Technology news

Slight spoiler alert for Star Wars: The Last JediAdam Driver agrees with you that he’s looking good in The Last Jedi – at least, according to Rian Johnson.
People caught up with the Star Wars: The Last Jedi director to ask how the much-buzzed-about beefcake moment came about.
“Adam looks so damn good because he’d been training hardcore for the past six months for those fight scenes,” Johnson told the magazine. “I’m like, ‘Eh. He looks so good. We s

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin got an early Christmas present on Saturday when a mysterious package addressed to him was found near his Bel-Air home late Saturday night.
Los Angeles Police Department's bomb squad was called to Mnuchin's neighborhood and, according to Associated Press, the package turned out to contain horse manure.
SEE ALSO: Steve Mnuchin and his wife held a sheet of dollar bills and made the internet rich with memes
The manure was gift-wrapped in a box and marked as from "th

Android users will soon be able to take part in HQ’s live trivia contests. Created by Vine co-founders Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, the iOS has become incredibly popular since it launched on iOS, and Android users can now pre-register to download the app on the Google Play store.HQ is a live trivia game played through an iOS app. Users can tune in twice a day at 3PM and 9PM ET to answer questions for the chance to win cash prizes — prizes that have ballooned from a couple of hundred

iPhone X owners have discovered that they can’t use Face ID to approve family purchases, pointing out on Apple’s forums that they can’t figure out how to activate the facial recognition feature to requests, and have to enter their password manually.Ask to Buy is an iOS feature that allows parents to control what their children are buying with their phone. It’s useful, given that children have been known to rack up hundreds of dollars of purchases by mistake.
Ars Technica

GUEST: Japan will lead the world in cryptocurrency adoption, according to a survey of crypto investors my team at Waves conducted last month. We surveyed 678 cryptocurrency investors from the EU, the US, Turkey, Brazil, Russia, and other countries to gauge their level of confidence in blockchain technologies and currencies.
Almost all of the respondents we interviewed (90 percent) believe in the future of сryptocurrency and are investing with a long-term perspective. Twenty-nine percent sa

What in the world do you get the matriarch that rules the Kardashian family and subsequently, many of our lives? 
Somehow Jennifer Lawrence knew exactly what to get Kris Jenner, the mother who has it all. The two, who are apparently best friends, exchanged Christmas gifts and well, Lawrence got Jenner something she definitely doesn't already have.
SEE ALSO: Jennifer Lawrence asks Kim Kardashian about farting and virginity
"My BFF Jennifer Lawrence asked me what i wanted for Christmas and of

In a new short film called SENTiNEL, a man wakes up in an empty field and discovers that he’s being chased by a flying drone, which sets off a desperate race for survival.That’s the premise behind Ryan Connolly’s intriguing new short film, which premiered earlier this week on YouTube and Vimeo. The film is really short: it clocks in at just under five minutes, but it lays out a gripping action sequence that reveals just enough information to hint at a larger story as it plays o

GUEST: During Apple’s fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts, CEO Tim Cook said, “AR is going to change everything.” He wasn’t exaggerating.
Augmented reality (AR) is shaping an entirely new paradigm for mass technology use. We’ve quickly evolved from typing on our PC keyboards, to the point-and-click of the mouse, to the smartphone’s tap or swipe, to simply asking Alexa or Siri to do things for us. Now AR brings us to the age of holographic computing. Alo

The Los Angeles Times' magazine Envelope got into a bit of trouble with the internet and film fans last week. 
Actresses Jessica Chastain, Annette Bening, Margot Robbie, Diane Kruger, Saoirse Ronan, and Kate Winslet donned the cover of the issue, which was exploring 'a shift in focus' on how stories are being told in film—but the image and subsequent conversation included no women of color. 
The publication was called out for its lack of inclusion, and the ever outspoken Chastain

People really do have more sex around Christmas — and there’s a baby boom nine months later to match, according to new research that looks at Google searches and Twitter posts.Researchers looked at web searches about sex from 2004 to 2010 and 10 percent of public Twitter posts from 2010 to 2014. (The results were published this week in the journal Scientific Reports .) The data came from 130 countries and both hemispheres, which is crucial to show that the increase in birth rates is

Virtual reality is taking off a little slow, but the team at Holospark is practicing its VR storytelling skills so that it can deliver cinematic moments the way that the best movies and games do.
The Bellevue, Washington-based VR studio has a half-dozen people on a Séance: The Unquiet, a ghost story set in VR. It hired a couple of actors for a demo that turned out to be both dramatic and spooky. Holospark is working on a ghost story for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive VR headsets. The team i

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station watched Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi while in orbit about 240 miles above Earth on Saturday. 
A picture posted to Twitter from NASA astronaut Mar. T. Vande Hei shows five of the six current occupants of the station gathered around a screen, watching what appears to be a scene from the latest addition to the Star Wars franchise. 
Although Vande Hei doesn't specify that the movie is The Last Jedi, space.com pointed out that the i

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our new biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can started and finished in a weekend.
“Doki doki” is a Japanese onomatopoeia for a heart beating quickly, usually with anticipation or excitement. Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel where anticipation and the different forms it takes. It’s a game that does this by constantly playing with your

Though 2017 will leave us with plenty of unanswered questions, let's take a moment to reflect on a few the internet answered this year. Namely:
1. Can Twitter win you a year's supply of chicken nuggets?
Teenager Carter Wilkerson of Nevada sought to find out when he fired off a tweet in late 2016 asking fast-food chain Wendy's how many retweets he'd need in order to win a year's supply of nuggets. Their price: 18 million retweets, well above the then-record set by TV host and comedian Ellen Degen

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By now, most people have heard the the stat that some 75% of people never venture beyond the first page of Google search results. If you haven't heard that before, just think about your own searching practices: When was the last time you actually dug that deep? Didn't think so.
SEE ALSO: Stick to your New Y

GUEST: With current housing prices skyrocketing in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, even grads with well-paying jobs are struggling to make rent on a place of their own. As a result, millennials and Gen Z’ers who don’t want to move back in with mom and dad are turning to co-living, sacrificing privacy for affordability, flexibility, and community.
While this model may remind you of communes in the 1960s and ’70s, co-living isn’t a sign of the counterc

Most people who use Google Maps do so without much attention to detail. We just need the directions, the right subway route, or the name of that good sushi place. We don’t spend too much time pondering how Google got so good at mapping the world, and what decisions and choices were made along the way that have made it the go-to navigational tool of our time.Justin O’Beirne pays attention to these types of details. He’s a cartographer who helped contribute to Apple Maps. So we s

2017 has been notoriously difficult for digital publishers, and the year has claimed a new victim: Great Jones Street, an app-based fiction magazine that curated a ton of great stories that spanned genres. In a post on Facebook, the app’s publisher, Kelly Abbott says that he will shut the publication down at the end of the year, saying that he ultimately “failed to convince enough readers to support it.”
Abbott launched Great Jones Street in 2016, laying out a simple mission: &

Warning: spoilers for The Last Jedi follow.
Star Wars has a long history of the Galaxy’s best pilots jumping into ships and blowing stuff up—usually without serious consequences or repercussions. We’ve seen Han Solo recklessly jump into his Millennium Falcon and fire at the imperial TIE Fighters in A New Hope, and a precocious Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace blow up the Trade Federation blockade ships against orders. Both characters are celebrated and cheered for their i

Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner famously relied on elaborate miniatures to bring its futuristic Los Angeles to life, and helped define a cinematic look for dystopian sci-fi worlds. While Denis Villeneuve also used a number of miniatures to achieve the same effect in his sequel Blade Runner 2049, quite a few of the shots were enhanced with digital imagery.Montreal-based Rodeo FX recently released a visual effects reel that highlighted its work on the film. Some of the film’s big

We've all been desperate for cell service. Maybe you were at a music festival, or out in the woods, or just in your parents' backyard when your phone lost a connection. You probably instinctively threw your arm in the sky in an attempt to get better reception.I don't know why we do this. It's just a thing we've started doing. Does it help? No, not really.
I talked to Lin Zhong, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, about this common behavior and whether it actual

You know how when you put someone in VR initially that doesn’t understand the technology or know very much about it, one of the first things they always do is reach out with their hands and try to touch the digital world? VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear VR, and all of the others don’t track your hand movement at all and instead rely on peripherally handheld controllers instead, but it doesn’t stop our brain from reacting that way. The simulation is so b

The internship The summer of 2001, I found myself in a hotel conference suite hearing from a successful black businessman named Brian Morton share his career experience. Sitting in a room with 40 or so other students of color, I listened with eager expectation as he imparted wisdom about the world of business into which I would soon embark. He was my first ever role model in the corporate world. He was the kind of person I knew I needed to be if I hoped to one day be successful. I don’t r

Everyone knows the importance of a data-driven decision making in business and it’s increasing in popularity every year. However, what tends to get lost in that obsession is whether or not the underlying data is trustworthy. It’s easy to say that inaccurate data leads to business problems. But what’s even worse is when a company runs on data that appears trustworthy, when in reality it’s flawed in ways that significantly impact critical decisions. I know the title is a t

Innovators and early adopters – a marketing perspective More than half a century after communications professor Everett Rogers popularized the Diffusion of Innovations theory, little has changed when it comes to how new ideas are communicated and adopted. The key characteristic of innovators has remained the same: people who create new ideas or tools that are more efficient than their predecessors. That of early adopters as well has been unchanged, or rather, amplified in the modern era o

A patent published today but filed in 2016 shows an Oculus concept for a convertible head-mounted display that can be powered by either a PC or phone.
The patent application 20170364144 from Oculus is listed as invented by Yury Anatolievic Petrov. It covers a head-mounted display said to receive “video input from a stationary computer in a first mode of operation and from a mobile computer in a second mode of operation, and to display images corresponding to the video input.”
Im

GUEST: As marketers look into 2018, they see that the conversational AI landscape is primed for increased consumer adoption. In fact, in a recent survey, nine out of 10 people said they prefer messaging directly with a brand. This year, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon all leaned into messaging and conversation. In 2018, the big four will make conversational AI the main gateway to communicate with the customer.
Consumers and brand marketers will see an uptick in the following areas:
A mo

The Story of Water director Guillermo del Toro recently spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about some of the strangest and most supernatural experiences of his life. In addition to two encounters with ghosts, he describes how he had a very vivid encounter with a UFO as a young man — and it looked like crap.
“You sound like a complete lunatic, but I saw a UFO. I didn't want to see a UFO,” says del Toro. “It was horribly designed.” He described buying a six-pack —