Technology news

Simon & Schuster has canceled Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ book deal after video surfaced of Yiannopoulos defending sex with minors. Publishers Weekly reported the news in a tweet, and Yiannopoulos confirmed it in a Facebook post that read merely “They canceled my book.”
Yiannopoulos’ book, titled Dangerous, was described as covering issues of free speech. He received a $250,000 advance from Simon & Schuster’s Threshold imprint, which has also release

The Senstone is described on its Kickstarter page as an “AI-powered pendant” that’s designed to capture voice and text notes. It isn’t a crazy idea to design a wearable voice recorder, which we’ve seen before, but the whole AI, life-changing pendant aspect takes the idea a bit far.
One of the first lines describing the wearable is: “We check smartphones 150 times a day, every day. But what if there was [a] plainly easier way to capture those precious words?&rd

Vacuum-maker Dyson has filed a patent for a “high-velocity” hairbrush that could potentially speed up hairstyling times, according to a report in Entrepreneur.The device — which in sketches looks like a cross between a curling iron and a round brush and is awkwardly affixed to the side of an androgynous person’s head — could dry the hair without the use of heat. Instead, it would expel fluid at a high velocity through holes, “drying the hair and/or styling the

 Leasing commercial space in San Francisco is as expensive as ever, but prices are mostly holding steady for the first time in a long time —  not rising. That shift has landlords offering more perks and brokers wondering what’s next. Their obvious concern: that good times can’t last forever, especially for venture-backed companies that aren’t IPO candidates and… Read More

The MTA’s Supreme-branded MetroCard launched in New York City today, and is currently available only at select subway stations in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.You can pick one up at the Broadway-Lafayette stop (right in front of the Manhattan Supreme store), Prince Street (two blocks from the Supreme store), Spring Street (three blocks from the Supreme store) Atlantic Avenue (right by the Atlantic Terminal mall), Union Square (in the heart of the Union Square shopping center), Marcy Ave

Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are two of the biggest stars on the planet, but who reigns supreme? One is poised to become one of the most powerful anti-heroes in the DC Extended Universe. The other is Groot. It’s hard to say who’ll win, but their rivalry seems to be heating up in the wake of their alleged Fate of the Furious beef. The next frontier: pop music.
Vin Diesel recently released a remixed version of Selena Gomez and Kygo’s new single “It A

Nintendo’s byzantine online account system just got even more complicated, with the addition of a new “User ID” to user accounts. The new User ID seems to be the way you’ll be identified online, similar to Microsoft’s Gamertag system. It is not the same as a Nickname, another form of identification used for the same accounts. You’ll need to log into your Nintendo Account here to claim a User ID, even if you already have a Nintendo Account set up.If you’v

In the 1996 book Zen in the Art of Writing, science fiction author Ray Bradbury had some advice for would-be authors: “Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white-hot, on paper.” That’s apparently exactly what Mall of America promoters want a writer in residence to do, except that the prism is entirely a promotional one, created and shaped by the mall’s publicists. Also, the writer they hire is meant to sit in the mall in public view, and burn white-hot o

The Hot Wheels line of toy cars seems like it would be an ideal candidate for augmented reality. Just take your phone and build the virtual track in your living room without the constraints of budget and physics of real-world plastic tracks and toy cars.The augmented reality Hot Wheels Track Builder Tango app that the company announced at this year’s Toy Fair unfortunately doesn’t quite live up to the dream of a virtual Hot Wheels masterpiece. The app lets you build your own Hot Whee

Far-right internet personality and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos will no longer speak at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, after video surfaced of Yiannopoulos defending pedophilia. Yiannopoulos, known for articles like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber, It's Time to Get Back in the Closet,” was originally invited because of his “important perspective” on conservatism. But Matt

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have released their list of nominees for the 2016 Nebula Awards, and it’s an impressive, diverse list of the best science fiction and fantasy stories of the year.Awarded annually since 1966, the Nebulas recognize the best novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories within genre publishing. Two additional awards, the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presen

When Max Karlsson found out that he was going to be in charge of Sweden’s official Twitter account this week, he was looking forward to sharing some of his photography, or riffing about music and technology — nothing too different from how hundreds of others have used the handle since Sweden opened it up to ordinary users in 2011.
“My thought was to speak about the interests and values that I have,” Karlsson, 22, said in a phone interview Monday evening. “And then T

Hoversurf, a Russian company that builds drones, posted a video last week showing off its latest prototype: the Scorpion-3, a single-seat, electric-powered hoverbike that looks cool as hell but probably won’t be ready for the X Games anytime soon.The manufacturers say they wanted to combine a motorcycle with quadcopter drone technology to create “an extreme sports instrument.” The electric-borne aircraft is intended for both “amateur and professional navigators,” Ho

Google and Microsoft have both voluntarily agreed to follow a new code in the United Kingdom to de-list piracy websites from the front page of Google search and Bing results, as well as remove autocomplete terms that could direct users to illegal content, according to a report from The Telegraph.In a statement to The Telegraph explaining the new code, Jo Johnson, the minister of state for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, said, "It is essential that [consumers] are presented with l

Kayla Newman, the Georgia teenager who brought the internet the phrase “eyebrows on fleek” in the summer of 2014, is now crowdfunding a cosmetics line on GoFundMe, The Fader reports.
Newman (self-titled Peaches Monroee on Vine) notes that she’s currently in school for nursing, but refers to the cosmetic and hair line as her dream. The campaign, launched today, has a listed goal of $100,000.
GoFundMe is an interesting choice for Newman. Anecdotally speaking, it seems rare to see

This upcoming Sunday is the Oscars, but it’s also the usual air time for some of HBO’s biggest weekly series. So to avoid the scheduling clash, HBO will make this week’s episodes of Girls, Crashing, and Big Little Lies available to stream early.
The episodes, which will be the second of the season for Crashing and Big Little Lies, and the third of the season for Girls, will be available on HBO Now, HBO Go, and on-demand this Friday, February 24th, ScreenCrush reports.
Although

Oppo is preparing to unveil some new photography tech at Mobile World Congress next week, according to the company. The smartphone maker is teasing an announcement surrounding “5x photography technology” that it says will change the way mobile photography works.The most obvious theory about what Oppo could be talking about with “5x” is optical zoom. Adding lens adjustments to a smartphone camera, without taking up the entire back of the phone like the Lumia 1020, would de

Lana Del Rey just released a new video for her track “Love,” the first single off her upcoming fifth studio album. The clip, directed by Rich Lee, tells a pretty average love story (boy and girl ride off into the sunset in their vintage car) before trading in the video’s initial West Coast setting for outer space.While most of Del Rey’s videos tend to rely on the drama of the terrestrial Earth —whether it’s a dusty open road or a rocky beach — she has pr

Google has been pushing RCS (rich communication services) texting through the Android Messenger app since last year, and that effort is expanding in a big way today to include Europe and Asia. That’s through a partnership with the carrier Telenor, which announced today that it’s supporting the new messaging standard.The next evolution of SMS
Telenor customers who live in markets where RCS support is launching will simply have to install an update to the Android Messenger application

A few weeks after finishing Resident Evil 7, the borderline reboot of the popular action-horror franchise, I am still chewing on one particular moment: the garage fight. The story opens with would-be hero Ethan breaking into the decaying estate of a mysterious family living on the Louisiana bayou. In short order time, Ethan learns the mother, father, son, and grandma are immortal monsters, and he looks for an escape. He finds a cop waiting outside a broken window. The skeptical man lends Ethan a

Last month, after reports surfaced that Uber had allegedly broken a taxi driver strike at JFK Airport amid protests against President Trump’s immigration ban, the hashtag #DeleteUber caught fire on social media, leading hundreds of thousands of users to cancel their accounts with the ride-sharing giant. But just when the grassroots backlash against Uber seemed to be dying down, a former engineer went public with her tale of rampant sexism and bureaucratic incompetence within the company. A

Here’s another gift from Facebook to Snapchat on the latter’s road to an initial public offering: WhatsApp has cloned Snapchat’s popular stories format and is using it to replace its old text-based status messages. The feature begins rolling out to WhatsApp’s billion-plus users today on Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone.
As on Snapchat, WhatsApp stories are posted from an in-app camera. Once you’ve taken a photo, you can adorn it with drawings, text, and emoji. Onc

Last year, AMC’s The Walking Dead sparked an outrage. The gory season 7 premiere left beloved characters behind in favor of archvillain Negan, and audiences followed suit: by the time the midseason finale rolled around, ratings had dropped 40 percent. Now the show has returned for the second half of the season. It’s an opportunity to chart a new course, to correct the mistakes it’s made, and convince viewers that the story of Rick Grimes is still worth following. The only quest

We have finally have our first look at the sequel to Alto’s Adventure. Today developer Snowman released the very first trailer for Alto’s Odyssey, the follow-up to the chill mobile snowboarding game, and it maintains much the same look and feel as its predecessor, but swaps snow for sand. The studio first teased the sequel’s existence back in December, simply stating that “the next adventure awaits.” Alto’s Odyssey is scheduled to launch this summer, though pl

While companies like Amazon, Flirtey, and Zipline continue to use drones for deliveries, a group of ornithologists at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania have studied a different way to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
By suspending a “simple, lightweight recorder” below a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter drone, Gettysburg College environmental studies professor Andrew Wilson and two undergraduate students studied songbirds and published their results in The Auk: Ornithological Advances.

A public service announcement: Playing Doom is great! Playing Doom using your Porsche 911 as the controller is not great, because cars are meant for safely driving from one location to the next. This is why I’d encourage you to watch this mod in action, spotted by Sploid, and then never, ever try it.
YouTube channel vexal has a video tutorial on how to mod a Porsche 911 to play the original Doom using a flash drive and the car’s computer, set to debug mode. Once the mod is set up, th

Policies permitting same-sex marriage are linked to fewer suicide attempts among young people — especially those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or questioning. That might be because such policies reduce stigma perceived by LGBQ kids, according to a new study published today in JAMA Pediatrics.Same-sex marriage policies were associated with a 7 percent reduction in the proportion of high school students reporting a suicide attempt within the past year, the authors found. That would

A Cure for Wellness is one of the most peculiar studio films of recent memory. Director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring) uses a decadent 146-minute runtime to thread together Cronenbergian body horror, universal movie monster villainy, a coffee table book’s worth of beautiful photography, and a handful of plot twists that are at once bizarre and predictable. The film is hardly perfect, but it’s memorable — particularly one scene involving poorly done dental w

LG is preparing to launch the G6, its next flagship smartphone, next week, but so far it hasn’t reached out to the group behind the 2009 smash hit “Like a G6” to license the seemingly synergy-heavy track. Far East Movement tells The Verge that it has not heard from LG about licensing the track, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2010, but noted “that would be cool.” When we asked LG about this they requested the group’s contact info, so there's still

Mattel’s Hello Barbie line is the company’s techiest endeavor. So far, the product suite consists of Hello Barbie herself, the smart Hello Barbie Dreamhouse, and now, Hello Barbie Hologram. Hello Barbie Hologram is designed to sit on a kid’s nightstand or around the house to extend playtime. Mattel introduced it at the New York City Toy Fair this past weekend. The idea is that kids want to know what Barbie is up to when she isn’t actively being played with, and the Hologr

If you were on Facebook or Twitter this week, you might have seen warnings about an immigration checkpoint in Flatbush, Brooklyn. “Avoid Church Avenue from 35th down to Utica,” one popular post warned. “There’s an immigration checkpoint!!” Similar reports popped up across the country, almost always secondhand, spreading like fire.
For anyone worried about being caught up in President Trump’s recent deportation push, such a message might seem urgent to share. A

The new $150 Beats X wireless earbuds have taken a backseat to Apple’s AirPods ever since both products were announced at the same event last September. The truly wireless AirPods got a Jony Ive-narrated video and together with the iPhone 7 signaled the start of Apple’s wireless audio future. After that was done, Phil Schiller quickly described Beats X as "an affordable, light, comfortable headphone for all throughout your day." They use a Bluetooth connection via the same W1 chip as

Imagine this: you’re in the shower, having a good scrub, enjoying the hot steam rising up around you. Pretty nice, right? Well now how bout this: you have an orange. The bathroom is still hot and steamy, but now you’re tearing open some citrus flesh with your teeth, the juice falling from your lips like you’re a little baby in a Tropicana commercial. You don’t get sticky. The evidence melts. If you’re on board with all this, may I suggest r/ShowerOrange? It’s