Technology news

Over the years, British inventor and YouTube vlogger Colin Furze has built a variety of madcap inventions, ranging from a microwave you can play a video game on, a working hoverbike, and a fireworks-proof Iron Man suit. A couple of weeks ago, he unveiled his biggest build yet: a life-sized replica of Kylo Ren’s TIE Silencer from the upcoming Star Wars film The Last Jedi. This week, he unveiled a new video detailing how the project came together, and it’s really impressive.Furze did a

GUEST: As hardware startup investors, we spend a good part of our lives looking at hardware projects and predicting winners and losers. Naturally, we’d like to see more entrepreneurs in the “winners” pile. So for anyone working on a hardware product, here’s our best advice on what types of projects are worth attempting in 2018 and what types you’d be better off avoiding — if you’re hoping to get funded, that is.
1. What will be hot
RaaS (Robot-as-a-

The OnePlus 5T is unable to stream content from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Google Play Movies, and other video services in high-definition, despite its HD-capable display and powerful hardware. The deficiency was noted in a thread on the OnePlus forums and points to lack of support for Widevine Level 1 DRM, which many services require for HD streaming. The 5T currently supports Widevine Level 3, which only covers standard definition streams. The Verge has confirmed that both the OnePlus 5T and its p

Ernie Cline’s 2011 debut novel Ready Player One is being made into a blockbuster movie thanks to Steven Spielberg, but it looks like Cline might be bringing readers back to the OASIS for another adventure. During a Facebook Live event in which Cline debuted the film’s second trailer, he confirmed that he was working on a sequel to the book.Set in a massive virtual reality world called OASIS, Ready Player One follows Wade Watts, a teenager who spends his time searching for three hidde

GUEST: It’s been18 months since the final rule of the JOBS Act went into effect, allowing equity crowdfunding. In those 18 months, everything proponents of the rule said would happen (and none of what the detractors said would happen) has become a reality. Over $82 million dollars of previously untapped capital from local investors has been committed to over 650 companies. No fraud has been perpetrated. And everyone (including investors, the Government, the Securities and Exchange Commissi

We got our first look at Steven Spielberg’s next big science fiction movie Ready Player One at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, and today, Warner Bros. released a new trailer on Facebook Live, with author Ernie Cline answering questions about the origins of the story.
Based Ernie Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One is set in a dystopian world where almost everyone spends a majority of their time in a virtual reality system known as OASIS, where players can visit any conceivab

When you’re asking a digital assistant to do something for you, do you say “please?” How about “thank you?” It’s a question that’s been on my mind for a while, ever since I set up some smart lights in my apartment and started using Siri to turn them on and off. Demanding that my phone turn on and off the lights started feeling weird to say aloud, which got me to wondering: was I being rude to my smartphone?To be clear, this isn’t some kind of &ldqu

Microsoft is focusing on Paint 3D for its festive holiday message this year. The software giant’s “3D Holiday” commercial has started airing this weekend, and it includes the adorable “Gabe the Yeti” which was created in Microsoft’s new version of Paint. In a year when everyone was worried Microsoft would kill off the original MS Paint app, the company is celebrating its biggest ever update to the classic app with a cute TV commercial.
Microsoft has positioned

Super Dark Times, Kevin Phillips’ debut feature and one of the best movies of the year, is a horror movie that starts with an injured deer flying through a high school window. It is gross and scary, and a good way to set the mood for a horror movie. However, Super Dark Times’ second scene takes it all back with a much more familiar image: a group of friends rolling into a gas station to buy some snacks.The teens weigh various purchases before landing on Starburst, Skittles, and dried

GUEST: New releases in the online gaming industry are highly anticipated events. Millions of gamers anxiously waiting to leap onto a shiny new game service is an irresistible target for hackers—with bragging rights being the prize. But for the gaming companies, suffering a DDoS attack is a disaster with immediate loss of revenue, mitigation costs and long-term consequences for their brand. Fortunately, new approaches to security based on multi-dimensional analytics and traffic modeling usi

Power armor and exoskeletons are a staple in science fiction. They enhance the abilities of futuristic soldiers on the battlefield, giving them an edge against their enemies. Recently, my colleague Lauren Goode finished out the second season of her series Next Level by checking out the promising future of exoskeletons in the workplace. She mentioned that while these devices have their roots in military technology, designers are hoping that they can be used to help help workers on the job or prev

Apple’s secretive autonomous car project has shifted focus over the years, but this year, it seems to be picking up speed. In April, the company received a permit to test self-driving cars in California, while in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that they were working on software that could allow cars — and maybe other things — to drive themselves. During a talk on Friday, Apple’s director of artificial intelligence research, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, spoke about some of th

Huuuge Games came late to social casino games, launching its Huuuge Casino in late 2015. But the company has carved out a niche in the $4 billion global market.
Anton Gauffin, CEO of the Palo Alto, California-based company, said in an interview that the company will hit about $150 million revenues in 2017. That puts it at about No. 9 in the market, behind leaders such as Playtika, Scientific Games, Zynga, IGT, and Aristocrat. The latter just acquired Big Fish Games for $990 millio

The majority of people stop reading aloud once they’re past the stage of sounding out the letters, but a small study suggests that doing so will help us remember, and tells us more about why.
For the study published in Memory, scientists recorded 75 students saying 160 words aloud. Two weeks later, they studied 80 of these words in a variety of ways: hearing their own recording of the words, hearing a recording of someone else say them,reading them silently, reading aloud to themselves. To

Wait. What? 
Last week's "Welcome to Hell" sketch was Saturday Night Live at its best, turning a pop music video into a scathing rebuke of a culture that's enabled egregious acts of sexual misconduct. This week's "Sexual Harassment Charlie" sketch, on the other hand, was SNL at its absolute worst.
SEE ALSO: Female senators asked Al Franken to resign. The GOP could learn something from their example.
Let's set the scene. A company institutes a zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment, and

Did you finish the latest season of Netflix’s Stranger Things and are impatient to see what happens next? You might have to wait a bit longer than expected: in a new interview with Variety, David Harbour says that the next season might not premiere on the streaming service until 2019.Netflix has already ordered a third season for the show, but Ross and Matt Duffer are still working on the season’s scripts, according to Harbour and he adds that they likely won’t begin filming un

Netflix debuted a new trailer for its upcoming cyberpunk show, Altered Carbon, introducing the main story for the show: after he’s murdered, Earth’s richest man hires an ex-soldier to track down his killer.
The streaming service released an announcement trailer last week that introduced the show’s main McGuffin: humans have developed a technology that allows for someone to transfer their consciousness from one body to another. The rich and powerful can now afford to become effe

A houseplant is the gift that keeps on giving. It purifies the air and will spruce up virtually any residence. But which houseplants make the best gifts?
Whether you're looking for a living room focal point or a cute little Instagram plant, you have a couple nice options. One thing to remember: unless you recipient is a Plant Master, you'll want to pick a plant that's fairly easy to take care of, lest you unwittingly give them the gift of murdering something beautiful.
SEE ALSO: Snag a floating

Two of my favorite PC games are Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Mount & Blade (both Warband and the original), so consider me excited when I saw Tales of Glory for the first time. With a heavy focus on first-person melee combat among an assortment of knights wielding weapons like pikes and swords and spears, it looks like the recipe for one of VR’s most exhilarating titles yet.
We’ve seen a ton of VR games that focus on small-scale combat, such as 1-on-1 d

In the short time since the new video streaming platform Facebook Watch went live in September, clickbait videos have risen to the front page of the platform, obscuring smaller producers from the spotlight. It’s bad news for guys like Doug Kim, who bet $165,000 of his own money on producing his Facebook Watch series, Just Doug.Kim describes Just Doug as a mix between Togetherness, the HBO drama about two couples pursuing their dreams, and Bojack Horseman, Netflix’s madcap show about

Just to let you know, if you buy something featured here, Mashable might earn an affiliate commission.
No one has ever has put socks, candles, or gift cards at the very top of his or her holiday wish list, but that hasn't stopped the occasional Secret Santa from dashing out to a local drugstore in search of those items 15 minutes before the gift exchange was set to start.
Deferring your holiday shopping for as long as possible and resorting to those I-waited-'til-the-last-minute staples will&nbs

Just to let you know, if you buy something featured here, Mashable might earn an affiliate commission.
If you thought you missed your chance to major in computer science when you opted for art history in college, there's good news after all. There are such things as second chances, and thanks to the influx of online learning, gaining a new skill set won't require you to dip into your savings. This Computer Science training is just $39 — that's equivalent to just 4.8 months of Netflix.
SEE

Just to let you know, if you buy something featured here, Mashable might earn an affiliate commission.
Over the past few years, selfies have transformed from a guilty pleasure to a viable way to take those special Kodak moments without bothering strangers. But while selfies may be all the rage, they're not the easiest to capture. From contorting your hand into an awkward, uncomfortable claw to making sure everyone's in the frame, mastering the art of selfies doesn't happen overnight.&n

GUEST: PlayStation again goes big, topping its rivals in TV ad spend once again after leading in October and September.
GamesBeat has partnered with iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than seven million smart TVs, to bring you a monthly report on how gaming brands are spending. The results below are for the top five gaming industry brands in November, ranked by estimated national TV ad spend.
  
The gaming industry increa

GUEST: Ignore the noise about a “Terminator scenario” in which machines become self-aware and seek to destroy their flawed human masters. Those of us who live and work in the “salt mines” of machine learning and artificial intelligence are almost universally unafraid. Still, a few well-known technical folk heroes continue to push this “sky is falling” narrative. The most prolific of them is Elon Musk, famed founder of Tesla and SpaceX. Not only do I think he&r

Star Wars: The Last Jedi held its star-studded world premiere at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Saturday night, and the credits had barely finished rolling before attendees hit Twitter to share their first reactions to Rian Johnson's take on the Skywalker saga.
While spoilers and plot details are under strict embargo until Dec. 12 at 9 a.m. PT, that didn't stop fans from weighing in on the tone of the movie, which has drawn inevitable comparisons to the second (and most critically accla

Christmastime is here. Happiness and cheer. And sexual harassment and assault and NFL anthem protests and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Everything in the news was coming out of Santa's bag on tonight's Saturday Night Live cold open, and if their questions were any indication, the kids are not all right.
Precious cherub No. 1 asked Santa (Kenan Thompson) for some toys, a laser tag game, the usual. Then he asked, "What did Al Franken do?"
Oh boy.
SEE ALSO: A delightful side-by-side comparison

James Franco started tonight's Saturday Night Live monologue bummed that the show brass doesn't do anything fancy for a host's fourth time at the rodeo, like give him a Five-Timers jacket, or even write a script. (Humblebrag noted, Jimmy James.)
So instead, Franco took random audience questions. But one woman's thoughtful and probing question about the actor's career trajectory was overshadowed by an awfully familiar face poking around behind her.If it isn't longtime Franco friend Seth Rogen &n

We’ve all tried writing in VR but, with the way we hold our Oculus Touch controllers and HTC Vive wands, it’s an awkward experience at best. Drawboard wants to change that for the better.
Drawboard’s creators call this new peripheral a pen, but it also reminds us of the type of stylus you might use on a tablet, only for VR. Essentially, it’s a pen-shaped controller that you hold as you would a real one. It’s tracked using Leap Motion’s hand-tracking

GUEST: Seemingly overnight, capable voice recognition joined forces with artificial intelligence and machine learning to push voice-enabled experiences to the forefront of business thinking. But before brands leap into the fray, they need to recognize where and when to invest in the new technology. For some, that means investing elsewhere, at least for now.
To see why, let’s start with the most common brand investment in voice these days: an Alexa skill. Some brands have received tremendou