Technology news

GUEST: With the recent surge in value of cryptocurrencies, ordinary people and traditional investment firms are paying more attention to the space. The market cap of cryptocurrencies has grown from less than $30 billion in March 2017 to over $110 billion in June 2017, and this is just the beginning. Cryptocurrencies are quickly becoming a new global market for assets, similar to stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and government backed-currencies.
But the immediate settlement of currency transfer on bl

If you’re planning on using your Surface Book or a laptop with the Windows 10 Creator update on it to take the bar exam in Tennessee next month, you’re out of luck. The state bar has prohibited test-takers from using the device, and anyone using a device with the new updates will have to make some adjustments.According to the Tennessee Board of Law Examiners, the directive comes from limitations with the exam software, SofTest, which doesn’t support the Windows 10 Creator updat

Super Mario Odyssey was the best reason to spend the last week in Los Angeles for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), and we spent some significant time with Nintendo’s big Switch game for this holiday during our adventures at E3. We were also able to capture some footage that we want to share with you.
This new Mario is bigger and more open than any previous entry in the series, and the two worlds Nintendo showed us at E3 demonstrated that by offering dozens of diverging paths and obj

The Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) is a body responsible for providing recommendations and information to the president, as well as overseeing the nation’s strategy for combatting the illness. On Friday, six members of the council resigned, writing in an op-ed published in Newsweek that they can no longer be effective under a “president who simply does not care.”
The letter was written by Scott Schoettes, who was joined by five other members: Lucy Bradley-Spr

GUEST: I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for the last 20 years, and recent political and economic events have had me thinking about how Silicon Valley relates to the rest of the country — or rather how it doesn’t. With CEOs boldly proclaiming their primary goal is to beat a rival CEO to $10 billion in revenue, leading innovators talking about sending tourists to the moon, and Uber’s “win at all costs” mentality miring them in multiple scand

Weird Phone Case of the Month is a monthly series in which we live with, and subsequently review, our time with a phone case. Phone cases are one of our only ways to express individuality with our smartphones, so what do our phone case choices say about us?
For my birthday this year, my girl and colleague Dami Lee bought me a hot dog phone case. I love hot dogs, which I wouldn’t expect you to know unless you’ve read my Tinder bio, or have somehow picked up on a subconscious hot dog b

GUEST: With all of the excitement around blockchain technology, it’s easy to think what we have now is the foundation for the next wave.
Yet, it’s worth remembering we are still in the early stages. The blockchains we have today probably won’t be the blockchains of tomorrow.
I am still bullish on Bitcoin (for reasons that go beyond this post), and Ethereum looks promising. It also has a lot of technical questions that surround it.
As Muneeb Ali of Blockstack 

In recent months, social media platforms have been under under pressure to do more when it comes to hosting content that promotes violent extremism and terrorist propaganda. In an op-ed published today in Financial Times, YouTube has outlined four new steps that it’s taking to confront extremist activity on its platform.In the op-ed, Kent Walker, the senior vice-president and general counsel of Google, writes that YouTube has been working with various governments and law enforcement agenci

Anyone remember the marketing catastrophe that was Bic for Her? Or what about the Ford Edsel, which lost so much money that the name “Edsel” became synonymous with failure? These are among the gems featured at Sweden’s newly-opened Museum of Failures, a shrine for mankind’s most spectacular product flops.
Curated by 43-year-old clinical psychologist Samuel West, the museum sits in the Swedish city of Helsingborg where it displays 51 products that were meant to innovate, b

Nintendo revealed a number of new mechanics for its Super Mario Odyssey platformer for Switch (read our preview) at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show last week in Los Angeles, and one of the biggest changes that we experienced while playing it at E3 is that Mario can now play dress-up.
The publisher has shown Mario running around in different outfits in a handful of Odyssey trailers and screenshots since announcing the game in October. The plumber can ditch his default overalls in fav

PREVIEW: Total War: Arena will take the real-time strategy war video game in a completely new direction, making the series more accessible to larger numbers of fans.
The free-to-play online game is a 10-versus-10 multiplayer game coming from Sega’s The Creative Assembly and Wargaming. Sega teamed up with Wargaming, maker of World of Tanks, because of its free-to-play experience. And The Creative Assembly hopes to go beyond appealing to its traditional hardcore real-time strategy custo

M.R. Carey’s spectacular 2014 novel The Girl With All The Gifts was a revelation. It’s the kind of book that’s best read with absolutely no knowledge going on, because of the way it drops readers into a future world where nothing can be assumed, and every new reveal comes as a surprise. Readers have to keep up as Carey unfolds his shocking facts about the protagonist, her circumstances, and the history that leads to the beginning of the book. So it’s only natural that the

GUEST: Over the past five years, organizations have become more aware of cybersecurity, and yet DDoS, spear-phishing attacks, botnets, and other attack vectors have continued to get worse. Digital insecurity will continue for the foreseeable future, with the biggest reason being that we don’t have enough well-trained, skilled cybersecurity professionals to go around.
There are a few reasons for this gap.
First, from a hiring perspective, the trickle of security students emerging from

The YouTube channel toco toco tv has released the latest installment of its artist documentary series. This week’s video is about Ei Wada, a musician in Tokyo who makes music from old media, like open tape reel recorders, VHS tapes, and boxy TVs.
First spotted by Prosthetic Knowledge, the clip follows Wada as he discusses his unusual tools and artistic process. Wada takes viewers on a tour of his local stops in Tokyo, including the only lab in the city where you can develop 8mm film, a ste

Facebook and Google want to help you celebrate Father’s Day this year, just in case you forgot to pick up a tie for your dad.Unlike Mother’s Day, Facebook hasn’t opted to roll out a special reaction, but it is providing users with some extras: users can send a personalized card, while Facebook Camera and Messenger each have some new frames that you can superimpose over your images.Similarly, Instagram has released some extra stickers and frames that you can add on to your Insta

The AI-powered Google Assistant has some advice for human dads. Say “Advice from dads” and the intelligent assistant will play advice to future fathers from real dads. Sometimes the advice is practical, like keep absorbent material in every room in your house, but a lot of advice is about relationships, like make sure you spend one-on-one quality time with each of your kids.
“Look at your children not just as an extension of yourself but as an unformulated possibility and allow

Science fiction television is filled with fan-favorite characters, but behind every lead hero is their assistant. They’re often present in the background, usually only ever get a first name, and the role might propel their portrayer into minor fame on the comic con celebrity circuit, long after the show has ended. Stephen Furst’s Vir Cotto was one such character in the science fiction show Babylon 5, but over the course of the story, he became so much more than that: an example of wh

If you’re afraid of the dark, Hunt: Showdown is going to scare you. Crytek’s new monster-hunting game is an intense, tension-filled experience where a pair of human bounty hunter players have to track down and kill a monster. Not only that, you have to do it before four other human duos get there first in a landscape that is almost pitch black. Then you have to collect the bounty and escape the map, even as all of the other human players close on you once you slay the monster.
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The Handmaid’s Tale finished its first devastating season on Hulu this week, but the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s chilling dystopian novel will come back for a second season.The novel and show portray a dystopia in which women are stripped of their rights under the Republic of Gilead, an oppressive theocratic regime that rises up in place of the United States. Atwood published her novel in 1985, and noted that she specifically drew on things that had been said or done. “I wo

Microsoft backed away from virtual reality on the Xbox One X at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week. But it said that VR on the Windows PC is a good fit, and graphics chip maker Nvidia is all in favor of that idea.
VR has moved into its gap of disappointment, but there are plenty of believers who still say it will become a huge market over time. The market could reach $17.8 billion in VR hardware sales alone by 2020, according to SuperData Research.
E3 2017 had plenty of VR off

A new report from USA Today found that drones have been used more than a dozen times to fly contraband into federal prisons over the last five years, as scattered reports suggest the smuggling operations have proven popular.
Drones used for smuggling a dozen times in five years
The paper writes that Justice Department documents showed attempts to smuggle cellphones, drugs, and porn into the federal facilities, although the tally almost certainly undercounts possibly successful attempts, as well

FEATURE: Arccos thinks it has figured out how to turn golf statistics into a machine learning-powered Caddie feature that can improve your game. So I decided to take the Connecticut-based startup’s system of sensors and services for a whirl to see if it could save my golf game.
See, I’m not a good golfer. I like hitting the driving range for a little stress relief every now and then, but a journalist’s schedule combined with a journalist’s salary means that I ve

GUEST: It’s amazing how rapidly the world of technology can turn customer service on its ear.
Transformational tech is completely revolutionizing the online sales experience. There’s only one hitch: What you don’t know about this topic can mean the difference between success and failure.
If you operate an online store, you can’t risk being left behind. But while understanding the potential benefits is great, knowing how to prevent things turning ugly is paramount. Now is

Nintendo is packing its next Mario game full of secrets and subtle references, but when I played the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week, I came across a hidden character as well.
After taking over a human with my hat, bouncing off taxi cabs, and exploring the back alleys of New Donk City, I had already found a number of moons (Odyssey’s equivalent to stars or shines) in Super Mario Odyssey. But these spaces contain way more than that for you to discover. In the video above

GUEST: We’re on the cusp of a new generation of better and more sophisticated intelligent agents.
Intelligent agents are fast becoming ubiquitous in personal life and business, which means they are an important area of opportunity and interest for innovators. As entrepreneurs, designers, product managers, developers, and investors, we should step back and think about the principles behind what we’re building. It’s a great time to start laying out practices and principles for ho

One of Microsoft’s biggest games for next year is a silly multiplayer pirate simulator, and we got a chance to play it once again at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in Los Angeles.
Developer Rare has spent the last couple of years producing Sea of Thieves, and it’s starting to look and feel rock solid. After demoing sea battles last year, the studio decided to show off a mission where a band of pirates — all played by real people — have to find treasure on an

GUEST: Connected vehicles (CVs) have inspired a great deal of digital ink, but it’s still easy to forget that autonomous vehicles (AVs) aren’t the only digital innovation revolutionizing the auto industry. Nor, in fact, are they the first. CVs have been on our roads and highways for the better part of decade, and most newer vehicles feature some form of connected technology.
Bluetooth connectivity, for example, is a feature found in most vehicle packages today. However, car manufactu