Technology news

A couple of years ago we told you about a future project from startup SpaceVR that would send virtual reality cameras into orbit in order bring back immersive space video to VR users on Earth. 
On Friday, I held that future in my very hands, and it felt like most space bound objects — surprisingly clunky, but packed with all the mystery and promise of the universe.
SEE ALSO: This is probably the only way you'll ever get to visit the Space Station, but it's pretty damn good
During a me

Walmart is buying up a lot of brands that don't really feel like Walmart. 
The big box store is reportedly about to close a deal to buy Bonobos, the men's e-commerce brandRecode reported news of the impending acquisition on Friday. Exactly how much Bonobos will go for hasn't been confirmed yet. 
The deal would come one month after Walmart bought ModCloth, the quirky women's online retailer. That acquisition came with a host of controversy, since ModCloth was once seen in stark oppositi

News isn't the only thing that's sometimes fake on Facebook.
The social network said Friday it has shut down a massive spam operation that generated thousands of "inauthentic likes" on publisher pages.
SEE ALSO: Facebook is cracking down on hoaxes in your News Feed
The announcement comes days after the company claimed to have deleted 30,000 fraudulent accounts in France ahead of the country's presidential election.
The scam targeted in the more recent crackdown operated at a more sophisticated l

Today's hopefully unnecessary PSA: do not answer the door for an alligator.
Police in Sarasota County, Florida, shared photos Wednesday of a rogue alligator that, while wandering a neighborhood, trudged right up to the front door of a house. It later tried its luck at the garage door, too, but no one let it in. Imagine!
SEE ALSO: Fisherman finds a terrifying surprise at the end of his line
We do not think it was invited. Perhaps it had the wrong address."Let this be a reminder that not all repti

What's better than walking out of Starbucks with a cup of your preferred caffeinated beverage just the way you like it?
How about a cute caricature of yourself drawn on your cup?
SEE ALSO: Starbucks could be jumping onto the unicorn train with a new drink
Jason Tocewicz is not your typical Starbucks barista. He's become something of a local superstar in Toronto, CBC News reports. 
Within 10-30 seconds after taking a customer's order down, he's already drawn caricatures of them on their cups

REVIEW: If you care about audio, you probably already have headphones that you love. But if you want something to use with gaming, you may also find yourself shopping for a headset so that you can communicate with your friends in Overwatch or Counter-Strike. But the Modmic from Antlion wants to ensure you never have to give up your awesome headphones even during online gaming sessions.
The Modmic 5 is a $70 adjustable 3.5mm microphone that you can attach to almost any pair of headphones tha

On April 15 — the day tax filings are due — thousands of Americans across the country took to the streets to demand that President Donald Trump release his tax returns. 
As a reminder, Trump still hasn't released his tax returns, unlike every other American president and presidential candidate since Richard Nixon. 
Of course, the protesters had some pretty good signs: Orlando Tax march is hopping! #resist #impeachTrumpnow #TaxMarch #taxday pic.twitter.com/Cv0FdgwRgS
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A conspiracy theory about whether a chemical weapons attack was actually perpetrated by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad started making the rounds shortly after that tragic incident shocked the world. 
Surprise, surprise, now we know Russian social media posts fueled that conspiracy, according to ABC.
SEE ALSO: Trump remembers what cake he ate but not what country he bombed and help us somebody please
The conspiracy started with a pro-Assad website in Lebanon.
Al-Masdar News published a sto

Easter Sunday is just hours away, and since it's 2017, and we're apparently living in the future, Microsoft has unveiled the first ever augmented reality Easter Egg hunt. 
The game was unveiled this weekend in Los Angeles at the VRLA conference where Microsoft and a team of AR developers allowed me to enter a surrealist forest construct where holographic eggs could be found using the HoloLens headset. 
SEE ALSO: 7 Silicon Valley CEOs weigh in on Microsoft and the HoloLens
While the res

Viewers with an appetite for quality television should hope that a Hollywood feud never erupts between writer/producer/director Tim Minear and his frequent collaborator Ryan Murphy. Between six seasons and counting of American Horror Story and the current season of Feud: Bette and Joan, they’ve turned out some of the most riveting and provocative TV content of recent years.
An executive producer on Feud, Minear – a veteran of an enviable assortment of beloved series including The X-F

 Altra’s Torin IQ were inevitable. Sensors integrated into articles of clothing have long been acknowledged to be the next step in wearable tech, and the Utah-based footwear maker just happened to beat most of its competition to the finish line with a pair of running shoes that bake tracking directly into the sole. But unlike the scads of smart clothing that’s almost certainly on… Read More

While we got the first trailer for Battlefront II today at Star Wars Celebration, EA Games dropped another bit of news: Christie Golden’s previously announced novel Inferno Squad is a tie-in for the game.
In the trailer, we see the Imperial special forces unit Inferno Squadron in action, taking on the Rebellion after the destruction of the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, but Golden’s novel will take place years before the game. Lucasfilm / Del ReySet in the aftermath of Rogu

Warren Beatty knows that this year's Best Picture mishap at the Oscars was the biggest television moment of the year. No, the decade. No, the century.
And he clarified a few things on Friday's Graham Norton Show. For one thing, he did not throw Faye Dunaway under the bus by making her read the erroneous card — she was meant to announce the winner all along. 
And, believe it or not, the La La Land vsMoonlight debacle wasn't the only thing people talked about at the afterparties. Accor

GUEST: India is the fastest growing e-commerce market in the world, according to a report published by Forrester. The same report claims the online retail market in India is poised to reach $64 billion by 2021, with a 31.2 percent compound annual growth rate over five years. In the Asia Pacific region, mobile commerce is expected to account for 78.1 percent of online sales in 2021, amounting to $1.1 trillion.
Considering that mobile will be the predominant driver for online commerce, the future

Star Wars: Battlefront II's creative director confirmed something we'd been hoping for in an interview before today's announcement: there's no season pass for the game this time around. 
Assuming things stay that way — and there's kinda-maybe-possibly a chance that they won't, as you'll soon read — it suggests that Star Wars: Battlefront II is coming together with an eye toward keeping the community whole long after the game is released.
That was a big problem with the first Bat

Anyone can be a hero in the Star Wars universe.
If there's an overriding philosophy behind Battlefront II, it's that. From the "untold soldier's story" in the story mode to the new ways the game lets you level up your profile, the idea is to create opportunities for every player to feel like a star — at least some of the time.
SEE ALSO: The first 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' poster will take your breath away
"You have many, many, many parts that, in my opinion, make up a Star Wars story. You

You know how, whenever a highly-anticipated new trailer or promo comes out, people scour it for Easter eggs? Those small, hidden, and usually fan service-y morsels of information? You know what we're talking about.
Anyway, those are fine, but regular Easter eggs — like, literal eggs — are better. So we put a bunch of them in photos from Game of Thrones. See if you can find them! Bet you can.
SEE ALSO: Now you can rant about 'Game of Thrones' with this new tweetstorm app
What, were yo

We already had a face thanks to the leaked trailer; now we have a name, a story, and — most importantly — a release date: Nov. 17. 
As for the rest of it: the hero(?) of our new Star Wars adventure is Iden Versio, who leads the Imperial special forces unit known as Inferno Squad. This elite unit — which specializes in both ground and space battles — will also be the subject of a book in summer 2017.
SEE ALSO: 4 fascinating details after a closer look at the 'Star Wa

When Star Wars: Battlefront was released two years ago, it received a lot of praise for the way in which it faithfully recreated props, vehicles, and worlds from the original film trilogy, but it took a hit when it came to the lack of a single-player campaign. With the sequel, EA hopes to change that, and this morning it offered a glimpse at what players can expect when Battlefront II arrives on November 17th. The single-player mode certainly looks like it will be heavy on narrative and world-bu

The latest app to delete? Snapchat. 
Snapchat users in India have been deleting the app since learning about a comment allegedly made by Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel in 2015. 
“This app is only for rich people,” Spiegel allegedly said at the time, during discussions about Snapchat's overseas growth. “I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.”
The comments came to light after former employee Anthony Pompliano filed a lawsuit in January

It’s time to head back to a galaxy far, far away. Electronic Arts and developers DICE, Criterion, and Motive revealed Star Wars: Battlefront II at the Celebration event for fans in Florida today. The game launches on November 17.
It was one of the poorly kept secrets of the week, as the Battlefront II trailer leaked a few days ago. EA followed up the leak with a release of a 30-second spot, teasing a longer trailer. And now, EA executives have described the game and released a full trailer

Burners, furries, book lovers, bots, cuties, pizza lovers — there's a place for everyone in the federated Mastodon universe.
And if there isn't yet, there soon will be. 
SEE ALSO: Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon.
The distributed social network Mastodon burst into the popular consciousness last week, and is expanding at a rapid clip. There are over 216,000 users at the time of this writing, along with 684 instances being tracked — up from 649 just earlie

Earlier this week a teaser trailer for the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront II leaked online, but here at Star Wars Celebration EA has revealed the real thing — and it includes quite a bit more than the leaked version. The centerpiece of the trailer is the single-player campaign, which focuses on an elite TIE Fighter pilot who is spurred to vengeance against the Rebellion after she sees the second Death Star blown to smithereens while on the forest moon of Endor.
It appears to be a darker t

If you own a broke down iPad 4, things are looking up for you.  
According to an internal memo obtained by 9to5Mac, Apple's been telling repair staff at Apple Stores and authorized service providers that fourth-generation iPads brought in for servicing may be swapped out with an iPad Air 2.
SEE ALSO: iPad 2017 review: $329 gets you a new iPad. We done?
Translation: Stock for the iPad 4, which came out in 2012, is running out, and the parts needed to repair broken iPad 4s are low as well. So

Over the next few years, NASA plans to get back to launching its own rockets again, with two deep-space missions that will take new hardware and people in the vicinity of the Moon. Those launches are tentatively scheduled for 2018 and 2021, but most likely they won’t get off the ground on time, thanks to high costs and technical challenges. That’s the conclusion of a new report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General.
The two inaugural missions are part of NASA’s long-ter

April the giraffe's much-anticipated new calf is only a few hours old, but it's already very busy doing fun activities. Standing and walking, for example.
As is to be expected, the baby was quite wobbly at first. In fact, its first attempts at standing up went extremely — albeit adorably — awry.
SEE ALSO: April the giraffe is raking in the cash while the world watches#AprilTheGiraffe's new baby tries to stand up and faceplantspic.twitter.com/8QPJpHtAnE
— likelyalright (@likely

Just in time for the rise in global military tensions, Russian officials have released video that's sure to calm fears all around: a death dealing humanoid robot that shoots handguns. 
SEE ALSO: Bizarre Boston Dynamics robot moves like a world-class athlete
Posted to Twitter on Friday by Russia's deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, the video shows the country's space robot FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research) accurately shooting twin pistols in a scene chillingly simi

ANALYSIS: “Drawing on your phone or computer can be slow and difficult — so we created AutoDraw, a new web-based tool that pairs machine learning with drawings created by talented artists to help you draw,” wrote Google Creative Lab’s “creative technologist,” Dan Motzenbecker, earlier this week.
AutoDraw is one of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) experiments, working across platforms to let anyone, irrespective of their artistic

There are several huge awards in the speculative-fiction community: science fiction has the Hugos and Nebulas, and fantasy literature has the World Fantasy Award. The WFAs have been handed out at the World Fantasy Convention since 1975, but this year, there’ll be a big change. From its inception in 1975, the award has been a bust of horror author H.P. Lovecraft, designed by cartoonist Gahan Wilson. But this year, the award has been replaced in favor of a design featuring a twisted tree.
Lo

c. 1986"Little by little, and you end up with a hooligan. Tolerance of drinking is dangerous. There is but a step from drinking to crime."Image: Unknown artist/alcohol by fuel publishingFrom the 1960s through the 1980s, artists throughout the Soviet Union designed propaganda posters to warn the public of the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption.With striking, colorful graphics and stark metaphors, the posters cast alcoholism as a snake choking the life from vivacious young men, a bottle as a

During today’s Star Wars Rebels panel at Star Wars Celebration, the show’s creator, Dave Filoni announced that the will be coming to an end at the end of its fourth season, but dropped an interesting tidbit: there will be another character transplanted from the Expanded Universe, one who will be voiced by veteran Star Wars actor Warwick Davis.During last year’s Star Wars Celebration in London, Filoni announced to great fanfare that Grand Admiral Thrawn would be joining the show

After months of anticipation and daily leaks, Samsung's Galaxy S8 and S8+ finally arrive on April 21. 
The S8's got arguably the most beautiful screen ever put into a phone, packed into a sleek, elegant glass and metal design that's the result of years of refinement. But these things didn't just happen overnight.
SEE ALSO: Galaxy S8 vs. iPhone 7 drop test has a surprising winner
It's hard to believe it, but it's been seven years since Samsung launched its first Galaxy S. 
Much has cha

This will be a day long remembered: it marked the end of the Rebellion. Sort of. 
Lucasfilm announced here at its Star Wars Celebration event that its only current TV show — the animated series Star Wars Rebels — will come to a close at the end of  season 4.
SEE ALSO: Why Rose should be your new favorite Star Wars character
Over the final 15 episodes, the story of the crew of the Ghost, who gets pulled into the wider rebellion, will reach a conclusion that was apparently al

During the Star Wars Rebels panel at Star Wars Celebration in Orlando Florida, show creator Dave Filoni announced that the show would be coming to an end at the end of the upcoming fourth season.During the panel, Filoni revealed that the show would come to an end at the end of the coming season. “Seeing the evolution of this family, [and] these kids, and watching them get older, as a creator of a story I think of these things. I think about where we are going, and what the characters need

I have a rather complicated home network. Its usage has skyrocketed in recent years, as the kids are always on Wi-Fi and somebody is always watching over-the-top services like Netflix while I play networked console or PC games. The number of devices we use that connect to the Internet has also gone up.
Fortunately, there are enough Netgear products to solve my challenges. If you’re a gamer, you might want to pay attention because it isn’t easy to guarantee great gaming connectivity i

Last weekend I watched Eight Days a Week, Ron Howard's documentary about The Beatles' touring years. It's a really enjoyable film with some great performance footage (turns out The Beatles were very good musicians), but what I really loved about it was the insight into ’60s culture on the periphery of it all.
The film was basically supplemental viewing for me, since I'm also watching through Man Men for the first time right now. In the spot I'm at — the middle of season five —

Celebrities often buy food for the people waiting in line to see them — that's nothing new. But Harry Styles went above and beyond: he sent line-dwellers queued for Saturday Night Live some big plates of sliced kiwi.
And, no, it's not just because kiwi is delicious (although it is). Styles, who is the musical guest on this week's SNL, is expected to perform "Kiwi" on the broadcast. And, now, fans are even more sure.
SEE ALSO: We finally have a tracklist and release date for Harry Styles' d

New software updates are great for your phone — they patch security holes and bugs and add new features — except when they break a core feature, like your phone's fingerprint sensor.
According to multiple reports on Google's Pixel and Nexus product forums, the latest Android 7.1.2 Nougat update cripples the fingerprint sensor on the Pixel/Pixel XL and Nexus 5X/Nexus 6P, rendering them useless.
SEE ALSO: 7 features to look forward to in Android O
Users on both phone forums are reporti

Another Uber service bites the dust. 
Uber will shut down its current version of UberRush, the logistics and courier delivery service it offered to businesses, Quartz reported Friday. 
The lesser-known Uber delivery service allowed restaurants and some other businesses to power their own deliveries. But as the popularity of UberEats, which allowed customers to order food directly through Uber grew, drivers who could have been picking up passengers were busy transporting meals through U

Uber will eliminate its use of UberRush for restaurants as a logistics and courier delivery service, Quartz reported Friday. 
The lesser-known Uber delivery service allowed restaurants and some other businesses to power their own deliveries. But as the popularity of UberEats, which allowed customers to order food directly through Uber grew, drivers who could have been picking up passengers were busy transporting meals through UberRush and UberEats. That led to surge pricing for UberX &mdash

You’re working on a project and you’ve got dozens of files in varying formats with different, sometimes conflicting data. With DeltaWalker 2 Pro, you’ll have the ultimate platform for comparing, editing, synchronizing and merging all that info into a cohesive whole. And right now you can unleash all of DeltaWalker’s powers on your workspace for just $29.95, 50 percent off its regular price, from TNW Deals. DeltaWalker is particularly useful to those in heavily detailed f

Apple customers who bring their fourth generation iPad in for servicing at Apple Stores and authorized service providers might soon get their unit replaced with an iPad Air 2, according to 9to5Mac.The fourth generation iPad was originally released in 2012 and replaced with the iPad Air 2 in 2014. Apple will typically replace models brought in for servicing, and as available stock dwindles, the company has told its service employees that the unit “may be substituted to iPad Air 2”, ac

Last year in the lead up to F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, the buzz was that Facebook Messenger would spark a “chatbot revolution.” Bots, some believed, would fundamentally change commerce and the nature of how businesses and customers speak to each other.
There was open speculation at that time whether Facebook Messenger and its 900 million monthly active users (now 1.2 billion) would embark on a journey to kill apps and achieve some sort of digital

While this weekend is all about Star Wars — and we have a fun deal to help you celebrate — the most notable deals are ending soon, including Microsoft’s big Spring Sale; highlights include a free Surface dock when you buy the Surface Pro 4, and $250 off Dell Inspiron 13 Signature Edition 2 in 1.
And that’s all I have to say, really. I’m going back to the Star Wars trailer and the new Kendrick Lamar album... which, believe it or not, kind of work when you play them a

Easter in old Hollywood clearly had its quirks.Take, for example, these surreal publicity shots from the early days of filmmaking, featuring young Hollywood in its Easter best.Doris Day poses in a human-sized picnic basket, while Alla Nazimova perches atop a giant mushroom, donning massive bunny ears and whiskers.But it's Jean Parker, posed alongside a bear-sized rabbit companion, who landed the oddest shoot concept. Modern horror has nothing on vintage Easter bunnies.Doris Day poses in a massiv

Sorry flat Earth truthers: Bill Nye — yes, the Science Guy — has a message for you:
You're wrong.
SEE ALSO: A Bill Nye science talk show is coming to Netflix
"There’s a movement afoot right now to deny facts and presume that one’s own belief is every bit as worthy as scientifically proven fact," Nye told Mashable in a recent interview. "We – people in my science education community – have to work to overcome this."
Nye, who is returning to the small screen wit

ORLANDO — "Look at her," said Luke Skywalker, aka Mark Hamill. "If she were any cuter, she'd be a Disney character." The object of Jedi adoration was Kelly Marie Tran, the most recently unveiled cast member of The Last Jedi. She plays a character called Rose.
At Star Wars Celebration Friday, Tran endeared herself to fandom with the elaborate ruse she'd used to prevent her parents from blabbing the secret. She'd told them she was filming an indie movie in Canada — and even sent them b