Technology news

Days after deleting an OKCupid profile that included personal information, Reddit user Drinkscocoaandreads logged onto Facebook to find an unpleasant surprise. “I had like three guys find me on Facebook within two days, screaming at me for leaving mid-conversation/not ever acknowledging their initial message,” the Redditor wrote in a thread about OKCupid. “One of them also added a few of my friends before I figured out what was happening and got him blocked.”
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Snap publicly launched its Lens Studio this past week, meaning that brands and general people can create their own augmented reality lenses. We figured brands would take advantage of the platform and maybe even pay Snap for promotion of their work. But today, we saw an actually inventive idea for the custom lenses: to preview your food.
with Snapcodes on menus, you can see before you buy#LensStudio pic.twitter.com/7B6wMXoTwL— Ellis Hamburger (@hamburger) December 22, 2017Snap employee (and

The formerly VR-only Star Trek: Bridge Crew will now work on traditional screens. In addition to Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR, people can now play it on PlayStation 4 and PC after a free update — instead of hand controls, you can use either a controller or a mouse and keyboard. The cooperative game is still cross-platform, so you can staff a ship with the same people inside or outside VR.
Publisher Ubisoft released Bridge Crew in May to strong reviews, following the company&rs

A new Facebook tool allows users to see just how vulnerable they were to Russian propaganda during the 2016 election. The tool, conveniently tucked away in Facebook’s Help Center, scans past posts in an attempt to link them to known propaganda Pages, some of which have since been deleted. I love how I see THIS in my Facebook feed today and not the fact Facebook's Russian propaganda tool is out. If they really wanted users to check, least they could do is a post that looks like this instea

Even the best digital security practices are often undone by sloppy physical security. An unreadable 40 character password, after all, is only as secure as the office containing the Post-it note you wrote it on. (Sidebar: please don’t do this. Use a password manager for god sakes, it’s almost 2018). To help combat the threat the Freedom of the Press Foundation, led by our favorite spy-turned-advocate, Edward Snowden, launched Haven, an app for cheap Android burners that turns them i

In 1995, director Joe Johnston adapted the children’s novel Jumanji, telling the story of a magical board game that could blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Twenty-two years later, it’s apparently time for the seemingly inevitable Hollywood reboot. (Technically, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a sequel, but when a movie is this intent on relaunching a franchise, the difference is negligible.) Naturally, there are a few new twists to update the story. The board game has bec

Weeks after announcing that he plans to send an original Tesla Roadster to space atop a Falcon Heavy rocket, Elon Musk has released photos of the car being prepped for launch at SpaceX headquarters. The series of photos, posted to Instagram, show the Roadster attached to a fitting and placed between the two halves of the payload fairing that caps the rocket. The photos were posted just hours after a picture leaked on Reddit that showed a grainy view of the car being readied for its final ride.Th

Generation Y is unique in many ways, including the fact that they’re choosing to invest in experiences over things. Instead of buying fancy cars and homes as soon as they get their first big payday, millennials invest in vacations, weekends at music festivals, and other adventures. For businesses interested in engaging this valuable demographic, this trend brings great marketing opportunities. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) realize that consumers in their 20s and 30s want to leave the ho

When J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens hit theaters in 2015, it was no surprise that moviegoers came away with lots of questions. Abrams — known for series like Lost and Alias — is notoriously fond of mystery, which he calls “the catalyst for imagination.” In a 2007 TED Talk, he presented a box he bought as a kid, and still hadn’t opened decades later — because unopened, it represented “infinite possibility.” The Force Awakens sug

As an up-and-coming software as a service (SaaS) business founder, you face some risks. Risk-taking is inherent to building a business and making mistakes is also often inherent to starting your own company. I’m a nontechnical founder myself who now runs the fastest growing sourcing platform that helps hundreds of companies produce products around the world. As we’ve scaled, I’ve made a ton of mistakes that I could’ve learned from others. Some of the world’s most r

It’s starting to cost a lot like Christmas. For the past month, many of us have been shopping for family members, friends, relatives we don’t really like, and Secret Santas. But, argues one famous economics paper, why even bother?In 1993, economist Joel Waldfogel wrote the article that is a favorite of Grinches everywhere, including myself: “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” published in the prestigious journal American Economic Review. Waldfogel asked Yale students abou

To make a “Potato Salad Cake,” you need a variety of ingredients: chopped potatoes, apples, and mayo, topped off with a layer of pickles and a crust made from hot dogs. This stomach-churning combination of food is a real recipe, according to the web, but take comfort in knowing that the disgust you feel is shared by the star of a hilarious, virally popular YouTube series, Kalen Reacts.
Kalen Allen is a Temple University senior who originally hails from Kansas City, Kansas and describ

Hot on the heels of bitcoin dropping over 20 percent in value this morning, buying and selling was once again unavailable on the bitcoin exchange Coinbase for roughly two hours today, before service was restored.According to the company’s support page, buying and selling was unavailable due to high traffic — likely caused by the drastic price fluctuations — with the company commenting that it was “working on restoring full availability as soon as possible,” which se

On a gray afternoon in early November, Samantha Miller supervised a handful of people in long white coats while they placed very delicate samples into very expensive machines. Miller spends most of her waking hours inside the peppy, lime-green-accented lab she founded. For five and a half years, she tested every sample that came through its doors herself. Lab workers are advised to avoid handling that much material because they can get repetitive stress injuries, but Samantha Miller loves to tes

Amazon’s smart home ambitions continue to expand today with the acquisition of Blink, a startup behind battery-powered connected cameras and doorbells. Blink started out with a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 and launched its promised smart camera at the beginning of 2016.
Blink’s big draw is that its cameras are supposed to last for two years with just a pair of AA batteries, which means you can easily put them around a home without having to worry about wiring. They’re also rela

Remember when you first starting using mobile apps around 2008? I know I do; I recall how the idea of pressing little iPhone icons for breaking news, emails, shopping needs, and restaurant searches seemed exotic and revolutionary, but it quickly became “the new normal.” I was a product manager back then and found the potential marketing capabilities of these apps to be fascinating. Fast-forward to the present, and like mobile apps in ‘08, voice assistants now are creating new

Tech has a drinking problem. Nowhere is that more apparent than during the holiday season. Across the world, hard-working and hard-partying startups are throwing their employees lavish parties, with moats of free alcohol for the taking. And over the past few years, a myriad of startups have emerged with products that promise to deal with the morning after the night before. The most notable is Silicon Valley success story Morning Recovery, which got off to an ostentatious start when it raised $2

Dating site OKCupid is trading its user pseudonyms for a real-name policy. The company explained its decision in a blog post today, saying that OKCupid handles are “a pain to come up with and a pain to remember.” The change starts with a test group, then rolls out to everyone by the end of 2017. “Like the recent goodbye we said to AIM screen names, it’s time to keep up with the times,” the post says. “We hope that you can instead use your profile to give peopl

Amit Rathore, the designer of the PressCoin ecosystem is on a mission to save the news industry from itself. A serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, Rathore launched a cloud-based multi-channel publishing startup in 2014. The following year, he moved into the Blockchain/crypto space. With PressCoin he is bringing these two worlds together to take on the platform giants on behalf of independent news publishers. Amit Rathore Rathore, 37, grew up in Bangalore, India, and arrived stateside a

The Razer Phone is not a good smartphone. Well, not a good $700 smartphone, at least. On paper, it competes with other Android flagships: it has a fast Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 8GB of RAM, a dual camera system, a high-resolution display, super loud stereo speakers, and so on. But in practice, it’s a big, clumsy phone with a terrible camera and only average battery life, despite its enormous battery capacity. On top of that, it lacks both water resistance and a headphone jack; the