Technology news

Long distance relationships are the definition of bittersweet: Being away from your boo is basically torture, but the corny "absence makes the heart grow fonder" stuff is too true, and it's probably making you wonder when your life turned into a rom-com.
While these relationships can be stressful, there are tons of tips and gadgets out there that can make the separation a little more bearable — especially if a trip to see each other isn't in the cards (or the budget) right now. Until telep

Alphabet has announced that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be stepping down from his role as Alphabet’s executive chairman. Schmidt will be transitioning to a new position as a technical advisor at the company as he continues to serve on Alphabet’s board.
Schmidt has served in senior roles at Google since 2001, when he was first brought on by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as the search giant’s chief executive. He stepped down from the role to serve as Google — and later

GUEST: There’s no doubt about it — artificial intelligence is here, and it’s poised to make a tremendous impact on virtually every industry. While many companies already recognize AI as a competitive advantage, this perception will only increase as the technology matures and organizations gain an even deeper understanding of its capabilities and full potential.
To help you prepare for these impending changes, I’ve picked out four AI trends that I believe will affect organ

I don’t know when it happened, but I’ve stopped using my phone to play games … well, unless they are PC games, Terrible Chess, or Bridge Constructor. That last one is a game I’ve played for years, and now developer ClockStone and publisher Headup Games have given me a reason to build even more bridges with an entirely new experience that expands the gameplay possibilities by bringing in concepts from Valve’s Portal puzzler.
Bridge Constructor Portal is out now for

It feels like it should have been here ages ago, but YouTube has finally updated its iOS app so that everyone can view vertical videos as they were meant to be seen: in full screen, rather than turned sideways with black bars on the sides. YouTube announced plans to introduce this feature back in August, and some users have already had it activated. But as of this week, it’s being enabled for everyone.
There are a lot of ‘vertical’ videos this doesn’t work for
As easy as

How well can machines interpret beautiful landscapes? After all, some sceneries are beautiful because they tug at human emotions, something that machines lack. Other landscapes, desert dunes in particular, look like nudes to robot eyes. To help, on Monday Google introduced a neural image assessment to figure out the most aesthetically pleasing images.
The assessment uses a deep neural network trained with data labelled by humans. It’s been trained to predict what images a typical user migh

This morning, Long Island Iced Tea, a New York-based beverage maker, announced it was changing its name to Long Blockchain Corp. The company’s relation to cryptocurrency is dubious — it says it will “leverage the benefits of blockchain technology” — but it was quickly rewarded with a 200 percent jump in stock price at the opening of trading.
Long Island Iced Tea isn’t the first or even the strangest company to try cashing in on the bitcoin craze. As bitcoin&rs

Apple yesterday confirmed that a long-held and controversial conspiracy theory actually contains some truth. The company says that, starting last year, it started slowing down older iPhones with lower-capacity batteries, mainly to prevent accidental shutdowns. The news set off a wide-ranging debate about smartphone reusability and longevity. But why does Apple need to do this in the first place?
First off, think of a battery like a system of pipes with water, says Marca Doeff, a battery expert a

GUEST: Few topics in technology garner as much attention and debate as the implementation of artificial intelligence. While we love technology and the things we can do with it, there always seems to be a creepy factor associated with our technology learning about us and acting independently to make decisions. Maybe too many people watched Terminator, but more likely, we just don’t understand what companies do with AI and how it may affect our lives.
As with most things, the fantasy is

Apple is working on expanding the heart monitoring capabilities of future Apple Watches, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. Following in the footsteps of AliveCor, maker of Kardia-branded accessories for iPhones and Apple Watches, Apple is said to be developing an integrated electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) reader for the Apple Watch.
The feature would enable future Apple Watch users to go beyond the devices’ current heart rate tracking functionality, providing specific visualizations of

Apple quietly updated its rules for developers yesterday with a new version of its App Store Review Guidelines, and it now requires that developers disclose the odds of getting cool loot in the loot boxes for free-to-play games.
Loot boxes have become a big monetization opportunity in free-to-play games, but they’re also controversial, as Electronic Arts’ discovered with tying loot crate purchases to unlocking desirable characters like Darth Vader in Star Wars: Battlefront II. G

Google’s Pixelbook has been out since October, but at that time the company had only released the base and mid-range models of its flagship Chromebook. But now the most powerful Chromebook on the market — the Pixelbook with an i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD — is finally available, via Phandroid.
That kind of power doesn’t come cheap, even for the Pixelbook (which starts at $999). Usually, the top of the line Pixelbook runs for an eye-watering $1,649, which put

Up in the Austrian Alps, inside two hydropower mills, a start-up called HydroMiner keeps high-power computers, CPUs, and servers running around the clock. These machines suck in a steady 600 Kilowatts of cheap hydroelectric power as they seek to mine new bitcoins — an energy-intensive process that involves solving mathematical problems by repeated trial and error. But unlike other bitcoin miners, HydroMiner says it’s minting cryptocurrencies without harming the environment or contrib

GUEST: A few months after moving to the suburbs of St. Louis, I read a profile of one of the region’s most successful entrepreneurs in the St. Louis Business Journal. I wanted to get to know him, so I sent an email introducing myself — assuming I would never hear back from someone so accomplished (and busy). I was wrong. I received a reply the next day.
A year later this serial entrepreneur would become my consulting firm’s first client, and he later hired my wife to be the dir

Utomik announced today that its PC game subscription service is coming out of beta. In early 2018, people will be able to sign up for $8 per month for unlimited access to its cloud-based library. Those who sign up while it’s still in open beta will get some perks. New subscribers will pay $6 per month for the first year of their subscription, while those who are already members will be grandfathered into a $6 per month plan for life.
Utomik first started in 2014, and in the intervenin

UK game room company Liberty Games has figured out a novel way for anyone to play one of its stand-alone games: it’s hooked up a crane machine to the internet for anyone to control, calling it Santa Claws. As a bonus, any toys caught translate into real dollars (or pounds, rather) that will be donated to St Mungo’s, a charity that provides support to the homeless.
To get it running, Liberty Games took a Sierra crane machine and attached a camera to the front. This allowed the company

Today hit battle royale game Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is finally leaving access with the 1.0 version of the game, but its creators also have a major milestone to celebrate. According to developer PUBG Corp., the game has 30 million players across both PC and the newly released Xbox One version. Sales are accelerating quickly, as just last month the company said the game, which debuted in March, had reached the 20 million sold milestone.
Reaching those numbers in less than a year puts PUBG i

Future versions of the Apple Watch may contain an advanced form of heart-monitoring technology that would use electric signals to detect heart abnormalities, defects, and other potential indicators of cardiovascular illness, according to a report from Bloomberg. Known as electrocardiograms, or EKGs, the tests are typically performed using multiple electrodes placed directly on the skin, which monitor otherwise imperceptible electrical patterns in between heartbeats.Apple is reportedly working on

Picking the best television shows of any given year used to be relatively easy, back when the major networks and a few powerful cable channels dominated the cultural conversation. These days, though, making any list of must-see TV is a downright Sisyphean. It’s impossible to keep up with everything worthy of consideration in television, so best-of lists inevitably become idiosyncratic, determined in large part by whatever limited pool of series a critic regularly watches.
But a handful of

After Geekbench’s John Poole published a data-driven report this week linking diminished iPhone processing performance to battery age and iOS updates, a new wrinkle emerged in a long-standing debate over whether Apple was deliberately slowing down old iPhones. What if Apple programmed iPhones to slow down as battery power waned, knowing battery degradation was inevitable after a year or two of normal use? Confronted with the Geekbench report, Apple admitted as much yesterday. Now, Poo

The latest Civilization game just went mobile. In a surprise launch, Civilization VI — which first came out on PC last year — is now available on Apple’s tablet. It looks to be a fully-featured version of the strategy game as well, complete with large-scale empires to build, the ability to research new technologies and cultures, and even a local multiplayer mode. The App Store description call it “the full, award-winning Civilization VI experience.”
While it may com

One of the PC’s best strategy game series is now available for iPad. You can buy Civilization VI in the iOS App Store for $30 until January 4. That is a limited discount on what will be its usual $60 price.
Civilization VI came out for PC on October 21, 2016. The game has sold more than 8 million copies. But the requirements are hefty: Civilization VI requires iOS 11 on an iPad Air 2, iPad 2017, or any iPad Pro. The iOS version does not include any expansion content. If you want to ju

Death Coming, a game that has you playing as the grim reaper, has sold over 100,000 copies since launching for Steam on November 6.
Death Coming is a non-linear puzzle game that has you setting up deaths so you can collect souls. It might sound dark, but the cute visuals give the whole thing a more whimsical flair.
Chinese indie developer Next Studio created Death Coming. The game released for Steam on November 6 as an Early Access title. Due to a mix-up, Death Coming left Early Access premature

Facebook has agreed to a multi-year licensing agreement with Universal Music Group to allow its users to upload music in their videos. The agreement, which also covers Instagram and Oculus, will allow users of those services to upload and share videos containing music from UMG’s artists without having the videos removed due to copyright violations as they have been in the past.The deal will help address the major copyright infringement issues around music on the platform. Facebook says thi

 Facebook today announced a first-of-its-kind licensing deal with Universal Music Group that will allow users across its properties – including Facebook, Instagram and Oculus – to use Universal Music in the videos they upload and share. The deal will also allow Facebook to introduce new “music-based products” across platforms, also including Messenger, the companies… Read More

Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator wields a powerful influence over the startup world. But president Sam Altman is apparently a bit worried there might be too much hype surrounding the accelerator program’s graduates.
In a recent interview with Rachel Vanier of Paris’ Station F Startup Campus, Altman cautioned that not all startups coming out of the famed program are necessarily worthy of or ready for funding. When asked by Vanier about Y Combinator’s famed Demo Day

Netflix’s big blockbuster Bright doesn’t debut on the streaming service until December 22nd, but the company is already plotting out its next steps. Bloomberg reports that the company has ordered a sequel to the fantasy cop film, with Will Smith set to star again.Bright is set in an alternate world where fantasy creatures exist and tend to stir up trouble for society. Smith stars as LAPD police officer Daryl Ward, whose partner is an orc named Jakoby (Joel Edgerton). In his review, m

As Americans pack their bags for holiday travel, a new report is raising key questions about a pilot program that scans the faces of international travelers.
The report criticizes the scope and execution of the program
The report, from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, criticizes the scope and execution of Homeland Security’s biometric exit pilot program. The program, currently running at nine airports around the country, uses facial recognition technology to identif

Genderwrecked is playful, poetic, lonely, beautiful, and gross. It’s a brilliant visual novel about a post-apocalyptic journey of self-discovery and gender. And also kissing, fighting, and talking to monsters, all of whom are endearing and grotesque in their own charming ways. One is a fiery ball of cosmic horror that alternates between shrinking with shyness and blazing with infernal fury. Another is a floating cube studded with sherbet-colored eyes that transforms into a gaping maw when

Apple is now requiring that any apps on the App Store that offer loot boxes must disclose the odds of the likelihood of players getting different types of items, according to a report from Polygon.The change comes from Apple’s official developer guidelines, which now state that “Apps offering ‘loot boxes’ or other mechanisms that provide randomized virtual items for purchase must disclose the odds of receiving each type of item to customers prior to purchase.”Loot b

 Smart speakers will likely outsell wearable devices this holiday season. That’s the latest prediction from analysts at eMarketer, which forecasts a slowing growth rate for devices like fitness trackers and smartwatches here in the U.S. The wearable market is continuing to grow, to be clear, but it’s struggling to reach the mainstream. Next year, only 20 percent of the U.S. adult… Read More

Uber announced today that it’s adding two new features to the Uber Freight app (iOS and Android), the service it launched for truckers back in May. Both are meant to make it easier for drivers to string together multiple jobs, which would make it more likely that they’ll keep booking with Uber instead of more traditional online cargo load boards or brokerages.
One, called Post My Truck, allows truckers to tell the app where and when they will be available with an empty truck. They ca