Technology news

Since Sesame Street launched in 1969, it’s been steadily expanding its educational agenda. The earliest episodes were simple, with a focus on helping young viewers get an early start on learning letters, numbers, shapes, and basic vocabulary words. Over the past four decades plus, the team behind the show has progressively gotten more ambitious about addressing social issues as well, preparing kids to interact with one another on the playground and in school. Sesame Street’s latest i

Developer Gabriel O'Flaherty-Chan’s latest hack makes running Doom on an Apple Watch look tame, by turning an Apple Watch into a mostly-functional Game Boy emulator (as spotted by Ars Technica).The emulator, known as Giovanni (named after the infamous Team Rocket villain from the Pokémon game), is built out of an existing iOS emulator called Gambatte. But O'Flaherty-Chan has managed to use that as a starting point and build out the watchOS version from there, although he notes that

Much has been said about the casting problems in Iron Fist, a show centered around the trope of a Western white man adapting the practices of a mystical Eastern society. Danny Rand, in keeping true to the character’s original appearance, is played by blonde-haired, blue-eyed Finn Jones.But in casting the show’s lead, Marvel did consider other actors, including Lewis Tan. The half-Chinese actor and son of award-winning martial artist and stunt coordinator Philip Tan was eventually cas

The London Philharmonic Orchestra is an incredibly respected musical group, known around the world for both its renditions of classical music and for its work in providing the instrumentation for numerous film scores, including Lawrence of Arabia, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Jesus Christ Superstar.
But all of that work pales in comparison to the album artwork for the London Phiharmonic’s video game music compilations, The Greatest Video Game Music and the sequel, the aptly named The

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

In theory, it was the perfect setup: an anonymous Twitter account on a prepaid SIM card, bought with cash. With no credit card or other identifiable info tied to the account, there should have been no way to trace tweets back to a human.
But on Friday, after taking all those precautions, a man named John Rivello was arrested for sending seizure-inducing tweets to Newsweek journalist Kurt Eichenwald. The arrest came three months and a day after the initial incident, and a newly unsealed complaint

Drake’s latest project More Life was streamed 89.9 million times in its first 24 hours on Apple Music, breaking the single-day album streams record for every music service, Apple tells The Verge. Apple Music far outpaced Spotify, which streamed the album 61.3 million times in its first day, a record for the service.
More Life also helped set records on Beats 1, as Saturday’s episode of OVO Sound Radio was the biggest Beats 1 show to date. Outpacing Spotify by nearly 30 million stream

What’s protecting us from a future where we have to share our genetic information with our job? Not much, at least legally. A House committee has approved HR 1313, a bill that would let companies make employees get genetic testing and share that information with their employer — or pay thousands of dollars as a penalty.Right now, this isn’t allowed because of the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA). The new bill — sponsored by Virginia Foxx, a Republican con

Biometric authentication is moving from phones to laptops and onward to... public bathrooms. Chinese authorities in Beijing are now combating a toilet paper stealing epidemic by locking the supplies away behind a dispenser powered by facial recognition software, according to a report from The New York Times.TP is not free
The unorthodox method ensures that the public bathroom at the Temple of Heaven Park disposes only a small amount of paper — approximately two feet in length — for e

Drake’s newest release, More Life, has only been out since Saturday and it’s already broken two Spotify records. On its first full day of availability, More Life was streamed 61,302,082 times, surpassing Ed Sheeran’s Divide for first-day album streams. Drake also broke the record on Sunday for single-day artist streams, with 76,355,041 streams.
Sheeran’s album held the record for less than a month, but his dethroning is not exactly surprising. Drake was Spotify’s mo

Internet providers are continuing to argue that they should be free to share and sell your web browsing history without permission because it isn’t “sensitive information.”
The latest group to make that argument is the CTIA, an industry association that represents AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, among others.
In a filing with the FCC last week, the CTIA wrote that “web browsing and app usage history are not ‘sensitive information,’” a claim the

Zapier doesn’t believe in relocation. In fact, it’s trying to incentivize current employees to de-locate by offering them $10,000 to leave. The Bay Area, that is, not the company. Zapier CEO Wade Foster says the offer is an experimental one. After moving to the Bay Area five years ago, Foster is aware of all the benefits of living there: great weather, beaches, wine country, skiing, and a location that puts you in the heart of tech-central. These perks don’t come for free. In

When I was a kid, a four-door car was considered a grocery-getter. Now, they’re running 10-second quarter-miles. Tesla’s Model S P100D is a fast car. It’s fast enough, in fact, to have run a 10.726-second quarter mile, the fastest of any stock production electric car — or any four-door sedan for that matter. Well, it was the fastest. A Drag Times video shows a P100D running a 10.723 recently, and setting a new record. The video shows two P100D’s, actually: one slig

This past Saturday Drake released More Life, a 22-track collection of songs that he’s calling a “playlist.” Reviews are already out, and music writers seem to have accepted this term quickly and without any caveats. But what does “playlist” mean in this context, and is it really any different from an album?Lizzie: Micah, I’m having some trouble understanding Drake’s (or Apple’s) insistence on calling this thing a “debut playlist.” From

A London man died last December after trying to charge his iPhone in the bath. Police wrapped up an inquest into the death recently. Police constable Craig Pattinson told the inquest that Richard Bull, 32, ran an extension cable from the hallway into the bathroom and was a little careless with the position: The extension cable was on the floor and it appeared as though he had his phone charger on his chest and the part between the phone charger and the cable had made contact with the

In the rush for faster delivery times in online marketplaces, eBay just stuck its hand up to remind everyone it can ship things fast, too. The company is rolling out a new feature called “Guaranteed Delivery” through which it will, as the name suggests, guarantee delivery for eligible items in three days or less. If the product isn’t delivered by the deadline, the buyer gets a refund. If it was shipped for free, a $5 coupon. Why is eBay making such an effort to point

What’s the point of having a voice assistant if you can’t ask it to charge your customers’ credit cards? A software engineer at Square understands our needs and dedicated himself to figuring out how to get the company’s cardless reader to activate through Google Home voice commands. The result is a Google Home that activates the Square Contactless Reader, which then accepts an Apple Pay transaction for the spoken amount.
To get it to work, the engineer, Pierre-Yves Ricau,

Microsoft will soon allow participants in the Xbox Insider program to choose a custom image for their gamer pic. No longer will you be limited to an avatar or game-related snapshot. That’s among the changes and new features outlined in a blog post from Major Nelson. Users will be able to choose a custom gamer pic directly from the console, a Windows 10 PC, or a smartphone, so you’ll have plenty of avenues for picking the image you want.However, Microsoft is already warning that it&rs

It’s easy to read Like Me as a fatalistic commentary on social media. Kiya, the film’s star, is a teenage YouTuber who makes the antics of personalities like PewDiePie seem quaint. In the film’s first 15 minutes, she holds a convenience store clerk at gunpoint just for the pleasure of recording his meltdown and posting it online.But Kiya — who seems to have an obsession with older men, and a dark need for validation — is speaking to an audience. As her videos hit th

Microsoft appears to have quietly released a new piece of migration software that makes it easier to switch from Mac to Surface devices. The Mac to Surface Assistant, as it’s aptly called, is pretty straightforward: you download it from here, and the software walks you through transferring documents, photos, and media files into a zip file on your desktop that you can then transfer to another device. The company didn’t formally announce it, but Microsoft watchers and Windows sites ha

 There are still a lot of unknowns in the medical world when it comes to pregnancy – including what factors lead to carrying a healthy fetus to term. That’s why WebMD and Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) have launched a new investigative study via WebMD’s newly redesigned pregnancy app and is teaming up with Apple’s ResearchKit to recruit participants to… Read More

Perhaps the most genius part of Amazon is its one-click buy feature. No doubt this has earned it a fair wedge of cash, as if you see something you want, it can be yours without any real depth or soul-searching. Humans are naturally impulsive creatures, and frictionless buying takes advantage of that aspect of our psyche. And now, the feature has escaped the confines of the web, and is making its way to traditional print and television advertising. And it’s all thanks to ZapBuy.

Not long after introducing Stories to Instagram, the company added a live streaming feature akin to the one already available on Facebook. Problem is, once a livestream finished, it was gone forever. Now Instagram lets you streamers save their videos. Once a broadcast has ended, simply click on the Save button on the upper-right corner of the app. The video will still disappear from Instagram itself, but it will be saved onto your camera roll – though there’s nothing stopping y

AT&T already gifted a free year of HBO to early subscribers of its DirecTV Now streaming TV service. But now the company is leveraging the premium network in another way: to entice consumers considering DirecTV Now into picking one of the more expensive channel packages. Today AT&T announced that customers on the Go Big ($60 per month) or Gotta Have It ($70) channel tiers will receive a free year of HBO at no extra cost. The credit will be applied within three bill cycles, according to t

You can count on Dutch police to train eagles to snipe down drones from the sky, but don’t let them buy any software for you. Following a horrific administrative fail, Dutch court has ruled that local police won’t be receiving any cash back from Microsoft after mistakingly purchasing too many licenses for its Office package. Back in 2008, a law enforcement employee accidentally ordered 13,656 licenses for a special home-working edition of MS Office. While inaccurate,

An American version of Top Gear is about to ride again. BBC America announced today that it has greenlit a new version of the show called Top Gear America. The show will be hosted by actor William Fichtner (The Dark Knight, Contact, Armageddon), professional drag racer Antron Brown, and British automotive journalist Tom Ford. Eight one-hour episodes will air on BBC America sometime later this year, according to the network.
BBC America’s announcement is light on details, but it sounds like

I’ve blogged about how I see leadership in the developing (developed now) economies of China and India, and the newer innovation models of emerging economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, but not quite in the way in which I see them now. The more I think about it, we have three major fintech models, each with their own unique blend of thinking. The mainstream fintech discussion here in Europe and America is how to reboot the antiquated banking system. Due to the implementation of technologies fr

When Instagram launched its live video streaming feature late last year, it was with a noticeable omission: the ability to save broadcasts once they were concluded, which the company has added to the app today.
It’s a move that puts Instagram Live on par with both Twitter’s Periscope and parent company Facebook’s Live, both of which have allowed users to save videos. When Instagram Live launched, Instagram’s head of product Kevin Weil defended the omission as intentional

Google is adding some handy features to Maps that’ll make it easier to remember where you left your car.
In the app’s latest beta on Android, you’re able to tap on the little blue dot that represents you to pull up the option to leave a parking reminder. Doing so will open a screen that lets you enter notes and capture photos to help you remember the specific spot your car is in — helpful for huge lots or multi-story garages. The app also lets you include how much time is

A new study confirms what you already suspect: Some people will believe anything if the right person shares it on Facebook. The Media Insight study, funded by the American Press Institute and AP-NORC, interviewed a sample of 1,489 adults on AP-NORC’s survey panel in the period between November and December last year. Media Insight created a series of fake social media posts sharing two identical articles from different sources — one article being published by the Associated Pre

 SirionLabs, a startup providing vendor management software to enterprises, is adding a U.S. headquarters to its footprint. The company was initially founded in India and has raised $16.95 million from Sequoia Capital India, Canopy Ventures and Qualgro VC to extract data from contracts to ensure transparency and accountability. The establishment of a U.S. presence represents a strategic… Read More

Google Maps just added a small but useful update: It can now save where you parked. As first spotted by Ars Technica, the latest Android app version (9.49) shows a new “save your parking option” when you tap on your blue location dot. Tap on this and Google will save your rough location (you can enter the exact location too), and give you the option to write notes, add photos, or even set a timer. That last option is particularly useful if you’re parked at a meter and need to