Technology news

It really feels like 2017 is the year of the drone. We got news that Drone Racing League is returning to ESPN in June, the DJI Spark wowed us as “the best starter drone on the market right now,” and there’s even a Kickstarter for a water-friendly drone from SwellPro that floats. Now, Voliro’s concept hexacopter is here — an acrobatic wonder drone that can stably fly in an array of arial configurations, thanks to individually tiltable axes.
An interdisciplinary team

One species of wart-encrusted octopus looks very much like another — which is why zoologists are taking a good, hard look at those warts: turns out, they could help scientists tell these exceptionally bumpy octopods apart.Remotely operated vehicles (also known as ROVs) are giving scientists an unprecedented peek at deep sea creatures. That includes these warty octopuses — collectively grouped under the genus Graneledone. But because the species look so similar, it’s hard for sc

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may enable online threats like ransomware to spread, but they are also fueling demand for powerful and efficient new graphics cards.
It’s difficult to find an RX 500-series Radeon graphics card at retail or online right now in part because people are seeking them out to mine certain bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies, chip manufacturer AMD explained to CNBC. In April, AMD released its latest round of Polaris-powered GPUs which can render graphically inten

GUEST: After decades of depictions in sci-fi, the era of consumer-level AI finally seems to be upon us. Siri is well-ensconced in our phones, while voice-activated, personal assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, and Apple’s just-announced HomePod, are all vying to become our household servants (or what Walt Mossberg recently dubbed “information appliances”).
While HomePod takes a small step in the right direction, all these devices are still fundamentally designed arou

Bubsy, a forgotten B-lister from gaming’s past, is returning for some reason or another. Probably because we’re bad people and we deserve it.
Accolade announced today that Bubsy is coming back in a new game, The Woolies Strike Back. The 2D platformer is releasing for PlayStation 4 and Steam this fall. This is the first new Bubsy game to come out since Bubsy 3D in 1996, a title that many consider to be one of the worst games of all time.
Before that, Bubsy starred in a series of

At Google I/O last month — just like Microsoft and Apple developer conferences — virtually every announcement was related to artificial intelligence or intelligent assistants. Some major changes were made to Google Assistant, including a new App Directory, the introduction of payments with voice apps, a Google Assistant app for iPhone, and the ability to access voice apps on devices like Android phones.
Since then, more than 40 voice apps have been added that

A small comment from Head of Xbox Phil Spencer was the final bit of news necessary to convince me Microsoft’s Project Scorpio will be named Xbox 10 S, and it will serve as a Windows 10 gaming PC built for the living room. I know, that’s a big claim — and I don’t encourage anyone to gamble on it. But ahead of Microsoft’s E3 event on Sunday, I’d like to collect the evidence that Microsoft is eager to put a computer beneath your television.First and foremost, Mic

If you ask a podcaster, YouTube creator, or Twitch streamer which microphone you should pick up to sound like a professional, many will recommend products from audio-recording company Blue.
But Blue, which is well known for its Snow and Yeti USB microphones, is expanding its product lineup to hit a wider audience of consumers that prefer consuming audio as opposed to producing it. That is where the company’s new $400 Satellite headset comes into play. It works well for consuming gaming and

Ancestry is going all-in on Amazon Web Services, plans to migrate a massive 10 petabytes of genealogy and genetics data from its private servers.
The move is already underway, and the company has migrated 8PB thus far, according to Nat Natarajan, the company’s executive vice president of product and technology. Ancestry will be migrating a total of 12,000 virtual machines to the cloud and is also adopting AWS’ platform services, like Redshift for data warehousing and Lambda for just-

Last year, Amazon tapped and swiped its way into the esports tournament space with Champions of Fire. It’s announced a new tournament later this year: Mobile Masters Invitational (M2).
Champions of Fire, held in December 2016, focused on casual games such as Pac-Man 256, Fruit Ninja, and Disney’s Crossy Road. M2 will have players facing off in mobile games such as Summoners War (a turn-based strategy massively multiplayer online game), Vainglory (a popular 3-on-3 multiplayer online b

The Beijing Cyberspace Administration has shut down at least 60 celebrity gossip social media accounts, Reuters reports. The administration reportedly asked internet companies like Tencent and Baidu to crack down on accounts spreading gossip or rumors online.
According to Reuters, a post on the Beijing Cyberspace Administration’s social media account says websites must “adopt effective measures to keep in check the problems of the embellishment of private sex scandals of celebrities,

While the stock market’s Trump bump may have faded, the president’s demand for good-paying American jobs may prove more lasting and could lead to new tech employment in the Midwest. “We’ve seen a huge uptick in interest from Fortune 500 companies,” said Mark Orttung, CEO of Nexient, a company that provides “outsourced” agile software development to large corporations and mid-sized companies across America. The company employs&nbs

Watchers on the Wall has been keeping an eye on the HBO schedule, and today, the site pulled out the episode lengths for the new season of Game of Thrones.Most of them look like they’ll be ordinary lengths. Episodes one, two, and five are all 59 minutes — pretty long considering an “hour” of broadcast TV without the commercials is 43 minutes, but not unusual for prestige TV. Other episodes vary a bit: episode three is 63 minutes long, episode four is 50 minutes.But the fi

The Al Jazeera news network is fending off a massive cyberattack, according to a statement today. The Qatari-owned news organization claims that its website and broader media network are currently “undergoing systematic and continual hacking attempts.”
The nature of today’s attack is still unclear, although one researcher observed the issues extending as far as US-based DNS servers, which could indicate a broader network failure. The network did not respond to a request for com

The demand to move money around anonymously on the internet is so strong that it has led to the creation and adoption of the viable, non-governmental cryptocurrency bitcoin. That sounds like a plotline from a game called Cyberpunk 2077, but it’s real, and it may have enabled an attack against the developer of Cyberpunk 2077.
CD Projekt Red revealed today that an individual or a group is attempting to hold some of the studio’s internal data for ransom. The threat involves older m

The BlackBerry KeyOne officially made its way to the US a few days ago, but some customers who have bought TCL’s first BlackBerry-branded phone are encountering an usual issue — the screen on the KeyOne doesn’t seem to actually be adhered to the rest of the phone.
The issue was first publicized by YouTube channel JerryRigEverything, which noted that the display on the KeyOne appears to just be snapped into place and lacks any more of adhesive or glue holding it in.
Additionally

Apple didn’t talk much about tvOS 11 during its Worldwide Developers Conference this week, yet it still released the developer beta. We’re slowly getting an idea of what to expect. 9to5Mac reports that AirPods will automatically pair with a user’s Apple TV. Previously, the earbuds only automatically paired with iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches that were associated with the same iCloud account.So maybe with tvOS 11 you’ll be able to watch TV without needing a whole speaker s

Google today launched the third Android O developer preview, available for download now at developer.android.com and via the Android Beta Program. The preview includes an updated SDK with system images for the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel C, and the official Android Emulator, and there’s even an emulator for testing Android Wear 2.0 on Android O. The big highlight with this preview is that the Android O APIs are now final.
Google launched the first Android O dev

PREVIEW: Fortnite has been lost in works for a long time at Epic Games, and it’s finally about to hit. The company announced the July 25 early access launch date for the third-person shooter game where you build a fort and defend it against zombies.
It will be available in paid early access for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Mac, and it will be free to play in 2018 when it formally launches. Fans can preorder or preregister now on the official website.
In Fortnite, you can play

We’re all familiar with QVC and the Home Shopping Network (HSN) — you know, when you see something on TV you want and dial the 1 (800) number to make the impulse buy? But using an app is so much more convenient for us millennials. This led Eric Feng, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Hulu’s former CTO, to launch Packagd: a family of apps that allow viewers to buy what they see on selected YouTube channels. The startup comes out of stealth today a

At a Chicago screening of the new post-apocalyptic horror film It Comes At Night, writer-director Trey Edward Shults revealed the film’s inspirations. Like his debut movie, 2015’s Krisha, It Comes At Night is a harrowing drama based on a crisis in Shults’ family: “It comes from my dad’s death,” Shults says. “I had a messy relationship with my dad… He battled addiction for a long time, I cut off our relationship, and after 10 years, I saw him on hi

The phrase “Uber is in hot water again” has become a bit meaningless over the last few months — and for good reason. The embattled ride-hailing company has been limping from crisis to crisis since the beginning of the year. But this latest controversy — in which a top Uber executive obtained the medical records of a rape victim in India — could be the most legally dangerous one yet.According to a report in Recode yesterday, Eric Alexander, the president of Uber&rsqu

Facebook has figured out a new way to train computer vision models that will massively accelerate the company’s work with artificial intelligence. Using the new technique, the company can train an image classification model in an hour while maintaining its accuracy.
At peak performance, the new system Facebook laid out in a paper today can train 40,000 images per second using 256 GPUs, without sacrificing the quality of the resulting model. It’s an achievement that should help improv

A few days before the influential Electronic Entertainment Expo video game tradeshow in Los Angeles, Microsoft may have tipped its hand on future virtual and augmented reality plans.
Microsoft has filed a trademark for Direct Reality, according to OnMsft (an independent news site that reports on the tech giant). The filing makes note of video game software, online games, and holographic applications. The name Direct Reality sounds like a mashup of DirectX, the Microsoft API (applicatio

Electronic Arts has caught flak for pulling out of the Electronic Entertainment Expo’s show floor. But the multibillion-dollar game publisher said it has begun listening to feedback from gamers, and the community has inspired it to build a big three-day EA Play fan event in Hollywood starting this Saturday on June 10. The event is expected to draw thousands of people.
EA realizes that some industry people aren’t happy that it isn’t on the show floor anymore. In fact, I’m

It’s been one year since Pokémon Go smashed mobile game records, hitting revenues of $600 million at an unprecedented rate of only 90 days. To celebrate, developer Niantic, Inc. and licensor The Pokémon Company International are hosting a number of real-world and in-game events.
Niantic reports that the game was downloaded over 750 million times since it launched on July 6, 2016, and according to market researcher App Annie, it generated a total of $9