Technology news

Living in New York City means taking the subway a lot. And taking the subway a lot means having time to kill. Some use that time to listen to music or play sudoku. 
Others however, prefer to read erotic fiction in huge, unmissable print, which is what Twitter user @amateurdentist found out today. 
SEE ALSO: 17 all-too-real terms that describe riding the subwaywoman next to me on subway reading an erotic novel in 128 pt font pic.twitter.com/uMGpsay0xj
— amateurdentist (@amateurden

Marco Belinelli of the Charlotte Hornets nearly pulled off one of the cheekiest shots in NBA history Thursday night. 
Nearly. Stupid rules. There should be an exemption for this. 
SEE ALSO: The Warriors are officially moving to San Francisco. Hopefully it doesn't ruin everything.
Belinelli was inbounding the ball with Charlotte down one point on the road against the Detroit Pistons and just half a second left on the clock. Standard operating procedure would dictate passing the ball in

Facebook-owned WhatsApp today announced that people sent 63 billion messages on New Year’s Eve, setting a new record for the app that lets people have chats and make voice and video calls.
Within those 63 billion messages, there were 7.9 billion images and 2.4 billion videos, a WhatsApp spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
For the sake of comparison, Messenger and WhatsApp combined were sending 60 billion messages per day, Facebook cofounder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said a

Whether you’re looking for a whole-home audio solution, or just to play a song for friends, AmpMe is a must-download app available for both iOS and Android. What is it? AmpMe is a an application capable of syncing multiple smart devices, or Bluetooth speakers, to a single audio source. Rather than gathering your group around a single device and hoping each can hear it, you can now transmit the sound to each of their phones, perfectly in sync with the original. The fun doesn’t s

Hello and welcome to an odd alternate reality.
SEE ALSO: Donald Trump trusts WikiLeaks more than the CIA or FBI
WikiLeaks, an online bastion of government leaks, sent out a tweet early Friday decrying a bit of leaked information.The Obama admin/CIA is illegally funneling TOP SECRET//COMINT information to NBC for political reasons before PEOTUS even gets to read it.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 6, 2017The irony was just too rich. Breaking: Wikileaks opposes leaks; wants to be calle

LAS VEGAS — Despite declining PC sales, laptops have made serious progress over the last few years.
Apple's MacBook Air and Intel's Ultrabook initiative pushed PC makers to build ever thinner and lighter laptops with sturdier, premium materials like metal instead of plastic. It's been a great half decade of innovation.
But if you've been paying attention to the slew of new laptop announcements at CES 2017, you'll notice a new trend taking shape: Laptops are getting bigger and heavier again

Fitbit wants to launch its own wearable app store “as soon as possible,” the company’s co-founder and CEO James Park said in an interview at CES earlier today.The new app store would be built using some of the assets Fitbit acquired from Pebble when it bought the struggling wearable startup last month. In its five years of existence Pebble amassed around 14,000 third-party apps in its store, and Park said Pebble had “worked out a lot of the kinks” that go into build

Wireless charging remains an elusive concept. It pops up here and there, often for mobile devices using special cases, and yet many solutions are painfully incomplete or too cumbersome for consumers to care. The Dell Latitude 7285, a new 2-in-1 business laptop announced yesterday at CES, uses a clever method to bypass wireless charging’s pernicious roadblocks to deliver a true solution. Dell claims it’s the first fully fleshed-out version of the feature for laptops.
The trick is in t

Huawei took to CES to announce its flagship Mate 9 is launching in the US today, January 6, for a price of $599. It’s the first time Huawei has launched a top spec’d device in the US. The Mate 9 is a darn good phone, with near-stock Android performance, a great screen, and serious battery life. I called it the best big phone of 2016. But in bringing the phone to the US, Huawei decided to tack on Amazon’s Alexa. Why? I have no clue. (Okay, so it’s prob

This kid's spelling skills are bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
New Yorker and Gwen Stefani mega-fan Norah shared a video Thursday of her 5-year-old son, Max, writing his first word: "bananas." 
And as he writes each letter, it's clear where he got the word from: Stefani's catchy-to-a-fault 2004 song "Hollaback Girl."
SEE ALSO: Extremely grateful kid is excited to receive toilet paper for Christmas"This year, because of Gwen's tour, I played even more music and he got really into it," Norah told Mas

French startup Smart & Blue believes that we don’t realize how much water we use in the shower. And so it has made a product that tells us just how much water is running down the drain while we’re singing a little too long.
The Hydrao Loop measures water usage in the shower and lets you know how much you’ve used by changing color. If the indicator stays blue, you’ve only used a few gallons of water, which is considered acceptable. But if it turns green, yellow, and fi

The Golden Globes are this Sunday, meaning mainstream audiences will be getting their first look at what movies and TV shows the Hollywood Foreign Press thinks mattered the most in 2016. You have your usual fare, of course: awards-baiting dramas ranging from cynical to groundbreaking; comedies that shine more for their storied leading ladies; and performances that go from good to kind of freaky. And then you have Deadpool. The first live-action superhero movie to pick up a Golden Globe nominatio

A man’s home is his castle — sometimes literally.
Developer Funcom released a new video for its upcoming survival game Conan Exiles, showing off how building works in the open-world title. You can watch it above. Conan Exiles is coming out for PC via early access on January 31 and on Xbox One on in the spring. With early access, you can buy and play a game immediately, but it’s unfinished and receives update as the designers continue working on the game, often incorporating pla

Friday, Jan. 6, 2017, will perhaps be remembered as the day WikiLeaks stopped even pretending to be an organization dedicated to governmental transparency. 
After tweeting against government leaks, the organization floated the idea of building a database of information about verified Twitter users.
SEE ALSO: Donald Trump trusts WikiLeaks more than the CIA or FBI
The theoretical database would include information about the families, jobs, finances and housing of anyone with a blue check next

Well, this is a new one.
When Utah Jazz forward Derrick Favors stepped to the line for free throws on Thursday night, Raptors center Lucas Nogueira decided to — ahem — adjust his uniform, we guess? Instead he ended up pulling his shorts all the way down.
SEE ALSO: Orlando City soccer club honors Pulse nightclub with a touching tribute
Whether it was meant as an intentional distraction or not remains to be seen. Either way, it definitely worked. Favors missed the shot.Intentional

LAS VEGAS — Forget waking in the middle of the night to flip your pillow. 
Moona, a French startup, says its smart pillow pad will keep sleepers cool all night, thanks to a closed circuit system that pumps water throughout the pad. The startup showed its pad at the 2017 International CES.
SEE ALSO: The best tech of CES 2017Image:MoonaMoona connects to a small, design-friendly temperature-regulating device that cools water to 64 degrees at most before pumping it through to the pad. The

Theranos will lay off 41 percent of its workforce, the company said on Friday. 
The troubled blood testing company, which is the subject of multiple lawsuits and investigations, announced that it would lay off 155 employees, keeping on 220 staffers. 
"These are always the most difficult decisions; however, this move allows Theranos to marshal its resources most efficiently and effectively," the company wrote in a press release. "The restructuring follows a period of significant change

Gamers are familiar with the sense of touch you get from rumble controllers, but it’s a pretty blunt form of force feedback. But Hap2U thinks we’ve all been out of touch.
So the five-person French startup has created a prototype of touch-feedback technology for touchscreens. I felt the demo at the CES Unveiled party this week at CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.
We’ll see if this kind of tech can help create a comeback for haptics technology, which

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its unclassified report on Russian hacking operations in the United States.
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” according to the report. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and th

What if there was an Uber-style app that replaced 911?
That's one of many timely questions posed by Fox's new crime drama APB, a cop show with a tech-savvy twist. 
Inspired by the New York Times Magazine article “Who Runs the Streets of New Orleans,” which chronicled entrepreneur Sidney Torres's attempts to reduce crime in New Orleans' French Quarter with a privately-funded police patrol squad that civilians could alert via app, the series follows billionaire engineer Gide

Hey! How's it going? Any chance this ham looks blurry to you?
You see, after Redditor MelvinDickpictweet posted a photo of this ham to Reddit on Thursday, a lot of people have been saying that it looks out of focus. A few commenters even accused the ham of giving them motion sickness.
Here. See for yourself.
SEE ALSO: Young adults and the evolution of modern food cultureImage:Reddit/MelvinDickPicTweetWhoa — that ham does look kind of blurry. 
Here's the thing: we believe this ham is a

It's all fun and games until someone sits on the conveyor belt.
This great day in the snow turns into a chaotic scene when a group of snow tubers causes a pileup by sitting on their tubes while being carried on a conveyor belt. Tubes are lost, people fall down, wintery panic ensues. 
The video was recorded and posted on Youtube by user ATL, and the best part is his confused narration as to how these tubers got this task so very, very wrong.
Don't stand up in a canoe, don't sit down on a co

"They're going to shoot me in the back," says Kim Kardashian West, reliving the Paris robbery which saw thieves make off with several million dollars' worth of jewelry after holding her at gunpoint in her hotel room. "There's no way out. It makes me so upset to think about it."
The new Keeping Up With the Kardashians trailer for the second half of Season 12 promises that America's pop culture royal family will continue letting us in on the good, bad and ugly parts of their lives. SEE ALSO:

Try as we might, no one can shade Kylie Jenner quite like Kim Kardashian West, so lucky for us she's back and getting the job done. 
After cautiously returning to social media after her harrowing trip to Paris Fashion Week last October, Kim began with some pictures of her family and just yesterday, finally, a selfie. We all wondered what would come next. 
SEE ALSO: Kim Kardashian's selfies have returned to bring peace on Earth
It didn't take long to get our answer. During a dinner with

Smartphones and tablets were supposed to kill the PC, starting with the static, unnecessary desktop and moving onward to the battery-deficient and cumbersome laptop. Of course, we know that didn’t happen. Laptops now morph into tablets, the battery life improved, and our smartphones now exist as just another notch — albeit an ultra-portable and increasingly more powerful one — in the greater computing continuum. The post-PC era never happened because we refused to stop using th

Fifteen months ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk released Autopilot: a semi-autonomous technology that allow cars to drive down the highway with little-to-no steering input. It’s been refined and improved over the years and Tesla leads all automakers in self-driving tech that you can actually buy. But other automakers are ready to give the electric upstart some much-needed competition. Mercedes-Benz is first up, releasing the next generation of its Drive Pilot system this summer in the nonpareil S-

GUEST: The sci-fi fantasy of seamless, AI-powered shopping has captivated the public imagination for many years running. Today this dream is essentially a reality, as evidenced most recently by Amazon’s new physical grocery store, Amazon Go, which features a checkout-free shopping experience facilitated by a smartphone app and powered by “computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning” technologies.
With many industry experts speculating that Amazon Go is ringing in “th

Opcom is convinced it can make a farmer out of anyone. After seeing GrowBox at a CES event, and learning about GrowWall, it certainly piqued my interest in at-home (and indoor) gardening systems. Hydroponic gardening systems have been around forever. Chances are, your parents probably smoked some expensive weed back in the 70s that was grown hydroponically. Put simply, a hydroponic system means a plant is grown without water, and typically with artificial light. Since the grower

The Aviation Herald is reporting that a passenger jet in Mozambique has collided with a drone, causing significant damage to the plane’s nose cone. The Linhas Aereas de Mocambique (LAM) Boeing 737-700, which was en-route from Maputo to Tete, encountered the drone as it was on final approach. As it was landing, the crew of the passenger jet heard a large bang, which they assumed was a bird strike. According to the Aviation Herald, a post-flight examination of the damaged aircraft revealed

Capping off what was already a strange day for WikiLeaks’ social media presence, an official WikiLeaks account floated an odd, unsettling, seemingly nonsensical idea for an “online database” of verified Twitter users.
“WikiLeaks Task Force,” an official account from the organization that says its mission is to “correct misinformation about #WikiLeaks,” sent out the idea this afternoon. “We are thinking of making an online database with all ‘v

Both Europe and North America are warmed in the winter by currents circulating in the Atlantic — but climate change threatens this source of warmth. If the Earth warms too much, it’s possible that this current could collapse entirely, new research says. That would mean frigid winters for countries along the North Atlantic, expansion of the sea ice in the Greenland, Iceland, and Norwegian seas, and a shift in rainfall across the world.“It is a major player in the climate system.

Blood-testing company Theranos today announced that it has cut 41 percent of its workforce, less than three months after laying off 43 percent of its employees.
Today’s move affects more than 150 people.
Theranos is now working toward “commercialization of the miniLab testing platform and its related technologies,” the startup said in a statement. “In the streamlined organization, teams have been aligned to meet product development, regulatory and commercial milestones.&r

CES 2017 is full of strange product hybrids. Sengled created one of these by putting a wireless speaker inside its Pulse LED lightbulb.
This is one of the weird artifacts of the Internet of Things, which is making everyday objects smart and connected. But Sengled believes this combo makes a lot of sense. The company showed off the bulb at CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.
It’s always a pain to wire a home for surround sound, with a bunch of speakers positioned aroun

EXCLUSIVE: How are humans going to compete with bots and AI down the road? According to child development startup EQtainment, it is emotional and social intelligence that will set us apart.
The Manhattan Beach, California-based startup announced today that it raised $5 million from angel investors to further develop and launch its products, which include an array of shows, music albums, toys, and games to teach kids social and emotional skills.
And though EQtainment’s CEO, former

At the end of each year, I take stock of the books I completed over the last 12 months. For the past couple of years, I’ve followed through on one of my annual goals: read a book a week. If I toss my phone into a different room, that’s relatively easy to accomplish. Though a few other tricks help, too.For example, it’s useful to plan ahead. My goal this year is to make a conscious effort to branch out, to read authors I would otherwise miss. I use Goodreads to keep track of wha

French startup Gaspard unveiled a connected wheelchair with the ability to track a person’s position on the chair. It is one more smart device in the Internet of Things, and it could make life better for millions of people.
Wheelchairs do a lot for people with disabilities. But modern technology can make them do a lot more. Morgan Lavaux, CEO and cofounder of Nantes, France-based Gaspard, came up with the idea of creating a better wheelchair after a terrible sports accident left him tetrap

Early in the HBO documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher And Debbie Reynolds, viewers get a glimpse of the huge double-doored gate to “the compound,” a sprawling, multi-house California ranch where author and Star Wars star Carrie Fisher and her mother, Singin’ In The Rain star Debbie Reynolds, live in adjoining houses. The gate is festooned with random kitschy signs, seemingly reclaimed from a series of junky bars. “Beware of crabs.” “No swimsuits i

We’re one week into 2017. The time to buckle down on resolutions for the new year is here, but first I need to mourn. Today, we bury my aspirations to better my life in 2016.My 2016 resolutions died young and unrealized, as unfulfilled and unfulfilling as the year in which they floundered. Simple enough in theory, there was one major impediment: self-control. I wanted to take a healthy step back from technology whenever and wherever I could.In 2015, I’d been an over-eager app user. F

Apple announced on Friday that a retail store is coming to Samsung’s home turf of South Korea. Neighbors!
It’s hard to believe Apple doesn’t already have a retail store in South Korea, but Koreans have been getting by with two certified Apple reseller stores up until now. Apple’s website now shows 14 new retail job listings in South Korea, including store leader and Genius bar staff.
“We’re now hiring the team that will offer our customers in Seoul the service

As headphones go, Vinci is in a league of its own. The headphones aren’t the best looking, or even the best sounding for that matter. What it lacks in aesthetics and premium sound the company more than makes up for it in innovation and intelligence. What is it? Vinci is the world’s first smart headphone with artificial intelligence. Powered by AI and driven by voice control, Vinci produces more than adequate noise cancellation and better-than-average sound. This isn’

For the second year in a row, Uber is offering tech bros with money to burn an opportunity to transcend the crowds and headaches of CES by booking a helicopter ride through the app. Let’s be clear: this is not a legitimate way to get from point A to point B. But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t the most fun I had this week, and that’s coming from a guy who’s not the biggest fan of heights.The price is $100 per person, give or take surge pricing
From January 4-8, peopl

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we look ahead to 2017’s game release dates, Mega Man goes to mobile, and XCOM 2 is getting new content thanks to an upcoming mod.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Great gadgets, moments, and trends at CES 2017
How French studio DotEmu specializes in resurrecting lost classics like Windjammers
2017 game release-date calendar
What are the best-looking video game consoles of all ti