Technology news

You can now play Pac-Man right in Snapchat, but you’ll have to go through an ad to do it. Reese’s, of Peanut Butter Cup fame, for some reason decided to introduce a Pac-Man themed game to the platform. It’s a marketing move, of course, but I can’t complain about yet another way to play Pac-Man. In order to try it out, you can scan this Snapcode: Nom nom nom nom nom… Translation? Play Reese’s Pieces Cup PAC-MAN on @Snapchat pic.twitter.com/srpMca4NfD —

The US Senate today announced it had reached an agreement internally concerning self-driving car technology. The Senate is expected to pass legislation on October 4th that would clear regulations and restrictions for manufacturers, in essence providing a clear path to putting driverless cars on the road. The House passed legislation this summer in a bipartisan effort to ensure the US remains at the cutting-edge of driverless car development. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune and Sen

Amazon is updating its Lumberyard tools for game developers. The engine is adding dozens of new features to improve animations, nonphotorealistic visuals, and more.
Lumberyard is Amazon’s biggest gaming project. The company has some internal development studios, but it is putting a lot of investment in building making a tool for others to use. The company is, of course, leveraging its gigantic Amazon Web Services cloud platform for Lumberyard, and its visual backbone is the CryEngine

GUEST: There is a disturbing movement among technology companies today. Many claim to be using artificial intelligence in one way or another, but more often than not, these claims are a massive exaggeration.
This may be hard to believe, especially in the age of the Elon Musk’s warnings about a potential global apocalypse caused by AI. While Musk’s warnings may be justified, they’re hardly relevant — AI is still playing around in the wading pool of what is and isn’t

After analyzing more than 70,000 Macs, the team at Duo Security uncovered a firmware vulnerability that could affect countless PCs. And although the research was done on Macs, Windows PCs are even more likely to be at risk. Rich Smith and Pepijn Bruienne outlined the flaw in a recently-published blog. The issue concerns Apple’s EFI, or Extensible Firmware Interface, which is the interface responsible for booting and running macOS. Because all subsequent software operations depend fir

Apple received a record number of national security orders this year, according to its bi-anual report published this week. The company stated it received more than 13,250 national security requests affecting over 9,000 accounts in the first half of 2017. Compared to the same period in 2015, this represents a threefold increase. “We count each individual request received and report the total number of requests received within bands permissible by law.” “Though we wan

In case you missed the announcement during Amazon’s very busy hardware event earlier this week, the Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show have all gained the ability to place voice calls to numbers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico for free. If you want to receive calls from regular numbers, you’ll need the new $35 Connect box that Amazon unveiled on Wednesday, which also allows you to use your home telephone number for Echo calls and dial emergency services like 911 or premium rate /

GUEST: Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and TrueBit founder Jason Teusch recently proposed a new way to run an ICO. Does it work? Possibly. Is it made for human beings? Therein lies the rub.
Here’s the problem they’re attacking: If a token sale is capped, say at $10 million, then a wealthy scalper can pre-emptively buy the whole $10 million supply and resell it later for a profit. But if a token sale is uncapped, then you have no idea if you’re purchasing 1 percent or 0.0001 pe

Unless you’re watching Her, you don’t generally connect AI with romantic angst. But researchers from the University of Southern California have trained one to give troubled relationships a death date — which might be the key to saving them. The researchers’ study, published in PLOS One, details the process. A machine learning algorithm listened in on the therapy sessions of 134 couples, and the researchers fed it information on the lifespan of each relationship. It

Elon Musk is obsessed with traveling between any two points on Earth in less than 30 minutes. Whether by hyperloop (above and below ground) or interplanetary rocket, the billionaire technologist is convinced that no trip between any two cities on the planet should last longer than an episode of The Big Bang Theory.His frustration with our current outdated methods of transportation is understandable. After all, we’ve been stuck with four modes of travel (road, air, water, and rail) for almo

Nintendo will shut down the Wii Shop channel on January 30th, 2019, marking the end of an era for the service that first came online for Wii consoles in December 2006. The shutdown will happen gradually: users will still be able to add Wii Points until March 26th, 2018, and still be able to use those points to purchase content until the shop fully goes offline in January 2019.You also won’t be able to re-download previously purchased Wii and Virtual Console games
Additionally, at some poin

GUEST: The automotive industry is no stranger to drastic changes, but none have been quite as divisive — or potentially game-changing — as the ongoing development of autonomous vehicles. Up to this point, much of the discussion has surrounded feasibility and safety. For me, autonomous driving is not so much an “if” as a “when,” so I think it’s worth beginning to discuss what it’s going to look like once it actually gets here.
Will riding in self-dr

Robert Bartkowski arrived outside Nintendo New York in Rockefeller Plaza two days ago around 5PM. His camping supplies are modest: a chair, some blankets, and a lot of patience. His food, as well as his bathroom breaks, are dependent on a smattering of stores across from him.Despite being subjected to the wilds of New York City for hours without end, the 20-year-old is in good spirits. He’s come to buy the SNES Classic, and less than an hour remains until the store opens its doors at 9AM.

VB EVENT: Our VB Summit, which is all about the best business cases we can find in artificial intelligence, is quickly approaching: October 23 and 24 in Berkeley, California.
The event is invite-only. But we’re publicly calling for submissions for our AI Innovation Showcase. It’s a special segment of the event that shows the most disruptive new business products in the area of artificial intelligence.
We’ll feature up to five innovative new products in the area of artificial in

Over the past year, Chicagoland has seen an uptick in the number of venture-backed insurance tech startups. Some of them provide comprehensive insurance, while others simplify only one part of the process.
But regardless of their niche, insure-tech companies are having a moment in Chicago, and it makes sense. Illinois has a history of being home to some of the nation’s biggest and most powerful insurance companies, like Allstate in Northbrook and State Farm in Bloomington, both of which ha

GoPro announced the Hero 6 Black yesterday, and a headlining feature of the new camera is its ability to shoot 4K footage at 60 frames per second. This is something that’s been long awaited by many power and pro users who want just a little bit (about two to three times) of slow motion capability at what is typically the highest resolution most people are shooting or watching. It may not be an ability you’ll ever use on a GoPro, but even if that’s the case these videos will hel

Hurricane Harvey’s unprecedented rains and flooding last month caused a leak from a heavily polluted site along the San Jacinto River east of Houston, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The so-called San Jacinto River Waste Pits, one of several Superfund sites flooded during the storm, contain cancer-causing waste from a paper mill. Harvey’s rains damaged the protective cap that was supposed to hold in the waste, exposing the “underlying waste material,&

Tencent has not invested in Bluehole Studio, the company that makes PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. News reports out of South Korea yesterday claimed that Tencent had acquired a 5 percent stake in the PUBG developer, but Bluehole confirmed to GamesBeat that those reports are false.
This does not mean that Tencent — a Chinese internet behemoth that already owns League of Legends and a piece of Fortnite studio Epic Games — will never invest in the last-player standing shooter phen

OPINION: This was a busy week for Twitter. The company made major headlines at least three times — and as is often the case, the first of the three received the least attention. Twitter’s decision to update its public policies after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened North Korea deserves more scrutiny. Yes, more than the 280 character limit or even the suspension of Russia-linked accounts.
140 was a poorly chosen arbitrary number. Doubling the poorly chosen arbitrary number is ju

South Korea said today that it plans to ban raising money through initial coin offerings (ICOs) for all cryptocurrencies, according to Reuters. The country’s Financial Services Commission said that all ICOs need to be banned because the trading of Bitcoin and other cryptocoins needs to be tightly controlled. Violators of the new ban will receive “stern penalties,” but no details of what those penalties will be have been provided.
As ICOs increase in quantity and scale, they&rsq

In this week’s episode, Travis and Stewart talk about virtual reality advertising, Intercom’s new lead generation solution, and Amazon’s smart goggles, which sound like they might be a terrible idea. Or they might be good.
Stewart thinks that either way they’ll be cheap because Amazon doesn’t do premium products. In our guest interview, Sean Ellis — the man who invented the term “growth hacking” — gives us all his secrets. Well, not all of th

Hello, and welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, the video game voice actors strike ended, Middle-earth: Shadow of War showed off its mobile version, and we tried to figure out what makes a “core” Mario game.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and roundup
The DeanBeat: The wonderful diverse world of games
PC Gaming Weekly: Atari searches for a market
Cuphead: Watch Dean conquer his demons
What makes a ‘core’ Mario game? GamesBeat Decid

GUEST: I’m not going to pull any punches — too many cities think of job creation or the number of new jobs added this month as a reliable indicator of long-term economic viability and success. These people are wrong.
Will there continue to be high-paying jobs in our country? Yes.
Will there continue to be high-paying jobs in abundance? No.
There are currently thousands of companies raising tens of millions of dollars to destroy your job. Breakthroughs in software, robots, and medical

Of all the tech I get to use on a regular basis, my monitor might be my favorite. That may sound silly if you’ve been using a laptop or a standard desktop monitor for years, but I use an ultrawide display (one that has an aspect ratio of 21:9 or wider) and it’s a massive canvas for me to digitally spread out on. Instead of needing two monitors to display my workspace, I can have all of my windows on the same panel at the same time without having to switch between multiple virtual des

Amazon announced a few more Echo devices this week, and The Vergecast is here to recap it all. Nilay, Dan, Dieter, and Paul discuss Amazon’s strategy with these new products, as well rumors of stuff that will be announced at Google’s event next week.
There’s a whole lot of stuff in between that — like Twitter’s new 280 character limit — so listen to it all and you’ll get it all.
02:22 - Twitter just doubled the character limit for tweets to 280
06:08 - T

At 2:59PM on September 28th, less than 24 hours before the launch of the SNES Classic, I felt a deep, familiar pang of regret about not purchasing one in advance. I’m generally against the idea of preordering anything, but the order window for the Classic had long passed. If I wanted to buy one on launch day, my options were as follows: get in line hours early and hope for the best, or follow someone who did get one, and mug them.Desperation makes a woman do crazy things, but the most outr

The morning after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, Sofia Maldonado tried to call her parents, who were still on the island. “You call them, call them, and no answer,” she says. She switched to texts. Still nothing. “Not having communications with your parents or your friends or anyone, it’s very hard because you don’t know how they’re doing.”Maldonado, an artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was traveling when the hurricane hit. She watched th

Google Container Engine (GKE), the tech giant’s managed service that’s designed to help businesses run applications that rely on software containers, has been updated today with a number of features that should help companies scale and manage their software.
Companies using GKE will be able to take advantage of new features like aliased IP support, which gives a container a virtual IP address that can be referenced from other applications in the same way a developer would work with a

The Commodore 64 is making a comeback. Koch Media, the German media company that also owns the Deep Silver publishing brand, announced that it is making a tiny version of the classic computer gaming machine. The Commodore 64 Mini is coming out sometime early in 2018 and will retail for $80
This is taking a page out of Nintendo’s playbook. Last year, the NES Classic Edition was a huge hit that was nearly impossible to find on store shelves. The SNES Classic Edition launches today. Preorders

Film and television have long had an equal representation problem, and a new website is here to address the issue. The site, called Mediaversity, reviews films and TV shows and measures the quality of the writing as well as how well people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and women are represented.Mediaversity was launched this past April as a passion project by Li Lai, a New York-based visual designer, who originally posted her reviews to Tumblr in December 2016. The site’s contr

Earlier this year, HMD Global revived Nokia’s classic 3310 candy bar phone with only the slightest updates. And next month, the phone is in for another tweak: a new version is getting support for 3G, which will open it up for use in a lot more countries — including the US. The phone should work on AT&T and T-Mobile, but not Verizon and Sprint.
The new Nokia 3310 3G will sell for €69 (about $81 USD), a slight bump up from the original version, which sold for €49 (about $

Uber launched a new tool yesterday to teach users how to sign simple phrases in American Sign Language for better communication with drivers who are deaf or hard of hearing. The website, ubersignlanguage.com, is an extension of an outreach effort launched by the company in 2015 to recruit more drivers from the deaf community. Now when you get matched with a deaf driver, you are offered the option of learning a few ASL signs in the app. The tool teaches you how to sign basic phrases such as &ldqu

As with its predecessor, the biggest issues with the miniature SNES Classic Edition are its wired controllers and lack of a dedicated home button. Thankfully, 8bitdo is fixing both of those problems with its new wireless controller.The new gamepad looks almost identical to the original Super Nintendo design, but with a solid dark grey front. More importantly, 8bitdo’s option comes bundled with a wireless dongle so that you don’t have to fuss with the frustratingly short cords availab

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for ho