(Reuters) — Tesla Motors Inc was sued on Friday by a Model X owner who said his electric SUV suddenly accelerated while being parked, causing it to crash through the garage into the owner’s living room, injuring the driver and a passenger.
The Model X owner, Ji Chang Son, said that one night in September, he slowly pulled into his driveway as his garage door opened when the car suddenly sped forward.
“The vehicle spontaneously began to accelerate at full power, jerking for

You need to concentrate on an important assignment. Maybe you need to relax. Or maybe you just need to get some sleep. Whatever the task, Brain.fm can actually enhance your state of mind to help you achieve your goals. And you can grab a lifetime subscription for the low, one-time price of just $39 from TNW Deals. Brain.fm isn’t just some music playlist. It uses an amazing mix of artificial intelligence and neurological research to actually compose music custom tailored to your desired me

LONDON — A lot can change in a year. 
No, we're not talking about politics. We're talking about the realm of online dating. 
If you've been off the dating scene for a while, things have changed a little bit since you were last swiping. Naturally, we've made you a little catch-up guide to make sure you're prepared to hit up the dating scene in 2017.
SEE ALSO: Finding a friend through an app may sound awkward, but it's not
Here are seven things that changed in the realm of online d

It’s that time of the year. As we approach the end of 2016, it’s important to take a step back and take a moment to reflect on all the progress we’ve accomplished over the last 12 months. In a year full of exciting announcements and releases, only a handful of companies managed to make a splash and catch the attention of tech aficionados across the globe. This is our roundup of the most influential companies of 2016. Apple For many sentimental fan boys and girls,&nbs

A utilities company in Vermont has detected evidence of Russian malware, according to a report this evening from The Washington Post, which cited anonymous US officials. The code is said to be connected to a Russian hacking outfit the US government has named Grizzly Steppe.Russian malware was found on one laptop not connected to the grid
According to the company, later revealed to be the Burlington Electric Department, the code linked to Grizzly Steppe was found on just one laptop, and the lapto

Each year new technologies, companies, and social and political forces displace and disrupt old technologies, companies, and ideas. In the 1920s and 1930s the car displaced the horse, in 1996 DVDs replaced the VCR, in 2010 Netflix pushed Blockbuster into bankruptcy and slowly replaced the DVD too, in 2008 digital cameras replaced the Polaroid, in 2011 Amazon pushed Borders into bankruptcy. It’s been called “creative destruction,” the old making way for the new and for the marc

In the nick of time, we're getting just what we needed: more of 2016.
To keep this relentless year going, we get to enjoy an extra second, known as a leap second, on Saturday Dec. 31.
The extra time is all about syncing the earth's rotation with the world's atomic clocks. Since it doesn't take a perfect 24 hours for the planet to rotate on its axis, every few years we add a leap second. The earth's rotation is actually slowing down, even if just a bit. 
SEE ALSO: 2016 recut as a horror movi

(Reuters) – The shift to electric vehicles will cost jobs at German automotive supplier Continental, its chief executive told a newspaper, but he said many of those jobs would be offset by new positions related to electro-mobility.
“Due to the low added value, production jobs will be lost,” German weekly paper Welt am Sonntag quoted Elmar Degenhart as saying in a summary of an article to be published on Sunday.
He said it was too soon to say whether the number of jobs that woul

A lot of you are having fantastical and monstrous holidays.
Pokémon Sun and Moon for the 3DS and Final Fantasy XV for PlayStation 4 were Amazon’s best-selling games of the holiday, according to the online retailer. This is in line with Nintendo confirming that this new pocket-monster adventure, collectively, is its fastest selling game ever. Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, was massively anticipated by fans who have spent years waiting for a proper sequel to Final Fantasy XIII. It&rsquo