Technology news

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has spent the last six years working on a giant aircraft capable of launching rockets to space. Today, his company Stratolaunch Systems literally rolled that plane out of its hangar in the Mojave Desert for the first time ever.It’s called the Stratolaunch aircraft, and it’s massive. The plane has a 385-foot wingspan, which makes it the largest in the world by that metric. It weighs about 500,000 pounds dry, but that can swell to a maximum takeoff weigh

One of my favorite gadgets at CES this January was the Norton Core. Not exactly for what it claims to accomplish — securing a home network filled with vulnerable IoT devices — but because it looks so weird while doing it.
BullGuard, the antivirus company, is now on the scene with Dojo, its own network security hardware, which offers an even stranger form factor. The core idea is the same: Dojo sits in between your modem and Wi-Fi router — or jacks straight into your ISP's route

Sara M. Lyons, a California-based illustrator and designer, has accused Snapchat of ripping off her design for one of its filters. The design in question, a pair of hands making the “whatever” sign, was a filter available to some users last night and this morning.
Lyons points out on Twitter that although her original design is fairly simple, the finger placement in Snapchat’s filter (above) and her own illustration (below) is very similar. Lyons says Snapchat’s filter lo

Hillary Clinton says that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “saved” The Washington Post by buying it in 2013, setting an example that more tech moguls should follow. “I think Jeff Bezos saved The Washington Post,” she said, during an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at Recode’s Code Conference. “I think a lot of people, a lot of his peers and friends, thought — why would you buy this ancient medium called a newspaper? But newspapers like the Post, the J

Hillary Clinton says that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “saved” The Washington Post by buying it in 2013, setting an example that more tech moguls should follow. “I think Jeff Bezos saved The Washington Post,” she said, during an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at Recode’s Code Conference. “I think a lot of people, a lot of his peers and friends, thought — why would you buy this ancient medium called a newspaper? But newspapers like the Post, the J

Hillary Clinton, in an interview at Recode’s Code Conference earlier today, said she believes that Russia was “guided by Americans” in the way that it weaponized information during the final days of her presidential campaign against Donald Trump.“Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign to influence voters in the election,” Clinton said. She went on to say tha

Sling TV has updated its live, streaming TV app with a straightforward grid of channel listings in an attempt to simplify the viewing experience for users. “Believe it or not, following DVR, the grid guide has consistently been our most requested feature from Sling TV customers,” the company said in a blog post announcing the new feature, which it readily admits is far from revolution.
But in all honesty, it’s pretty easy to believe that customers have been asking for a traditi

Apple’s answer to the Amazon Echo lineup and Google Home has advanced to the manufacturing stage, according to Bloomberg. The report says that a WWDC unveiling for the product remains possible, but Apple won’t be shipping the device until later in the year.
Aside from what we’ve heard about the “Siri speaker” before (such as deep HomeKit integration and the ability to control smart home gadgets), today’s Bloomberg report says that Apple is placing a heavy emph

Members of a Tijuana motorcycle club have spent the last few years stealing 150 Jeep Wranglers in and around the San Diego, California, area. But it’s only just this week that federal and state authorities have shed light on the particularly high-tech methods the bikers used to thieve all those cars.The thefts date back to 2014, and each one involved a multiple-step process. First, the bikers would scout for the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) of Jeeps they wanted to steal. Then, they

In an interview today at Code Conference, Hillary Clinton urged social media platforms to figure out new ways to slow “the weaponization and manipulation” of information, admitting at the same time that it was a difficult problem to solve.“We weren’t in the same category as the other side.”
“I have a lot of sympathy at this point… for people trying to make these decisions,” she said toward the end of her interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossbe

Wacom introduced two new styluses today, one optimized for Windows 10 and another for iOS devices. Bamboo Ink, the Windows Ink stylus, is designed for writing, although it comes with three different nibs — soft, medium, and firm — for different feels. The pen works with lots of Windows devices, which Wacom says it’ll list online.We could have anticipated this new pen given that Microsoft announced at Build earlier this month that it was expanding what people can do with their s

With summer upon us, it’s more important than ever for streaming services to find ways to convince you to stay home instead of, you know, just going outside where the sun is (hopefully) shining. How important? Enough so that Netflix is releasing the new season of Orange Is the New Black on June 9th, and releasing its new series GLOW on June 23rd. And don’t worry if movies are more your thing; Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is coming to the service on June 1st, and if you l

 Business travelers between the U.S. and Europe can breathe a small sigh of relief and clutch their laptops a little closer — for now. Following a call between Secretary John Kelly and defense leads in Europe, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a statement clarifying that it would not seek to ban laptops from the cabin on commercial flights from Europe at this time. Read More

Europe plans to add thousands of free Wi-Fi hot spots to public spaces across all EU members countries over the next few years.
The hot spots will be added as part of a plan called WiFi4EU, which was agreed to on Monday by the European Parliament, Council, and Commission. The parties agreed to add between 6,000 and 8,000 Wi-Fi hot spots by 2020.
The goal, says Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who introduced the WiFi4EU plan last year, is to have free Wi-Fi in “every European villa

Hey buddy, how's it going? Everything cool? Work is good? Good to know. So yeah, anyway, I was wondering what's up with the three-foot-tall polygonal robot statue on your coffee table that's also a Bluetooth speaker?Kalium LabsFirst off, who am I to judge? I have a framed Doritos bag on my wall. I understand the appeal of "outsider art."
One sec, let's watch this YouTube trailer for the Sound Heroes video game tie-in for your Bluetooth speaker robot statue that's glaring into my soul:See what ju

Interviewed by reporter Peter Kafka at Recode’s Code Conference today, Reed Hastings addressed recent months’ controversy around Netflix competing at the Cannes Film Festival.Given Netflix’s refusal to release its competition films — Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories — in French theaters, the French film industry’s governing body threw its weight around a bit, prompting Cannes to disqualify streaming-only films in futur

 You know design is having its moment when IBM, the stodgy normcore dad of the tech industry, gets in on the action. In the last five years, Big Blue has grown its designer to developer hiring target from 1:72 to 1:9. It’s not the only one — companies across Silicon Valley are recruiting far more designers than ever before. I’ve been hearing about this hiring crunch for… Read More

As President Trump eyes backing out of the world’s largest climate agreement, he may lose one of his most prominent advisors from the tech world. Today on Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that if President Trump publicly withdraws from the international Paris agreement, Musk will respond by withdrawing from all White House advisory councils.“[I] don't know which way Paris will go,” Musk tweeted, “but I've done all I can to advise directly to POTUS, throug

Slowpoke, Magikarp, and Magnemite are not the best-known faces of Pokémon (clearly that’s Pikachu), but all three share a special honor: their very own theme song. The Japanese Pokemon Official YouTube Channel released a new anthem for Magnemite, a frantic song that’s basically a Where’s Waldo-style music video.I don’t think I ever realized how tiny Magnemite apparently is, or how creepy it can get. It lurks among your desk supplies, your bathroom tile, your foiled

On the heels of Overwatch's one-year anniversary celebration, Blizzard is launching the next major piece of content: a new Assault map set on the Moon called Horizon Lunar Colony.
In Overwatch's fiction, Horizon Lunar Colony is the home of the genetically modified gorilla hero Winston. He was seen growing up there along with other human and gorilla test subjects to study the effect of long-term life in space in flashbacks from the previous “Recall” animated short. Following a gorilla

 Daily fantasy sports are too complicated for the average fan. Or at least that’s the thesis behind Boom Fantasy, a daily fantasy sports experience designed for the everyday sports fan. Instead of sorting through thousands of players to craft lineups from scratch, Boom Fantasy players answer a series of simple questions – like “who will score more points tonight, Lebron James… Read More

Netflix’s chief executive officer has made no secret of the fact that he’d like movies to come to Netflix almost as soon as they’re released in theaters. Today at Recode’s Code Conference, he offered a rather optimistic view of how people will still have their in-theater experience and stream it, too: by likening the theater experience to going out to dinner, as opposed to cooking at home.During an onstage interview with Recode’s Peter Kafka, Hastings said he thinks