Technology news

Brexit could be a big setback for nuclear energy in the United Kingdom. When the UK officially leaves the European Union, it might also be leaving the agency that oversees nuclear safety in EU member states, called Euratom, the Financial Times reports.Quitting Euratom could interrupt the flow of nuclear fuel and ores from Europe and leave the UK’s nuclear power and radioactive waste management facilities largely unregulated. The UK has 15 nuclear reactors that produce about 21 percent of i

Twitter today published redacted versions of two National Security Letters (NSLs) that it received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the past two years.
Typically these information requests are under gag order, meaning that recipients can’t even disclose the existence of them to their users or the people who are targeted by the requests. But FBI “recently informed us that the gag orders have been lifted and that we may notify the account holders,” Elizabeth Bank

A new at-home male fertility product called Yo could make testing semen way less awkward. Yo turns a user’s phone camera into a microscope that’s able to zoom in on a semen sample and determine how many sperm exist and are moving, aka the motile sperm concentration. The higher the concentration of moving sperm, the better a man’s chance of fertilizing an egg. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company turn a smartphone camera into a microscope, although this is

In about a month, Nintendo will launch a new console, and you may have some trouble finding one in the publishers home country.
Japanese Nintendo fans have preordered more than 80 percent of the initial launch shipment for the upcoming Switch console, according to sales-tracking data firm Media Create. This hybrid handheld/home system will debut March 3 for $300, and it has created a lot of buzz among consumers that is translating into preorders. This more evidence that the Switch could easily o

LG’s stupidly thin Signature 4K OLED W series has finally been given a price, and it will put a dent in your bank account. As first reported by TechRadar, retailer B&H has released pricing on most of LG’s 2017 TV lineup, and the 2.57-millimeter-thick, 65-inch W series TV will cost $7,996, with the larger 77-inch version coming in at a staggering $19,996. One could argue that price is justified given just how amazing the TV actually is — it’s so thin the actual compone

 The rogue government Twitter account, AltUSNatParkService, which claimed it was being run by current park rangers, says it has now handed off control of its Twitter account to “several activists and journalists who believe they can continue in the same spirit.” The move has led some to question if the account was, in fact, ever operated by disgruntled government employees in the… Read More

GUEST: Already, as of 2010, a quarter of Americans (24 percent) had posted product reviews or comments online, and 78 percent of internet users had gone online for product research. But those are ancient stats. Numbers are higher now. More recently, BrightLocal found in 2016 that 91 percent of consumers regularly or occasionally read online reviews, with 47 percent taking sentiment of local-business reviews — the tonality of a review’s text — into account in purchasing dec

Elon Musk isn’t building a commercial hyperloop, his idea to shoot people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes through a vacuum tube. But Musk’s Mars-bound company, SpaceX, is challenging students and independent engineers “to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype.”
Musk first announced plans to build a one-mile test track two years ago. Now the track, located next to SpaceX’s HQ, is apparently ready to go. Th

If you were a Silicon Valley CEO, would your goal in life be to reshape society with world-changing products, or simply make as much money as possible and grow as fast as you can in the shortest amount of time? That’s the blunt and much-needed philosophical debate at the heart of The Founder, a free browser-based game from designer Francis Tseng. Launched earlier today thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, the game blends the open-ended decision-making made popular by The Sims, the

Microsoft today started rolling out a new Windows 10 preview build for people participating in the fast ring of the Windows Insider Program.
Build 15019, which follows build 15019, does have significant bugs that might impact the playing of some games — but then again, it does come with the previously announced Game Mode, and Microsoft wants feedback from users, Dona Sarkar, a software engineer in Microsoft’s Windows and Devices Group, wrote in a blog post.
The Settings app now featu

Today is a somber day for NASA. The space agency marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 disaster, which claimed the lives of three astronauts who were slated to test out technologies needed to eventually land on the Moon. During a launch rehearsal on January 27th, 1967, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed after a fire broke out in the cabin of the spacecraft they had been training in. It was a tragedy that forever changed how NASA handled safety protocols surroundin

The US Patent and Trademark Office this week published a patent application by Apple that details a peculiar vaporizer technology. The document, filed last year, outlines plans for an apparatus that can regulate temperature to release heat from a substance within a canister. It’s also able to keep air out of the chamber of the substance being vaporized.
That little nugget of information might lead you to think that Apple is building some sort of iVape, but we wouldn’t be quick to jum

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated by the United Nations General Assembly to remember the victims killed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In commemoration of the day, and in light of recent events, one educator has turned to Twitter to take a look at the terrible story of the MS St. Louis, a refugee ship that saw a number of its passengers killed during the Holocaust after they were turned away from US and Canadian borders prior to World War II.There are man

Microsoft gave details on the upcoming Windows 10 Game Mode feature earlier this week, and today began to roll it out to users in the Windows 10 Insider Preview program as part of the latest 15019 preview build.If you’re trying out the build, Microsoft is warning users that there could be a few bugs. In a statement released to The Verge, the company noted that the latest build includes “a few platform related bugs, unrelated to the new features included within the build, that are imp

One of the best games of 2016 is about to get an interesting new mode as part of a major content update.
Above: The Stacks map in Live Fire.Image Credit: Respawn
In February, developer Respawn Entertainment will launch the Live Fire patch for its sci-fi shooter Titanfall 2. This mode will introduce the Live Fire game mode, which is a fast-paced, 60-second mission where two teams of six pilots each fight to have control over a neutral flag when time ends. This should make for hyper-aggressiv

GUEST: Tax season is around the corner, and for most Americans, it involves dealing with the complex tax code, an accountant, and maybe friends who claim to be tax experts. According to IRS statistics, there were 507 million visitors to the irs.gov website in 2016, a 3 percent increase when compared to 2015. Furthermore, Americans spend 6.1 billion hours and $233.8 billion complying with the tax code. With complexity comes confusion and frustration, leading many taxpayers to turn to tax preparer

When Apple’s iPad was first announced seven years ago today, some people wondered whether it would work as a giant phone. It’s hard to imagine now, given that talking on the phone is a dying art form. But this morning I was reminded (thanks, Facebook) of a photo someone took of me on January 27th, 2010 using a large piece of cardboard as a proxy for the real iPad; it was pressed up to the side of my face like I was making a phone call with it. It was intentionally ridiculous. It was

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands debuts on March 7 on the console and the PC. It’s a vast, open world where your stealth soldiers take on a Bolivian drug cartel. And one of its unique features is four-player co-op, where you can drop in or drop out at any time. You can seamlessly switch from single player to four-person co-op at any time and still stay in the same open world session.
I tried it out at a preview session with fellow journalists at Ubisoft in San Francisco. We had a t

The arms race for the biggest hard drive is constantly escalating: last year saw Seagate announce a 10TB hard drive, and now the company is back with an announcement that an even large 16TB drive is in the pipeline for release in 2018, according to Geek.com.
While we’ve seen similar and even dramatically bigger SSDs (Seagate has a 60TB solid state drive), the 16TB hard drive would be the single largest magnetic disk drive ever if it actually makes it to market. Seagate is noting that the 1

One juicy but ultimately wrong tweet set internet detectives off on the case of Donald Trump allegedly Photoshopping his hand to look larger than life. The images show Trump’s hand resting on Barack Obama’s shoulder, but one looks visibly larger than the other. The problem is that it’s completely false.Here’s the original tweet that started the mess, which is based on a screenshot from ABC’s recent interview with President Trump in the White House.Trump 100% photosh

Accidental Queens’ newly released game, A Normal Lost Phone, has an appealing hook: you have found someone’s unlocked smartphone, and now you have access to everything inside. It’s a power fantasy, but where other video games let you win the Super Bowl or punch Nazi scum, A Normal Lost Phone has you invading someone’s privacy one app at a time.
If this doesn’t immediately give you panic hives, consider this: a casual tour of my phone would net you the locations of m

The best way to see Dave McCary’s terrific directorial debut Brigsby Bear is without knowing anything whatsoever about the story. The specific way it unfolds invites a lot of “What’s going on, and what does it mean?” conjecture from the audience. It's more fun to watch than to read about.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to discuss the exact reasons the film works without getting into the plot. So for the spoiler-averse, here’s the detail-free summary: Brigsby B

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to make peace with his new Hawaiian neighbors. After purchasing a $100 million, 700-acre plot of land on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg filed lawsuits in an effort to officially buy land that’s technically owned by descendants of Kuleana tenant farmers. Now, that process — called “quiet title and partition” — is being ended. In a letter printed in Kauai’s The Garden Island, Zuckerberg and his w

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has signed up an additional 11 airlines for the TSA Precheck program, including prominent international airlinesEmirates and Virgin Atlantic, as well as low-cost domestic carrier Spirit Airlines.
Precheck is a program created by the TSA to help frequent flyers speed through security checkpoints with shorter lines, and without removing shoes, laptops, liquids, belts, and light jackets. It’s available at more than 180 airports and now with 30

Bob Bates, a veteran of 45 games developed, has launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a new text adventure called Thaumistry: In Charm’s Way.
The title is part of the wave of games that appeal to the nostalgia of players who grew up on old school text adventures.
“With the resurgence of interest in text games sparked by the success of Twine and the Choose Your Own Adventure format, now is a great time to bring out a classic parser-driven adventure,” said Bates. &ldqu

Endurance International Group, a publicly traded company that operates many hosting providers, will be laying off employees at its office in Austin, Texas. The move will impact around 90 employees that provide customer support for three of its hosting subsidiaries: Arvixe, A Small Orange, and Site5.
The announcement came on January 24, a few days after Endurance told employees it would close its Bluehost headquarters in Orem, Utah. Endurance’s website says the company employs “well o

Everyone loves talking about what phone Donald Trump uses (purportedly a Samsung Galaxy S3), but what's his TV remote situation like? Photo journalist John Bodnar recently got a picture of Trump in his office on Air Force One.
Trump on Air Force One: “Beautiful. Great plane. Really beautiful…..nice plane.” via pooler @jeffzeleny and CNN photojournalist John Bodnar pic.twitter.com/CWcmwR0sST— Ashley Killough (@KilloughCNN) January 26, 2017As nerds, the 90s sci-fi prop on

In an early move as head of the agency, the new chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, circulated a plan to close the door on some net neutrality transparency requirements.
Proposal would expand transparency waivers
When the FCC passed its net neutrality rules in 2015, they included transparency measures for internet service providers. Big providers were required to submit information to regulators and consumers on data caps, fees, and speeds, but the order also included a temporary waiver for providers

Samsung’s Galaxy Note7 fiasco is largely over, but the consequences will likely continue for many months, if not years. The company has already put in a ton of work to stymie the inevitable impact on its brand and sales, but there’s always more to be done. Here’s one option I haven’t seen discussed: Samsung should manufacture all its phone batteries in-house.
After a thorough investigation, Samsung concluded there were two separate issues that led to the Note7 battery exp

News hit this morning that Trump’s “Manufacturing Jobs Initiative” will feature two tech CEOs: Intel’s Brian Krzanich, who nearly hosted a Trump event during the primaries, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, who appears to be pragmatically — and, I assume, reluctantly — steering the president on issues like climate change.
The list of Silicon Valley somebodies willing to work with the president now tops out around five, a rather low number, counting U

That didn’t take long.
Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire has already passed its $1.1 million crowdfunding goal on Fig, the Kickstarter competitor that can issue equity to backers, in less than 24 hours after launching. Backers will receive equity if the campaign passes $2.5 million. It is at $1,109,233 raised, and the campaign will continue until February 25.
The first Pillars of Eternity raised $3,986,929 on Kickstarter in 2012, making it the No. 4 game in K

Kevin, Bob, and the other one (species: minions), are getting a theatrical sequel to their 2015 solo debut, Minions. The movie will be released over the July Fourth weekend... in 2020, according to Polygon.Many people, I have discovered, do not like the Minions. They find their squishy language, poor eyesight, and commitment to denim overalls distasteful. This is wrong. But July 4th, 2020, is more than three years away. Minions are inescapable, and if the 2003 movie Elf taught us anything, it&rs

Penny Arcade and ReedPOP announced today that they will stage a new gamer event called PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia.
Announced during PAX South 2017, the new tabletop gaming event will take place in Philadelphia in November 2017. The event is the sixth addition to the international line-up of PAX events.
The event will be at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from November 17 to November 19. The event will take all the elements that have drawn millions of gamers to PAX – th

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we play Resident Evil VII (which or may not be scary, depending on which of our staff you ask), Overwatch passes 25 million players, and a new Pokémon game releases for mobile.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: How Warner Bros. rescued Avalanche Studios after Disney buried it
The Top 5 3DS games? GamesBeat Decides
Is Nintendo Switch going to completely replace the 3DS? Game

Another Vergecast is up! We have a CES Twitter live show reunion, featuring Nilay, Dieter, Megan, and Paul discussing this week in news. As Nilay mentions throughout the show, the gang has senioritis as they prepare to move to new offices next week... just FYI.Also, Verge science editor Liz Lopatto returns to the show to discuss the new administration’s action toward the science world, and how the scientists are handling it.If you keep listening, you’ll come upon a talk about net neu

More than a year ago, long before Russian hackers tried to influence a presidential election, Keeper Security CEO Darren Guccione argued that the United States needs to treat the nation’s cybersecurity as if we were at war. Guccione made the assertion after tens of millions of U.S. citizens had their personal information compromised in the summer 2015 hack of the federal Office of Personnel Management.
Today, he says, we are at war, and the U.S. government and priv

Ghost Recon Wildlands has incredible environments where you can climb to a mountaintop and then visit everything that you can see from that mountain.
I saw the game in a preview last week at Ubisoft in San Francisco, and then I did an interview with Nouredine Abboud, senior producer at Ubisoft on the game. When I played, I had to start pecking away at the huge task of breaking the grip of the drug lords over the entire country. Every place I went was hostile territory.
He said that Ubisoft

In recent years, Archie, best known as the red-headed teenager on the cover of comics at the grocery store check-out line, has shrewdly swapped safe Americana for bizarre adventures and brand partnerships. Archie Andrews and his pals faced the zombie apocalypse in Afterlife with Archie; they got mauled by Predator — yes, that Predator; and they hung out with Marvel’s murderous vigilante The Punisher, the rock group the Ramones, and the cast of the TV musical series Glee.
And the seri

Missy Elliott doesn’t really have to do much to destroy the competition. After more than a year of sporadic appearances since the release of 2015’s “WTF (Where They From?),” she’s back with “I’m Better,” a tense, stripped-down single for an album that we can only hope might come out soon. (Who knows?) Like most Missy videos, this one is effortlessly weird, featuring Missy as the bird queen of a futuristic, underwater dystopia.
Missy has been relati

In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo this morning, VoteStand founder Gregg Phillips asserted that he knows for a fact that 3 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election, insisting that he just needs a little more time to prove it. Cuomo pointed out the flawed logic in this statement saying, “If I know the answer to something it’s because I concluded my process of analysis, not because I’m in the middle of it.”The apparent baselessness of Phillips’ as

Adobe today announced Adobe Contribute and Adobe Director will no longer be for sale nor supported as of February 1, 2017. At the same time, Adobe is also stopping Shockwave for Mac updates and support on March 14, 2017 after the last release of the product.
The reason Adobe gives for the death of Contribute and Director is simple: The company’s customers are embracing “the new features and efficiencies offered by Creative Cloud.” As for Shockwave, its content is made with Dire

The FBI has posted a heavily redacted report of its threat investigations during the Gamergate controversy in 2014 and 2015. The 173-page document (not counting 61 deleted pages) primarily seems to cover harassment of against critic Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Brianna Wu, including a shooting threat that caused Sarkeesian to cancel a planned talk at Utah State University. Ultimately, the investigations petered out: the FBI wasn’t able to identify the people behind some of the threa

Fifty years ago today, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom opened a treaty for signature that would become the backbone for international space law. It was a United Nations-approved agreement called the Outer Space Treaty, and 104 nations have become parties to the document since it was signed and enacted in 1967. Since then, the treaty has helped ensure the peaceful exploration of space, as well as provide a lasting framework for how nations are supposed to behave in Ear

2017 may be the year the US starts a nuclear war because someone tweets something mean about Donald Trump, but at least we’re getting some weird selfie apps before we go. Earlier this month we had Meitu, which made you look like a terrifying anime character and possibly tracked your location data, and this week we have FaceApp, which uses neural networks to paste a smile on anybody’s photo and possibly steals your soul or something.The app is iOS only and very hit-and-miss. You can s