Technology news

Waymo, the self-driving car company spun-off late last year by Google, is suing Uber and its self-driving truck company Otto, claiming the ride-hail giant stole its key technology.According to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in California, Waymo accuses Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Google to found Otto and now serves as a top ranking Uber executive, stole 14,000 highly confidential documents from Google before departing to start his own company. Among the documents were schem

More than three years after the surprising news that Irrational Games was closing down, the studio behind BioShock is back: but with a new name. The studio is now called Ghost Story, and it was formed by a dozen former members of Irrational, including controversial co-founder Ken Levine, who will serve as president and creative director of the new venture.
“Our mission is simple: to create immersive, story-driven games for people who love games that ask something of them,” the studio

LeEco is rolling out the latest update to its Le Pro3 and Le S3 smartphones this week which finally adds an app drawer to the company’s Ecosystem User Interface skin of Android, after user feedback.
It’s a welcome addition to the phones that should help entice users to at least try out to LeEco’s default skin, which previously (and bafflingly) would place all installed apps on the home screen grid. The app drawer will take its rightful place at the center location on the dock,

A Kansas man was charged today after the fatal shooting of a Garmin engineer at a bar Wednesday night, police said.
Witness said Purinton yelled “get out of my country”
The suspect in the shooting, Adam Purinton, was drinking at the bar in Olathe, Kansas, at about 7:15PM that night, the Kansas City Star reported. A witness said he yelled “get out of my country” to two of the victims, reportedly saying the men, believed to originally be from India, were “Middle Easte

Star Wars actor Oscar Isaac is returning to the stage this summer in a production of Hamlet at the Public Theater, per a report from The New York Times. Isaac, known from his popular turn as pilot Poe Dameron in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and its upcoming sequel The Last Jedi, will star as the titular Danish price, alongside Key & Peele’s Keegan-Michael Key, who will make his New York stage debut as Horatio.Hamlet marks a return to the stage for Issac, who had previously starred in p

Nightwing is reportedly getting his own movie in the DC Extended Universe. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. is currently developing a film that will follow the grown-up former sidekick of the Caped Crusader. The Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay is currently attached to direct, though there’s no word yet on when the film might be released.
Nightwing is one of the most important characters in all of DC Comics
Nightwing, otherwise known as Dick Grayson, was Batman&rsquo

The Expanse is a television show based on the novels by James S.A. Corey. Every week, I’ll be taking a look at one moment in each episode of the show’s second season, and chatting with the creators about how it was created and what it means for the larger story.
Spoilers ahead for the fifth episode of season 2, “Home.”
With every adaptation of a novel, there’s a point in a television show or movie that fans know is coming. We’ve read about it, and we wait in e

The crush of Hollywood awards season has provided ample opportunity for people in the entertainment industry to speak out about current political events, and almost everyone with something to say has taken advantage. Last month, Meryl Streep drew wild applause (and a presidential hate-tweet) after speaking out against Donald Trump at the Golden Globes, and Aaron Sorkin followed suit days ago by issuing his own creative call-to-arms when taking home the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award at this year&r

Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, two married venture capitalists who were early investors in Uber, published a scathing indictment today of the ride-hailing company’s decision to tap a team of insiders to investigate claims of sexual harassment.Earlier this week, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick announced that he had brought on former US Attorney General Eric Holder to oversee “an independent review” of the issues raised by ex-engineer Susan Fowler in her explosive blog post. Holder

We now know what the rumored Huawei Watch 2 will look like, courtesy of Evan Blass over at VentureBeat. The follow-up to Huawei’s smartwatch was rumored last month, and as per the original VentureBeat report, seems to offer the promised new “sportier” design. We’ll have to wait until we can see one in person to find out how successful Huawei was in reducing the bulk of the original Watch, though. VentureBeatThe Watch 2 will run the latest Android Wear 2.0, and offers a na

Amazon has filed a motion to dismiss a search warrant for recordings from an Echo owned by a suspected murderer. Amazon argues that both its users’ requests to Alexa and the response the company produces are protected under the First Amendment. The company says it should only have to turn this data over if law enforcement meets a high burden of proof.
The criminal case involves a man named James Andrew Bates. Bates lives in Bentonville, Arkansas and happens to own a few gadgets, including

The Nintendo Switch is almost out, and chances are you’ll want an extra battery pack to juice up your console on the go (in addition to a couple other accessories, like a microSD card). Fortunately, the Switch has a standard USB-C port, which makes it the most universal Nintendo power system since the Game Boy took AA batteries.
The downside is that the wide range of devices that support USB-C make the standard somewhat of a tricky beast, especially when it comes to making sure you’v

whileThe Batman has a new director. Matt Reeves, who’s best known for directing Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes has signed on to direct and produce the film in Ben Affleck’s stead. The word comes from Deadline, after word broke that he was a top choice for the role earlier this month and after a week of back and forth that almost saw him depart from the film. He’s an excellent choice for picking up an intense action film, and he m

 Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor, two early investors in Uber, are feeling “disappointed” and “frustrated” in light of Uber’s response to claims of sexual harassment at the company, the two wrote on Medium today. Earlier this week, Uber said it had hired US Attorney General Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran, partners at law firm Covington & Burling, to work… Read More

Faraday Future employees have been doing a lot of talking since we first learned about the company in late 2015. The problem with that is they only started backing it all up in January at CES, when we finally got a look at — and more importantly, a ride in — the FF91, the mass-market electric vehicle Faraday plans to build. That car now has a new test ahead of it that will take place in the public eye, because Faraday has entered the FF91 in this year’s Pikes Peak International

Battery packs are a dime a dozen these days, and a must for any gadget lover. But while the average Anker on Amazon will let you charge USB-powered gadgets like a smartphone or tablet, they aren't helpful for other types of devices.
That’s where Omnicharge’s battery packs come in. Not only can they charge your phone or tablet a number of times over, they can power anything with a standard three-prong power cord. The larger of the two packs can even wirelessly charge a smartphone plac

Facebook has added nearly 200 flags to its Profile Frames feature, letting users now attach a symbol of national identity to the corner of their profile pictures. Profile Frames came out in 2015 as a way to let users around the world pledge allegiance to their favorite sports team, and in December of last year Facebook started allowing anyone to design and submit their own photo frames. The addition of official flag frames was first reported by TechCrunch earlier today.Facebook’s photo fra

The television adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s best-selling fantasy novel American Gods finally has a release date. We’ve been eagerly waiting for news on the show, which will air April 30th on Starz.The show is written by Bryan Fuller (of Hannibal and Pushing Daisies fame) and Michael Green (who co-wrote the dark new Wolverine movie Logan). It stars Deadwood’s Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday, and The 100’s Ricky Whittle as protagonist Shadow Moon. The show will run for eight ep

Amazon’s Alexa has passed a milestone: there are now 10,000 app “skills” working with the digital assistant, according to Wired. To put that in some perspective, Alexa had about 1,000 skills last June but grew the catalog of integrations to 7,000 by the time CES rolled around in January.Apple opened up its own digital assistant to third-party developers last summer, but useful integrations have been slow to come to Siri. Google did the same with Google Assistant at the end of 2

A four-minute prologue for Ridley Scott’s next film, Alien: Covenant, hit the web last night, showing off how the film will borrow aesthetically from the original Alien, and ignore its more immediate predecessor, the critically maligned Prometheus. The prologue introduces us to the crew of its titular spaceship, and culminates with a nod to the chestburster scene in Alien.
For memory’s sake, here’s the original sequence:As my colleague Rich McCormick mentioned last night, there

Spotify just announced three new original podcasts, TechCrunch reports. The podcasts will feature discussions about musical moments on TV, daily interviews with people in the creative industry, and the life of music industry exec Chris Lighty.Showstopper, which premiered today, is hosted by The Fader’s Naomi Zeichner, who will interview music supervisors for popular television shows like Girls and Stranger Things. Unpacked will be hosted by Broad City’s music supervisor Matt FX and S

Is there a more comforting experience than sitting in your childhood living room, hypnotized by the green confetti of The Weather Channel’s doppler radar? Probably not, at least according to Jessica Brillhart, a virtual reality filmmaker at Google who tried to mimic that experience in a new video.A stormy Kenny G experience
Spotted by Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen, “Conditions at Omaha” is a three-minute VR clip that pulls together four different local weather forecasts that a

 Once again, tech companies are again finding themselves in the midst of a culture war in response to action by the Trump administration. On Wednesday, the administration rescinded guidance for transgender students in public schools, repealing a similar letter which the Obama administration had issued in May 2016 to allow those students to use school facilities that conform with their… Read More

Neanderthals died out a long time ago, but their genes may make us more susceptible to certain diseases.DNA inherited from Neanderthals affects which of our genes are turned on or off, according to a study published today in Cell. This phenomenon, called regulation of gene expression, means that traits such as height and susceptibility to diseases like schizophrenia or lupus may be affected in people with Neanderthal ancestry, say scientists from the University of Washington in Seattle.The study

 Hiatus, a New York-based startup that helps you identify (and potentially cancel) your monthly reoccurring subscriptions, has raised $1.2M in seed funding. Founded in 2015, Hiatus first connects to your bank account and identifies your paid reoccurring subscriptions, some of which you may have forgotten you’re even paying for. Each month it will notify you before an auto-payment happens,… Read More

Today, Google made major waves in the cryptography world, announcing a public collision in the SHA-1 algorithm. It’s a deathblow to what was once one of the most popular algorithms in cryptography, and a crisis for anyone still using the function. The good news is, almost no one is still using SHA-1, so you don’t need to rush out and install any patches. But today’s announcement is still a major power play from Google, with real implications for web security overall.
Like most

The first words I remember posting on the internet were on a self-made site uploaded to my local dial-up ISP's web hosting service. I have no idea if anyone ever read them, because they were a digital monolith — an attempt at writing that existed outside any real community or ecosystem, except maybe my parents and the real-world friends I showed it off to.
Today, my online writing is assimilated into a network so vast I don't even know where it stops. I can tell precisely how many people a

Samsung is taking a big step forward on both processing and LTE speeds with its next mobile system on a chip. The chip, called the Exynos 9 Series 8895, is supposed to perform 27 percent faster than its predecessor and consume 40 percent less power. It’s also Samsung’s first to support gigabit LTE, offering much faster speeds on networks that support it.
The big gains come from Samsung shifting over to a 10nm process for this chip series, allowing it to make a more efficient processo

In the summer of 2015, the tiny world of Pluto came into focus for the first time as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sped closer and closer toward the dwarf planet. During this approach, images taken by the probe revealed a diverse landscape of surface features on Pluto, including a giant heart-shaped region of icy plains and mountain ranges that stretch more than 11,000 feet high. The New Horizons mission team have since given all these unique features some of the most wonderful, nerdy nam

Good morning. It’s February 23rd, 2017. It’s been exactly four years since my favorite tech video was uploaded to YouTube and I don’t think I have been able to properly capture the relatability, authenticity, and pacifying feeling with sound in my own videos — especially a tech review. The audibility of “Booting up my old computer” is something I still learn from. Everything in the world makes noise, and consumer technology is no exception.
The video opens by

Making the rounds on various British news outlets this morning: a video of a bunch of Siberian tigers chasing down a drone and ripping it out of the sky. Wow, it’s such a good video. All the beautiful tigers look up at the sky and run around. Eventually they get the drone, and get their heart rates up in the process. Good for them. Good for me.
According to a caption on the BBC website, the tigers are being intentionally lured into exercise by a trainer who is operating the drone. That doe

Acer introduced a new air monitor today, aptly called the Acer Air Monitor. It checks on air quality in real time and indicates what it’s picking up on through its companion phone app. The monitor also includes LED lights that indicate the quality. (Those lights will turn off when it’s dark in the room.) Acer says people spend 90 percent of their time indoors, so it’s important to give them information on what they’re breathing. Typically I think outdoor air is dirtier th

The second season of the BBC’s reboot of Top Gear has a new trailer and a new premiere date: March 12th on BBC Two. Echoing a poster that was recently released for the new season, the trailer shows off some of the stunts and shenanigans in store for viewers. I’ve spoiled some in the headline, but there’s so much more that the hosts will be up to:Hitting ludicrous speed in the $2.6 million Bugatti Chiron.
Drifting the BMW M2.
Road tripping in the new Ford GT.
Attending a Soyuz r

Good news, residents of Sheboygan, Wisconsin! Lyft, the ride-hailing company not currently plagued by a sexual harassment scandal, is coming to your town — as well as 53 other cities. Most of the cities are concentrated in the Midwest, with a few on the East Coast and Southern states. It’s the company’s largest expansion to date, and brings the total number US cities served by Lyft up to 300. Last month, Lyft announced it would be launching in 100 additional markets in 2017. To