Technology news

False alarm, internet — Ed Sheeran isn't quitting Twitter.
The musician caused a stir amongst media outlets  (us included) after quotes published in The Sun on Monday led the internet to believe he might be leaving Twitter for good. 
SEE ALSO: Ed Sheeran doesn't get why we're so hyped about his 'Game of Thrones' cameo because he apparently hasn't met the internet
"I’ve actually come off Twitter completely," he told The Sun. "I can’t read it ... I go on it and there&rs

This adorable hot dog was just minding its own business, getting its groove on, when suddenly, it was whisked away by a shopping cart.
SEE ALSO: 8 Devious Snapchat PranksBrittany Melone uploaded the video, taken on June 30, to Twitter on Tuesday. The 3-second clip features a Snapchat filter of a headphone-wearing hot dog showing off its dance moves. 
Unfortunately, Melone believes that clicking the screen at the wrong moment caused her smiling sausage friend to be moved offscreen when the s

Disney and Lucasfilm Animation have finally launched their new micro-series, Star Wars: Forces of Destiny, this week. Three episodes are currently available on Disney’s YouTube channel, and they feature some brief, entertaining looks at the adventures of Rey and Princess Leia. More stories featuring the leading women of the Star Wars universe are on the way.
The first two episodes of Forces of Destiny feature Rey and BB-8, and they appear to take place at an early point in The Force Awaken

Sylvester Stallone, a movie star who uses third-person hashtags like #SylvesterStallone and #rockybalboa in his own Instagram posts, is about as subtle as a clanging bell. It's why we love him — and it's also why when he's trying to be coy, it winds up being adorable.
And nowhere in his oeuvre does the Stallone storytelling sledgehammer pound more heavily than Rocky IV, which Stallone directed, wrote, and starred in, making him solely responsible for its heavy-handed patriotism, heavy-hand

You’ve probably come across the phrase “blind as a bat” at some point in your life. But, as it turns out, bats aren’t blind.
To figure out where this myth started and why it’s so popular, The Verge called up Winifred Frick, the senior director of conservation science at Bat Conservation International. Not only are bats not blind, most species aren’t the disease-carrying, bloodsuckers we often see on television. In fact, bats play vital roles in ecosystems arou

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Prime Day is a marathon, not a sprint.
Prepare yourself for one of the most anticipated shopping days of the year with this guide. Get the most out of this year's deals by following these steps.
It's time to go PrimeImage:amazonIt's not just about 2-day shipping: enjoy exclusive access to movies, music, Kindle books, and more. Become a Prime member with a 30-day free trial here. No worries, you

Because the internet loves a good conspiracy theory (who doesn't?), this new, wild one about beloved aviator Amelia Earhart is blowing everyone's minds.
A black-and-white image obtained by the History Channel suggests that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan actually survived their circumnavigation around the globe.
But, we're just a bit skeptical.
Earhart and Noonan's 29,000-mile flight, which departed on July 2, 1937, was cut short during the final stretch when the two mysteriously disappear

There are a small set of facts here, but they have profound implications for how we live our lives.
There's a new Kickstarter project called Amabrush.
It's shaped like a mouthguard, and it brushes your teeth all at once in 10 seconds.
A removable handle makes the whole setup look like an adult pacifier. It's what vibrates the "brush" mouthpiece and dispenses the toothpaste.
The handle uses proprietary toothpaste capsules.
Notice what's missing? That's right, there's no app. How am I supposed to

Welcome to July, the sleepiest month for video games in 2017 thus far.
It's not that there's nothing new to play. Nintendo fans especially have some exciting stuff coming up. But in a year that's already seen bona fide Game of the Year contenders like Horizon: Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, these quiet summer months offer a respite from the "must-play" deluge.
SEE ALSO: Conan O'Brien and Will Arnett fumble their way through Nintendo's 'ARMS'
Then again, there's always som

For a space nerd, there's nothing quite as imagination-sparking as Jupiter's Great Red Spot. 
The 10,000-mile-wide storm that's likely been raging for centuries in Jupiter's atmosphere is past due for its close-up. But the Great Red Spot's time has finally come. NASA's Juno mission will fly just 5,600 miles above the planet's raging storm on July 10, giving humanity its first view of the spot from (comparatively) close range. 
SEE ALSO: Jupiter is the gigantic, stormy hellscape we alwa

The Fourth of July weekend wasn't a time of celebration for everybody. 
Redditor Kentkirk uploaded this photo on Wednesday of an adorable raccoon seeking shelter from all the firework festivities.
SEE ALSO: A delightful little raccoon is hanging out in the ceiling of the Toronto airportThe cutie found a safe space on Kentkirk's front porch behind a large stone block.
Redditors noted that it looks like the little raccoon is about to set up shop.Comment from discussion Enthusiasms's comment f

ARKit has looked like a promising platform for augmented reality in the few short weeks since the first two beta versions of iOS 11 were released to developers. But when iOS 11 officially drops this fall, it’s more likely that we — both consumers and developers — are still going to be figuring out what to use it for. Which means, in the early going, we’ll probably be using ARKit apps to goof off.Take this example from Federico Viticci on Twitter. Unlike some of the more a

Rockstar has teased the existence of aliens in Grand Theft Auto V since the game launched in 2013. Nearly four years later, we finally have real evidence of extraterrestrial life in GTA.
A group of mystery-hunters and data-miners managed to find evidence of an alien mission in the most recent GTA Online update that introduced running. The video above is a mission they discovered last week involving a downed spacecraft, an alien egg, and some aggressive aliens.
Today, the group figured out how t

Shawn Wasabi is an LA-based musician, but not in the way you might traditionally think. He doesn’t just play a guitar or piano or produce songs in a DAW (digital audio workstation, like Ableton Live or FL Studio). He’s a controllerism artist, using a piece of equipment called the Midi Fighter 64, a custom 64-button controller commissioned from music tech company DJ TechTools.
Controllerism artists use physical MIDI controllers like the Midi Fighter 64 in conjunction with a DAW, allow

After beginning a wide expansion of data caps earlier this year, Cox is now putting limits on even more of its internet subscribers. As spotted by Ars Technica, Cox has expanded its 1TB home data limit to Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma; the cap was previously in place for customers in Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
Cox subscribers who use more than 1TB of data in a month will automatically be charged

Our tiny insect friends have a few notable talents:  digging in dirt, crawling on walls, and, apparently, creating artistic masterpieces.
We now know that stag beetles can make quite the little artists, thanks to Twitter user mandy @ japan and her pet stag beetle, Spike.
Mandy posted a few pictures on Twitter that show off his unexpected special talent that surely has sent shock waves around the art world. 
SEE ALSO: Savage ant casually throws another ant off a tablewhat do you think?

UPDATE: July 5, 2017, 4:35 p.m. UTC Updated to clarify that the news about 4:44 is not as straightforward as the RIAA made it seem, according to SPIN. On July 2, Sprint reportedly sponsored free downloads of the album via the website 444.tidal.com, which Billboard reported were also counted toward the platinum certification. The original story follows below:
Looks like the fact that Jay-Z's highly anticipated album is still a Tidal and Sprint exclusive isn't stopping fans from showing it all the

As with so many things having do with the president in 2017, this mess started with a tweet. 
You've probably seen a few tweets about a gif — something to do with Reddit, Trump, and CNN — many of them infused with a lot of 140-character anger. From there, fans of President Donald Trump and their most-hated media outlet, CNN, were on yet another collision course. 
SEE ALSO: CNN to Trump: Do your job
I've tried to explain what happened, below.
The tweet
On Sunday, July 2

The first thing you should know about the Trial of the Sword, the core focus of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s first of two expansion packs, is that it is very, very difficult. The challenge strips you of all your hard-earned weapons and armor, and it takes away your vast collection of health-restoring meals and power-augmenting tonics. You’re a barefooted Link, wearing just a pair of shorts, who has to make his way through three separate 15-level endurance trials that demand you clear

Find a handwritten note on your car and you can likely assume bad news is coming.
Redditor Doc_Toboggan discovered a note on his vehicle recently. Expecting the worst, he was  relieved to find out that nobody hit his car and instead, he made a little kid's day by owning a flashy car.
SEE ALSO: Man discovers 36-year-old message in a bottle and the original writer is delightedThe note, left by one of his neighbors, describes an adorable scene. His neighbor's son had recently discovered Transf

CNN is facing escalating backlash after publishing a controversial article on a Reddit user.The incident started earlier this week, when President Trump tweeted a GIF showing himself knocking out someone digitally labeled “CNN,” an image that many took as an endorsement of violence against the media.
#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017On Reddit, a user named “HanAssholeSolo” took credit for the GIF, saying h

Chinese search giant Baidu today announced that more than 50 companies, including big names in the auto and tech industries, have joined its Apollo self-driving car platform. Those companies include Ford, Daimler, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, and popular LIDAR-supplier Velodyne. The partnerships alone aren’t a huge milestone. Rather, it’s how Baidu plans to work with these companies to turn Apollo into a global initiative that can compete with the biggest names in Silicon Valley.Apollo,

The past few days have seen not one but two virtually identical-looking third-party Nintendo Switch docks hit crowdfunding sites. Over on Indiegogo, you’ll find the $59 SFANS, while Kickstarter has the slightly more expensive $69 Switch-Con to offer. Both docks try to take the features of Nintendo’s own bundled dock (which completely covers the entire console) and cut it down to a more manageable and portable size.On paper, it’s a great goal. People have been complaining about

In the official trailers for Spider-Man: Homecoming, the web-slinging superhero can be seen soaring through the sky next to Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. It’s a shot that masterfully hypes the movie in mere seconds: it teases Downey Jr.’s return, gives fans of the ongoing MCU a chance to reminisce on Spider-Man’s first appearance in Captain America: Civil War and promises an epic team-up. But like so many before it in so many different films, that scene never appears in t

According to Goldman Sachs, Bitcoin (BTC) could climb to nearly $4,000 in the near future. Near, in this case, is relative. But after BTC breaks through the “messy” period in which it currently resides, Goldman analyst Sheba Jafari believes the coin is headed to at least $3,212, and quite possibly $3,900-plus. As of this writing BTC was worth $2,600 per coin. Jafari notes that BTC has entered its fourth “wave” and that these periods “tend to be messy/complex.&rdquo

Snapchat’s latest update on iOS and Android now lets users do what brands can already do: link a website to your snap. Now your friends just have to swipe up to view whatever you link in Snapchat’s internal browser.After today’s update, users can just tap a little paperclip icon located in the Vertical Toolkit and type in a link, which sounds a lot like what you can do in Instagram alreadyif you’re a publisher or have a verified account.
Other new features in the update i

Most experts believe the first industry to be upended by autonomous driving will be the trucking sector. What better use case for driverless technology than long-haul trucking where most of the driving is confined to the highway? The Swedish startup Einride certainly buys into this vision. It recently unveiled a prototype of a self-driving truck that completely lacks a steering wheel, pedals, a windshield, and, well, the whole cab really.“a complete transport system between Gothenburg-Hels

For years, our electronic devices have been getting smaller and faster, but the trend can’t continue until we solve one big obstacle: batteries.Batteries are the bottleneck of any electronic system, says Dina El-Damak, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California. A device is only as good as its power source, and already the quest for more power and faster computing has led to dangerous situations like the Samsung Galaxy 7 explosions. One solution is creat

Facebook is building a standalone app that incorporates ideas from Houseparty, the group video chat app that rose from the ashes of Meerkat, The Verge has learned. The app, which has the working name Bonfire, was recently demonstrated for employees. It is being targeted for a fall release, according to a person familiar with the matter. “We don’t have anything to share at this time,” a Facebook spokeswoman said.
Facebook’s move comes two years after Life On Air, which had

Lyft just announced that it’s now providing over 1 million rides per day in a blog post that highlights the company’s growth and momentum in its continued battle with Uber. Lyft’s ride-hailing service has spread to cover “nearly 80 percent of the US population.” For the whole of 2016, Lyft recorded a total of a little over 160 million rides. So it’s still gaining on Uber, but there’s a long way to go.
Just last week, Uber announced its own milestone of h

By now everybody knows that Facebook has done everything in its power to imitate Snacphat across its entire portfolio, but now Snacphat is fighting back with a few new tools of its own. A backdrops feature essentially lets you green-screen yourself into different scenes. Tap the Scissors button to locate the new Backdrop icon. The tool only works with photo snaps for the time being, but it essentially lets you trace objects or people in a snap and replace the background with colorful patterns.

Japanese pro-gamer Daigo Umehara rose to fame as an arcade fighting game player. He’s considered one of the best Street Fighter players in the world and holds a Guinness World Record as the most successful competitor in major tournaments for the series. In honor of his legacy, UDON Entertainment is releasing an English version of the manga chronicling his road to stardom.
The series is called Daigo the Beast: Umehara Fighting Gamers!, and it memorializes Umehara’s “aggressive p

China increased its censorship of films, blogs, and educational websites last Friday with new rules that say sites failing to adhere to “core socialist values” will have to shut down, according to Reuters. That means that topics like drug addiction and homosexuality are banned.China’s history of censoring the web dates back to the early days of the internet when the Chinese leadership initiated “the Great Firewall of China” that blocked sites that included pornograp

Wallets already seem anachronistic. They're stuffed with paper currency, analog identification cards, and credit cards that are easily emulated by your phone. But what if your wallet had 512MB of RAM, a built-in camera, and doubled as a Wi-Fi hot spot?
Volterman is a new smart wallet project on Indiegogo. It includes all the guts of a years-old smartphone, other than a screen. You can use it to charge your phone, you can pair it over Bluetooth to act as an alarm if you forget your phone, or have

My mother died on June 5th, at the age of 57, after a long fight with breast cancer. Every day since has been filled with a hollow, echoing loneliness — like someone shouting into an empty room. So when the feeling is too much, I reach for her iPhone. I watch the videos of her talking to my brother, or read the text messages she sent me in better times. Something about holding this device as she did and looking through all the things she thought were important gives me a comfort I don&rsq

I like to keep a charger in my bag, one of several “just-in-case” things I tend to carry around with me everywhere. Who knows when you might need to recharge your phone? (Then again, I also travel with a couple power banks, so it’s possible the wall charger is a bit overkill.)But the bulky wall wart that lives in the bottom of my bag might be getting some competition in the form of Kado, a wall charger currently seeking funding on Kickstarter that’s just 0.2 inches (7mm)

A Paris City Council ruling on Wednesday says people renting out their apartments on short-term rental services like Airbnb must now register their properties with the government. This is great news for the hotel industry in Paris, which has been lobbying for the change under the claim that Airbnb and similar services create unfair competition. The head of Union of Trades and Industries of the Hotel Industry (UMIH), Roland Heguy, said in a statement: This is a strong signal sent out to other mu

Jay Z’s 4:44, an album you can’t listen to unless you’re a Tidal subscriber, has gone platinum. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) made the announcement this morning, less than a week after the album’s release.
Few albums go platinum, which certifies a record has been sold 1 million times, in less than a week, especially digital-only albums. The RIAA didn’t even count streams toward a gold or platinum album certification until last year, when it ma

Skype recently updated its mobile app with several new features, attempting to stay relevant to the Snapchat generation. Judging by the reviews, it may have been misguided — because users (or at least reviewers) loathe this new version of the app. Having been forced to use it myself, I can see why. The star rating for the new version of the app tanked hard following this update. Currently, it’s sitting at one-and-a-half stars in the App Store. Titles for the reviews encaps