Technology news

Researchers at Google have found a vulnerability in the way watermarks are used by stock imagery sites like Adobe Stock that makes it possible to remove the opaque stamp used to protect copyright.
The consistent nature in which the watermarks are placed on photos can be exploited using an algorithm trained to recognize and automatically remove watermarks.
“As often done with vulnerabilities discovered in operating systems, applications or protocols, we want to disclose this vulnerability a

New game Pet the Pup at the Party could be one of the most relatable games ever, even if you’re a cat person like me. Made by designer Will Herring, the game is all about alleviating social anxiety at a house party by ignoring people to instead search for very good boyes to pet.
Made from a first-person perspective, you’re only given two minutes to zoom through rooms in a house in order to find pups. This means pushing by party-goers on phones or eating pizza who are mostly grumpy an

Cars have finally caught the iPad bug. The screen technology used over the past decade or more, which has almost always been resistive type, has not exactly registered every finger press perfectly. In some cars, you had to tap the screen a few times to get it to work — and forget about swiping or making any gestures on the screen. It was all about button taps.
In a recent test of the 2018 Acura TLX A-Spec (base price $42,800), I noticed the screen looked better and responded to touch faste

 You’ve probably had the experience of going to a website and seeing a lot of content that’s not really relevant. For the most part, a lot of this is organized in a way that’s either pre-defined or based on a limited number of signals that aims to sort of personalize the experience for a normal user. But as time goes on and the competition for eyeballs continues to heat up,… Read More

In recent days, web services and platforms have rushed to drop any clients tied to hate groups or other extremists, hoping to cut any apparent links to the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Apple Pay and PayPal have changed policies to stop payments to white nationalist groups, Facebook has stepped up anti-violence enforcement, and the notorious neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer has been kicked off the internet entirely, unable to secure a registrar.
At the same time, the rush t

It’s easy to be hyperbolic when praising novels: every promising new author’s work is described as a “future classic.” But last week, fantasy author N.K. Jemisin became one of a handful of authors to win the Hugo award for Best Novel two years in a row, first for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, then for its 2016 sequel The Obelisk Gate. After reading the final book in the trilogy, The Stone Sky, I think it’s likely that she’ll do it again next year. The book

The total solar eclipse on August 21st is promising to be a life-changing event. For the first time in 99 years, the path of totality will cross the length of the continental US from coast to coast. And what better way to view it than reclining in the leather-draped comfort of your Volvo SUV?
The Swedish automaker manufactured a batch of oversized sun shades that can be clipped on to the 2018 XC60 SUV’s panoramic moonroof using magnets. The shade is ISO-certified 12312-2 material, allowing

In an ecommerce landscape increasingly dominated by Amazon, Walmart is showing that there is still ample opportunity for growth, although it can come at a cost.
Walmart reported financial results for the June quarter today, with many analysts focusing on how its ecommerce business is doing. The company said the gross merchandise value of its ecommerce operations grew 67 percent in the quarter, with revenue rising 60 percent. While ecommerce revenue growth is down from 63 percent in the previous

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Obi-Wan Kenobi will be the subject of the next standalone Star Wars film, with The Hours director Stephen Daldry in “early talks” to direct. The movie will follow the lead of last year’s Rogue One and the forthcoming, untitled Han Solo film, rather than the main “Saga” films that include The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that there is no script for the project, and that talks to bring Dal

The shooter audience on PC looks like it is in the middle of a migration from last year’s big hit to this year’s breakout success story. Nearly a quarter of all Overwatch players on PC also played PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds last month, according to data from intelligence firm Newzoo. And it’s finding that players are going back to Battlegrounds and leaving Blizzard’s Overwatch behind.
“In terms of crossover, fellow shooter Overwatch came out on top with 24.

When you look at a robot, what do you see? For those of us who cover technology, it’s a bunch of plastic, a coprocessor, and some software. We know the hard part of hardware design is getting the bot to do anything worthwhile. That’s why the idea of a plastic robot taking over the world or stealing jobs from American workers is a bit laughable. It’s hard enough trying to get a meeting robot to look at the right person when he or she talks. Taking over all janitorial duties at a

Asus has a new gaming monitor out, the ROG Strix XG27VQ, a name that I’m not even going to bother commenting on. In a world where most of these monitors try to be the biggest and best around, the new Strix XG27VQ takes a bit of a different approach, via AnandTech.At 27 inches, it’s smaller than most of Asus’ curved monitor lineup, which tends to be in the 32-inch and up range. It comes in at a mere 1080p resolution instead of the more pixel dense offerings on the high end of th

EXCLUSIVE: There’s a new open source tool in town for tying different event-driven functions together. Serverless, a startup that builds tools for building applications without having to worry about underlying infrastructure, announced a new Event Gateway project today that provides developers with a platform-agnostic tool for passing events from one program to another.
Event Gateway combines two different sets of functionality: an API gateway that lets developers monitor and manage connec

As high-tech firms have begun taking steps to weed out some of the most offensive right-wing hate groups, alternative social network Gab has seen a surge in donations to its crowdfunding campaign as it plays up its anti-Silicon Valley crusade.
Today, Gab passed $1 million raised. That includes almost $500,000 in just the last five days. And Gab isn’t being coy about its feeling towards Silicon Valley giants.1 million dollars raised by THE PEOPLE to make speech free again and say FUCK

Twitter has partnered with The Weather Channel to live stream next week’s total solar eclipse as the Moon’s shadow travels from the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States. The stream will start at 12PM ET on Monday, August 21st, and it will include live footage from cities in Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Kentucky, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming. This is roughly the path of totality, meaning when the Moon will completely block out the Sun.So if you&r

Sylvain Neuvel imagined piloting a giant robot when he was growing up. And while the dream of stepping into the cockpit of a building-sized mech may still be out of reach, he’s done the next best thing: written a book series about giant, alien robots called The Themis Files, which is set to conclude next year with Only Human.
The series is set in a world that — initially — is more or less like ours, until a scientist named Rose Franklin discovers a giant, glowing metal hand bur

Tomorrow morning, a NASA communications satellite is scheduled to launch to space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on top of an Atlas V rocket made by the United Launch Alliance. The launch was slated for earlier this month, but was delayed after some equipment on the probe was broken during launch preparations. But now, the satellite, called TDRS-M, is ready to head to orbit, where it will join a fleet of other satellites crucial to NASA’s operations in space.
That fleet is known as NASA&rsq

Tomorrow morning, a NASA communications satellite is scheduled to launch to space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on top of an Atlas V rocket made by the United Launch Alliance. The launch was slated for earlier this month, but was delayed after some equipment on the probe was broken during launch preparations. But now, the satellite, called TDRS-M, is ready to head to orbit, where it will join a fleet of other satellites crucial to NASA’s operations in space.
That fleet is known as NASA&rsq

The Gogoro scooter-sharing service, Coup, has launched today in Paris. Announced back in May, 600 of the Taiwanese company’s slick electric scooters are now available for rent in and around the city’s center. The price has ticked up slightly from the original plan, though — it will cost €4 for the first 30 minutes of riding, and an additional €1 for every 10 minutes of riding after that.Riders can download the Coup app (available on iOS and Android) to find and reserv

YouTube TV launched only four months ago, and it's rapidly expanding beyond its initial five markets. Today, the company announced that the service will be available in 14 new US markets, which means 50 percent of US households have access. It plans to expand to 17 more markets in the "coming weeks." Here's the complete list of where YouTube TV is expanding now and where it'll be expanding later:
Launching now: Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, Columbus, Jacksonville-Brunswick, Las Vegas, Louisvill

Blizzard’s Hearthstone and Overwatch are two of the most popular games on Twitch, the No. 1 game-streaming site in the world. Now, fans of those titles will have an easier time finding content that suits their needs.
Twitch is adding new search filters for each game. For Overwatch, you can look for streams for specific heroes. For Hearthstone, you can find ones for classes, game modes, player ranks, and number of wins. The features will be rolling out gradually throughout the day.
This is

Samsung’s removing a step in between hearing a good song you don’t recognize on TV and pulling out your smartphone to identify it with Shazam, Siri, or Google Assistant. That can take a few seconds — if your phone is even nearby. So to streamline things, the company has added Shazam directly to its Smart Hub on 2017 Samsung TVs.You can activate it by selecting the Shazam icon in Smart Hub to pull up details on whatever’s playing at that moment. You can also use the voice

Cryptocurrency has the potential to disrupt many industries, and a startup called GameCredits hopes to use it to disrupt the mobile app store duopoly of Apple and Google. Its motto is “In games we trust.”
GameCredits is creating a blockchain-based app store that will be an alternative place where mobile game developers can sell their games. Users will be able to make purchases in the games using the company’s own digital blockchain currency, dubbed GameCredits, and GameCredits

Shenmue III is set to debut in the second half of next year, and now Saints Row publisher Deep Silver has revealed that it will distribute the game for PC as well as PlayStation 4. This ensures the most unlikely of sequels to Sega’s Dreamcast and Xbox life-simulator series will get both a digital and a physical release when it rolls out in late 2018. Shenmue creator and director Yu Suzuki will also appear at Gamescom in Germany at the end of this month to meet with fans and discuss his lat

Instagram is rolling out a new feature today on its iOS and Android apps that'll clear up DM confusion. Users could already reply to photos, videos, and reshared posts sent to their DMs with their own photo or video, but now, a sticker of whatever they're responding to will automatically show up in their reply.Here's a good example from Instagram on what that'll look like:InstagramYou can obviously blow the sticker up, doodle on it, or add extra stickers. I know on Snapchat, I always forget what

Blockchain-based game marketplace DMarket has raised $2.5 million in a presale and launched its public token sale (ICO) today. The ICO, which kicked off just an hour ago, has so far generated over $1.5 million.
DMarket’s decentralized, cross-game marketplace will let gamers freely trade and sell in-game assets, earning real value for those virtual items. In the $100 billion-plus gaming market, only about 4,000 of the millions of gamers are able to profit from their time spent gaming, the c

About 45 million people in the US wear contact lenses — and most of them do it wrong, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Almost 90 percent of US adults said they either slept with lenses, did not replace them as often as prescribed, or did some other dirty thing that would make your eye doctor lose it. The CDC would like you to stop: not wearing your contacts properly ups your risk of eye infections, and can even make you go blind.
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A new drone video shows work continuing on Apple Park, including progress on landscaping, despite reports that the company was attempting to prevent such flyovers.
Over the summer, several drone operators said that Apple had hired security guards for adjacent sites to warn them not to fly their drones over the company’s new headquarters. At the time, it did not appear Apple Park had been declared a no-fly zone by the Federal Aviation Administration. Still, some drone operators who had been

ZoomInfo, the subscription-based B2B platform that sells access to company data such as contact details, employment history, and other background information, was acquired earlier this week by Boston-based private equity firm Great Hill Partners. But the company didn’t reveal how much it was acquired for — until now.
A ZoomInfo spokesperson has confirmed to VentureBeat that it was acquired for $240 million, and it said that it will continue to operate as is, except under the wing of

EXCLUSIVE: HashiCorp and Microsoft announced today that the two organizations will be working together on integrating the popular Terraform infrastructure management software with the Azure cloud platform.
It’s a move by Microsoft that could help with adoption of its cloud platform, especially by enterprises that are the bread and butter of the tech giant’s customer base. Terraform allows developers to provision compute infrastructure using code across both on-premises and cloud envi

Social news site Reddit today announced the official launch of its video hosting feature, meaning users of certain pre-approved communities can now upload video directly to the site. The feature is already in place as part of a beta testing phase the company began conducting in late June with around 200 existing subreddits. Reddit says it’s now ready to expand the feature to other communities, and that those interested can work directly with site moderators and the company’s video te

Germany’s Deca Games is coming out of stealth to offer live operations (such as tournaments) that can breathe life into older mobile and PC games.
The Berlin-based company will work with game studios and developers who don’t want to continue the task of running an existing game as a service. It will do so by taking over the entire operation of a game through acquisition or licensing. In doing so, Deca Games will compete with rivals such as RockYou and Tag Games. Deca’s ver

Box is bringing more artificial intelligence to its content services offering for enterprises, the company announced today. Using the Google Cloud Vision API, customers will be able to get automatic tagging of objects, optical character recognition of text in images, and other information when they upload files.
With this move, Box is adding a new layer of intelligence to its marquee service, which offers customers secure, cloud-based file storage and content management capabilities. Box Image R

Id Software announced today that its multiplayer first-person shooter Quake Champions will transition from its closed testing phase to Early Access on August 22. To play the game in Early Access, you need to buy the Champions Pack for $30. That’s $10 cheaper than it’s final $40 retail price.
Quake Champions is a PC-only arena shooter, a kind of multiplayer FPS that focuses on fast-paced deathmatch action. The Quake series was one of the first to popularize the subgenre with Quak

This year, students at Arizona State University will have the opportunity to live in college housing with Echo Dots in a program that encourages engineering students to practice voice user interface development skills on consumer hardware.
ASU has built a new work / live space for first-year engineering students called the Tooker House, and those moving into its residence hall will be able to opt in to the program and receive an Echo Dot for their dorm room. The school says Amazon has donated 1,

OPINION: If there’s one thing consumers don’t like, it’s being spammed with calls, instant messages, and texts involving promotions and other forms of marketing chicanery — especially when they haven’t given consent.
What may be even more annoying, however, is turning on your phone to find a survey has been baked directly into the software. Nevertheless, a number of mobile phone makers seem to be employing this tactic in recent times as they seek to garner “va

Marvel’s The Defenders begins streaming tomorrow on Netflix, but a new trailer has just hit the web, showing off plenty of new footage of the team in action, teasing the nature of the threat that they face.The first trailer for the show introduced the team trying to find their dynamic together, while the second showed off Sigourney Weaver’s villain Alexandra. This new preview really shows just how much of a threat Weaver’s character is for the team and the city that they protec

 Bay Area startup Ripcord just scored a $40 million Series B, following its successful launch earlier this year. By all accounts, the company has apparently hit the ground running with its decidedly unsexy goal of using robots to digitize paper records for large corporations and organizations. According to CEO Alex Fielding, Ripcord already has a number of Fortune 100 companies on board,… Read More

Ripcord, a startup that’s using robotics, machine vision, and artificial intelligence to create what it calls the “truly paperless workplace,” has raised $40 million in a series B round of funding led by Icon Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lux Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank.
The funds constitute $25 million in equity financing and $15 million in debt.
Founded out of Hayward, California in 2015, Ripcord has built machines that can scan, index

Facebook has announced two new updates that will limit video clickbait posts from appearing in the News Feed. The posts being targeted are those that have fake video play buttons embedded into an image, and videos of a static image.Facebook’s algorithm actively promotes videos, especially longer ones. Spammers have exploited this to trick users into clicking links to low-quality websites and those with malicious ads. Users started noticing static images disguised as videos a little while a

Microsoft is testing out its new Skype mobile interface in a desktop preview of the company’s communication app. The new radical Skype mobile design debuted back in June, and the reception hasn’t been positive. Despite that, Microsoft wants to try out a new design on the desktop side. “It’s not yet complete and we need your feedback,” says a Skype spokesperson.
The new Skype Preview is designed to take advantage of the larger screen space on a desktop PC, and Micros