Technology news

Since Aug. 2014, Donald Trump has referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" at least 26 times. 
He mostly slings the slur on Twitter, but he's also repeated it during rallies, interviews, and at meetings with fellow government officials — all attempts to discredit the senator by painting her with an offensive nickname that propagates one of Trump's pet conspiracy theories.
SEE ALSO: Elizabeth Warren gets real about Trump's racial slurs and the importance of fighting against th

Grindr announced new updates today to its gay dating app on iOS and Android that are designed to make its social network feel more inclusive of transgender users. The app will now include more gender-neutral terms, and it’s getting an identity section on user profiles that includes options for gender and pronouns. Importantly, users can also write in their gender identity if it’s not on the list and specify pronouns that also might not be listed. Additionally, gender-neutral language

Larian Studios has sold more than 1 million copies of Divinity: Original Sin 2 on Steam. This is an impressive landmark for almost any game, but Larian is hitting that threshold while also breathing life into the classic hardcore role-playing genre.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 debuted in September, and it is available on Steam for $45. It tells a fantasy story where players can make crucial choices that affect the world. Original Sin 2 also features a thoughtful and dynamic turn-based combat system

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There's something so satisfying when you're favorite entertainment franchise makes merch you'll actually use or wear.Showcase your passion for the Star Wars saga in a subtle way with the Star Wars Galactic Statement Necklace.
SEE ALSO: The power of the dark side is actually pretty bright with this LED lightsaber lamp
This dreamy hunk of jewelry is a nerdy but adorable twist on the common solar

Any Destiny fan will tell you that feelings on the game itself always run hot and cold. The community, however, is eternally wonderful. And this bizarre t-shirt situation perfectly illustrates that.
There's a new fan-created t-shirt that bears the text: "Two tokens and a blue." It's a reference to Destiny 2's underwhelming rewards for certain events: Two tokens, which amount to one-tenth of a future piece of loot; and a "blue," a reference to gear that most players outgrow once they reach the en

 In the latest edition of “uh-oh, we left that just sitting out in the open,” a batch of NSA and Army files were discovered on a cloud storage server with no password protection, accessible to anyone with the URL. Chris Vickery of security firm UpGuard found the files on an unlisted Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage server belonging to the United States Army Intelligence and… Read More

Keanu Reeves is really good at stabbing people, at least in this bizarre and hilarious game called Absolutely: A True Crime Story.
In Absolutely: A True Crime Story, Keanu Reeves is accused of stabbing quite a few people and needs to convince the powers that be that he is innocent (or at least that he doesn't deserve a death sentence) by recounting his day.
SEE ALSO: It used to be gaming's most pervasive meme. Then it took an arrow in the knee.
What unfolds next depends on you and your actions.

Scientists are carefully watching the eruption of Mount Agung, the Bali volcano that has spewed ash at least four miles into the sky and is now shaking the popular vacation island with violent tremors.
These earthquakes may portend an even greater eruption, as massive amounts of pressurized, heated magma swirl beneath the volcano. 
Already, Mount Agung has affected the local populace, prompting evacuations and tainting the air. But explosive volcanoes like this one, which last had a major e

After burger connoisseurs grilled Google for its sorry excuse for cheeseburger emoji, which foolishly featured the cheese under the patty, CEO Sundar Pichai vowed the company would "drop everything" to make the emoji right with the world.
On Tuesday — one month after the ordeal shook foodies everywhere — Emojipedia released Google's updated burger emoji, which is now respectably ordered: bun, lettuce, tomato, cheese, patty, bun.
We needed this small win, 2017. Thank you.
SEE ALSO: Bu

GUEST: Straight out of defense labs, autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons are already in use, but there’s no overarching agreement among key stakeholders on how to control their implementation and diffusion. Unlike nuclear or biological weapons, whose proliferation have been largely controlled, autonomous weapons face some tricky problems.
The first is the absence of an international treaty regulating them.The second is the comparative ease by which autonomous weapons are developed. Nucl

Google’s Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL phones haven’t had the smoothest of launches, with screen issues, quality control problems, and audio bugs in some units. Fortunately, Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL users will have one less thing to worry about soon, as Google has announced that it has identified a problem causing the phones to randomly reboot. It will be issuing a fix “in the coming weeks,” according to Android Police. That could come either bundled as part of a monthly security

The eye can often be fooled by simple things like the manipulation of light, a change of angles, or a beloved pet.  
Even a photo of what looks like a wildly-deformed dog can mess with your mind.  
And it can also send the web into a frenzy. 
SEE ALSO: Calm your dogs down with this fabulous doggy leotard
Reddit user, chadwalk posted a photo last week with the title, “Optical Illusion Dog”.  Image:via Reddit user ChadwalkAt first its hard to decipher what exactly y

This is not a jokeBudweiser announced that they will be the first to bring beer to Mars. They've partnered up with scientists and researchers from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space and Space Tango. 
Their first experiment is bringing 20 barley seeds to the International Space Station on SpaceX's CRS-13 mission on December 4th. They'll be testing how the seeds will be stored in a microgravity environment. The next experiment will test the growth rate. 
If these seeds ca

What if your smartphone could fully charge in less than 15 minutes?
That future may not be so far off, according to Samsung, which Tuesday detailed new battery research that could have big implications for the smartphone maker's business.
SEE ALSO: Researchers create a 'battery-free' mobile phone
The Korean electronics giant says it's developed a type of battery material that's more efficient and charges faster than traditional lithium ion batteries. Called "graphene ball," Samsung says batterie

When it comes to family holiday gatherings, you can pretty much expect the same old typical questions, "How's your love life?" "How's your career going?" or "When are you planning on having kids?"
Oh, the joy.
The same can be said of Christmas cards. Families are all too ready to show off how well put together their lives are while the rest of us just grin and die a little more inside.
SEE ALSO: Upside down Christmas trees are trending, and the internet is outraged
One family decided to lay it f

Huawei's new flagship phones, the Mate 10 and the Mate 10 Pro, are like a typical Hollywood blockbuster — polished in all areas, but entirely void of originality. 
This has always been the case for Huawei, which is still struggling to get significant traction in the U.S. despite being the world's second-largest smartphone manufacturer. I've given up waiting for Huawei to wow me; instead, I'd like to see the company produce a phone that's really, really good at everything. 
With t

Pollution in India’s capital city has skyrocketed to dangerous levels. At times, just breathing in the outside air can be equivalent to smoking 45 cigarettes per day.
Smog in New Delhi arises from various sources like late fall weather patterns, which limit the movement of air masses, agricultural fires, factories, power plants, and vehicles. Read more...More about Space, Mashable Video, India, Fog, and Smoke

Tencent is bringing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to mobile as part of its deal with the Bluehole Games and its new in-house studio, The PUBG Corporation, but the partners may find that market oversaturated with battle royal competitors by the time it launches.
PUBG for mobile will debut first in China, according to a Tencent announcement on Monday. It didn’t reveal a release date or plans to roll it into other territories. But while PUBG will get off to a slow start on iOS and

Congratulations, it's a big cheesy pizza pie! 
Domino's is launching their very own baby registry. They partnered with Gugu Guru, a registry consulting company, to provide a platform for parents to create a wishlist. 
The website coincides with the wedding registry they created earlier in the year which basically means they want pizza to rule over your life. What's next real estate? Health insurance?  
SEE ALSO: Why choose between pizza or a burger when you can have this glorious

Red Bull is known for pushing extreme stunts, but its latest endeavor has pushed yet another limit.
French wingsuit flyers Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet of the team Soul Flyers managed to fly into the door of a plane flying through the sky. Yes, a real plane, with a propellor that could easily slice them to shreds.
The stunt began with a BASE jump from the top of Jungfrau mountain in Switzerland. The duo then chased the plane through the air using only their wingsuits, finally landing safely in t

Federal judge William Alsup delayed the upcoming trial between Uber and Waymo because the ride-hailing company withheld key evidence during the discovery process. Waymo, the self-driving car company that was spun out of Google, sued Uber in February for allegedly stealing key parts of its autonomous vehicle technology.The evidence in question is a 37-page memo from ex-Uber security analyst Ric Jacobs that was written to the company’s legal team. The letter states that Uber’s “M

This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest sales day for online and for mobile ever in the US. Online sales brought in $6.59 billion in total, while sales on mobile broke a new record by reaching $2 billion. Mobile also dominated over desktop for the first time for Shopify merchants, which include brands as varied as Tesla Motors and Kylie Cosmetics, according to the company.Part of this is because retailer apps and mobile wallet services have made it easier than ever to shop on your iPhone

There’s a major flaw in Apple’s macOS High Sierra operating system that allows anyone with physical access to a Mac to gain system administrator access without so much as entering a password. Late Tuesday, Apple confirmed that it’s working on a software update to fix the issue and published step-by-step instructions to help customers protect their machines in the meantime.
The vulnerability was publicly disclosed on Twitter this afternoon; it’s not clear whether the probl

Expensify is a popular app that helps employees quickly submit reports for business-related expenses. Expensify’s standout feature is its SmartScan OCR, or optical character recognition, technology. The feature saves data-entry time by scanning your receipt, verifying that the expense is compliant with your employer’s rules, and then organizing it into an expense report — all automatically. When the technology fails, however, Expensify says it has a team of secure technicians t

In a bid to encourage more users to privately message one another, Instagram today announced a new feature it’s calling “remixing.” The process involves editing a friend’s photo sent to you via direct message with stickers and custom text and doodles, and then sending it back to them within another photo of yourself.That way, you can make it seem like your friend’s selfie is part of your own staged scene, giving your friend free rein to make you look as goofy or com

GUEST: By any measure, we’ve entered the age of machine learning and artificial intelligence. The confluence of massive data, cheap storage, elastic compute, and algorithmic advances, particularly in deep learning, has given rise to applications that previously were confined to the pages of science fiction novels.
Machines now surpass humans in complex strategy games, to say nothing of image recognition, speech transcription, and other advances that begin to complicate our assumptions abou

Last month at its Oculus Connect 4 event, Oculus revealed details about its Rift Core 2.0 user interface for its virtual reality headset. Starting sometime in December, people will be able to opt-in to test Dash, which is the new in-app interface, and the revamped Oculus Home. They’ll also be able to try out the updated desktop app.
As we learned at the Connect 4 event, Dash will enable users to bring up a task bar, friends list, and notifications without exiting whatever ap

The 2018 Grammy Award nominations were released this morning, and certain categories looked markedly more diverse in their selections. “Despacito” became the first Spanish-language song to be nominated for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, every lead artist nominated for Record of the Year was a person of color, and the list for best Album of the Year did not contain a single white male artist for the first time in Grammy history. (Sorry, Ed Sheeran.) In short, the nominations

Gang Beasts is a delightfully goofy multiplayer brawler set in the colorful metropolis Beef City. Indie developer Boneloaf and publisher Double Fine Productions released it on Steam Early Access in 2014. It’ll be launching for PC and PlayStation 4 on December 12 for $20.
Up to four players can participate in Gang Beasts’s slapstick cartoony fights. At its core, it’s everyone for themselves as each player attempts to emerge victorious. Other modes also spice up the gameplay: 2-v

Hulu has been steadily rolling out its new UI and live TV service to a whole bunch of platforms since it was first announced in May. Next up: Samsung’s smart TVs, as spotted by Multichannel.Everyone but Sony now
All of Samsung’s most recent 2017 models are getting the update, which should be automatically waiting for users the next time they use the bundled Hulu app. Now, Samsung’s smart TV join the Apple TV, Xbox One, iOS, Android, Chromecast, Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire S

Today, eBay released an updated version of its Google Assistant app that lets users start a conversation about an item they want to buy on a smart speaker and then continue the shopping experience on an Android or iOS smartphone.
Say: “Hey Google, ask eBay to find me a — ,” followed by the name of virtually any item, and the eBay voice app will ask questions to narrow your search before pulling up results. Once you find an item that’s to your liking, the app will ask if i

As part of Giving Tuesday, Google has added a new Donate button to its knowledge graph when you search for recognized nonprofit organizations. The Donate button allows you to directly contribute money to nonprofits when searching for them on the web, though the organization also has to enroll with Google for the button to appear. (I checked through large organizations like the American Red Cross, UNICEF, Planned Parenthood, and Feed The Children, but did not find the buttons available yet.)Unlik

The Federal Communications Commission put out a final proposal last week to end net neutrality. The proposal opens the door for internet service providers to create fast and slow lanes, to block websites, and to prioritize their own content. This isn’t speculation. It’s all there in the text.
But a new “fact sheet” sent out by the FCC today asks: what if facts are flexible things that we can bend to our preferred reality? It lists a series of “myths” about the

Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised to look into the great cheeseburger emoji debate, and he's made good on his word. Apparently Android 8.1 ships with a new and improved cheeseburger emoji in which the cheese is placed atop the patty, as opposed to underneath it. Emojipedia first spotted the fix.Google previously pictured the cheese at the bottom of the sandwich, which we can all agree is incorrect. But it wasn't until someone named Thomas Baekdal called the emoji out in October that the world wo

Blizzard Entertainment announced today that Hearthstone‘s next expansion, Kobolds & Catacombs, will launch December 7. The free-to-play digital card game is available for PC and mobile.
Hearthstone has been a big hit since launching in 2014, and a constant stream of expansions have kept money rolling in as players spend cash on card packs. It is the leader of a market that research firm SuperData estimates will hit $1.4 billion this year. Kobolds & Catacombs adds 135 new cards

Amazon toady announced that third-party developers will be able to make use of the Alexa assistant’s voice recognition feature to personalize apps for its line of Echo speakers. The news, announced at Amazon’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas and reported first by TechCrunch, builds on the company’s announcement in October that Alexa can now identify individual users’ voices to personalize responses.Until today, that recognition feature only worked for Amazon-built servi