Technology news

As if Tesla wasn’t already keeping busy with the Model 3, it’s continuing to juggle around prices and equipment on its existing models. But it’s pretty much good news for fans of lower prices and more stuff in their electric cars.While Tesla killed the least-expensive Model S in July and therefore raised its starting price by about $5,000, it dropped the price of the least expensive Model X this week to $79,500 — that’s $5,000 more than the equivalent Model S, Elect

President Donald Trump is back in the Middle East ... kind of. His image popped up several times on a West Bank barrier near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem.
SEE ALSO: Trump's first foreign trip is already a disaster and it hasn't even started
In one mural Trump is touching the Western Wall in Jerusalem with a yarmulke on his head, based on this image from his Israel trip. A thought bubble says, "I'm going to build you a brother..."
In another Trump looks like he's embracing a guard tower with

The next generation Apple Watch might break free from your iPhone and connect directly to cellular networks, according to a report from reliable insider Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, who cited "people familiar with the matter." 
The network access would come via new LTE modems in the devices, which sources claim will be supplied by Intel. The unnamed Apple Watch, which might be called the "Series 3," is expected to launch later this year with the next generation of Apple products, although it c

Kendall Jenner—oh no, baby, what is you doing? 
On Thursday night, the model was spotted at Baby's All Right, a music venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where A$AP Twelvyy's debut album release party was being held. For some, seeing Jenner at the venue might be a cool experience. For the bartenders, maybe not so much. 
The venue's Instagram shared a photograph of a receipt that shows Jenner's name and signature—and no tip.
SEE ALSO: Kendall Jenner is too cool to wear a fanny

Apple may finally be ready to release a version of Apple Watch that cuts the gadget’s dependence on the company’s iPhone.
According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple is readying an Apple Watch that works on cellular networks. It would represent a pivotal step in the development of the wearable.
Since its launch two years ago, even some fans have lamented the fact that it must be tethered to the iPhone for most of its functionality. Removing that barrier could dramatically expand inte

Apple screwed up. Like, badly. 
The company known around the world for secrecy is having a bad week, and, unfortunately for the Apple-can-do-no-wrong crowd, it has no one to blame but itself. That's because the largest leak to come out the Cupertino-based tech giant in some time was not the result of self-proclaimed supply chain insiders taking on Reddit, but rather a good old-fashioned employee screw up. 
We speak, of course, of the pre-release HomePod firmware uploaded to a public se

After being in development for over 20 years, a new RPG released today on Steam — and gamers are decidedly unimpressed. Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar — which, by the way, is the most RPG name an RPG game has had since D&D — went live on Steam today after one of the longest development cycles in gaming history. The announcement banner on its Steam page leans into its semi-mythical status by saying, “Itz Coming” and “This is not a drill

Getting a photo ID can be nerve-racking. You'll likely have to show it off for years, so people tend to try and look their best. 
One woman proved no matter how great your photo is, there's still a chance your passport photo can come back looking ... off.
Redditor reece1 posted an image of his girlfriend's passport photo to Reddit on Thursday along with the original, and well, look for yourself. 
SEE ALSO: 18 Yahoo Answers fails that will leave you scratching your headSomehow the poor

In news that should be no surprise to anyone who follows the film industry, a new study has found that men speak more than twice as much as women in film, and often, the dialogue that is given to women helps reinforce gender and racial stereotypes.The new study comes from the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. Researchers examined more than 53,000 dialogue segments from 7,000 characters in 1,000 scripts, and used

GUEST: Over the past couple of weeks, you’ve likely seen one of your Facebook friends sharing an article about how a pair of AI-driven Facebook chatbots invented their own language in a deviation from what they were originally programmed to do. The gist is this: Facebook created twin AI chat programs to converse with each other (and learn from each other), and they eventually stopped communicating in English and began communicating in a non-English language they “invented.”
The

Apple plans to release an Apple Watch with built-in LTE this year, according to Bloomberg. The integration should allow Apple Watch owners to leave their iPhone behind and still get near full functionality out of the watch. Until now, the watch had to be within range of an iPhone to do most tasks, like receive notifications or make calls.
There’s still a lot that’s unknown here. Apple could choose to sell models of the watch with and without LTE, like it does with the iPad, charging

Android fanboys hold two truths to be self-evident: Android is better than iOS, and the closer to stock (or AOSP), the better. To the tech-saavy user, an Android skin is, at best, an unnecessary inconvenience. More often, it’s a deleterious faux pas by manufacturers out of touch with user demands. I’ve been regurgitating that wisdom to friends, family, and the internet ever since the first Android skin appeared in the form of HTC Sense way back in 2009. But 8 years later, I’m

Social media is a weird place. An April video that’s again making the rounds today appears to show a man hanging from a drone, and just sorta chilling mid-air in a hammock. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Residents of the Republic of Georgia — that’s the country, not the state — gathered in amazement as a man took two of our favorite activities (lounging in hammocks and flying drones) and combined them. The “man,” however, is actually a mannequin, and whi

Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” is now the most-viewed YouTube video of all time. It has more than 2,997,026,945 views, and, as Vulture points out, it’s only been out since January. That means it took less than seven months for the video to break the standing record.If this sounds familiar to you, that’s because this record was just broken. At the start of this month, Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” from Furious 7 stole the title from Psy&r

Yelp’s 5 years as a public company have not always been fun. Founded almost 13 years ago, the social review site hit a low point in May 2015 with rumors that it was seeking a buyer as growth sputtered.
Despite being a Web 2.0 pioneer, it has only occasionally managed to post quarterly profits. It’s seen its stock fall sharply from its most optimistic moments, when it hit $97.25 per share in 2014. In February 2016, it fell as low as $15.56 per share.
But just as it seemed time to

Facebook is at it again, unleashing advanced AI networks on the world. This time, instead of being surprised by the ability of computers to create their own language, Facebook is using them to help us better communicate in ours. The social network’s AI research team have turned translation services over to AI completely, it said in a post from an official blog. Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning team has been training its AI to better understand how things like slang, typos, and in

Adios, “See You Again.” Hasta la vista, “Gangnam Style.”
The runaway hit single “Despacito” has pushed past both to become the most viewed clip on YouTube of all time in less than 8 months. YouTube revealed the milestone Friday in a blog post.
“Averaging 14.5 million views per day since upload, the video already owned the record for fastest video to 1.5, 2 and 2.5 billion views, reaching each of those milestones in less than 1/2 of the time of the previo

Martin Shkreli, who became a national symbol of pharmaceutical company villainy after massively increasing the price of a drug, has been convicted on securities fraud charges, according to CNBC. He’s now facing years in prison.Shkreli was convicted on three of eight counts
Shkreli’s trial in federal court focused on prosecutors’ claims that he misled investors who had placed money into two hedge funds he ran. After the operations went south, prosecutors said Shkreli misused fun

Google is developing technology that would allow news publishers to build Snapchat-style stories that would live inside the company’s search engine, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The stories may resemble what publishers have in the past created for Snapchat’s Discover section, which mixes mobile-first design with a blend of photos, videos, and text. Google is said to call the product “Stamp,” with the “St” standing for stories. There is t

If there’s one area of the Atlanta startup ecosystem lagging behind the growth of the rest, it’s local capital. Talent, startup activity, public support for entrepreneurship, and corporate innovation are all consistently strong, but the region lacks the investment resources of many of its fellow top-ranked Global Cities.
But investment activity in the city may be picking up. One sign is just-released figures by the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the sta

Dragon Con has announced the nominees for its second annual Dragon Awards, designed to highlight the most popular works in science fiction and fantasy literature. While the award appears to be a populist response to the better-known Hugo and Nebula Awards, it’s a wide-ranging snapshot of the last year in genre publishing.
There are a couple of things to unpack about what these awards actually mean. In recent years, the genre’s biggest prizes, the Nebula and Hugo Awards, have gone to

GUEST: My first reaction to the headlines about President Trump’s proposal to cut immigration in half was that it would be as disastrous as his Muslim ban. But after reading details of the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act (Raise Act), I can’t find a reason to be outraged. The legislation surely needs to be improved and the numbers of immigrants admitted increased, but it could be good for the country because it gives preference to the job-creators an

Here’s a frightening scenario. What would happen if Facebook developed a chatbot, it started communicating in a language humans do not understand, Facebook pulled the plug, and then everyone who has a passing grasp of artificial intelligence suddenly went ballistic and thought this meant the end of the world?
That’s essentially what happened when Fast Company wrote about Facebook bots that seemed to go off the deep end a few weeks ago. As these scares usually run, it took a

Updated: The first trailer for the third season of USA’s Mr. Robot is available now, for those who managed to figure out some nutso internet puzzle.
In it, a voice that could be Rami Malek’s or could be some other person’s recites the lyrics of the Leonard Cohen song “Democracy.” Not much happens, there are just a lot of chilling shots of Malek’s character touching his mouth, Carly Chaikin crying, and Grace Gummer holding a gun. We also get a glimpse of B.D. W

Hearthstone fans might want to wear a jacket or something on August 10. That’s when the digital card game’s chilly new expansion, Knights of the Frozen Throne, will release for PC and mobile.
Blizzard announced the date today on its site, clarifying the previous release window of August. The expansion will add 135 new cards to Hearthstone, including the Death Knight heroes that give you new powers. Hearthstone has been a big hit since launching in 2014, and new sets like this ke

OPINION: I’ve always looked forward to the next Nexus, and last year, the Pixel. My first Android phone was a Nexus 5. This year, I’ve used nothing but the Pixel XL. But the Pixel 2 and Pixel XL 2, or whatever Google ends up calling them (the branding hasn’t leaked yet), give me almost nothing to look forward to.
As my colleague Evan Blass reported earlier today, both of this year’s phones will have a squeezable frame and stereo speakers. Both will also not receive d

Bad news for environmentally conscious pet owners: cats’ and dogs’ eating habits are responsible for dumping as many as 64 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year — roughly the equivalent of driving over 13 million cars. That’s due to all the meat our furry friends gobble down, according to new research.There are more than 163 million dogs and cats in the US, and they just love to eat. In fact, cats and dogs in the US consume about 19 percent as ma

Shopify wants its 500,000 merchants to be able to run their business almost entirely through the use of bots or voice apps like Alexa.
Speaking exclusively with VentureBeat, Shopify product director Brandon Chu said steps being taken to improve its Alexa skill continue a conversational computing strategy that has been carried out by the ecommerce platform for more than a year.
“Ultimately, any type of information merchants need to make decisions about their businesses, we want our Alexa sk

Elon Musk apparently has way too much time on his hands. On July 20th, the Tesla / SpaceX / Boring Company / OpenAI CEO tweeted that he had received “verbal [government] approval” to build a hyperloop between New York City and Washington, DC. Today, Bloomberg is reporting that Musk won’t just be digging the tunnel for the hyperloop, he also intends to build the entire ultrafast transit system himself.In retrospect, all the signs were there that Musk would reverse his promise to

A day that many old-school role-playing game fans thought would never come has arrived. Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar has launched after nearly 25 years of development.
I saw a tweet from indie designer Jay Barnson this morning noting that Grimoire had released on Steam, Valve’s humongous PC gaming community. It was first set to debut during early July, but the Golden Era Games studio postponed it. But it’s live now.After nearly 25 years of development, the CRPG Grimoire i

Google is likely going to reveal a new Pixel and Pixel XL in the coming months. We've already seen an image of the rumored Pixel XL, codenamed Taimen, and now, we're getting a peek at the smaller Pixel follow-up, codenamed Walleye.Evan Blass at VentureBeat tweeted this image today:
Google's 2017 Pixel forgoes increasingly-common flagship features https://t.co/IUsN4Ex4YP pic.twitter.com/GudbGUPaTC— Evan Blass (@evleaks) August 4, 2017While it's slightly grainy, we can see that the device in

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, Zynga makes money thanks to CSR Racing 2, Nintendo finally tells us when we can preorder an SNES Classic Edition (kind of), and more Persona games are on the way.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Casual Connect’s mood reflects the highs and lows of gaming
PC Gaming Weekly: Survival evolved
Who’s on gaming’s Mount Rushmore? GamesBeat Decides
AR/VR Weekly: RIP, Altspace
Why Hearthsto

 Xfinity xFi, Comcast’s Wi-Fi management service launched this spring, is now making it easier for parents to set boundaries for internet usage in their home. The changes include the ability to put the internet “on pause” for a period of time, as well as lock down web searches so they won’t return adult-oriented results, among other things.
With the newly launched… Read More

Beginning today, anyone with a Brooklyn or New York Public Library card can stream the Criterion Collection online for free. As Gothamist points out, the perk is the result of a new partnership with Kanopy, a streaming service available to public and university libraries.The NYPL already has a bunch of movies available to stream online, but the Kanopy partnership adds 30,000 films to their database. This includes more than 400 movies in the Criterion Collection, like Eraserhead and The Blob.
Get