Technology news

Verizon just made a rather surprising weekend announcement: unlimited data plans are coming back. The carrier says that beginning tomorrow, it will offer what it's calling Verizon Unlimited. The plan will cost $80 for an individual line or $45 for each line on a four-line family plan. Those prices are described as “introductory” and require both paperless billing and AutoPay to be enabled. Customers will get full LTE speeds until they reach 22GB of usage, after which they’ll be

Before his death last year, Prince was famously protective of his work, and had pulled his music from most streaming services two years ago. Today, a number of his albums have returned to sites such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora.In 2015, Prince pulled body of work from all of the major streaming services, with the exception of Tidal. Now, 27 of Prince’s albums and compilation albums from Warner Bros., have returned to those sites, which include For You, Prince, Dirty Mind, Controver

After using Uber to visit his mistress, a French businessman is suing the company after his wife received notifications of his trips and later filed for divorce.The man had logged into his Uber account on his wife’s phone once, according to the BBC. Despite logging out, his wife continued to receive notifications related to his trips, which ultimately tipped her off to his affair. According to the man’s lawyer, the bug “has caused him problems in his private life." The case is

When Apple designed CarPlay for iOS, it decided to stick with a familiar paradigm: a home button that takes you to a simple home screen of icons. That’s not a terrible idea — the interface is simple and familiar to everybody, and you don’t want to be struggling with a touchscreen when you’re supposed to be keeping your eyes on the road.
However, think about the two main things you have on a car dashboard: you glance at a map and you control your music. Currently, in order

Saturday Night Live is enjoying its highest ratings in over 20 years, despite lending absolutely no credence to the argument that comedy might improve under the Trump administration.Of course SNL always feels most relevant when political stakes are high, but the buzz around the show has reached a new pitch in recent months because of how directly it affects our thin-skinned new president. He spent some of the first weeks of his time as president-elect tweeting about Alec Baldwin’s “u

Two weeks ago, Sidd Bikkannavar flew back into the United States after spending a few weeks abroad in South America. An employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Bikkannavar had been on a personal trip, pursuing his hobby of racing solar-powered cars. He had recently joined a Chilean team, and spent the last weeks of January at a race in Patagonia.Bikkannavar is a seasoned international traveller — but his return home to the US this time around was anything but routine. Bik

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine stands out from the other series in the franchise as a more mature and serious take on the final frontier. Now, Ira Steven Behr, who served as showrunner for the series for most of the show, is teaming up with Adam Nimoy to produce a documentary looking back on the history of Deep Space Nine, and they’re turning to Indigogo to fund it.The film, called What We Left Behind (a reference to the final episode of the series, “What You Leave Behind”) has alr

Lucid Motors, the small-but-ambitious electric car startup based in Menlo Park, California, is holding an exclusive event in Los Angeles this weekend to show off its first production model, the all-electric, 1,000-horsepower Air. The company’s engineers and designers will be on hand at the Peterson Automotive Museum to discuss the car’s finer details, as well as offer rides in their engineering prototype. (We got to take one for spin during CES last month, and it left us scrambling t

GUEST: We’ve heard many predictions of how robots will take over the monotonous functions of our daily lives, freeing us to work on highly-skilled or creative tasks. But in fact the opposite may be happening: Some of the easiest tasks to automate turn out to be creative ones, and many of the montonous jobs we’d really like to automate are proving very tricky.
Tasks surprisingly easy to automate
Art. Since the early 2000s, the University of London’s The Painting Fool program has

If you’re one of the estimated 50 to 70 million Americans who have trouble sleeping, you might just want to treat yourself to a camping trip. New research shows that spending time outdoors — away from artificial light like your TV and cellphone — can reset your biological clock, helping you sleep longer.
Scientists have long known that using electronic devices like tables and phones at night is bad for sleep. Artificial light, in fact, suppresses the production of the hormone m

Just like with fashion, music or slang, it’s hard for system administrators to keep up with what’s cool in malware land. The men and women who keep our networks safe have to deal with a never-ending flow of information about new vulnerabilities, exploit kits, and ransomware. It’s a tough job, especially when having to decide what to patch first. This is the reason the Intel Security Group – previously known as McAfee – have released their new ‘Threa

The 59th annual Grammy Awards will feature the first significant changes made to the ceremony in some time. After hosting the show for five consecutive years, LL Cool J has been replaced by Carpool Karaoke specialist James Corden, in an attempt to breathe new life into the program. While that may be the most notable public-facing change to the show, the most important shift comes in how the people running the Grammys determined award eligibility this year.
For the first time, the Grammys have al

The best books you’ll read are typically recommended by people you like or admire. Which is why we’re partnering up with bookshelf.tips to do a monthly roundup of short book recommendations from the apex of the tech world. Bookshelf.tips asked entrepreneurs, CEOs, and other visionaries share stories about books that changed their life or the way they do business – in less than 50 words, because we know you’re busy people (but hopefully not too busy to read these books).

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, and PAX are all great trade shows and fan events for exhibiting virtual reality. But in the early days of this industry, it is the developer conferences, the places where creators come together to share knowledge and reveal breakthroughs, that are the really exciting events to cover. There’s no better time of the year to do that than at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).Filling up the halls of San Francisco’s Moscone Ce

Few things infuriate me as easily as having picked the wrong subtitles for a movie – and finding the right ones could often be a malware-ridden hassle. But this gorgeous app turns this frustrating process into a child’s play. Built by Dutch developer Giel Cobben, Caption is a nifty app for desktop that lets you find and download the right subtitles for any movie or television show you want to see. What is particularly handy about Caption is that it will

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who published explosive details about U.S. intelligence activities, has lived in exile in Moscow since 2013. Now, he could be sent home to face espionage charges.
According to NBC News, U.S. intelligence sources have obtained information that says Russia may extradite Snowden as a “gift” to win favor with new President Donald Trump. The President has in the past described Snowden as a “traitor” who should be executed.
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GUEST: All hail the hype cycle — 2016 was nothing but acceleration for the burgeoning bot economy. We experienced Gartner’s “innovation trigger” and reached the “peak of inflated expectations” in under 10 months. Congratulations, everyone!
Now comes the sobering reality that customers — actual, living, breathing companies — need to be able to implement these things and demonstrate real business value. While some may long for those magical