Technology news

Yesterday, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to allege that President Barack Obama had ordered a wiretap on Trump Tower during the final weeks of the 2016 Presidential Campaign. This weekend, FBI director James Comey asked the Justice Department to publicly rebuke those allegations, arguing that they are “false and must be corrected”.Citing “senior American officials”, The New York Times reported today that Comey has been working this weekend to convince the Justice

When Facebook rolled out a wider selection of reaction buttons a year ago, the was one button conspicuously missing: a dislike button. Facebook is now testing out a thumbs down reaction, but not for posts. Rather, it’s a feature in Facebook Messenger.TechCrunch is reporting that the company is testing a new reactions feature in Messenger, which would allow users to add reaction emojis next to text in conversations. Users would do this by clicking on a button next to text, which would bring

If you’re friends with lots of Star Wars fans on Facebook or Instagram, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen some of Brian Kesinger’s artwork blending George Lucas’s story with Calvin & Hobbes. We fell in love with his art when we first came across it last year. Since then he’s been hard at work creating more of the images.On his Facebook and Etsy pages, Kesinger has been posting quite a lot of artwork: sketches, photographs and other franchise mashups i

Scientists have a discovered a way to fold origami — without physically touching it. By shining different colors of light on a sheet of Shrinky Dink plastic, researchers remotely bent it into various 3D shapes, according to a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances.The key discovery was figuring out how to fold the plastic in a specific order. “As anyone who has done origami — or folded their laundry — can tell you, the order in which you make the folds can

Leah Reich was one of the first internet advice columnists. Her column "Ask Leah" ran on IGN, where she gave advice to gamers for two and a half years. During the day, Leah is Slack’s user researcher, but her views here do not represent her employer. How to be Human runs every other Sunday. You can write to her at [email protected] and read more How to be Human here.
Dear Leah,
I was never the best at writing a good beginning for an email, and this sentence only serves to demonstrate th

Yesterday, The Center for Investigative Reporting published a report that revealed that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has launched an investigation into hundreds of Marines following the discovery of a secret Facebook group that was used to spread naked pictures of service women.The report, authored by Thomas Brennan, founder of a non-profit news organization called The War Horse, revealed that pictures of the service women were shared on a private Facebook group called Marines

Does It Hold Up is a chance to re-experience childhood favorites of books, movies, TV shows, video games, and other cultural phenomenon decades later. Have they gotten better like a fine wine, or are we drinking cork?A cornerstone of any pre-teen’s life between 1998 to 2007 was the Disney Channel original movie. If you grew up during that time you do not need a refresher on why movies like Halloweentown or Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century were popular — they were your main option for

Tesla launched a video contest for fans of the brand, with the opportunity for their work to be promoted by the company, and a chance to attend a product launch. While the contest has a heartwarming origin, it’s worth examining the contest’s rules and to think twice before hitting the Submit button.On March 1st, a father passed along a letter from his daughter to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The letter is sweet: the fifth grader suggested that because Tesla doesn’t put together its own

Every year a ton of phones come out with similar features and designs. But every once in a while, one comes out of nowhere that stands out for a great idea, unique style, or utter extravagance. ProTruly’s Darling smartphone seems to hit all three in the best and worst ways.
The Darling appears to be the first smartphone with a built-in 360-degree camera, allowing it to take photos and record video in all directions at once. The phone seems to let you preview those recordings as strange glo

(Reuters) – A vest designed to shield astronauts from deadly solar particles in deep space is set for trials on a lunar mission ready for deployment on any manned mission to Mars, its Israeli developers said.
The AstroRad Radiation Shield has been devised by Tel Aviv-based StemRad, which has already produced and marketed a belt to protect rescue workers from harmful gamma ray radiation emitted in nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima.
The vest will protect vital human tissue,

Despite big releases in the likes of Resident Evil 7 and Dirt Rally VR, it’s been an undeniably quiet start to the year for PlayStation VR (PSVR), but Sony is promising that won’t last long.
The headset maker said this week that more than 220 software titles and experiences are development for the device, and more than 100 of those will be released this year. It’s not clear if that includes the apps already launched in January and February, though we’d assume it does.
Tha

GUEST: The mass adoption of the radio changed American homes forever. In 1930, more than 40 percent of American households owned a radio; a decade later, 83 percent owned at least one. The radio brought news, entertainment, music, sports, politics (think Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats), and advertisements to millions of Americans. It was the first time that ordinary people had access to live, broadcasted information from the ease and comfort of their living rooms.
Before

Game developers are doing their part to resist “oppressive authoritarianism” in all of its forms through an event called Resist Jam.
The jam runs from March 3 to March 11, and it included a series of talks and workshops leading up to the jam during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. More than 750 were signed up to participate.
The organizers of the event wrote, “The global political climate grows increasingly terrifying by the day. We want to empower people to res

GUEST: Criticism of Uber continues to pile up.
This week, we heard the car service was using secret software to evade government regulators and a video showed its chief executive in a verbal altercation with one of the company’s drivers. Previously, the company’s self-driving cars raised safety concerns in San Francisco when, because of faulty and incomplete technology, they reportedly barreled through red lights and crossed over bike lanes. Uber has recently been accused of sex

(Reuters) – A top U.S. Federal Reserve official on Friday raised caution about central banks issuing digital currencies as they are vulnerable to cyber attacks and criminal activities along with privacy issues that still need to be addressed.
“A digital currency issued by a central bank would be a global target for cyber attacks, cyber counterfeiting, and cyber theft,” Fed Governor Jerome Powell said in prepared remarks at a conference held at the Yale Law School on payment tec

Whew, what a week. Can we sleep now?
With each passing year, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) becomes more and more important to the VR industry, and 2017’s iteration was no different. There have been a frankly ridiculous amount of announcements over the past six days and we wouldn’t blame you if you’d missed a few of them.
So we’ve gathered what we’d consider to be the nine biggest stories of the show, representing the need-to-know information. If you’ve