Technology news

The FTC filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Qualcomm today, arguing that the chipmaker used its baseband processor patents to illegally force competitors out of the market. (The short version: the FTC says Qualcomm wouldn’t sell modems to any company that didn’t also agree to pay Qualcomm patent royalties on phones that used modems from other supplies, which the agency refers to a the “no-license-no-chips” policy.)
Anyway, a big part of the complaint has to do with Apple,

Qualcomm is being sued by the United States Federal Trade Commission for anti-competitive practices relating to the way it sells modems for devices like smartphones.
According to the FTC, Qualcomm used its dominant position as a modem supplier to muscle out competition by essentially giving smartphone manufacturers two choices: pay extra for use of its patents, or don’t make a widely available phone.
Qualcomm denies the allegations, saying they’re “based on a flawed legal theor

President Obama has granted a pardon to retired Marine Corps general James Cartwright, according to The Wall Street Journal. Cartwright was charged with crimes related to leaked information about the Stuxnet computer virus.
Pleaded guilty to lying to investigators
The infamous virus, widely believed to be a creation of the United States and Israel, was unleashed on Iranian nuclear centrifuges as part of a government operation codenamed Olympic Games. Cartwright, the government alleged, leaked in

Though the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon contains the unsettling phrase “goodnight air,” it has nothing (unsettling-wise) on the recently released Arianna Huffington audio book Goodnight Smartphone, a horror story for our modern times.Here is a brief plot summary: people who don’t have a sleep ritual that involves baths and separate bedrooms for their electronic devices are “sleep deprivation braggers” with “sleep macho swagger” and &ldquo

President Obama just effectively freed Chelsea Manning from the 32 remaining years in her jail sentence, according to the New York Times. While it’s not a presidential pardon, the commutation of Manning’s sentence will see her go free in just five months. After leaking more than 700,000 documents that exposed American military and diplomatic actions worldwide, Manning became a polarizing figure. The document dump was ultimately published by Wikileaks and included atrocitie

Last week, as Donald Trump prepared for his inauguration in Washington, DC and protestors readied demonstrations to counter it, a series of advertisements were posted on Back Page.
The site claims to pay protestors thousands of dollars
“Demand Protest is the largest private grassroots support organization in the United States,” the ads read. “We pay people already politically motivated to fight for the things they believe. You were going to take action anyways, why not do so wi

President Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence, according to a report from The New York Times. While not technically a pardon, the order reduces Manning’s sentence from 35 years to just over seven years, the majority of which Manning has already served. As a result, Manning is due to be released from federal custody in just five months, on May 17th.
While serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning leaked more than 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks, including video of a

Representative Karen Bass (D-CA) will skip President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration after “an overwhelming response” to a poll she conducted on Twitter. Bass announced the news today, along with a screenshots of the majority “no” results.Bass posted the poll on January 15th, saying that she wished to hear directly from her constituents. She represents California's 37th District, including Culver City, Los Angeles, and South LA; since Twitter polls are open to all

After four years of planning, AT&T officially pulled the plug on its 2G network. For owners of the original iPhone, this news means your nine-year-old handset is now officially dead and relegated to a new role as a nostalgic paperweight. It’s the end of an era, and we’re sorry for your loss. You wouldn’t expect this news to impact but a small segment of retro gadget owners, so it might come as a surprise to learn it actually caused a bit of a disaster in San

Super Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch was announced only days ago, and already the internet is offering up parodies. While the original announcement teaser shows Mario in a New York City-like metropolis, this video asks: what if Mario lived in Liberty City? Mayhem right? Yeah, all the mayhem.
Using a whole host of mods for Grand Theft Auto IV, YouTube user CrowbCat turns Niko Bellic into a brightly colored plumber with a giant head and parkour skills, which is a surprisingly apt descriptio

Evernote redesigned its mobile app for iOS today, making it easier to capture new notes and search for existing ones. The company replaced its confounding black-on-green mobile design with classic black and white, and the result is an app that is faster and more pleasant to use. But while the company should be applauded for tackling some of its longest-standing product issues, Evernote’s biggest problems are more pressing than ever.
Still, it’s a good redesign. The centerpiece of the

Vine is all-but dead. Though the app will survive as a camera, its dedicated community will be gone as of tomorrow. But Twitter will now keep at least one other aspect of the social network alive by looping any video under 6.5 seconds. As spotted by TechCrunch, Twitter has now started looping any videos under 6.5 seconds (we reported this change was coming a couple of weeks ago). That includes videos posted from any platform, not just Vine. I just found out twitter vids loop now so he

Team-based sports don’t have a singular rallying cry (not counting Nike slogans), but perhaps it’s time they adopted one from the wise words of Celine Dion. Really, is there any better slogan than “You're here, there's nothing I fear” for a group of hardworking athletes? Titanic Hoops, as spotted by Select All, is a Twitter account that combines various sports clips with Titanic’s iconic theme, “My Heart Will Go On,” like so.LeBron James' clutch jumper i

Logan Green and John Zimmer, the co-founders of Lyft, have an idea for ending traffic, but you may not like it. They published an op-ed today on Medium called “The End of Traffic,” in which they propose encouraging more people to carpool by charging a fee to those who don’t.According to Green and Zimmer, the federal government should provide grants to cities to reclassify specific streets and highways as “smart lanes,” in which people with three or more occupants in

Evernote is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. For years now, the company has seemed content with resting on its laurels in hopes that a better option didn’t come along. All the while, the company tried to turn the corner and scale into profitability and beyond. Standing firm, and looking forward don’t typically go hand-in-hand, as Evernote seems to have figured out. The company began its downward spiral under the watchful eye of then CEO Phil Libi

The Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. is using a bunch of Tesla batteries, along with solar power and a microturbine generator, to help make beer brewing more environmentally friendly at its Chico, California facility.
The company has installed a 1MWh Tesla Powerpack battery system, taking power from an existing 10,751-panel, two-megawatt solar installation — the largest owned by any US brewery — and a two megawatt microturbine. In all, the setup allows Sierra Nevada to offset around 20 perc

Google’s Daydream View VR headset is on sale now for $49, $30 off the usual price of $79 and the first major deal we've seen for the Daydream View. The Daydream View VR headset is one of the best solutions for mobile VR yet, so if you’re looking to get started in the world of virtual reality and have a Daydream-compatible phone, it’s a good time to buy. Keep in mind that Daydream only works with a few phones right now: Google’s Pixel and Pixel XL, and Motorola’s Mot

The next version of Google’s smartwatch operating system is slated to arrive on February 9th, according to mobile reporter Evan Blass. The leak follows last week’s report that Google had notified developers of Android Wear 2.0’s upcoming release so they could prepare to update apps for continued support.
Blass is also reporting that Android Wear 2.0 will arrive first to two new smartwatches manufactured by LG: the LG Watch Sport and LG Watch Style. Both watches feature circular

Anyone still clinging onto the original iPhone got some bad news yesterday: AT&T announced that it shut down its 2G network on January 1st, 2017. That means any original iPhone 2G owners will finally have to say goodbye to their devices, which will no longer receive cellular service on AT&T’s network.
The 2G shut down will free up resources and spectrum bandwidth
The 2G shutdown has been planned for a few years at this point, and judging by the lack of outcry when the network stopp

 Zuckerberg was forced to leave his signature grey t-shirt at home today and suit up for court. The Facebook CEO was called to the stand in a Dallas courtroom today to testify in an explosive $2 billion lawsuit which claims that Oculus Inc. (which FB acquired in March of 2014) was built upon technology stolen from Zenimax Media. The lawsuit is structured around dissecting the help… Read More

The British Antarctic Survey will shut down its Halley base in Antarctica because of cracks in the ice under the station.
The station — which consists of eight pods mounted on legs — is located on the floating Brunt Ice Shelf on Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. Nobody is in immediate danger, but the base could be destroyed if the cracks get bigger. So, BAS is relocating the base about 14 miles away from the cracks and also shutting it down from March to November.There are two cracks i

Gaming PCs are largely known for being huge, garish LED-studded machines. But as Zotac's new Zbox Magnus EN1070K shows, that doesn’t have to be the case.
Announced earlier this month at CES 2017 and reported by AnandTech, the Magnus EN1070K is the latest entry in the Zotac E-series of miniature desktop computers, and measures in with a tiny footprint of 8.27 x 7.9 inches (or a little bigger than a Mac Mini). But it packs some serious firepower into the small size, offering a current-genera

Language is tricky. It’s full of nuance and layers, and regional and dialectal variations that complicate things even further. For example, if I was to describe something as “sick”, do I mean that it’s disgusting, impressive, or quite literally unwell? Again, there’s the word “cool”. Is it a positive adjective, or a statement of temperature? Computers really struggle to understand this. Sure, you can train an AI to identify spelling mistakes a

Juicero, the company behind the luxury juicer that only works with proprietary fruit and vegetable pouches and requires a connection to the internet, is significantly dropping the price of its juicer today, bringing it from $699 down to $399.
The price cut seems to speak to just how difficult it is to sell a nearly $700 juicer that can’t juice fruits and vegetables bought at the store. Juicero says that when it cut prices for Black Friday — dropping the juicer to $350 for a few days

Ford is updating the venerable Mustang for 2018, changing its engine options and offering a slew of new tech and a 10-speed automatic transmission. The biggest change may be the loss of the current entry-level V6 engine, which has been available in the Mustang for decades.
Ford’s turbocharged 2.3-liter 4-cylinder EcoBoost engine will be the new base option, joined by an upgraded 5-liter V8 in the Mustang GT. In a press release, Ford says the latter engine has been “thoroughly reworke

A few things come to mind when I think of iconic Super Mario villain Bowser: Mr. steal-your-girl; a roided-up turtle that just discovered Hot Topic; Great dad. Now I can add Korean rice and soup delicacy gukbap to that list.
According to this 2000 Famitsu interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, Bowser was given the Japanese name Daimaō Kuppa — Kuppa being the Japanese name for gukbap, a Korean dish. See the resemblance?The things you learn. (The Korean word is “gukbap” but Japane

When a soldier is stationed at the furthest human outpost in the galaxy, he’s confronted with an incredible challenge: staying alive in a meaningless existence, hoping to one day be promoted to a better location.Joe M. McDermott’s new short novel The Fortress at the End of Time is a thoughtful investigation of how people cope when their lives are put on hold, and a brilliant analysis of technology, faith, and the point where they meet. The Fortress at the End of Time is set in a far

 With a pitch for its users to just let go of the things they no longer need, the online used goods marketplace letgo has managed to grab on to $175 million in new financing.
Since its launch in 2015, the would-be craigslist killer has raised at least $325 million to tackle the U.S. market.
It’s been growing a blistering clip, to over $20 billion in gross merchandise value sold on the… Read More