Technology news

During today’s quarterly financial call for the Walt Disney Company, CEO Bob Iger announced that The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson will be helming his own Star Wars trilogy. But that isn’t all: Disney also plans to create a live-action Star Wars television show for its upcoming online streaming service.There are no details on what this show might be about. But according to Variety, Iger also revealed that Disney is currently working on shows based on Monsters Inc., High School Musi

Facebook today explained in more detail its new test for combating revenge porn following mass confusion earlier this week over how exactly the system works and whether it puts users at a higher risk for abuse. The system, currently being piloted in Australia in partnership with the country’s eSafety Commissioner, allows users to upload nude photos preemptively directly to Facebook Messenger, so the company can create a digital fingerprint of sorts for the file to then prevent it from bein

Since Amazon bought Whole Foods in August, it’s doing things a little differently this Black Friday. The two are teaming up to offer in-store discounts on Amazon devices, including the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Fire TV, and Fire tablets, at over 100 Whole Foods stores.
Amazon’s also going to be adding pop-up stores, staffed with Amazon employees, to select Whole Foods locations in Illinois, Michigan, Florida, California, and Colorado, starting on November 13th. It’s not yet known

Expectations are high for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and it appears Disney and Lucasfilm are happy with the way the film turned out: today, Disney announced that its director, Rian Johnson, will be launching an entirely new trilogy in the Star Wars franchise.Johnson will write and direct the first installment in the new trilogy, with his longtime producer Ram Bergman set to produce the films. While details are scarce, the new trilogy will be separate from the classic Skywalker saga, and instead w

Guillermo del Toro went on Facebook earlier today to answer questions about his upcoming film The Shape of Water, and then surprised audiences by unveiling the film’s final trailer.
The Shape of Water is a film set in the 1950s that follows a mute woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) who mops up floors at a facility that’s housing a strange aquatic creature. Michael Shannon plays Strickland, a man tasked with keeping an eye on the beast, who believes it is dangerous and not to be truste

I’ve got no problem with the iPhone X’s new home indicator and its swiping gestures. In fact, I quite like them. Swiping up to go home feels like second nature after just a few days using the phone. Same for getting to the app switcher by pausing after that upward swipe.But I’m not a big fan of how far away Control Center feels now. That upper right corner is a stretch for my thumb — even with my big hands. So yesterday I thought about trying a different method to reach t

The key to better computer algorithms might be found in the brains of fruit flies, researchers say.Computers are always doing searches that involve comparing similar things. Think about when you go on YouTube to listen to Coldplay and it recommends a song by Radiohead. (This is called a “similarity search.”) Fruit flies do a version of this to survive: if they learned that the smell of an orange indicates food, they will know in the future that a similar smell is also food they can e

For years, rumors of sexual harassment have swirled around comedian Louis CK. Now, five women have come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct, as reported at The New York Times. Their accounts are remarkably similar, involving incidents where the Louie star either asked if he could masturbate in front of them, or simply did so without their consent.Although his agent said he would decline to comment, Louis CK previously brushed off rumors of sexual misconduct, telling Vulture in 2016, &ldqu

CBS will air Star Trek: Discovery’s last episode of 2017, “Into the Forest I Go,” on Sunday, November 12th. After it airs, fans will have to wait until the new year to see what happens next. Fortunately, the hiatus won’t be that long: the show will return on January 7th.Set roughly a decade before The Original Series, Star Trek: Discovery follows a disgraced Starfleet officer named Michael Burnham. When war breaks out between the Federation and Klingons, she’s assig

“The Glass Room... what is that?” a young woman asks, while walking arm in arm with a man past a well-lit storefront in London’s Soho district. From the outside, the art installation looks very much like an Apple Store. There’s a long white bar running through the center of the room. The sign “Data Detox Bar” is not visible from the street. Toward the back of the space, rows and rows of little white pedestals prop up iPads, each of which plays a different vide

Logitech has been taking heat in recent days for announcing plans to permanently disable its Harmony Link device this coming March. But today the company is trying to make amends with affected customers by offering all owners of the 2011 product a free Harmony Hub. The Hub is basically the newer version of the Link that’s been updated to control the smart home in addition to the many entertainment console gadgets that the Link supported.“I made a mistake. It was an honest mistake,&rd

The Essential Phone shipped earlier this year with an optional 360-degree camera accessory, but it didn’t really do more than take 4K spherical videos and photos. Now, Essential’s updated the mod to support 360-degree live-streaming, with Facebook Live as its first partner and Twitter’s Periscope to come.
To stream in 360 degrees on Facebook, you’ll need to go live from within the 360 Degree app, then log on to Facebook to start the stream. The camera is capable of suppor

Thanks to the ubiquitous version that’s bundled with Windows, pretty much everyone has played a few rounds of digital Solitaire. But for Zach Gage, the most popular version of the game was lacking the variety and challenge found in the many real-world iterations of the card game. So two years ago he developed Sage Solitaire, an experience explicitly designed with a smartphone in mind, that fused Solitaire with Poker to add new elements of strategy. Now he’s taking a second shot at ma

iOS 11.1.1 is here, and it comes with a small but important update: a fix for the strange autocorrect bug in iOS 11.1 that has been automatically changing the letter “I” to “A [?]” for some users.Apple had previously recommended using Text Replacement as a manual workaround so that users could type the letter “I” again, but it seems things are finally back to normal again with the new update.Along with the autocorrect fix, the update also fixes an issue where

Uber is conducting a pair of experiments to see whether its most premium riders would use 24/7 support features. The pilots were first reported by TechCrunch, and involve both a hotline and an in-app feature staffed by “specially trained experts” who are available to answer questions and field complaints 24 hours a day, seven days a week.The pilots, which launched this week, are being tested with a portion of Uber’s most frequent riders. It’s unclear how Uber defines &ldq

GLAAD released its annual study of LGBTQ representation on television this week, and for the most part, the findings are positive. The study found that 2017 was the best year ever for LGBTQ characters on television, with 6.4 percent of characters on broadcast prime-time TV identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer.The study found that 58 out of 901 regular characters on broadcast TV identified as LGBTQ, up from 42 last year; on cable TV the number of regular LGBTQ characters i

The last Harry Potter movie came out in 2011, but in that time, the best way to relive the series has been to buy the movies outright or wait for an ABC Family (er, Freeform) marathon of the films; they’ve never really been available on any major streaming service in the US.Fortunately for Potter fans, that’ll be changing on January 1st, 2018, when all 8 Harry Potter films are coming to HBO Go and HBO Now for on-demand streaming, via Business Insider reporter Kim Renfro. HBO will als

Stranger Things actor Finn Wolfhard recently drew the ire of a few vocal fans after he failed to say hello to a crowd waiting for him outside of a hotel. In a video posted and later deleted by fans watching for Wolfhard’s appearance, he can be seen walking into the building without acknowledging those waiting. A fan can be heard calling him “rude” in the video, and later, a tweet deemed him “heartless.”
There’s a recurring harmful notion that actors are obliga

Netflix released a new trailer and announced a premiere date for its first German-language show Dark. If you’ve been looking for something to pick up after the latest season of Stranger Things, this show looks like it might do the trick when it debuts on December 1st.We got our first glimpse of the show back in March, when Netflix released the first teaser, showing off a familiar premise: some children have gone missing, and there’s something strange going on in the town where they v

After widespread criticism over its decision to verify the account of Jason Kessler, an organizer behind the far-right Unite the Right protest, Twitter said it has “paused” its verification process while it works on a new system.
“Verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance,” the company said in a tweet. “We recognize that we have created this confusion and need to resolve it. We h

If you’re the proud owner of a new iPhone X but are stumped on which wallpaper to display on that beautiful screen, iFixit has released some pretty nice see-through options. Fresh from its teardown, iFixit has given users two high-resolution wallpaper options, including one that shows what’s inside the iPhone X and another that’s an X-ray version. The standard wallpaper shows the battery cells, haptic engine, and dual camera. You can download them from iFixit’s site. To s

It’s been less than two weeks since Netflix released season 2 of Stranger Things, and the internet is still buzzing with memes and analyses of every detail in the hit series. Nielsen estimates that 15.8 million people tuned in to watch on the premiere weekend, and that 326,000 people streamed all nine episodes on the first day. The show has a huge following, and a confirmed third season on the way, but the aspects that had fans charging into season 2 might not be the same things that will

Sean Parker, of Napster fame and an early investor in Facebook, says the founders of the social networking site knew they were creating something people would become addicted to, reports Axios. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said at an Axios event in Philadelphia, noting that he has become a “conscientious objector” on social media, even though he still maintains a presence on Twitter and Facebook. (He is currently the founder an

UberEats updated its app today to include restaurant reviews. Users can rate the restaurant on a five-star scale. Specific dishes can be rated, too, but only with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Users can also now "favorite" a restaurant so it appears at the top of the restaurant feed, and the app will suggest dishes based off the user’s taste and prior orders.The ratings system will display information from the past 90 days and will break down how many users gave it each star rating. It'll al

Nintendo’s gaming tablet is finally getting some streaming content. Today, the company revealed its first major media app will be Hulu, which will be available later today. The Switch version will be the full Hulu app, including the company’s live TV package and on-demand subscription service. With the release Hulu becomes the first major streaming service available on the Switch to users in the US.Hulu.It’s been a long time coming for Nintendo fans; since the Switch first laun

The Robot crew showed off their camera chops this week, folding the entire episode into a single shot spread across multiple characters and locations. Now it makes sense why it was all commercial free. As we learned on the after show, it was actually a couple shots shot out of order and stitched together, but that’s still pretty cool.It also means there was really just one big hack — Angela’s full-frontal assault on Evil Corp’s hardware security module — clearing th