Technology news

In our latest installment of "No, really, Zuck is honest-to-god not running for political office," we find Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg taking a ride around South Bend, Indiana, with Mayor Pete Buttigieg. 
SEE ALSO: Harvard dropout to give Harvard commencement speech
Zuckerberg is calling this yet another stop in his 2017 personal challenge to "get out and talk to more people about how they're living, working and thinking about the future."During the drive, which is broken up into two parts,

GUEST: On Thursday the FAA released an entirely new kind of map that will open up controlled airspace for drone pilots. To date, controlled airspace was a broad five-mile radius around an airport that restricted drone flight. The new three dimensional grids are less draconian. Instead of indiscriminate five-mile circles around an airport, actual flight paths and neighborhood boundaries are taken into account. Operators will still need authorization to use the airspace, but the new maps remove so

Never thought we'd see Nike slides that look good enough to eat.
But we have, and it's all thanks to Milan-based artist and chef Yujia Hu, whose obsessively detailed sushi and onigiri shoes are truly the stuff of tiny art and tiny food lovers' dreams.
Please behold, for example, these extremely slick Air Jordans.
SEE ALSO: Cakes that look like succulents are the best way to eat your greensA post shared by Yujia Hu 🇨🇳🇮🇹🍙🏀 (@theonigiriart) on Apr 5,

"Stop hitting yourself... Stop hitting yourself..." 
That's the sound of ESPN bullying itself into irrelevance as we've now learned that the self-described "worldwide leader in sports" has killed the best thing to come out of its Bristol, Connecticut headquarters in recent years: the TrueHoop network of podcasts. 
The news that the podcasts will shut down comes along with the massive layoffs announced earlier this week.  
SEE ALSO: ESPN is laying off a bunch of its on-air talent
A

After his company dragged a man off an airplane, United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz lost out on a seat as chairman of United's board. 
Now, he has to go to Congress. Munoz will testify in front of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Tuesday, the committee announced Friday. 
Munoz will have to answer questions about the incident, which left doctor David Dao bloodied and battered, in a hearing about improving relationships between airlines and passengers. Munoz will be

Turkey blocked access to Wikipedia on Saturday, according to Reuters, using a law designed to grant authorities the ability restrict content the country considers obscene or a threat to national security.Access to the online encyclopedia appears to have been blocked at 8:00AM local time on Saturday morning, according to monitoring group Turkey Blocks, a project to “identify and validate reports of internet mass-censorship in Turkey.” It explained that the loss is consistent with &ldq

GUEST: Amazon is an undisputed leader in digital retail, but soon the online giant will venture into the realm of physical stores. This isn’t so much a choice for Amazon as it is a necessity if the company plans to remain a leader in retail. Modern retailers need an omnichannel strategy that understands and caters to every channel that customers shop in.
So what will these physical stores look like? I predict they’ll be clean cut in the front and a bit hectic in the back — call

In 1920, Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury was born in the the Chicago suburb of Waukegan, Illinois. While he spent his early years there, he and his family eventually moved to California, where he spent the rest of his life. Now, his hometown is looking to honor the author with a statue, and has launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance the project.Last fall, the Ray Bradbury Statue Committee selected a design by contemporary sculptor Zachary Oxman, whose work has been exhibited in places su

At its recent F8 annual developer event in San Jose, California, Facebook doubled down on its gaming initiatives, announcing the progress it has made with Instant Games, Gameroom, and Gaming Video. That’s all part of its vision to become the place where people play, watch, and share games.
The numbers it shared show that Facebook remains a massive platform for gamers. It said that gamers had played Instant Games 1.5 billion times in the past 90 days, and that there are now more than 8

In addition to its many other failures, it looks like Fyre Fest is also an unintentional copycat.
According to some Friday tweets from Seth Rogen and The Lonely Island, the two are combining comedic forces for a film about a "music festival that goes horribly wrong." Interesting! That sounds familiar.
SEE ALSO: Here's the official postmortem statement from Fyre Festival organizersThis seems like a good time to mention the movie we are making with @thelonelyisland about a music festival that goe

If there's anyone who needs coffee, Tom Hanks believes it's a White House press corps' reporter. 
He bought an espresso machine for the entire stable of White House reporters because "those poor bastards" need it, the actor said Friday on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. 
SEE ALSO: Watch 'The Circle' cast awkwardly roast Twitter's CEO on his own site
Here's the clip:Hanks did the same when George W. Bush and Barack Obama were president, but there are a few hints that this time, the

Yik Yak has been on its last legs for a while, and now the end is officially here. 
The anonymous, location-based messaging app that rose to popularity in 2014 will "begin winding down" over the next week, Yik Yak co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington wrote in a blog post Friday.
Square — yup, the Jack Dorsey-led payments company — acquired some of the Yik Yak engineering team for $1 million. Unsurprisingly, Square didn't want the app. 
Yik Yak was once valued

GUEST: Last week at Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg went all in on augmented reality (AR). Since then his announcement has been praised as a great thing for the AR developer world and panned as an attack on Snapchat. See it here in full:As a longtime AR developer, I can tell you the announcement didn’t come as a surprise for its content but for the speed and breadth of its potential capabilities: What Facebook announced is a vertically integrated AR development and distribu

When Vizio unveiled its “new” 2017 P-Series and actually-new 2017 M-Series TVs on Tuesday, it seemed as though the company was making a quick return to the old smart TV approach of preloading apps like Hulu, Vudu, and others onto the sets. Last year, no apps were included on Vizio’s TVs out of the box; instead, they were designed as great looking displays that hooked into Google Chromecast, allowing owners to stream content from hundreds of apps using their own smartphone. But

It’s time to introduce our lightning round session at our upcoming GamesBeat Summit 2017: How games, sci-fi, and tech create real-world magic. This session will feature five speakers talking in lightning-fast five-minute sessions.
GamesBeat Summit 2017 will take place on May 1-2 at the historic Claremont resort hotel in Berkeley, Calif., just a short distance from San Francisco. You can secure your seat here. Register today and receive 20 percent off current ticket prices. U

We don't know who he is. We don't know what his secrets are. But we do know that he is a hero among men.
Very lucky person Craig Calhoun spotted this particular hero on a Toronto bus Friday, calmly transporting his 30-gallon barrel of Taco Bell Cinnabon frosting. (Probably for those delicious Cinnabon bites.)
SEE ALSO: Cool dog rides a skateboard on the subway just like you've always dreamedGuy on this bus is packing a 30 gallon drum of Cinnabon frosting pic.twitter.com/f9mYbdvUSK
— craig

Earlier this week, Consumer Reports lowered its ratings for Tesla’s Model S and Model X vehicles, because the company had yet to enable an automatic emergency braking safety feature, six months after it was announced. Following the rating downgrade, Tesla began rolling out the feature to its vehicles, but only at speeds of up to 28 miles per hour.The magazine published its report on Wednesday, and deducted points from the two models because Tesla hadn’t activated the system. Tesla an

Edward Snowden felt a little bit of vindication Friday. People said speaking up isn't worth the risk. Today, we can see they were wrong. Blow the whistle, change the worldhttps://t.co/GfwPn2ICYX
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 28, 2017Before Friday, the NSA had a policy of sucking up texts and emails exchanged between Americans and people outside the U.S., with impunity, if those communications even mentioned non-American targets of NSA surveillance. The agency did not require a war

GUEST: Here’s a quick wrap-up of the biggest stories from India this week.
1. Amazon chief Jeff Bezos is optimistic about the company’s prospects in India, a $16 billion e-commerce market. Amazon has already committed $5 billion to grow it’s presence in the country, and Bezos called out the performance of its India business at its earnings call last Thursday. He said that the company’s website is the most visited and fastest growing marketplace in India. While the company

Wikipedia is now blocked in Turkey, according to news reports. 
Turkish authorities blocked all versions of Wikipedia in any language in the country through an "administrative measure" and did not give a reason, BBC reported. 
Turkish media reported that authorities had asked Wikipedia to remove content that linked Turkey to terrorist groups, BBC said. Wikipedia didn't remove that content, and was blocked on Saturday. 
In the past, Turkey has blocked Facebook and Twitter following

In the wake of Ja Rule's disastrous Fyre Festival, Fyre has finally released an official statement addressing guests', uh, less-than-Instagrammable experience.
Co-owners Billy McFarland and Ja Rule are now promising guests full refunds and VIP passes to next year's festival, which will reportedly be held on a beach in the United States. The festival also plans to donate a small portion of each ticket sold this year to the Bahamian Red Cross.
SEE ALSO: I am having a great time at Fyre Festival a

Belief is power in the world of American Gods. In Neil Gaiman's beloved novel — and the lavish new Starz adaptation from Bryan Fuller and Michael Green — gods exist because people believe in them, and as soon as we stop believing... well, you remember what Peter Pan told us about fairies.
Unfortunately for the Old Gods — mythological deities like Odin and Anubis, who were worshiped in earlier periods of civilization — humans typically have a short attention span, and we'r

Looking for something to watch the other week, I took my colleague's suggestion and checked out Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, the first film from La La Land director Damien Chazelle. It's a scrappy, black-and-white, super-low-budget musical with the same interest in jazz but none of the production value.
I love getting to watch directors' earliest features and seeing just how far they've come. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins also started with a black-and-white, low-budget feature — Me

Yesterday, Amazon announced that it would be ending its Underground Actually Free Program, a shopping app that offers free versions of apps such as Star Wars Rebels: Recon Missions, Monument Valley, or Office Suite Pro 8 for Android phone and Fire Tablet users.In its statement, Amazon said that as it launched the program in 2015, it was building its own Appstore, and decided to end the Underground program while it continued to “expand the Amazon Appstore experience.” The company note

In the emerging war of pets versus home robots, things have now ratcheted up from furry-faced consternation over mechanical invaders to fighting back using paw and snout. 
That's the scene in this latest video featuring Shasta the dog foiling her owner's attempt to clean the living room by using dog wits to repeatedly turn off a Roomba vacuum cleaner. Aside from this groundbreaking development of dogs having learned to turn off our robots, there's the cute-but-maybe-disturbing serious as h

Pay up or the show gets plastered. 
The next season of Orange Is the New Black may soon be floating around the internet after a hacker claiming to have pilfered the first 10 episodes of the new season threatened to release it unless Netflix forks over cash. 
A hacker reportedly released the first episode of Season 5 of Orange Is the New Black early Saturday after demanding ransom from Netflix. In a letter, the hacker, called The Dark Overlord, said they'd next release episodes two thro

FEATURE: It’s not often that we go back and analyze “tweet storms,” those controversies that spin out of control on Twitter and the rest of the Internet after somebody steps their foot in a big pile of crap.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and the modern virtual reality movement, got caught in such a storm. Along with a $500 million judgment in a copyright-and-theft lawsuit by Bethesda, the controversy led to his departure from Oculus. But a document that captures

Prom in 2017 hardly resembles prom in 1997— the promposals alone have reached impossible heights. There are, however, common threads tying the youth of today to the youth of yesteryear, namely the prom song.
SEE ALSO: High schooler asks his girlfriend to prom using one of our favorite 'Office' moments
You know the one— the single du jour that united your senior class on the dance floor for two to four blissful minutes. Because prom is grossly overrated, the rest of your night was lik

Mother’s Day in the US is quickly approaching on May 14th, and along with several other notable deals, we’ve got a handful of on-sale gifts that’d be great for the mothers of the world, including 20 percent off Apple’s Beats X earbuds. As my colleague Chris Welch mentioned in his review, these neckbuds are so comfortable that you’ll often forget they’re wrapped around your neck. For $120, why not gift your mom these reliable earbuds; after all, she did bring y

If you really liked James Mangold’s Logan, but wanted to watch it in monochrome, you’re in luck. The director announced on Twitter that the film would be getting a special black-and-white theatrical run on May 16th.
Mangold announced last month that he was working on a black and white cut, and told fans today that it would be coming to Blu-ray and DVD. He also confirmed that moviegoers will be able to see the film on the big screen one more time, but only in US theaters.Suggestion. H

With the fallout from the ill-fated Fyre Festival still unfolding and Amazon's slightly creepy new Echo, you may have missed some of this week's best new apps. 
SEE ALSO: Inside the exclusive, stealthy club where future tech moguls are born
Each week, we round up the latest app news, along with a few of our favorite new and updated apps, to keep you in the loop with everything coming to your phone.Here's what caught our eye this week. If you're looking for more, make sure to check out last

In Trump's America, marching has become a weekly activity. 
One week after the massive March for Science, people across the country and around the world, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Branson, took to the streets on Saturday for the People's Climate March. At least 200,000 people marched in D.C., the march's organizers said Saturday afternoon. Time-lapse, bird's-eye video shows thousands of protesters marching toward White House for action on climate change https://t.co/yoYEI

A hacker has stolen the upcoming fifth season of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, according to the Associated Press, and has reportedly released it via file-sharing websites.The AP reports that a hacker called The Dark Overlord reportedly uploaded the first episode to file-sharing services earlier this morning and that they claim to have stolen shows from other studios. According to a release from the hacker, the remainder of the show’s stolen episodes have been made available thro

Take it from John Boyega: starring in one of the world's most beloved movie franchises does not make your love life a walk on Naboo.
On this week's Graham Norton Show, Boyega spilled about a first date he had in New York before The Force Awakens was released. The two were cruising through Times Square when the woman asked what Boyega did for a living — and his response was to point to the nearest Star Wars billboard. (The one where he's wielding a lightsaber, of course.)
As one might expe

A resurgence in activism has defined President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office, with protests becoming the number one way to resist the new administration. 
No protest, however, is complete without a piece of cardboard on a stick. The art of the protest sign has become truly vital to the resistance.
SEE ALSO: The unforgettable moments of resistance that defined Trump's first 100 days
Activists haven't hesitated in using their creative talents and wit to take Trump to task. Whether q

This weekend, SpaceX is slated to do its very first national security mission for the US military — sending a spy satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office. Dubbed NROL-76, the secretive payload is scheduled to go up on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket early Sunday morning from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. After launch, SpaceX will attempt to land the Falcon 9’s first stage — the 14-story high core of the rocket that contains the main en

Image: James Speed HensingerIn April 1970, 22-year-old James Speed Hensinger, an enlisted man in the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade, was stationed at a compound in Phu Tai, west of the coastal city of Qui Nhon, Vietnam.Over the course of several nights, a lone Viet Cong fighter had repeatedly crept in among the rocks on a mountain overlooking the base and sprayed the camp with automatic AK-47 fire, perforating the sheet-metal roofs of the Americans’ hooches, killing one man

A theory building momentum among Game of Thrones fans is that Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) may in fact kill his twin sister and lover, Cersei (Lena Headey).
Coster-Waldau weighed in on the theory earlier this week while doing press for his upcoming Netflix film Small Crimes, and while he can’t confirm or deny it, he does seem to have thought it out quite a bit.
“I mean I don’t think he — I’m just saying it’s a valid theory,” Coster-Waldau told

Whether President Donald Trump likes it or not — and he definitely doesn't — his first 100 days as commander-in-chief have been defined by The Resistance. The mass activist movement has brought together those who oppose Trump's leadership, and marginalized communities most impacted by the president's policies are at the helm.Since Trump's inauguration, protesting has become a regular weekend activity. Young people now call their senators more than their parents. City streets are cont

Over the course of his first months in the White House, President Trump notoriously turned Twitter into his personal outlet for unhinged political venting. That of course inspired the creation of dozens of parody accounts that became tools of resistance, coping mechanisms, and light-hearted distractions from the political chaos. 
A simple Twitter search for "Donald Trump Parody" reveals a collection of over 50 accounts, and though each tackles Trump’s presidency with a different appro