Technology news

Chinese President Xi Jinping looks too much like Winnie the Pooh, apparently, so the regime had to go ahead and ban any mentions of the cuddly wuddly big yellow bear on the Internet, according to BBC News. GIFs of Winnie the Pooh have been deleted off China’s instant messaging app WeChat and trying to compose a message mentioning the bear will grant you an error message.Like Xi, Winnie has a rotund face and nose, and netizens have been taking split-screen pics of the two making similar pos

Super Mario Maker came out in 2015 and proved that designing games is a ton of fun. Now, in 2017, gamers are still waiting for a followup to that game from Nintendo or something similar from any other publisher or developer. Instead, fans have started filling in the gaps with their own games that enable you to make your own Mega Man levels and Super Mario 64 courses. So why the hell are we relying on fans, and where are the official Mario Maker clones? We tackle that subject on this week&rs

Highmark Interactive has raised $2 million as part of a seed-funding round. That influx of cash will go toward developing games aimed at treating brain injuries. Last month, Highmark acquired XMG Studio, a mobile game developer, and it plans on expanding its development team further. So far, it hasn’t revealed further details about what its exact methodologies will be or what kind of games it will make.
“We believe our video game technology will revolutionize patient management

GUEST: Robots have a rich history. The ancient Hebrews wrote about an artificial being, the golem, that would assist with tedious labor; Leonardo da Vinci published a design for a mechanical knight in 1495; and Westinghouse’s Televox robot, created in 1927, listened to human voice commands. These developments all paved the way for today’s Jetsons-inspired vision of our robotic future.
Yet despite all the online tutorials available to teach the average pe

The dogs of ancient Europe probably looked a lot like the mutts roaming Europe today, new DNA discoveries from dog fossils suggest. In the ongoing debate over how many times dogs were domesticated from wolves, this new study suggests it happened just once.
Dogs are the very first species that humans tamed, but the details surrounding dogs’ origins are a little fuzzy. Now, ancient DNA extracted from two 7,000-year-old and 4,700-year-old dog fossils discovered in Germany offer scientists a g

WhatsApp users in China are experiencing trouble using the app to send photos, videos, and sometimes even texts. Security analysts confirmed that it was the Chinese government’s doing, according to The New York Times. This partial block of the Facebook-owned messaging app could mean an eventual full ban of the app in China, or the ban could be lifted later on.
If WhatsApp gets permabanned, it would join a list of banned sites that only grows longer by the day. In the past few months, outra

A new hero is about to enter the Overwatch arena. Doomfist will go live in all regions July 27. You can currently play as him if you log into the public test region, but he’s going to enter standard quick play and ranked matches in just a couple of week.
Doomfist is a new assault-style character. Unlike Soldier 76 or Reaper, Doomfist does not focus on firearms-based combat. Instead, this supervillain wails on players using melee combat and his giant, mechanical arm. To prepare players for

BioWare is losing one general manager and gaining another. In a pair of blog posts on the studio’s site, current GM Aaryn Flynn announced his plans to leave the developer, while Casey Hudson revealed that’s he’s coming back to take that role.
Casey Hudson left BioWare three years ago, later joining Microsoft and working on mixed reality projects for HoloLens. Now he’s returning to the studio that he helped create multiple hits for, including Star Wars: Knights of the

GUEST: Do you remember the futuristic movies that showed us what daily life might look like 50 to 100 years from now: the autonomous cars in Minority Report or the drone deliveries and parachuting packages in The Hunger Games? Well, you might be surprised to learn these formerly futuristic movie effects are slowly but surely becoming our reality.
Drones, driverless vans, delivery bots, and other futuristic technologies have the potential to make a great impact on us day-to-day, making life easie

Yesterday, Comcast filed its comments in favor of the FCC’s plan to eliminate the 2015 net neutrality rules. While much of the document was devoted to arguments we’ve heard before — Comcast believes the current rules are anti-competitive and hurt investment, but generally supports the principles of net neutrality — one statement stood out.Buried in the 161-page document was this quirky assertion (emphasis ours):At the same time, the Commission also should bear in mind tha

Two of the biggest broadcasters on Twitch came together last night for a megastream. Tens of thousands of people were watching PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds livestreamers Grimmz and DrDisRespect take on the last-player-standing shooter until a ban ended their night early. Today, that ban turned into a tiny beef when DrDisRespect jokingly threatened to kick PUBG creative director Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene in the chest.
Deep into their cooperative stream last night, DrDisRes

Seventy-five years ago, a Swiss couple disappeared in the Alps after going to feed their cows. Their bodies were recently found in a melting glacier, “perfectly preserved” in World War II clothing, complete with identification papers.The couple — Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin — lived near Chandolin in southwest Switzerland. They were 40 and 37, respectively, on the day they went missing. The couple had five sons and two daughters.Their youngest child is Marceline Udry-Du

Amazon launched Amazon Spark today, which is available as a feature on the mobile app on iOS, where users can post and share photos of themselves using Amazon products. One tap on a user’s photo and the product’s Amazon page comes up. Users can comment or “smile” on a photo, which is Amazon’s version of a like.Spark is located under Programs & Features on the Amazon’s app navigation menu. Once you click on it, Spark prompts you to list five of your interes

After introducing them to the world with buzzy, pop-up vending machine drops and then eventually expanding to direct web orders, Snap has begun selling its Spectacles camera glasses through Amazon. All three colors — black, coral, and teal — are available for the usual $129.99 price and are eligible for next-day delivery. The Spectacles are sold directly by Snap and fulfilled by Amazon.Spectacles were Snap’s first hardware product and had their big moment last fall, when Snapch

The Fender name is legendary in the world of music for its guitars and amplifiers. But now the company is setting its sights on a new chunk of the music industry — Bluetooth speakers. The company is launching two speakers: the larger $349.99 Monterey, and the smaller, portable $199.99 Newport.The $349.99 Monterey is the more powerful of the two new speakers, which is logical, given that it's meant to stay put on a shelf or cabinet unlike the portable Newport. It features four drivers &mdas

Doomfist — the highly anticipated new hero for Overwatch, Blizzard’s popular team-based shooter — now has an official release date for his debut to the live PC servers and Xbox One and PS4 consoles on July 27th.The new character was announced earlier this month, alongside a release on the game’s PTR (public test realm) server to help make sure that Doomfist’s abilities are well balanced. The launch at the end of July marks the “official” release for the

Google is making it even harder to accidentally install a malicious plugin. Today, the company announced new changes to the way Google services handle plugins, adding new warnings for users and a more involved verification system for apps. The result is more scrutiny on apps plugging into Google services, and more active involvement from Google when an app seems suspicious.
The changes come after a sophisticated phishing worm hit Google Drive users in May, masquerading as an invitation to collab

Adobe pushed out some pretty substantial updates to its Photoshop Lightroom iOS apps today that contain support for Apple’s Pencil stylus and 3D Touch finger editing. Now, if you’re using Lightroom on an iPad Pro with the Pencil, you can apply pressure with the tip of the device to selectively apply changes to brightness, exposure, and other settings. Adobe is calling this the Brush Selection tool, and it also works on iPhones with 3D Touch. Just press harder with your finger on the

With Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman now in theaters and breaking box-office records, a movie about her origin is coming up quickly on its heels. In the official trailer for Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, William Moulton Marston (The Girl on the Train’s Luke Evans) and his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston (Iron Man 3’s Rebecca Hall) meet Tufts university senior Olive Byrne (Neon Demon star Bella Heathcote), and the trio start the polyamorous relationship that led to the crea

Following last year’s hack, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has switched to encrypted messaging app Wickr for all internal communications, as reported by BuzzFeed.
Installed by the DCCC in June, Wickr provides end-to-end encryption for messaging, similar to WhatsApp and iMessage. The DCCC is the first party committee to use Wickr, although Republicans in the White House have adopted a similar app called Confide, according to a report earlier this year, raising records reten

Snap today announced a pair of new Snapchat features that should make recording and editing new footage a bit easier. The first feature, called multi-snap recording, will let you record up to six 10-second clips in succession, so you can go back over up to one minute of footage and pick out the best clips to send out or save to your Story. The other is a new effect called tilt brush that will let you edit the color of objects within a photo. The new recording limit is rolling out to iOS and Andr

If you’re a filmmaker trying to bring fantastic characters to life with the most realistic, lifelike performances possible, you’re probably going to want to talk to Joe Letteri. The longtime visual effects supervisor has been working with computer-generated characters going all the way back to James Cameron’s The Abyss. As part of WETA Digital, he helped the director bring the Na’vi to life in 2009’s Avatar. Peruse Letteri’s filmography, and it’s hard to

After a long debate, the United States is reportedly moving forward with plans to separate its military-focused Cyber Command branch from the National Security Agency. The changes could be announced in the coming weeks, according to the Associated Press.
The two roles have caused tension
Since Cyber Command’s 2009 inception, it has been under the same command as the NSA, but the two operate in different ways: Cyber Command has focused on digital warfare, while the NSA has focused on electr

Some OnePlus 5 users are unable to call emergency services on their devices, according to user complaints on Reddit. A handful of OnePlus 5 owners have complained that the device will reboot itself once 911 is called, preventing them from reaching emergency services.Reddit user Nick Morelli noticed the glitch after he tried to call 911 to report a building fire in Seattle, and other users have reported that the OnePlus 5 is unable to dial 911 (or 999 in the UK, as another user reported) without

For nearly half a decade, Nintendo developed some of its most creative and exciting games for one of its biggest hardware failures. Graphically underpowered and aesthetically confused, the Wii U was such a flop that some analysts speculated it would mark the beginning of the end for Nintendo’s time in the console business. Its standout games never had a chance.
Thankfully, Nintendo has been rectifying that mistake over the last year, bringing the best Wii U games to new platforms. Build-yo

There’s a long-running fight between wireless standards to be the one and only to connect all the smart devices in your home. And with an upgrade today, Bluetooth is making a good case for itself.
Bluetooth SIG, the group that oversees the Bluetooth standard, is today releasing the specification for Bluetooth Mesh. If you’re familiar with mesh networking, Bluetooth Mesh is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: it allows low-power Bluetooth devices to create and act like a mesh net

In March, Wizards of the Coast announced at PAX East that it would be bringing the traditional pen-and-paper role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons into the digital age with a new tool: D&D Beyond.
Wizards of the Coast describes D&D Beyond as a “digital toolset” for players using the game’s 5th Edition rules. The company partnered with Curse, a Twitch-owned company that builds other gaming-management tools, with the intent of making it easier for players to manage the

A month ago, OnePlus launched its best product of 2017, but it wasn’t the hotly anticipated OnePlus 5 smartphone. I reviewed that phone and found it a mixed bag, however it was the actual bag that OnePlus introduced alongside it that really captured my attention. The descriptively titled Travel Backpack has a demure look and a surprisingly functional design. At $69, it outperforms numerous backpacks I’ve reviewed that cost multiple times more.
Taking my first look around the OnePlus

A preliminary study from NASA has confirmed what we’ve all suspected: that buzzing noise from drones is more annoying to humans than noises from cars and trucks, even when the noises are at the same volume.
The study found that listening to drone noises was as if a car were suddenly “twice as close as it had been before,” according to New Scientist.Researchers played recordings from commercially available drones flying at various speeds and altitudes, and recordings of cars, ut

It was a fun ride while it lasted, Jide. The company that promised the ultimate desktop fork of Android — complete with floating windows, mouse and keyboard support, a start bar surrogate, file system, and more — has announced it will no longer sell to consumers. Development on “all existing products,” including the Remix OS software and the company’s hardware offerings, will stop immediately. Anyone who backed Jide’s products on Kickstarter (like this Remix O

Earlier this week, rumors were swirling that Amazon was preparing a new meal kit service, similar to those offered by companies like Blue Apron or Plated, with a trademark filed on July 6th. Turns out, not only were those rumors accurate, but Amazon is reportedly already selling its new Meal Kits to select Amazon Fresh customers.Most of the information on the Meal Kits comes from Josh Chadd, a Seattle resident who described his experience to GeekWire. Each Meal Kit includes food for two, ranging

When I first put on the Mira Prism augmented reality headset, I was skeptical. AR is a proven concept in fields like surgery and mechanics, but nobody’s made a good pair of glasses for everyday use. They’re not cheap enough, they’re not sleek enough, and there’s not enough to do on them. But as I was surprised to find, Mira isn’t just another company with a clunky proof of concept and some big promises. Yes, the Prism is as weird-looking as lots of AR headsets &mdas

Following its job hunting initiative announced back at Google I/O, the company today released a new tool to help small to mid-sized businesses recruit talent. Aptly called Hire, the service builds on G Suite and lets employers track candidates’ contact information, resume, calendar invites, and allow business partners to share feedback within the candidate’s profile. Hire can also port data over to Sheets to make candidate pipelines more glanceable.
Only information a candidate volun

Google Glass, the smart heads-up display and camera that was supposed to become everyone’s next portable computer, isn’t dead. It’s gotten a job — multiple jobs, in fact. The second iteration of Google Glass has been tested and deployed across many factories in the United States by companies such as Boeing, GE, and DHL, as first reported by NPR in March and today reiterated by a feature-length piece over at Wired. Dubbed Google Glass Enterprise Edition (EE), this is the s