Technology news

OkCupid's bringing one of its desktop features over to iOS this week. The company's Discovery feature, which allows users to search for specific interests, will roll out on Apple devices this week, with an Android launch sometime in the future. Users can type in more general topics like, "hiking," or more specific keywords, like "mom," to find momma's boys or something. The app will then surface people whose profiles contain that word.I played around with a test build of the feature and found it

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Breeched security, fraudulent charges, and compromised data — let's face it: Hacking doesn't have a good reputation.
But what you probably didn't know is people can use their knack for slipping through the web's tiniest cracks for good, not evil. Ethical hacking exists, whether you're beefing up a site's security or detecting foul play on the deep web. 
Want to learn how to hack &mda

Hearthstone’s Kobolds & Catacombs expansion launches for PC and mobile on December 7. We’ve now seen all 135 new cards in the set, and we’re excited by the possibilities.
Kobolds & Catacombs introduces new mechanics and cards, like Legendary Weapons and Spellstones that grow more powerful in your hand if you meet certain conditions. But some of the expansion’s most interesting additions are just regular spells and minions.
Below, we’ve picked five cards from

Your office Secret Santa is happening soon and you're wondering how in the hell you got stuck with someone you really just don't like. 
You have to give them a gift. But no one ever said it had to be a good one. 
SEE ALSO: 10 passive aggressive holiday gifts for that roommate you hate
If you're unsure of what to buy (or regift), here are a few ideas for that "special" person in your life:
For the overachiever
They always need some sort of recognition, so why not fill up their ego with

PAID CONTENT | 1-800-Flowers.comFind everything you need for holiday decorating and hosting at 1-800-Flowers.com and make it a season worth celebratingMaking it through the holidays with your reputation as a good guest and party host intact is your new goal. If the endless stream of party invites and a hankering to throw a get together of your own is making you break a sweat, we’ve got the decor tips, perfect hostess gifts, and ultimate table setting guide to get you through holidays, cour

The man who was in charge of Volkswagen’s US environmental and engineering office before the Dieselgate scandal has been sentenced to seven years in prison. Oliver Schmidt had previously pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act and conspiracy to defraud the US government in August for his role in Dieselgate, where VW was found to have used hidden software to hide the fact that many of its cars weren’t meeting emissions standards.The prison term and an accompanying $400,000 fine

GUEST: “Hey, Siri. What is the capital of New York?” We all know what happens next — Siri provides the answer. How Siri knows the correct answer is not a mystery (we have the internet to thank for that), but what is more interesting is the fact that Siri is able to understand the question at all.
Siri can understand and respond to human speech for the same reason Facebook knows which friend to tag in a photo before you even type their name. This “knowledge” is a tec

All year, legislators have been bracing for a major fight over NSA surveillance. The 2015 bill that reauthorized the Patriot Act is set to expire on December 31st of this year. That would leave just a few weeks left to replace it and potentially add new restrictions to the NSA’s sprawling surveillance powers as part of the deal.
Now, it looks like legislators may have more time than they thought. According to a New York Times report today, the White House believes the Patriot Act’s s

Lyft’s first self-driving car pilot is officially underway. The company is sending autonomous vehicles — developed by the startup NuTonomy — to pick up passengers in Boston’s Seaport district, which is a growing tech hub. The cars are not completely driverless, as human safety drivers will remain behind the wheel, ready to take control when needed. But it’s a big moment for Lyft, which has seen its star rise this year as its main rival Uber was beset by numerous sel

Steam is no longer accepting bitcoin as a payment method, game company and distributor Valve announced today. The company is attributing its decision to cryptocurrency’s “high fees and volatility.” In a blog post, Valve explained that bitcoin transaction fees have gone up to nearly $20 per transaction last week, “compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin.” Those fees then have to be shouldered by gamers making purchases on Steam, and the total cost

Bitcoin is causing too many complications for Valve, so the company has announced that it will no longer accept the digital cryptocurrency. Valve runs Steam, which is the the biggest PC-gaming distribution platform outside of China, and it started taking Bitcoin as a payment in April 2016 after talking about the possibility for years. But high fees and the roller coaster market value have convinced Valve to give it up as a viable alternative to traditional payment methods.
In a blog post, Valve

PRESS RELEASE:Identity leader announces new or expanded deployments with Caesars Entertainment, CBRE, City of Las Vegas, Nordstrom and Restoration HardwareSAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–December 6, 2017– Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA), the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, today announced that new Q3 FY2018 customers CBRE, City of Las Vegas, Nordstrom and State of Arizona have chosen the Okta Identity Cloud to securely connect their people and technology. In

Every day on the subway, I’m confronted with ads that suggest I don’t know how to clothe or feed myself, and it seems like there’s no shortage of unnecessary subscription-box services no one asked for. The fake company Coal parodies this coddling startup phenomenon with its own subscription-box service that “sends you a real piece of coal (in fancy, Warby Parker-esque packaging) right in time for the holidays.”
Coal’s very real website features four different

Google has launched Chrome 63 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Additions in this release include dynamic module imports, async iterators and generators, Device Memory API, among other developer features. You can update to the latest version now using the browser’s built-in silent updater or download it directly from google.com/chrome.
Chrome is arguably more than a browser. With over 1 billion users, it’s a major platform that web developers have to consider. In fact, with Chrome’s

 Mr. Robot’s email service of choice just expanded its support for a handful of popular email clients. ProtonMail just introduced a new tool, called ProtonMail Bridge, that could expand its relatively niche appeal to more mainstream users who aren’t yet comfortable with giving up their email client habits.
ProtonMail, built around the encryption standard known as PGP (Pretty Good… Read More

Qualcomm has just revealed the details of its new Snapdragon 845 mobile processor, which will show up in smartphones and laptops starting early next year. The Snapdragon 845 is the direct successor to 2017’s 835, which proved to be wildly popular for flagship Android smartphones. Like its predecessors, the 845 is not just a processor, but an alphabet soup of processors and systems, such as a CPU, GPU, ISP, and DSP, all contained on a single unit. In addition, the platform utilizes Qualcomm

Wolves in the Walls VR, a virtual reality adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s eponymous children’s book, will premiere at next year’s Sundance Film Festival. The episodic experience follows Gaiman’s story as participants play a character who can interact with its young protagonist Lucy, who is convinced that wolves live in the walls of her house. It’s being developed by former members of the now-defunct Oculus Story Studio, resurrecting a project that was be

Oculus’ Rift Core 2.0 update is now available in beta. The update includes three major parts, which were announced at this fall’s Oculus Connect convention: a revamped interface known as Dash; a customizable space called Home; and a feature called Oculus Desktop, which lets users access their Windows apps and desktop inside VR.
Previously, Oculus Home was a fixed virtual environment that was also the interface’s metaphorical home base: you’d visit to launch apps, but coul

 It’s been a bad few months for internet freedom in China (and really, a bad few decades, but who is counting?). The government brought into force a broad-ranging “cybersecurity law” earlier this year that empowers Beijing to take unilateral control over critical internet infrastructure, while also mandating that foreign companies keep all citizen data local inside China. Read More

The granddaddy of surreal, science fiction television anthologies is returning. CBS announced today that it has issued a series order for a revival of The Twilight Zone from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Simon Kinberg’s Genre Films for its All Access streaming service.Peele and Kinberg, along with Marco Ramirez (Marvel’s The Defenders), will serve as executive producers on the show and will “collaborate on the premiere episode.” CBS has yet to announce a

There’s been a growing movement within the science fiction community to imagine the future as something other than a dreary dystopia. That’s what Arizona State University is doing with a new digital anthology called Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures.The book comes from the university’s Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI), which was founded in 2012 to bring together artists, scientists, and engineers to think about the future. CSI has p

Lytro’s once futuristic “living pictures,” which photographers and viewers alike were able to refocus to their heart’s content after they were taken, are now almost totally dead. The company recently pulled hosting support for pictures.lytro.com, which is where all photos with Lytro cameras had to be shared in order to allow users to play with the refocusing and 3D depth features. This move has subsequently killed all the Lytro photos embedded across the internet (includi

Spry Fox has been making a new kind of bullet hell game for the past five years, and the indie game studio is finally ready to show off Steambirds Alliance. And unlike other games in the genre, it’s pretty hard to grief other players.
It’s a beautiful PC and Mac title where every explosion is colorful and you are in an airship fighting against other flying objects in a 2D scene. Like in other bullet hell games, your job is to keep shooting at everything that moves and avoid getting h

Michael Shannon isn’t just a screen villain. He’s frequently played soulful, sympathetic heroes, particularly in the films of writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Midnight Special). His stage career, as an actor, director, and co-founder of Chicago’s Red Orchid Theatre, has let him take on a wide variety of characters, like the embattled, disintegrating romantic lead in the stage and film version of Tracy Letts’ grueling Bug. And he’s been no

Allegations that Google has paid its female employees less than men and given them fewer promotion opportunities have been dismissed for now by a California state judge today, as reported by Reuters.
Superior Court judge Mary Wiss said that the lawsuit, which represented all female Google employees in California, was too vague, and asked that the plaintiffs file a new complaint for only the specific groups of women affected by pay discrimination. Wiss added that two of the three named plaintiffs

Google-owned DeepMind put out a new paper that outlines how the team took the machine learning system that created AlphaGo and built a new system that tackled chess and shogi, beating the top programs at each game. The program, called AlphaZero, also beat its predecessor, AlphaGo Zero.
It was a logical next move for DeepMind. Chess and shogi (a chess-like board game that originated in Japan) are both games with computer programs that have already beaten top human players. AlphaZero beat both Sto

Wildfires are spreading unchecked across Southern California, adding more infernos to the state’s worst fire season on record. A warm, dry fall in Southern California and strong offshore winds combined to create dangerous fire conditions that will probably get worse. As the winds continue to blow, a dome of warm, high-pressure air is forming over the West Coast that could keep California dry and flammable for weeks to come.The largest fire burning in Southern California started in the foot

Crossing rivers with suspension bridges or steel rebar is folksy and quaint, but those methods are too old fashioned for Aperture Science. And in the upcoming Bridge Constructor Portal, due out December 20 on Steam and mobile devices, you’ll get the chance to use the space-time-bending tool from Valve’s Portal games to help vehicles go from point A to point B.
Publisher Headup Games and developer ClockStone Software, which are responsible for the popular Bridge Constructor, are worki

The Game Awards takes place on at 5:30 pm Pacific time Thursday. Now in its fourth year, the event gives gamers their chance to beat their chests about their favorite games, and it lets the industry honor those who created them. It also features revelations from some of the biggest game companies about the new games that are coming in 2018.
Geoff Keighley, awards’ host and organizer, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the show will feature world premiere announcements of two new

GUEST: Companies that have successfully managed crisis realize that how they behave in the minutes, days, and weeks following a crisis is even more important than what actually happened. A company’s ability to successfully manage a challenging news cycle is paramount to maintaining company value.
While working in the White House during the Obama Administration, Eric Schultz was the person you wanted in the trenches with you during times of crisis. As the former White House principal d

Tidal is now compatible with CarPlay, the streaming service announced today. Users will be able to stream music directly through their infotainment systems on the over 200 car models that support Apple CarPlay.
Subscribers will have access to their favorited songs, albums, and playlists through the My Collection section, and a special version of Tidal’s Explore section will let users find new music and podcasts as well as the most played versions of both.This is the second major update for

In honor of next week’s finale, we are thrilled to announce a fan art contest!Next week, we’re going to have Price and Whiterose here in the studio - or at least the actors who play them, Michael Cristofer and BD Wong. That got us thinking - what if we had them judge a contest?We’d love to see your original illustrated artwork of the two characters - it could be individually or together. Submissions will be judged by Nilay, Russell, and myself with input from our guests. We&rsq

Astronomers have spotted the most distant supermassive black hole ever seen in our Universe — a behemoth that’s nearly a billion times more massive than our Sun. This is no ordinary black hole either, but an active one known as a quasar that’s surrounded by a super bright, highly energetic disk of swirling gas and dust. And its discovery could help scientists learn more about what conditions were like when the Universe was still quite young.The object — detailed in studie