Technology news

Microsoft today released a new Windows 10 preview for PCs, with no new features. This is the latest build of the company’s upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update, which is slated for release in “early 2017” (likely to arrive next month).
Windows 10 is a service, meaning it was built in a very different way than its predecessors so it can be regularly updated with not just fixes but new features, too. While Microsoft has released many such updates, the Creative Update will be a maj

The TV adaptation of American Gods is coming to Starz next month, but anyone eager to get the story now can always pick up the book. Neil Gaiman’s best-selling fantasy novel is getting a new edition courtesy of The Folio Society, a publisher known for putting out amazing special editions of classic books.I’ve gushed about The Folio Society’s books in the past, particularly with their edition of I, Robot last year. The publisher’s editions are elegant, and come with additi

Hasbro and Harmonix Music Systems want to inject some life into music gaming with a card game called Dropmix.
It consists of an electronic Dropmix Board, Dropmix Cards, and the Dropmix app, which will be free to download on the iOS and Google Play app stores. The cards feature some of the biggest hits in pop, R&B, dance, indie, country, rock and hip-hop from around the world that players can combine in unexpected ways. The music-mixing game will have songs by Afrojack, Bruno Mars,

In March of last year, publisher Square Enix kicked off a six-episode season of content for the latest Hitman game. From the outside, it looked like an experiment in a new business model, but inside developer IO Interactive, it made complete sense.
Hitman was one of my favorite games last year, and IO recently launched the entire first season on disc for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and that provided me an excuse to talk to IO creative director Christian Elverdam about the sandbox assas

On Thursday, Egyptian and German archaeologists extracted a 26-foot (8-meter) statue in the El Matareya district of Cairo. It’s believed to depict Pharaoh Ramses II, one of Egypt’s greatest rulers.The statue, carved out of a tough rock known as quartzite, was submerged in groundwater where it was buried under the streets of a Cairo suburb. Archaeologists also recovered fragments of another statue believed to be of Ramses II’s grandson, Pharaoh Seti II, as well as an obelisk.Egy

Kong: Skull Island is opening in theaters today, but Legendary Entertainment is setting its sights on a bigger prize: the eventual clash of King Kong and Godzilla. To that end, the studio has announced the assemblage of a writers room that will author the story beats of Kong vs. Godzilla, under the direction of Pirates of the Caribbean screenwriter Terry Rossio. But this news isn’t really about one flashy mash-up.
Legendary intends to get into the “Cinematic Universe” game &mda

The literary internet is abuzz with news that Jane Austen — who died at age 41 — may have been poisoned. The evidence? Three pairs of her glasses have very strong lenses. This means she might have had cataracts. Sometimes, arsenic poisoning causes cataracts. Therefore, Jane Austen could have died from arsenic poisoning.
I’m not buying it, and not because I love Austen and don’t believe that anyone would have wanted her dead. (I happen to agree with my editor, Liz Lopatto,

GUEST: The future of search is conversational assistance. Instead of typing in keywords to get back a set of results, users will converse with software agents using natural language to specify increasingly complex tasks.
Now, truth be told, this has been “the future” for over 50 years, from the Star Trek computer to Iron Man’s Jarvis. This Apple concept video depicts a helpful conversational assistant you can use for any number of tasks, complete with bow tie. It’s from 1

 Verizon Ventures and R/GA are announcing a new program called the Verizon Media Tech Venture Studio.
Stephen Plumlee, R/GA’s global COO and managing partner of R/GA Ventures, explained that the interactive agency’s “venture studios” started out similar to other startup accelerator programs, but they’ve expanded to provide access to “financial capital… Read More

Before every episode of The Vergecast I sit down, read through a bunch of news, and take a bunch of notes. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my week, and I started thinking it might be fun to do every day on the site. So, every day this week I’m sitting down and writing some notes on the news as though I’ll be talking about it later. Are you into this? Am I into this? I don’t know. But it’s fun to do! Give me some feedback and we’ll keep mutating this in

If you’ve ever been in love, you might be familiar with the practice of mailing nice things to the object of your affection. I don’t know, maybe you’ve sent flowers or chocolates or a customized T-shirt with a photo of Jake Gyllenhaal feeding Kirsten Dunst soup on it.If you have never been in love, maybe you’re familiar with pranks.No matter which group you belong to — lovers or pranksters — Mojigram claims to have something for you. Specifically, it has a cor

The annual SXSW conference kicks off today in Austin, Texas, bringing together the worlds of technology, music, film, and gaming in a nine-day carnival of breakfast tacos and panel presentations. It’s also a time where corporate brands are able to capitalize on the crowds to raise awareness for various properties. As I discovered this morning, Star Wars fans aren’t getting left out in the cold.
Disney has opened up what’s essentially a Rogue One-themed escape room here in downt

The government isn’t doing a good job of checking in on its social media screening projects, according to a new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General. The report looks at three recent pilot programs for social media screenings of visitors to the US, including a mix of automated tools and manual screenings. The Inspector General hoped to assess whether the programs were accurate enough to continue, but found that the department had set few criteria for ho

The Securities and Exchange Commission has denied the application for the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust ETF, in a stunning defeat for its founders, the Winklevoss Twins. In an order today, the commission found that the proposed fund was too susceptible to fraud, due to the unregulated nature of Bitcoin. The result is a major setback for the fund, and a frustrating false start for the crypto-currency at large.
The ETF is essentially a common stock fund pegged to the price of Bitcoin, allowing investor

One of the best (and most crowded) talks at this year’s Game Developers Conference was a lecture by three of the directors of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Days before the game’s release, art director Satoru Takizawa, technical director Takuhiro Dohta, and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi spent 90 minutes explaining how their team reimagined one of Nintendo’s most beloved franchises.
The trio shared many fun details, like how the game began as an 8-bit prototype an

The bulk of media coverage after leaks like the recent ‘Vault 7’ release by WikiLeaks tend to focus on zero days: vulnerabilities in software the manufacturer doesn’t know about until they’re released. This focus is only natural, because the unknown tends to scare people, and scaring people gets you clicks. But according to a panel of security experts at South by Southwest, this focus on zero days is somewhat exaggerated. The panel was called Bugs in the System: Mapping

If Alexa understood your needs and anticipated your decisions, would you love it or would it annoy the crap out of you? Sophia Yeres of Huge, a Brooklyn-based digital marketing agency, presented a talk at SXSW called “The Risks of the Quantified Mind.” She spoke about the future of voice-driven interfaces, and the potential of voice-first devices, such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa, to evolve into emotionally-connected, self-prioritizing personal assistants. Since the word “

(Reuters) — California, the largest U.S. car market, plans to allow testing on public roads of self-driving vehicles without human backup drivers by the end of the year, state officials said Friday.
The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles is seeking public comment on proposed regulations for driverless testing and public use of autonomous vehicles that will no longer be required to have conventional manual controls such as steering wheels and pedals.
Current regulations require such

A little over a year ago, the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued draft regulations that would have put the kibosh on autonomous vehicles without a human driver, such as Google’s steering wheel-less prototype. Today, the agency reversed itself, putting out proposed rules that would not only allow for the testing of self-driving cars without a human driver, but also regulate the manufacture and sale of fully autonomous vehicles.But the DMV argues that it hasn’t changed its

GUEST: Watson captured the public imagination about artificial intelligence after defeating two world champions of Jeopardy in 2011 and bringing home a $1 million prize. Since then, Watson has gained new cognitive capabilities through APIs like Alchemy (for sentiment analysis), Tone Analyzer (for personality and emotional analysis), and Conversation (a chatbot builder) and has been embedded in hundreds of applications across financial services, healthcare, retail, and digital.
“Chances are

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 what it means for the larger story.
Spoilers ahead for the seventh episode of season 2, “The Seventh Man.”
Last week, The Expanse reset itself as it geared up for its next big story arc, which started to get moving this week. Mars, Earth, and the Outer Planets Alliance are all shuffling for power in the

Fantastic Contraption was one of the more creative virtual reality games that debuted last year on the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift VR headsets. Now it’s coming to the PlayStation VR in April.
I had a hands-on preview at Sony’s game headquarters in Foster City, California. And if you’re part of the Minecraft generation, you might like building contraptions that solve difficult physics problems.
In this game, you build machines that can function in the VR environment.

The cast from Mamoru Oshii’s animated Ghost in the Shell will reunite for the Japanese-language version of the live-action remake, according to Kotaku. As originally reported by the website Natalie, Akio Otsuka (Batou), Koichi Yamadera (Togusa), and Atsuko Tanaka (Major Motoko Kusanagi) will all reprise their 1995 roles.Given the remake’s controversial casting choices, the decision to have the original cast return for a dubbed version may appease fans looking for something truer to t

I barely keep myself alive, let alone plants. Who has time to care for another living thing? Click & Grow’s Wall Farm Mini helped me not only grow a garden but also actually sustain one. With it, I created life. And salad.
What is it?
Click & Grow has a line of products designed to automate gardening. We reviewed its herb garden before, which sits on a countertop. But the company’s new Wall Farm products are bigger, standalone gardens that can grow multiple plants at once. I

How do you put rearview mirrors on a bike? It’s a tougher question than you’d think. The traditional solution of mounting them on the handlebars works for seeing to the sides of your bike, but unlike cars, there’s no ceiling to mount a mirror on for seeing directly behind you.
A startup called Smart Bike has an idea to solve this problem using a camera and a handlebar-mounted smartphone. Its first product, a camera called Hexagon, connects to a smartphone app and functions as a

WhatsApp recently introduced a very Snapchat-esque Status feature, complete with its own tab on the app’s main screen. In doing so, WhatsApp also removed the plain-old text statuses, much to the dismay of us old farts who can’t be bothered with the full screen bonanza of the new design. Fret no more. As spotted by Android Police, WhatsApp has brought the text status back into the picture in its latest Android beta. As before, it can be found under your profile settings, li

Judging from the first full trailer for Atomic Blonde, the single-take brawls seen in The Raid, Daredevil, and John Wick have become a staple in Hollywood actioners. Here, we meet MI6 operative Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) literally moments before she takes on a group of thugs in a bruising stairwell fight that frankly looks like it hurt to film. And all that’s just in the first minute.
Atomic Blonde, directed by John Wick co-director David Leitch, is a spy thriller set right at th

Oculus today is receiving an update to its Gear VR platform that will allow users to live stream their virtual reality gaming sessions straight onto Facebook. Much like hitting a button on the Facebook app on your smartphone to go live, the update will now offer “Livestream to Facebook” as an option on the Universal Menu when you’re in VR.
The update is rolling out today to users outside the United States, though Oculus says support will arrive stateside “soon.” Ocu

If you’ve been waiting for Avatar 2 to hit theaters next year, keep holding your breath. James Cameron told The Toronto Star that “2018 is not happening,” for the kickoff to his growing science fiction series.
Speaking to the paper, Cameron noted that the first film took a long time to come together, and that the additional sequels are what he described as an “epic undertaking,” that will likely consume the next eight years of his life.
Two sequels have ballooned to

Since the Tesla Model 3 was unveiled nearly a year ago, we haven’t seen terribly much of it. Last month we heard that Tesla was retooling its factory so production can start later this year, but we’re still a long way from being able to head to a Tesla dealer and take one for a spin.
So, for now, we’ll just have to make do with glimpses of Tesla prototypes driving down the street. This video, by Tesla customizing shop Unplugged Performance, was taken next to the SpaceX Hyperloo

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving spinoff from Google, is formally asking a judge to block Uber from operating its autonomous vehicles, according to new documents filed in Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber. The lawsuit, which was filed last month, alleges that Uber stole key elements of its self-driving car technology from Google. Uber has called the accusations “baseless.”
Today in federal court, Waymo filed the sworn testimony of Gary Brown, a forensic security engineer with Go

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn are kicking off a new series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why,

Last year, the Amazon-owned Twitch acquired Curse – a popular, gamer-focused chat application – for an unspecified sum. Now we know what it intends to do with it, as it’s relaunched the software as the Twitch Desktop App. At first glance, the Twitch Desktop App is faithful to its origins. It has retained many of the features that were popular with Curse users – like screen sharing, voice and video calling, and the ability to launch community servers. But this has been en

Writer-director Genndy Tartakovsky promises the new season of Samurai Jack is the last one. His stylish animated series, about a feudal Japanese samurai stuck in a dystopian far future launched in 2001, and ran for four seasons on Cartoon Network. But it wrapped up in 2004 with no real conclusion. Jack was still stuck far from his own time, fighting the shape-changing, world-conquering demon Aku.
Tartakovsky had a busy career in animation before Samurai Jack: he was one of the original directors