Technology news

Apple is adding a subtle new feature to Safari in iOS 11 that will automatically strip out Google AMP URLs when a webpage is shared or copy and pasted, as spotted by MacStories editor Federico Viticci.Very nice: when sharing AMP pages to iMessage or Reading List, iOS 11 Safari automatically removes AMP’s crap from the URL. Go Apple pic.twitter.com/aHgSMcofUv— Federico Viticci (@viticci) August 23, 2017Google’s AMP is a standard for stripped-down, faster webpages that Google fav

Last Friday, Taylor Swift began a long, winding publicity stunt that started with scrubbing her social-media accounts, and ended with snakes and an announcement that she had a new album coming out. It’s called Reputation; here’s the album art.If you’ve been on Twitter in the past five days, you’ve probably had a hard time avoiding the saga, and maybe you’ve felt like this album rollout has been received differently than Swift’s past releases. The stakes establ

Amid the arguments between investors and board members, and the continued search for a new CEO, Uber executives are eagerly sharing that its business continues to grow.
Uber officials said Wednesday that gross bookings were up 17 percent in the second quarter of 2017 over the first, while losses shrank 14 percent to $645 million on revenue of $1.75 billion. The company reported $6.6 billion cash on hand, down from $7.1 billion at the last reporting period.
This financial report comes after a roc

Alongside the Galaxy Note 8 announced today, Samsung also revealed that it’s making yet another iteration of the Gear VR headset that’s designed to support the Note and its 6.3-inch display. Aside from accommodating Samsung’s newest phone, very little else seems different between this Gear VR and the previous one we saw a few months back that bundled in a handheld, physical controller. That one came out at the same time as the Galaxy S8 and S8+, but apparently Samsung wasn&rsqu

The Federal Trade Commission says it won’t attempt to block Amazon’s proposed acquisition of Whole Foods, despite some calls for the agency to closely scrutinize the deal.FTC will not “pursue this matter further”
“The FTC conducted an investigation of this proposed acquisition to determine whether it substantially lessened competition under Section 7 of the Clayton Act, or constituted an unfair method of competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act,” the acting

People in the US who search Google for “depression” on their mobile phones will soon have the option to take a screening questionnaire to test whether they’re depressed. The new feature, which Google spokeswoman Susan Cadrecha says "will be fully rolled out on mobile in the US over the next day or so," isn't meant to subvert a medical evaluation. It's meant to steer you to one if you appear depressed.Clinical depression is a fairly common condition: about one in five Americans

Hulu with Live TV can now be streamed using web browsers on PC and Mac, expanding the service beyond the mobile devices and set-top boxes it’s already on. Live TV channels can be viewed using Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge browser, and Internet Explorer 11. Taking live TV to the browser is something that Hulu’s competitors — Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, and DirecTV Now — have already done; Sling added the feature just over a week ago.Don’t expect

Today is the 10th anniversary of Chris Messina suggesting that the pound symbol could be used to tag and organize tweets, thereby tagging and organizing people, ideas, and images. Can you believe it?Back then, we had no idea what to do with the hashtag. But it’s evolved over the last 10 years: it’s been used to assist news gatherers, make jokes, share bland advice, force musical projects to “trend,” vote for awards, submit to contests, indicate sponsored content, declare

Samsung is already working on getting into the smart speaker market. DJ Koh, president of Samsung’s mobile division, confirmed the news to CNBC today at its Galaxy Note 8 event, saying the product would launch "soon." That timeline isn't specific, but at least it's something. Koh says he's already working on the device and wants to create a "fruitful user experience at home with Samsung devices, and [he] want[s] to be moving quite heavily on it."
He didn't say whether the speaker would fea

Facebook has allowed users to upload and view 360-degree photos for a little over a year now, but the social media platform is also adding the ability to capture them, too. Starting today, both the iOS and Android versions of the Facebook app will allow users to create 360-degree photos without requiring a third-party app or camera.
Of course, since phones don’t have 360-degree cameras built in (yet, at least), the process resembles how you create panoramas in your phone’s camera app

Adam Wingard didn’t necessarily set out to be a horror director, but his love of horror films, and his deep familiarity with the genre, pushed him in that direction. He started out with low-budget, high-intensity projects (Pop Skull, A Horrible Way To Die, You’re Next), and became part of a generation of young horror filmmakers who gradually built a reputation off gruesome shorts in anthology films like V/H/S and The ABCs of Death. In 2014, he and frequent screenwriter partner Simon

The Galaxy Note 8 is official, marking Samsung’s final move to get past the Note 7 incident and onto bigger, less (literally) explosive things. For a quick recap of what was announced at the keynote here at the Unpacked event in New York City, we’ve condensed all the biggest moments from a one-hour presentation to a totally unintentional (but certainly appropriate) eight-minute supercut. Eight minutes of Note 8! Isn’t that great? Good thing the event didn’t run too late.

I’ve been looking at the $930 starting price for the new Samsung Galaxy Note 8, scratching my head in bewilderment, looking at that price again, and furrowing my brows. We don’t usually get many mainstream phones with a starting price north of $900 ($960 if you opt for Verizon or AT&T, and even worse in the UK thanks to the pound’s Brexit-induced weakness), and I find myself wondering about the market dynamics nudging the flagship price tiers up. Is it a matter of market sa

You will soon be able to subscribe to publications after reading their stories in Facebook’s instant articles, the company confirmed Wednesday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the company will begin testing subscriptions inside instant articles, the company’s fast-loading news format, later this fall. “If people subscribe after seeing news stories on Facebook, the money will go directly publishers who work hard to uncover the truth, and Facebook won't take a cut,” Zuck

Blizzard has premiered the latest Overwatch animated short at Gamescom, focusing on the ice-wielding hero, Mei.“Rise and Shine” is the seventh short film the company has released so far set in the Overwatch world, joining “Recall,” “Alive,” “Dragons,” “Hero,” “Infiltration,” and “The Last Bastion.” The almost 10-minute-long video gives fans a deeper look into the backstory of Mei, who was cryogenically frozen for

Snapchat wants to have its own original scripted shows by the end of this year. At the Edinburgh International Television Festival today, Snapchat’s head of content, Nick Bell, called scripted programming an “interesting next venture” for the company, Variety reports.
While Snapchat’s plans seem vague, focusing on scripted shows feels like an inevitable decision. Up until now, the company has mostly relied on networks with built-in audiences to create Snapchat-ready versi

For the launch of its new Galaxy Note 8 smartphone, Samsung is — not surprisingly — doubling down on the whole support thing. New Note 8 buyers in the US will get 60 days free of Samsung Premium Care service, which normally costs $11.99 per device per month and includes everything light support to coverage for damage.
For the in-home support portion of the service, Samsung is relying on a lesser-known logistics startup based out of Los Angeles called HelloTech. And HelloTech is promi

Before Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 8 during its event in New York City today, it first addressed last year’s Note 7 battery mishap. This is not new. Samsung has spent the last year issuing conciliatory statements about its phone that repeatedly caught fire, as well as how poorly it acted in response to those failures. But this time around, the company opted for an uplifting tone, starting the whole event off with a sugary reel of supportive words from Note fans.Opening the event this

Samsung announced today that users of its Bixby digital assistant will soon be able to use voice control to play music through Spotify. The news, announced by director of product marketing Jonathan Wong onstage at Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 reveal, is a welcome addition to the list of Bixby integrations, which so far have been somewhat lacking since the product arrived in the US for the S8 and S8 Plus in July after months of delays.Billed as a central hub for interacting with computing device

Samsung announced today that former Note 7 owners can trade in their current phone for a value of up to $425 off the Note 8. The huge discount is a gesture of reconciliation after last year’s Note 7 incident, when many devices caught on fire due to defective batteries. Eligible customers can take the company up on the offer via Samsung.com when preorders go live on August 24th.
Samsung had to recall nearly three million copies of the phone, which was a huge blow to the company’s repu

Rocket League is coming to the Nintendo Switch a lot later than other platforms, but at least the cars-meets-soccer game will have some goodies when it does arrive. Today, Rocket League developer Psyonix revealed two of the Switch-exclusive vehicles that will be featured in the game, both based on iconic Nintendo properties. The first, called the NSR, will come in Mario and Luigi varieties, while the second is styled after Samus’ iconic gunship from Metroid. Both vehicles will be free unlo

How do you recover from one of the most disastrous episodes in consumer electronics history? That’s the challenge Samsung has confronted in the months leading up to today’s announcement of the Galaxy Note 8. Undeterred by the battery catastrophe that led to a complete recall and effective cancellation of the Galaxy Note 7, Samsung just unveiled its successor today.The Galaxy Note 8 is here, and Samsung is hopeful that consumers who appreciate the Note’s features and its signatu

A little over two years ago, the startup Astro HQ emerged with an app that could turn an iPad into a drawing slate for Photoshop and other desktop illustration tools. Now, Astro HQ is back with a new product that goes even further: it’s a small piece of hardware that turns an iPad into a full-on second display, no wires required.
Astro HQ’s new product is called the Luna Display, and it’s supposed to look like a small crystal with a USB-C port sticking out of it. (A Mini Displa

Patrick Gilmore, the studio head at Amazon Game Studios Orange County, has a unique view from his office. It’s not some picturesque Southern California landscape, filled with swaying trees or sandy beaches. Instead, when Gilmore peers down the hallway, he sees an e-sports broadcast booth, where once a week the studio live-streams its next game, Breakaway. The new game initially looks a lot like other competitive multiplayer games, with its combination of mythological heroes and back-and-fo

Every August, droves of car collectors gather for a week on the Monterey Peninsula to show off, ogle, and place big-money bids, all culminating in an elaborate Sunday afternoon car show: the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Ladies wear complicated hats and men don pastel seersucker suits for the golf course occasion. It’s an ostentatious display that seems distant, even out of step with the concerns and circumstances of the outside world.But Monterey Car Week also might be the most

After the Note 7 fiasco, all of Samsung’s reputation was riding on its next smartphone launch back in March for the Galaxy S8. But even though that’s done and over with, the company is still finding its upcoming Note device associated with what happened last year. Will this finally be the phone that gets us all past Samsung’s past? For everything you need to know about this year’s flagship phablet, and other gadgets announced at the company’s Unpacked event in New Y

A new version of Samsung’s fitness-tracking wearable, the Gear Fit 2 Pro, has leaked online ahead of the company’s Unpacked event with a listing on Samsung’s Malaysia website, which was spotted by Evan Blass.The Gear Fit 2 Pro is an upgraded version of Samsung’s Gear Fit 2 fitness tracker from last year. The biggest addition is its water resistance up to 5ATM (roughly 50 meters or around 164 feet), meaning you’ll be able to wear the Gear Fit 2 Pro while swimming. To

UK postal service the Royal Mail is trialling completely electric vans from carmaker Arrival. Arrival, also based in the UK, has partnered with the postal service to operate nine trucks to deliver mail and packages in London and surrounding areas. The trucks are three different sizes and will begin deliveries today from the postal service’s central London hub.
The electric vans are co-branded, have a range of 100 miles, and will produce zero emissions, according to the company. Arrival use

Scientists have created a virtual reality system that allows fruit flies to fly around a virtual pillar, and zebrafish to swim with aliens from the video game Space Invaders. The goal is not to give animals a good time, but for scientists to study how mice, flies, and fish respond to the VR worlds in real time. It’s basically a new tool to study animal behavior in the lab.
The VR system, called FreemoVR, pretty much resembles a holodeck from the TV show Star Trek. It’s an arena surro

Drone delivery has taken another small step toward becoming a reality, thanks to a new trial taking place in Iceland. Israeli drone logistics company Flytrex has partnered with Icelandic on-demand goods service AHA to set up a small drone delivery route in Reykjavík.
Flytrex doesn’t make drones. Instead, it’s spent the past few years working on solving for the rest of the drone delivery equation. That involves working with local regulators (Icelandic Transport Authority, or Ic

Three of Bethesda’s biggest franchises are coming to virtual reality, and today the publisher announced release dates for all of them — and they’re all coming out this year. It starts with the VR version of Skyrim on November 17th, which will be coming to PlayStation VR, followed by Doom VFR on December 1st for both PSVR and the HTC Vive. Finally, Fallout 4 will be available on the Vive on December 12th.
With these releases, Bethesda is one of a small number of major game publi

Every time I've used a Linux computer — at least, a Linux computer that's not hidden behind the sheen of Chrome or Android — it's been the exact same story: nothing ever works right the first time. So I was both excited and a little scared when I was offered a Librem 13 laptop from Purism. The $1,399 ($1,537 as tested) Librem 13 runs PureOS out of the box, Purism's security-focused version of Linux. That means all the initial hurdles of getting Linux running on a system were solved f