Technology news

In video games, you kill Nazis. That’s what we do. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (read my review) doesn’t try to disrupt or examine this. The latest shooter from developer Machine Games treats Nazis like zombies, aliens, or robots — or the same way games have always treated Nazis. But Machine Games uses our history with Nazis in games to take a political stance that is modern and relative to today.
Wolfenstein II brings Nazis to America in an alternate-history sci-

If you were preordering an iPhone X from Best Buy today, you might have noticed that the popular electronics retailer is charging an extra $100 on top of the already expensive $999 and $1,149 prices that Apple charges for the phones.Danielle Schumann, a spokesperson for Best Buy, tried to explain the fact that the company is overcharging for the iPhone X in a statement to Bloomberg, which is included in full below for the sheer ridiculousness of it.
“Our prices reflect the fact that no mat

Few computer peripherals are as venerable as Microsoft’s IntelliMouse Explorer, an old series of office mice so well-rounded they were once one of the most popular choices for professional gamers. Now Microsoft has brought it back to life with the new IntelliMouse Classic, making my nerdy heart skip a beat. It’s available from the Microsoft Store now for $40 bucks. Too bad it seems the company didn’t give it any gaming chops at all. The mouse is basically a modernized version

You’ve long been able to get localized search results by visiting Google at different domains — like google.com for the US, google.co.uk for England, or google.co.jp for Japan — but that won’t be the case any more after today. Google said that it’ll now deliver search results relevant to your current location no matter which domain you visit. So if you’re in New York and visit google.ru, you’ll still get results relevant to New York City.
Fortunately, it

GUEST: Smart home and AI devices aren’t just convenient — they can also make your home a safer place. And thanks to the proliferating internet of things (IoT), good security practices are becoming less of a chore.
It’s a little like the iPhone’s touch ID fingerprint reader, or now face ID — it’s more secure than a four-digit pin, and it’s so much easier to use. That convenience is what gets people using the technology, but the added security is the

I like collecting Amiibo more than actually using them. Unlike Skylanders, Nintendo’s toys-to-life line isn’t built around a specific series. The figures work differently with a bunch of games.
Sometimes, tapping an Amiibo to your controller will unlock in-game items. This is the case for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Certain Amiibo can make powerful items appear. It feels like cheating. Other games, like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, just unlock costumes. The items are cosmet

Yesterday, Facebook rolled out ‘Stories’ to FB Lite – a version of its mobile app meant to minimize data consumption – prompting us to ask: why? Though my colleague Bryan Clark wrote the piece, I was the one who first pointed out the apparent irony: Facebook was rolling out an underused, data-heavy feature onto a version of the app that’s ostensibly meant to save data in emerging markets. But then I realized that’s a pretty arrogant thing for me to

Yamaha spent the week at the Tokyo Motor Show airing out a few truly ridiculous reference designs, but none were more outrageous than the Niken three-wheeled motorcycle. Tricycles aren’t new, and this isn’t even the first leaning trike. But it’s the first idea like this to come from a major motorcycle company like Yamaha.
Being a reference design, there aren’t really any specs to speak of. Yamaha says that this “Leaning Multi-Wheeler” uses a liquid-cooled 3-cy

Tatarus is a first-person sci-fi survival game with an unlikely hero: Cooper, a part-time cook on a mining ship in space. It’s from the Istanbul-based indie studio Abyss Gameworks, and it will be out on November 21 for PC.
Something has gone awry aboard the Tartarus, and you and systems engineer Andrews are the only ones left to fix it. Unfortunately, Andrews is trapped in a remote part of the ship, which is hurtling toward Neptune. To avert certain death, you must repair pipes and in

Next week, Facebook will appear before the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees to answer questions about Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But before it does, the company is laying out the steps it plans to take voluntarily to prevent foreign actors from interfering again. Facebook today said it would introduce its new disclosures around advertising next month, starting with a test in Canada before it rolled out more broadly elsewhere.“When it comes to advertising on Facebook

Facebook announced new advertising transparency policies today that affect all ads on the network. In addition to letting all Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger users view any ad on a devoted page regardless of whether they’re in a targeted audience, the new policies also specifically target political ads. Facebook hopes to curb election interference like the 3,000 Russian-linked political ads seen by 10 million users during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The new policies will be tes

GUEST: You’ve probably read that artificial intelligence is transforming medicine. While the field has yet to reach its full potential, researchers are exploring ways that machine learning, a subset of AI, can dramatically improve patient outcomes.
Machine learning is ultimately about understanding large amounts of data, making it an important tool for handling the flood of electronic data available to health care workers. Its benefits fall into a few major categories:
Detect problems soon

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today outlined the social network’s newest measures to get a handle on its political ads problem and reach “an even higher standard of transparency.” He listed three points the company is implementing to effect this change and plans to put in action next year, through a Facebook post. The most game-changing proposal is that political advertisers will have to prove their identity and disclose who is financing the ad. Every single ad they publish wil

Zombies and vampires make for pretty good horror stories: both monsters feed on flesh or blood, and their bites turn victims into zombies and vampires themselves. But the scariest thing of all? Both myths have a few things in common with a real-world nightmare: rabies.
Rabies is an infectious disease that’s primarily spread through the bite of an infected animal, like dogs or raccoons. The virus spreads from the bite to the brain, where it’s devastating: victims can experience anxiet

Intel is bringing some of its most impressive storage technology to consumers for the first time with its new Intel Optane SSD 900P Series of products. These are Intel’s latest PCIe NVMe 3.0 SSDs that provide much faster read and write times than the aging SATA connection standard.
The 900P comes in 480GB and 280GB capacities, and it is available starting today, according to Intel. This kinda of hyper-fast storage can improve performance for PCs that frequently load massive data sets for j

OPINION: Earlier this week, the official Samsung Turkey news portal Güncel Miyiz let slip that Samsung phones will be getting Android 8.0 Oreo in early 2018. The page, which the site has since pulled (Google cache, Bing cache), said that work on bringing Oreo had begun, but it didn’t specify for which devices (likely the Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+, and Galaxy Note8). Samsung is moving way too slowly.
Samsung declined to comment on the report, which in cases like this typically means &ldquo

Hello, and welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, Dragon Ball Fighterz gets a release date, we kill Nazis in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and Animal Crossing is going camping on Android and iOS.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Inside Microsoft’s Inclusive Technologies Lab
PC Gaming Weekly: Meet your Destiny (2)
Is Super Mario Odyssey perfect? GamesBeat Decides
10 Super Mario Odyssey tips: An essential guide to Moons, hats, co

During a summer internship with a large Kansas City corporation, college student Louis Byrd was unexpectedly called into the HR office.
Although the incident was about 10 years ago today, it has not yet left his mind, Byrd said.
“I’ll never forget this,” he said. “HR told me that the people on my team had complained that my hair, which was in dreadlocks at the time, was inappropriate for the workplace. … I responded, ‘I don’t say anything when people co

When Supermassive Games launched the horror title Until Dawn in 2015, it became a party game where your friends could help you make the right decision to save the lives of doomed teenagers. With Hidden Agenda, Supermassive is offering the same kinds of choices.
Only one person had the controller in Until Dawn, and everybody else on the couch had to watch. But thanks to a new Sony PlayStation technology dubbed PlayLink, everybody can now join the game. With PlayLink, one player controls the PlayS

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul run through the news this week on The Vergecast, with a lot of heavy sighs to go around. There's the Pixel 2 XL screen fiasco, Amazon's home camera invasion efforts with Amazon Key, and Amazon's oversized new Fire TV. Plus, Paul is back with his weekly segment about water pods. And more! Listen in and lament the current state of technology with your three best friends.02:44 - Google 'actively investigating' reports of Pixel 2 XL screen burn-in …
17:39 - Google Pixe

Earlier this month, Twitter temporarily suspended the account of actress Rose McGowan after she denounced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein for sexual harassment and assault. McGowan, who is among Weinstein’s accusers, had posted a private phone number to the service. In response, Twitter restricted McGowan’s access to her account. Thousands of users protested, complaining that after they experienced harassment on the platform, their reports went unanswered.
Twitter relented, restoring Mc

One of the most exciting electric cars in the works (and one of the most obvious legitimate competitors to Tesla’s hold on the high end of the market) is the Porsche Mission E, which is slated for a 2019 release. And now there’s finally footage of it in motion — or, at least, the test mule version.Electrek spotted a video uploaded by France’s L’Automobile Magazine that shows the car whipping around the Nürburgring track in Germany. The famous circuit is where c

There’s a certain breed of game that just fits perfectly on your phone. Games that look beautiful, with pleasing visuals and serene sounds, that can lull you into a trance while you zone out with some headphones on. Think titles like Alto’s Adventure, Kami, or Monument Valley. Now, you can add the iOS-exclusive Frost to that list: a minimalist pleasure about controlling swarms of glittering light.
As with the best puzzle games, the core goal of Frost is pretty simple. In each level t

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

 Any automation evangelist will tell you that the goal of industrial robotics is to replace work that’s “dull, dirty and dangerous.” As someone who’s worked a fair number of retail gigs, I can tell you that inventory falls squarely into the first category. Walmart employees likely won’t miss out on that bit as the mega-retailer begins rolling out shelf-scanning robots. Read More

EXCLUSIVE: REDMOND, Washington — Microsoft’s Inclusive Technologies Lab is full of insightful ideas about how to enable as many people as possible to enjoy video games. One of them is a game controller that is really, really heavy. It is meant to give game designers an idea of what it’s like for a person without strong hands to use a typical controller.
And on the wall is a sign that says, “When you do not intentionally, deliberately include … you will unintentiona

In the early 1900s, downtown Durham’s Parrish Street was a thriving entrepreneurial hub for African American-owned businesses and financial services — so much so that it earned the name “Black Wall Street.” Today, with the help of players in the Triangle area’s startup community, that legacy has come back to life.
Raleigh and Durham have been earning recent accolades as one of the country’s emerging technology centers. Behind the scenes, Google