Technology news

Dashcam startup Waylens is already working on a followup product to the Horizon, a sharp-looking camera for your car’s dashboard that was released late last year. The new camera is called the Secure360 and, you guessed it, it’s a dashcam that shoots 360-degree photos and videos.Where Horizon is more about capturing video and data of your on-track performance, or scenic road trips, Secure360 is more of a traditional dashcam. It’s just able to capture a more full field of view th

Recently, Facebook announced that it was building a housing community in Menlo Park to offset Silicon Valley’s bone-dry supply of housing. While commendable, it’s not likely this will do much to offset the problem — it’ll just make Facebook feel better about having done something. The proposed village will have 1,500 housing units, 1.75 million square feet of office space, and 125,000 square feet of retail space. It wouldn’t be restricted to Facebook employees

Celebrity culture ruined television, social media, and 24-hour news networks. Now it’s trying its damnedest to ruin online dating. Badoo is an online dating app (yes, another one) with a unique new feature. Instead of swiping right on the people you’re least disgusted with on Tinder, Badoo wants you to bypass the shallow bullshit of checking profile photos (or pretending to read a bio) and instead skip to the even shallower practice of searching for your next date by which celebrity

I tried to visit /r/technology today, like any good nerdy redditor. But I failed at typing, and ended up in /r/technolog instead. I now have a headache and a newfound fear of Cthulhu. Wut. Even the page creator seems to be calling out in despair, trapped in a neverending vortex of darkness and CSS animations. Note the “Help” that appears on the upper left corner. Try as you might, you can’t click on the text. There is no hope. At least you can read some creepy HP Lovecraf

Microsoft surprised pretty much everyone when it brought native support for Ubuntu in Windows 10 last year. Now the company is going a step further: As promised, you can now download Ubuntu right from the Windows Store. Installing an entire OS just became as easy as downloading an app. Well, almost as easy. The feature is currently only available to users participating in the Windows Insider Program, but that’s easy enough to join if you haven’t already.  You’ll also

Google’s highlighted answers have gotten the company into murky waters a handful of times in the past, and now it seems to be suggesting the best torrenting sites to anyone who asks.
As first reported by Torrent Freak, Googling “torrent sites” or “best torrent sites” will feature results like The Pirate Bay, Rarbg, and 1337x, just as casually it gives you suggestions for “best news sites” or the cast of a particular movie. Clicking on one of the answers

Zenimax was hit with a lawsuit last week over its use of a song in a two-year-old Fallout 4 trailer. Turns out the singer thought his music shouldn’t be used over violent imagery — or, at least, that he should have been paid more if it was. According to court documents revealed by Polygon, 60s pop star Dion DiMucci didn’t like his hit song “The Wanderer” used in Fallout 4 commercials, due to their objectionable content. Quoth his lawyers: Without Pla

Microsoft announced at its Build 2017 developer conference earlier this year that Ubuntu would be heading to the Windows Store, and now the popular Linux distro is available to download.Ubuntu — like SUSE Linux and Fedora, the other two forthcoming Linux distros heading to the store — runs in a sandbox alongside Windows 10, and offers regular command-line utilities as a standalone installation, with shared access to files and hardware with Windows 10.In order to install Ubuntu, users

The Toronto International Film Festival is putting together a $3 million fund that will be used to set up three-month artist residencies for women filmmakers, launch a speaker series about women in film, and create resources for educators who want to discuss Hollywood’s sexism problem with their students.Variety reports that the fund will also accept donations from individuals and corporate donors, and has enlisted the support of several filmmakers including Omoni Oboli (Okafor’s Law

Faraday Future, the troubled California startup that aimed to unseat Tesla as king of electric cars, is scrapping plans to build a $1 billion, 1-million-square-foot factory in Nevada — a casualty of the sprawling cash problems of its billionaire Chinese financier.It was just five months ago that FF was claiming that it was finally restarting construction of its proposed factory in North Las Vegas, almost 11 months after construction was first halted amid the company’s ongoing financi

Mark Zuckerberg is doing a little promotional work for an upcoming Oculus Rift game. Fans of the Zuck can rest assured the CEO and founder of Facebook hasn’t been demoted. However, Ready At Dawn — the company who makes the video game he’s posting about — does have the world’s richest PR agent in Zuckerberg, even if it’s just for today. Facebook purchased VR Headset maker Oculus in 2014 for 2 billion dollars, looks like it finally found a spokesperson (pokes-p

Fighting trolls on the web is an everlasting battle, but Twitter’s been on a bit of a roll with features to keep the haters at bay. The company is today adding the ability to mute notifications from new users and people who don’t follow you. Now you have even more control over your notifications. Mute accounts that don't follow you, new accounts, and more. https://t.co/UapP6DtTtY pic.twitter.com/RcBQGx219k — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 10, 2017 That builds upon the up

Next time you buy a gadget from Amazon, a techie might come to your home to set it up. That’s because the Seattle-based retail icon just launched its own Geek Squad-like home support service. Recode broke the news earlier today, and the service is already live in nine markets: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Jose. In addition to free consultations on technologies like Alexa and how to use certain smart home devices, Amazon is offe

Mac OS X / macOS has been a fundamental part of Apple’s modern-day renaissance. Throughout the years, the company has graced each version of its computer operating system with default desktop wallpaper that has ranged from instantly iconic to, well, some really nice pictures of mountains.But most of the older wallpapers were never really designed to be used on a higher-resolution screen, so if you’ve been looking to use the classic Aqua wallpaper from OS 10.3 Panther or 10.5 Leopard&

One of the more useful abilities of Amazon’s Echo products is the ability to use them to order stuff from Amazon. So if you’ve been hesitant to set up the feature to avoid accidental purchases, or are just curious about how ordering through Alexa actually works, read on for a guide on how to shop on Amazon through your Alexa device.Why use Alexa voice orders?
There are a few advantages to ordering through Alexa. First off, there’s the convenience of just being able to ask your

The news industry has never been more dependent on tech companies and the massive distribution platforms they operate on the internet, leading to a long-standing and ongoing existential crisis in journalism. This isn’t exactly a secret — nearly half of all American adults rely on Facebook as a primary news delivery mechanism, and both the social network and Google collectively control more than two-thirds of the entire online advertising market. But it’s something that has publ

Twitter has announced new advanced filters so you can snooze notifications on accounts that don’t follow you. Recently, Twitter updated so you can mute accounts that have a default profile photo, those without a confirmed email address / phone number, and accounts you don’t follow — but not the other way around.
Now you have even more control over your notifications. Mute accounts that don't follow you, new accounts, and more. https://t.co/UapP6DtTtY pic.twitter.com/RcBQGx219k&

It’s the time of year again, time for Amazon’s 3rd annual Prime Day. It goes live tonight at 9pm EST and is basically the Black Friday of Amazon deals, but in all honesty, Amazon serves up even more deals than it does on that magical shopping day in November. I’ve compiled a list of 20 Prime Day deals that you should definitely check out – some of these have all gone live early, so you can even beat the rush by ordering them now. You can check them out below! TOPSELL Pac

The first trailer for David Simon and George Pelecanos’ The Deuce is here. Though a basic Google search will fill you in on what sounds like a promising premise — the rise of New York City’s porn scene and the seedy, salacious years of Times Square, with a pilot and finale directed by Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones regular Michelle MacLaren — there’s little in this clip that would help you guess that.The trailer’s neon title cards broadcast the crucial selli

We know modern advertising is based, to an uncomfortable degree, on personal info culled from the internet. Everything from search histories to GPS locations will get you and your whole family targeted by ads designed to appeal to your personal interests. Even those of us who find it creepy (me) have accepted it as a fact of life by now. But it’s a little different hearing it from the perspective of the targeter — and I dare say it makes me feel even more creeped-out. Carol McDaniel

Uber’s rating system is a mystery to every passenger. Luckily, we have the answers you probably weren’t looking for. According to Uber: “After each trip, riders and drivers have the opportunity to rate one another from 1 to 5 stars, based on their trip experience. Ratings are anonymous. Neither riders nor drivers see individual ratings tied to a particular trip or person.” Uber created the passenger rating to foster mutual respect between riders and drivers. But how are

On July 7th, fire chief Chris Kocher at the Worland, Wyoming volunteer fire department received a phone call alerting him of a “blue glow” in a rural area off Highway 20 North. As soon as he arrived onsite and looked at the blazing area through binoculars, “I saw we had a sulfur fire,” Kocher tells The Verge.The fire looked like a carpet of sparkling blue blaze. In a video posted by the fire department on Facebook — which has been viewed almost 2 million times &mdas

Nearly half of women of color working in astronomy have felt unsafe because of their gender, says a new study.
Researchers gave a survey to 474 astronomers and planetary scientists. The results, published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research, show that women — especially non-white women — often face a negative environment at work. Women of color felt unsafe 40 percent of the time due to gender, and 28 percent of the time due to race. In addition, 18 percent of women of color

I’m on record as being a fan of the California electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors and its forthcoming first production model, the Air. I rode in the engineering prototype at CES earlier this year, and enjoyed the alpha prototype’s fully reclining back seat during the New York Auto Show a few months later. But we still have a long wait until the first model comes out in 2019, so Lucid will need to go that extra yard to keep us interested. That’s probably what motivated them t

Scientists in Zurich are removing the blinders and letting drones figure things out for themselves. Using “vision algorithms” a group of researchers were able to teach inexpensive off-the-shelf drones to fly autonomously and map surrounding areas. The algorithms used are a “dense surface reconstruction” data-set designed to teach drones to understand their environment. Using a single camera and an inertial sensor the drones are able to take off, navigate, and create accu

For every exciting opportunity promised by artificial intelligence, there’s a potential downside that is its bleak mirror image. We hope that AI will allow us to make smarter decisions, but what if it ends up reinforcing the prejudices of society? We dream that technology might free us from work, but what if only the rich benefit, while the poor are dispossessed?
It’s issues like these that keep artificial intelligence researchers up at night, and they’re also the reason that G

San Diego Comic-Con has become an informal virtual reality testing ground over the past couple of years, with many fans getting their first exposure to the technology thanks to TV show activations and movie tie-ins. This year the network FX will be doing the same thing for the Microsoft HoloLens, with a mixed reality experience based on the Noah Hawley show Legion.
Directed by Justin Denton from VR production company Here Be Dragons, Sessions: The Legion Mixed Reality Experience will be a 10-min

The sharing economy has made it easier for communities to peer exchange anything from a spare bedroom in your house to car rides and bicycles. But the model doesn’t work for everything, as one umbrella-sharing startup learned the hard way. Just under three months after launch, China-based E Umbrella has reportedly lost almost all of its 300,000 umbrellas available to rent across 11 Chinese cities.
"Umbrellas are different from bicycles"
E Umbrella had an investment of 10 million yuan (appr

The grease that makes the wheels of the sharing economy work is the assumption that most people are good. There’s an assumption that you won’t vomit in an Uber, steal from your Airbnb host, or crash your Turo car. One startup that’s learned the hard way you can’t always rely on the goodness of strangers is the snappily-named Chinese startup, Sharing E Umbrella. This newly-formed company lets users rent out umbrellas for 0.50 yuan ($0.07) for 30 minutes, in addition to a

TNW Deals’ Python Programming Bootcamp has perennially been one of our most popular course packages. So it stands to reason that when it came time to update that Python learning package, it only made sense to add in even more of what made the offering so popular in the first place: smart, insightful, easy-to-follow Python tutorials. Which brings us to Python Programming Bootcamp 2.0, a streamlined, even more adrenalized version of the Python deep-dive users appreciate. And this time,

Game of Thrones is gearing up for its seventh season, which is set to debut in just a matter of days. With the new season comes the knowledge that the show is swiftly coming to an end — and that HBO is hard at work on follow-ups that capture its spirit. There are a handful of projects that are being worked on, but we don’t know which one(s) will see the light of day. However, a fan-made pilot set 400 years before the series is where the network should really consider taking things.
A

After spending more than a year at Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft is about to fly over the planet’s most iconic landmark: the Great Red Spot. It’s a giant storm twice as wide as Earth that’s been brewing on Jupiter for hundreds of years. Now, Juno is going to get the closest ever view of this extraterrestrial cyclone.
The Great Red Spot is the most recognizable part of Jupiter, but there’s still a lot of mystery surrounding this massive storm. It’s unclear ex

If you’ve been waiting to purchase the PS4 Pro in white, well the wait is over. Sony is now selling a PS4 Pro in glacier white as part of a Destiny 2 bundle that will hit shelves on September 6th.The console, which comes with a matching glacier white controller, will also give users early access to bonus content for Destiny 2 before other users. Access to a multiplayer map, three-person co-op Strike, a new ship, and a gear set with an “exotic weapon” will be given to users as p

BoJack Horseman is coming back to Netflix in September. The series, about a washed-up actor who is also a horse, was renewed for a fourth season back in 2016, right after its season 3 premiere.Last season ended with BoJack hitting new lows after his prized Oscar nomination was taken away from him, and the fourth season is likely to continue that downward spiral — with some jokes, of course. In an interview with The Verge in 2015, BoJack creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg said, “I'm really

Bluetooth headphone receivers are more or less a dime a dozen these days. Just browse Amazon and you’ll see tons of chunky, plastic $15 dongles that attach to the end of a headphone or an aux jack to let you add Bluetooth audio to older hardware.Xiaomi’s new Bluetooth receiver may cost roughly the same as the various models you can find online at 99 yuan (roughly $14.56), but its slimmed-down style is more reminiscent of the high-quality Noble BTS receiver than something like TaoTron

The latest movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t just continuing the story told in films like Iron Man, The Avengers, and Captain America: Civil War. Those movies are all Disney productions, but the new Spider-Man: Homecoming is part of a sideline of films produced by Sony, as part of a complicated deal that will let the studio produce Spider-Man movies that could be considered inside the MCU canon, yet outside of its narrative line. Confusing? It doesn’t have to be. Just as D

Microsoft is announcing Microsoft 365 today, a new way for businesses to purchase Office and Windows together. While the software giant has sold Office 365 and Windows 10 to businesses in many different ways, Microsoft 365 Enterprise combines Office 365 Enterprise, Windows 10 Enterprise, and Microsoft’s mobility and security improvements into a single subscription.
Microsoft is also offering 365 Business, which will debut in public preview on August 2nd and includes Office 365 Business Pre