Technology news

In a statement today, Facebook said it will review its content moderation system after a video showing a deadly shooting in the Cleveland area stayed on the site for hours.
Facebook admits the shooting video stayed up for hours
A nationwide search is under way after the release of the shooting video, which appeared to show a man identified by police as Steve Stephens approaching and shooting 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. The company said in today’s statement that it took more than an hour

Since time immemorial, Uber has stood alone against the scourge of tipping. Or, another way of looking at it: since its inception, Uber has refused to do right by its drivers and allow for tipping within its app. Either way, that may be coming to an end.Today, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission said it was considering enacting a new rule that would require car service companies like Uber to offer a way to tip that was commensurate with the method of payment. And since Uber is a cash

Right now the external GPU market is a bit of a mess, full of hacks, incompatibilities, half-adhered-to standards, and artificial limitations from the likes of Apple. The folks over at eGPU.io are putting in some solid work to make sense of it all (as spotted by AppleInsider), and they've just had a surprisingly great result with the latest Nvidia drivers, a GTX 1080 Ti, and a 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro.
This is, of course, courtesy of the new Mac drivers that Nvidia just released, which bring the

What is the role of theaters as streaming platforms become film studios? That question is floating around an anxious film industry as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and other video streaming services rapidly contract talented filmmakers and make aggressive acquisitions at big-name festivals. Amazon has cooperated with theaters, releasing awards-friendly films like Manchester by the Sea and Chi-Raq in cinemas before making them available to subscribers. But Netflix has been doggedly committed to releasin

Netflix’s just-released Q1 earnings report has lots of numbers in it. Some of them are interesting and some of them boring, but just one of them reflects on you and me in a way that is deeply upsetting.
That number is “half a billion,” which is how many hours Netflix users have spent streaming Adam Sandler movies of their own free will between December 2015 and now. From Netflix’s letter:“Since the launch of The Ridiculous 6, Netflix members have spent more than hal

Netflix reported a healthy profit for the first three months of 2017, but missed its own projections for revenue and subscriber growth. It booked $2.64 billion in revenue and added just under 5 million new subscribers. Thanks to higher prices and a maturing business overseas, Netflix reported a net income of $178 million, more than six times the profit it had during the same period last year. It should cross the 100 million subscriber milestone easily next quarter.
“Our year-over-year stre

Lenovo is working on a successor to last year’s Moto Z Force, which was a thicker version of the regular Moto Z with a bigger battery, higher-res camera, and shatterproof display. A few photos of the Z2 Force have already leaked, and now Android Authority has shared some more details. The most important thing is that the headphone jack is making a return. Android AuthorityLenovo might have a case for ditching the 3.5mm jack in the super-slim Moto Z, but it never made much sense not to incl

This weekend, The Fate of the Furious bested The Force Awakens to claim the mantle of biggest worldwide debut. The not-so-subtle superhero franchise is cherished for escalating over-the-top action sequences that mirror the low-key hyperrealism found in early Marvel films. (At one point in the latest film, Dom practically gets his own first-generation Iron Man suit.)
The latest film is lousy with nigh-believable moments, including Dwayne Johnson physically redirecting an ice-skating torpedo while

Uber doesn’t allow tips in its app. Although the company is vaguely okay with cash tipping – how would it even find out? – the app itself has no mechanism for tipping. But if New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) has its way, Uber may be forced to change that. The TLC announced today it was supporting a petition by the Independent Drivers Guild (which amassed more than 11,000 signatures) which suggested drivers were missing out on thousands of dollars

Once overlooked, hotel executives are now taking notice of Airbnb. The short-term rental company was dismissed by one Marriott executive as recently as December, saying the company was “not really making headway in the corporate environment, which is really our bread-and-butter business.” Things have changed. According to documents obtained by The New York Times, the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) — a group representing the $1.1 trillion hotel industry &mda

Are you an Apple fan, and you’re feeling a bit nostalgic? Then you might want to check out the Internet Archive’s old-school Mac OS emulators. As spotted by Neowin, the archive now hosts Mac OS System 6 and System 7, as well as a variety of games and apps including Frogger, Space Invaders, MacPaint, and much more. Granted, you could already do all of this using an emulator on your computer, but being able to accessa retro OS from your browser is way more convenient, not to mention m

The Elgato Stream Deck is a customizable control pad for live-streaming that includes 15 LCD keys for switching scenes, launching media, and adjusting audio on the fly. You can trigger self-promotional tweets, chat commands, and a bunch of things you’d usually have to Alt-Tab to do. The Stream Deck is powered over USB 2.0 on either Windows 10 or macOS 10.11 and later.Elgato says the its device is compatible with Elgato Game Capture, OBS, Twitch, Twitter, TipeeeStream, and other services, a

$999 is a new budget sweet spot for gaming laptops — it's enough money to afford a GTX 1050 Ti graphics card in a somewhat portable form factor — but I wouldn't have expected Origin to hit that mark.
The new EON15-S seriously undercuts the rest of Origin's laptop lineup on price. It has a 1080p IPS screen, weights five pounds, claims up to six hours of battery life, and is based on the 1050 Ti with 4GB of video RAM. It's not the prettiest or slimmest gaming laptop out there, but PC g

Google has agreed to be less controlling about what Android phone manufacturers can do in Russia, as the result of a settlement today with the country’s antimonopoly agency.
In addition to paying a $7.8 million fine, Google has agreed to stop preventing phone manufacturers from changing the default search engine to anything but Google. Google won’t be allowed to require any app exclusivity on new phones, nor will it be allowed to prevent other companies’ apps from coming preins

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission announced a proposal today that could force Uber to finally allow riders to tip drivers within its app. The full proposal will be introduced in a few months and would require “car services that only accept credit cards” to let passengers tip with their cards in the app, according to The New York Times.
“We have not seen the proposal and look forward to reviewing it,” an Uber spokesperson told The Verge. “Uber is always

Coachella might be a Snapchatter’s paradise, but it’s also, apparently, a phone thief’s paradise. Thirty-six-year-old Reinaldo De Jesus Henao was arrested at the festival on Sunday with more than 100 stolen smartphones in his backpack, KMIR News reports.
As Consequence of Sound points out, the Indio Police Department said that a group of users were able to locate Henao on the festival grounds by using Find My iPhone. This is not the first time the tracking feature has successfu

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has more in common with Pokémon’s beloved mascot, Pikachu, than looks would suggest. Both have enjoyed enduring fame; both have a family-friendly image; both have a certain quality that makes you want to hug them and never let go.Johnson may have started his career as a pro wrestler with a great catchphrase, but he now holds the titles of singer, producer, highest paid actor, and dad. As BuzzFeed put it, he’s a hero who can reinvent himsel

The first time I heard of Nature is Brutal, it was in the context of cat necrophilia. See, I had friends over to grill sausages in the backyard, and the conversation turned to feral cats. My yard has a pretty stable community of feral cats that, during the day, cuddle up cutely in chairs. At night, they turn into monsters. I hear them hiss and growl — sometimes so loud that their noises enter my dreams, turning them into nightmares. And so we got into an argument about what the cats were f

Lynk & Co, a new car company that was spun out of Volvo (and is owned by Chinese automaker Geely), has released some teaser images of its newest concept sedan ahead of a full unveiling later this week at the Auto Shanghai show. The car is simply called the 03, and while it doesn’t look as crazy as your typical concept, it still paints a pretty different picture of where the industry is headed.
Lynk & Co is adding a subscription service to the mix
Like the SUV concept that Lynk &

It has been out for over a month now, but the conversation around the Nintendo Switch is still dominated almost entirely by a single game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Link’s latest adventure was the showcase example of how great a massive game could be on a hybrid console / portable platform — after Breath of the Wild, I wanted to play every other big new game on Nintendo’s tablet. But as great a match as Zelda and Switch are, there’s more to Nintendo’s

Back in December, Instagram added a feature to allow you to save your posts into your own private stockpile. Starting this week, you’ll be able to save these photos into your own private collection. Basically, they’re just folders for your saved images. After all, once you’ve saved a several dozen photos of cute puppies or hipster pastries, it might get a little tedious to sort through them all. To create a collection simply open your saved images, tap the ‘+&r

Verizon announced today that its $350 Wear24 smartwatch will be available online and in stores on May 11th. The Android Wear 2.0-based device will have 4G LTE connectivity on Verizon’s network and will come in three colors: stainless steel, gunmetal black, and rose gold. It also includes NFC for Android Pay. Verizon is positioning the Watch24 as a competitor to LG’s big, bulky Watch Sport and the Huawei Watch 2.And it’s got the specs to match those devices — at least on p

The Galaxy S8 is by all indications a pretty great smartphone, but Samsung didn’t do much with the rear camera this time around. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t thinking about it though: a leaked prototype shows a version of the Galaxy S8 plus sporting a dual camera setup. The images, shared by  KK on Weibo – a leaker with a solid track record – shows off two cameras in a vertical arrangement (like the new iPhone is rumored to have) in a body otherwise v

Gorillaz’s upcoming album is called Humanz, which seemed like an interesting choice for a band that hides its human members (Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett) behind animated avatars. But the band just detailed its first tour in seven years, and it turns out there will be some humans onstage after all. Albarn and Hewlett’s animated personas Murdoc, Noodle, Russel, and 2D will share the stage with some of the musicians who appear on the album, Billboard reports.
Humanz and animationz, t

Legendary film composer Hans Zimmer made his Coachella debut yesterday, performing the music he wrote for films such as Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight, and Inception, accompanied by a live orchestra.You can listen to the live performance of the Inception medley in full, courtesy of the festival’s official page — a solid soundtrack if you’re looking to engineer a 10-minute period of escalating panic for yourself. Is that a good way to get work done? Let me know.Zimmer

The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment of the Fast and the Furious franchise, is off to a record-breaking start. The film debuted this weekend worldwide, where it raked in $100.2 million domestically and $432.3 million internationally. Combined, that puts The Fate of the Furious at $532.5 million at the global box office, surpassing the previous record of $529 million set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
It owes that success largely to China, where it topped $190 million; the second hig

It is no secret that Samsung experimented with a dual-camera setup for its Galaxy S8 smartphone generation. The company told our own Dan Seifert as much during its preview event for the S8 in South Korea last month. Company execs told Dan that they didn’t pursue the dual-camera route because "Samsung has not found real value for it yet." But to test the hypothesis, Samsung naturally put together a few prototypes, and one of them appears to have emerged online courtesy of Weibo leaker KK.
&

HTC, the company that once rivaled Samsung for the adulation of Android smartphone fans, has sunk to the role of a discount player. Its new flagship device, the U Ultra, launched only last month, but it’s already subject to a $150 discount this week, which takes it from its unreasonable $749 sticker price to a more palatable $599. Even at a fifth less, the U Ultra is hard to recommend, owing to its peculiar mix of bad ideas and poor execution.
Other phones in HTC’s range are getting

Last July, the UK handed out its first ever jail sentence to an individual using a quadcopter to smuggle contraband into prison. Now, the government has announced the formation of a new specialist squad to tackle the problem nationally.
The new squad will be formed of police and prison officers, and will primarily be an information-sharing exercise. (If you were imagining officers using drone-blocking guns or specially trained eagles to take down rogue quadcopters, think again.) Investigators wi

United Airlines has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately – having police rough up a passenger to make room for its staff on an ‘overbooked’ aircraft, threatening to place another in handcuffs, and removing a couple believed to be traveling to their wedding from a flight. If the carrier’s less-than-stellar record has you wary of hopping aboard one of its planes, you’ll certainly want to install DropUnited, a handy Chrome extension that ‘drags Unit

As part of an overhaul of the UK’s national driving exam, trainee drivers will be tested on their ability to follow directions from a sat nav. The Driving and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), which licenses instructors and regulates driving tests, said it was updating the exam to include “more real life scenarios” that better reflect new demands on drivers.The DVSA says about half of all car drivers in the UK use sat nav of one form or another (including both standalone units a

Britain is a nation of borrowers. The average Brit owes nearly £17,000 (roughly $21,000) in loans, credit cards, and overdrafts. Much of this debt is revolving, with interest constantly accruing. As no stranger to this, I know how hard it can be to visualize the cost of borrowing, especially when you use several different financial products. One company that wants to solve this problem is Pariti. It believes that by aggregating the total monthly amount our debt costs us per month, it can

If you wanted to lock down your Twitter account and make it harder for hackers to break in, you’d either have to turn on SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) or generate a one-time login code. But now, you can use handy third-party authentication apps like Google Authenticator and Authy. Android Police heard from a Twitter developer that the company had added support for third-party authentication some months ago, but didn’t announce it publicly. Still, it’s better late t

Uber is gearing up to launch its UberEats food delivery service in India sometime during this quarter, reports The Economic Times. The company had previously announced its intentions to do so around the end of January, but hadn’t specified a time frame. After trialing the service in Los Angeles back in 2014, it launched a standalone app in Toronto in December 2015. UberEats is already available in nearly 80 cities worldwide; it plans to initially launch in one Indian city, and a

On Easter Sunday, 37-year-old Steve Stephens from Cleveland, Ohio, uploaded a video to Facebook which showed him shooting and killing a senior citizen at point blank range, on a sidewalk. The victim was identified by Cleveland Police as 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. He is believed to have no connection or relation to Stephens, who, in a previous video, said he was driven to kill people by his girlfriend Joy Lane. He also claimed to have killed about a dozen more people, but that is yet to be ve

A story about Snapchat on Variety from last week highlighted an alleged comment made by CEO Evan Spiegel: “This app is only for rich people. I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.” Spiegel’s alleged remark was recounted by ex-employee Anthony Pompliano in a lawsuit over the company’s misconduct with him, with incidents dating back to 2015. While the company has rubbished the claim, calling it ‘ridiculous’, the backlash from Ind

Star Wars Celebration has wrapped up in Orlando, Florida, and it’s been a fun four days immersed in everything Star Wars. We’ve learned a lot about the next couple of years of the franchise: we got our first looks at The Last Jedi and Battlefront II, learned the fate of Star Wars Rebels, and heard a bit about Disney’s ambitious plans for its Star Wars-themed parks.
Here’s some of the biggest things that happened.The Last Jedi
The biggest story of the convention was the fi

A Cleveland man is at large after reportedly killing someone and uploading the footage to Facebook. The video appears to show a man identified by police as 37-year-old Steve Stephens approaching a 74-year-old man, before asking him to say a name and shooting him in the head. Some time after the murder, Stephens also began broadcasting on Facebook Live. The video and broadcast were among multiple Facebook posts made by Stephens on Sunday afternoon, in which he claimed to have killed up to 15 peop

A Cleveland man is at large after reportedly killing someone while broadcasting the act on Facebook Live. The video appears to show a man identified by police as 37-year-old Steve Stephens approaching a 74-year-old man, before asking him to say a name and shooting him in the head. The video was part of a number of Facebook posts made by Stephens on Sunday afternoon, in which he claimed to have killed up to 15 people as part of an “Easter Day slaughter.”
Stephens posted the updates to