Technology news

A bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers today introduced a bill that would require US police agencies to obtain a warrant before deploying cell-site simulation surveillance devices known as “stingrays,” reports USA Today. Stingrays are typically used by police to triangulate a criminal suspect’s location based on data emitted from their smartphones or wearable devices with cellular connectivity.
Stingrays are a controversial form of surveillance technology as it can ac

Shamrock Shake hype starts early for some. Who are you Shamrock Shake lovers? I’ve never cared about the McDonald’s shake timeline, but with age, I’ve realized that maybe the Shamrock Shake inspires you in the same way daylight saving time’s ending reminds me that summer is coming.
McDonald’s is excited to ring in the new season with you all, too, and is definitely super excited to sell some shakes. So this year, the company funded the reengineering of the straw to

This is a new series called "Paul's doing it wrong and everyone is smarter than Paul and if he'd only just listened..." where I explain something dumb I've done in my life and people at work can't stop giving me shit about it.
Let me just explain to you how I take screenshots on Windows, and either you'll immediately realize how foolish I've been, or you're in the same boat in which case I guess you can grow alongside me.
So, first: find the Print Screen button. This isn't always easy, because s

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted and then quickly deleted three tweets condemning President Trump’s executive order on immigration today. The tweets took on a much more critical tone than the statements Musk made on January 28th. Shortly after deleting the tweets, Musk explained to an inquisitive Twitter user that these “were earlier drafts that I accidentally published.”A screenshot of the notifications from Musk’s three immigration-related tweets.
“Regarding

Republicans may try to reverse a landmark privacy rule that requires internet providers to get permission before sharing your web browsing data and other sensitive information with outside companies.
Politico reports that Senate Republicans are planning to introduce legislation that would reverse the rules, which began going into effect at the beginning of the year.
It would be easy enough for them to do, too. The Congressional Review Act allows a new Congress to reverse rules recently passed by

Parasitic worms may be causing an often-deadly seizure disorder that has puzzled scientists for years. The seizures affect at least 17 percent of children in parts of Uganda, and make sufferers look like they’re nodding involuntarily. Right now, the disorder is incurable — but today’s findings mean that there could be ways to prevent it, and the study drops clues toward a future cure.By analyzing the blood and spinal fluid of people living in Uganda and South Sudan, scientists

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit alleging that the San Diego police skirted California privacy law by taking DNA samples from five teenage boys without a warrant or meaningful consent. Police allegedly stopped and frisked the teens without cause, and then told them to agree to cheek swabs before being let go. The ACLU contends that in doing so, police used a loophole to avoid following state rules that limit collecting DNA from minors. The lawsuit requests that the San Diego Police Department return

Growlers are a great way to buy beer from your local bar or brewery, but they tend to go stale or flat after a couple of days. There have been a few attempts to solve this problem by replicating the tap experience of a bar at your home, but nothing I’ve seen solves the issue as completely as the Growler Chill, a countertop tap system that’s currently looking for funding on Kickstarter.
In addition to just keeping your growlers cold and pressurized so they last longer, the Growler Chi

It’s getting harder and harder to enter the United States with your privacy intact. In the wake of President Trump’s executive orders on immigration, travelers have reported increasingly invasive stops by border agents. On January 30th, NASA scientist and US citizen Sidd Bikkannavar was coerced into unlocking his phone for Customs agents at the border, possibly exposing sensitive information. Homeland Security leaders are also considering more invasive requirements, like demanding so

Lenovo has a Moto event planned for Mobile World Congress, where it’s increasingly looking like we’ll see the Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus. Details of the phones have leaked multiple times already, but now we know more about the devices’ specs. As first spotted by Droid-Life, electronics retailer K-Tronix leaked full listings for the devices online, including specs and images. Here’s what we learned about each:
Moto G5 specs:
5-inch, full HD display
Android Nougat
32GB of sto

Apple seems to be trying to lower expectations on its willingness to ramp up US manufacturing, something that President Trump has repeatedly requested the company look into.
At a Goldman Sachs conference yesterday, Apple’s chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, responded to a question on manufacturing by indicated that Apple’s focus is on creating jobs in other sectors.
“One of the points that we are making in Washington is the fact that we have been a very large contributor to

Computers today are even smaller than ever. But some of the new, smaller computers are even smaller-er than other smaller computers. In this case, I’m referring to the GPD Pocket, a crowdfunded laptop that at first glance kind of looks like a toy but apparently is a full Windows 10 computer.The Pocket is actually the second miniaturized Windows laptop from GPD, after the GPD Win, which was a more gaming-focused device. It measures 7.1 inches x 4.2 inches, or roughly the footprint of a medi

Comcast is launching a new app called Xfinity Stream which will be available to all Xfinity subscribers for free on February 28th. The app is an overhaul of the Xfinity TV app and will be replacing it as the tool for subscribers to access live channels, DVR content, and on-demand titles on the go.
Xfinity Stream will provide access more than 200 live channels from anywhere you have internet
Most notably, Xfinity Stream will provide access more than 200 live channels from anywhere you have intern

One of the first cameras with HomeKit support is now available from the Apple Store. The D-Link Omna 180 Cam HD is an indoor camera that features a 1080p camera with a 180-degree field of view, night vision, two-way audio, and an SD card slot.Much like the Nest Camera, the Omna will send you a notification if there is movement in your house, but you can view Omna’s live feed from your lock screen thanks to HomeKit integration. D-Link says the connection between the camera and your iOS devi

Starting this summer the PlayStation Now game streaming service will only be available on PlayStation 4 and PC. Today Sony announced that it will be discontinuing the service on a wide range of platforms, including the PS3, PS Vita, PlayStation TV, and all supported smart TVs and Blu-ray players. The discontinuation will go into effect as of August 15th, 2017.
“After thoughtful consideration, we decided to shift our focus and resources to PS4 and Windows PC to further develop and improve t

Flyte is a company that seems to like taking ordinary objects and adding magnets to make them float. Their previous design pieces / products, the Fylte light bulb and Lyfe planter, both look really cool, but don’t actually do a whole lot when it comes to being a functional object.But Story, the company’s third product, which goes live on Kickstarter today, is a little different in that it’s actually kind of useful. It’s a clock that using Flyte’s signature mag-lev t

A newly discovered essay by Winston Churchill shows that the British statesman gave a lot of thought to the existential question that has inspired years of scientific research and blockbuster movies: are we alone in the Universe? The essay was drafted in the 1930s, but unearthed in a museum in Missouri last year. Astrophysicist Mario Livio, who was the first scientist to analyze the article, says it shows that the statesman was very up-to-date with the scientific research of his time. Churchill&

The disputed patents on the gene-editing tool CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, according to a ruling by judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) in Alexandria, Virginia. The ruling comes a little over two months after a high-profile court hearing, during which MIT and University of California, Berkeley heatedly argued about who should own CRISPR.
STAT News reported that the decision was one sentence long. The three judges decided that the Broad patent

In 2014, Keanu Reeves surprised pretty much everyone with John Wick. The story of a hitman who comes out of retirement to take revenge on the Russian gangster who killed his puppy and stole his car, Wick is a violent, kinetic, pulpy tour de force. Basically, John Wick kills everybody he runs into, in the most stylized way possible.
For the sequel, John Wick: Chapter 2, Reeves reteamed with director Chad Stahelski and writer Derek Kolstad. While the stakes are less personal in Chapter 2, the acti

As action fraalnchises go, John Wick is relatively small. The first film in the series earned a modest $88 million worldwide, which was a nice return on a $20 million production budget, but not the kind of money that gets studio execs excited. The new installment, John Wick: Chapter 2, is on track to make a little more than its predecessor, but then again, it cost twice as much to make. So given the relatively modest audience size for these films, it’s been fascinating to see how they&rsqu

Verizon is expected to close a revised deal to buy Yahoo at a reduced price — about $250 million less than the original offer. The price dip follows the disclosure of two security breaches at Yahoo in recent years.
Bloomberg reported the lower offer this morning, additionally claiming that both parties in the deal are expected to share legal responsibilities related to the cyber breaches. Reuters reports that the final price reduction could in fact be as high as $350 million.
Verizon annou

It sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel: thieves cut open the skylights of a warehouse, rappelled into the building, and made off with nearly $2.5 million dollars of rare books. But the heist truly happened to a shipment of books destined for last weekend’s California International Antiquarian Book Fair.The heist took place on January 29th, in a warehouse in Feltham, West London, with the inventories from three separate dealers targeted. The thieves spent several hours sorting th

The Day Without a Woman strike is now set for March 8th, International Women’s Day. Organizers for last month’s Women’s March on Washington set the date for women across supportive communities to collectively stop working that day to protest White House policies and legislation.
Women’s March announced plans for a general strike last month in the wake of the mass protests that followed President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The announcement for the strike comes via

In a letter sent yesterday to the EPA’s independent watchdog, two Republican representatives asked the agency to investigate reports that EPA officials have been using encrypted messaging apps like Signal to discuss Trump administration policies.
Letter was sent by two Republican representatives
“Reportedly, this group of career officials at the EPA are aiming to spread their goals covertly to avoid federal records requirements, while also aiming to circumvent the government’s

EVGA is ready to move past 2016. After a tumultuous year in which the company’s popular GeForce GTX 1080, 1070, and 1060 graphics cards reportedly started catching fire, EVGA is now introducing a new type of cooling technology that relies on the power of sensors, baby. Ten sensors, to be exact. The iCX cooling system, which is debuting in its GTX 10-series, is designed to bring “peace of mind gaming” to the user. Gamers will know if their graphics card is near overheating, whic

The developers of Twitterrific — one of the oldest third-party Twitter apps around — have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a “reboot of Twitterrific for Mac.”
Twitterrific for Mac was first released back in 2007, but as Twitter began to limit third-party developers’ abilities, Twitterrific for Mac fell to the wayside. Developer Iconfactory focused its attention on the more popular iOS version; the last time Twitterrific for Mac received an update was December

NASA is mulling over the idea of putting astronauts on the first flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) — the giant heavy-lift rocket the space agency is building to take people to Mars someday. Currently, NASA is hoping to fly the SLS for the first time in fall of 2018, and the original plan was for that mission to be uncrewed. But a new memo sent out to NASA employees this morning shows that the agency will start investigating the possibility of making the debut flight of SLS, called EM

Amazon and Google are considering bringing voice calls to their respective smart home speakers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The feature could be rolled out to Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers as soon as this year, but both companies have concerns about privacy, emergency services, and regulatory hurdles.
There’s also the fact that you would only make calls over speakerphone, which could limit the usefulness of the feature for some users. Theoretically it would b

There was a moment during Neil Gaiman’s latest book, a novelistic retelling of Norse myths, where I couldn’t help but burst into laughter. It was during a chapter called “Hymir and Thor’s Fishing Expedition,” in which Thor and several other gods arrive at the great hall of the sea giant Aegir and demand a feast. The giant is understandably put off by this intrusion, so he says he’ll host them, if Thor brings him a cauldron big enough to brew sufficient beer fo

When it comes to basic sci-fi setups, nobody would ever accuse “fighting for your life on a space station that’s been taken over by aliens” of being particularly fresh. Whether you’re talking about movies, books, or games, it’s the kind of premise that serves as sturdy scaffolding — a framework on which to hang what are (hopefully) much more interesting ideas and interactions. So when I sat down to preview the first hour of Prey, Arkane Studios’ upcoming

Intel’s latest and definitively greatest Xeon processor, the E7-8894 v4, has an MSRP of $8,898. There are other specs I can (and will) tell you about this, but really, that’s the most important one: $8,898.
Now, to be clear, this is a professional-grade piece of hardware that’s really only meant for companies running servers with big databases. Sure, it’s set a whole bunch of benchmarking records, but it’s not really the kind of chip you’d use to play Overwatc

Google Assistant can schedule appointments, control your home, and tell you why the sky is blue, but thanks to a small band of creative types — its personality team — it can also be a game show host, a fortune teller, or sports fan.
The personality team behind Google Assistant decides what it replies if you ask “What’s your favorite color?” or “Who are you rooting for in the Super Bowl?” The team is tasked with the creation of the personality of Google A

Vungle said it has reached a $300 million run rate for annualized revenues from its performance-based in-app video ad platform. The company also said it is profitable.
San Francisco-based Vungle said that adoption of its software development kit is up 125 percent from the previous year, an indicator that it has good traction in the mobile app and game ads business. Competing with rivals such as AdColony, Vungle is trying to get its unfair share of the $77 billion that’s spent on digital ad

Location has become an important and ever-present part of the mobile app experience, but for developers and marketers, understanding the information gleaned from it and how to take action can be confusing. Radar offers a tool to take all the guesswork out of using location — it’ll take the data you want to collect, analyze it, and provide you with actionable results. The company is launching today with $500,000 in backing from startup studio Expa.
Radar was founded last year by

Mobile game publisher Plarium has partnered with Twentieth Century Fox to create Rio: Match 3 Party, a mobile game debuting this spring on iOS and Android.
The title is one more example of a big game company — Plarium has had more than 250 million downloads — and a Hollywood studio getting together to publish a title in the $40 billion mobile game industry, where getting discovered is a big problem.
The game features a creative mix of match-3 puzzles, mini-games, and character collec

Orreco, a Galway, Ireland-based startup that uses machine learning and performance statistics to improve athletic performance, announced today $2 million in new funding. The investment was led by True Ventures, which has previously backed fitness-related startups Fitbit, Peloton, and Athos.
“We take multiple streams of data from an individual athlete or a team into our cloud-based system called TrackOR,” Dr. Brian Moore, founder and chief executive of Orreco, wrote in

About a year ago, I wrote a column suggesting what the major tech companies should try and accomplish in 2016. For Google, I said: “It would be pretty great if Chromebooks could, out of the box, run all Android apps — provided that, unlike on the recent Pixel C tablet, the Android apps were able to adapt better to a bigger screen.”
I’m happy to report that the first Chromebook designed from the ground up to run Android apps out of the box has arrived, albeit a little past

Microsoft is sharing some interesting tools with the open source community today. Developers and researchers will be able to take advantage of a new simulator that will let people test and train robots and drones in a virtual environment to prepare them for moving around the real world. A beta version of Microsoft’s research tool is being made available free of charge on GitHub today through an open source license. It’s just the latest in a line of tools and software that Microsoft h

Dell’s XPS 13 has been one of our favorite laptops for the past couple of years because of its sleek, trendsetting design, great keyboard, and solid performance. When it debuted back in the spring of 2015, it was one of the first Windows laptops that really provided a solid alternative to Apple’s MacBook line.Now there are a lot of great Windows 10 laptops available, many of which have cribbed the ideas first demonstrated on the XPS 13, like its compact size and almost borderless dis

Germany company Cliqz, which makes a privacy-focused browser of the same name, announced this morning that it has acquired popular anti-tracking and ad-blocking plugin Ghostery in an all-cash deal. A spokesperson for Cliqz, which is part-owned by Mozilla, said that the Ghostery plugin would continue to be available as a product for other browsers, but that the company hoped the acquisition would encourage users to try Cliqz.“We want to use it to leverage internationalization and reach a la