Technology news

2017 was a good time for racial representation in movies. From films like Hidden Figures to Coco, it seems that Hollywood is more invested than ever in telling stories with diverse leads. Not all of the news is good, however; the past year also saw two more whitewashing controversies thanks to the live-action Ghost in the Shell and Netflix’s Death Note, and people of color on the big screen still lag far behind their populations in real life. Although it’s difficult to square all th

Throughout the final week of 2017, culture writers from across Vox Media will be chatting about the best works of the year. In this installment, Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff, Alissa Wilkinson, and Genevieve Koski; The Verge’s Tasha Robinson; and Polygon’s Julia Alexander talk about the movies of 2017.
Todd VanDerWerff: My favorite movies in 2017 weren’t escapism, not precisely, but they did take me so thoroughly out of my own point of view that reentering reality afterward cou

Earlier this month, HQ Trivia announced that the app would finally be available for Android users, allowing them to pre-register to download it. The app is now available in the Google Play Store’s Early Access section.
The game launched this past fall on iOS. The Android app is still in beta, and the product page notes that the app is potentially unstable. Recode reported earlier this month that the company is working to raise money from venture capitalists for a potential $100 million va

Before his death in January 2016, David Bowie was a noted musician, actor, and was a prolific reader. On Twitter, Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones recently said that he has been “feeling a building sense of duty to go on the same literary marathon in tribute” to his late father, and will be holding an online book club based on his father’s favorite books.Bowie’s website provides a list of his 100 favorite books, and Jones, the director of Moon, Warcraft, and the forthcomi

A team of reptile and amphibian enthusiasts is asking for the public’s help training artificial intelligence to spot snakes, frogs, and more from photos. The team wants to eventually create an app that can help people identify these creatures in their backyards — and prevent people from killing them. But first, their AI has to get better at making those photo IDs.The AI, named Fitch after the late, renowned herpetologist Henry S. Fitch, is part of a new platform called What the Herp

WhatsApp went down in several parts of the world today, including parts of Europe, Asia, and South America. The crowdsourced website DownDetector found the largest concentration of outages in portions of England, Germany, and virtually all of the Netherlands, as well as parts of Italy, Spain, and Central Europe.
Outages were also reported in many major cities around the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Mumbai, and Toronto.
Outages tracked by DownDetector began to

A court in Germany has told Amazon.com that it can no longer use search terms to lure in customers who misspell “Birkenstock,” according to Reuters.The German sandal maker filed an injunction, complaining that the online retailer had been using variations on its brand name, such as “Brikenstock”, “Birkenstok”, and “Bierkenstock” on Google’s Adwords. Birkenstock alleges that by luring in customers with keywords, it’s potentially selling

Sometime in late March of next year, a Chinese space station named Tiangong-1 is going to fall back down to Earth — and some big pieces may survive the reentry. The module’s descent has caused a bit of concern about debris raining form the sky. But in reality, a falling space station is the last thing anyone should be worried about.
Satellites and spacecraft fall to Earth all the time. Vehicles in lower orbits get bombarded by small particles in the planet’s upper atmosphere,

2017 is wrapping up and so reflect we must on the year that was. By now you’ve hopefully seen our extensive list of nominees for our Best of 2017 awards, which we think do a pretty great job of representing the VR industry in 2017. But, as with any medium, there are a handful of apps that flew under the radar this year that we really, really don’t think you should be missing out on.
Some of these are already included in our nominations, but we’re still highlighting th

What’s the worst that could happen tonight, the most loaded night of the year? You could have no one to kiss or no one to get drunk with, or worse — you could have both and still not have a good time. It’s so much pressure and even the nicest things you can think of will likely involve so much “walking outside” and “being in a crowd” and “money,” that it couldn’t possibly be worth it. A new year? I’ve seen 940 of them already. An

The biggest story about apps in 2017 was, well, stories. Snapchat still deserves the credit for coming up with the concept, and Instagram shamelessly ripped it off back in 2016, but this year, everyone got on board. WhatsApp added stories (and then later made them less prominent after users complained). Facebook added stories (and tried to guilt users into using them with digital ghosts of friends.) Medium — a largely text based app — added stories! YouTube added stories! It’s

Earlier this month, hackers stole $63 million from crypto-currency mining site NiceHash, prompting the company’s founders to apologize on Facebook Live and to shut down operations for 24 hours. Now, the company’s co-founder, Marko Kobal, has stepped down as CEO.The company allows users to offer up their computer’s processing power to help with the calculations needed to create new bitcoins. In a statement on LinkedIn, Kobal says that the company has been working to recover fro

Rusel Demaria is interested in the history of games, and he doesn’t want it to slip away from us.
Demaria wrote High Score! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, published in 2002. And now he’s back with 800 pages of additional reading. Demaria interviewed scores of former Xbox and PC gaming veterans, and he created a history of Microsoft’s game business, dubbed Game of X.
Volume 1 is about the creation of the Xbox, which debuted in 2001, and the Xbox Live gaming se

Netflix recently began streaming its big blockbuster Bright, and it hasn’t been entirely well received by critics. The action film is set in a modern fantasy world where elves, humans, and orcs live alongside one another, but it only alluded to the larger world that drives much of the story. To help fill in those gaps, Netflix released a short video that highlights all of the history of the world that would have made the story a bit more comprehensible.Bright might not have been great fil

A club in Prague named Karlovy Lazne has recently introduced a robot DJ that alternates with a human to program music for the dance floor throughout the night, as reported by Reuters. Now in rotation for a few weeks, the robot has software that allows it to choose songs, select CDs from a rack, insert them into CDJs, and then play the songs. It also has some pretty sweet dance moves.
The club employed a robotics firm to have the robot specifically made for DJing. It’s an adaptation of a K

If 2016 was the year that streaming music became a necessity, 2017 is the year streaming music showed its clout. This couldn’t have been showcased any more clearly than at the Grammys, where Chance the Rapper won best new artist, best rap album, and best rap performance — an honor only made possible because nomination rules changed, allowing for streaming-only albums to be eligible for nomination. In his acceptance speech, Chance gave a shout out to SoundCloud.
Streaming music consu

My best way to look back on 2017 in the world of headphones is to consider the things I wasn’t able to say a year ago.
The best portable headphones today are wireless. That wasn’t true last year — at least not in my Beoplay H6-loving judgment — however Bowers & Wilkins’ PX have shot to the top of the charts with an exquisitely tuned sound, handsome looks, and solid battery life. The noise-cancelling PX are a transformational pair of headphones because they take

2017 has been quiet a year for VR entertainment as Oculus, HTC and Sony continue to push their respective headsets as gaming devices first and everything else second. That said, everything else has had a pretty good year too; VR has started to prove its worth as a tool for positive change in 2017.
Over the past year we’ve shed pounds, looked after ourselves and learned more about the world around us with the help of headsets that let us see and do anything we want to.
Shedding The PoundsTh

You’re only as good as your last good idea, right? This is as true for companies as it is for the employees within it. A company’s value lies in how much it can deliver to its clients and customers. So, who better to create new products and services that would be beneficial to their businesses than the teams that already work with them? I feel it’s obvious that giving employees the space, freedom, and support to think beyond a company’s core product range is paramount to

Here’s how hectic the world of virtual reality has been in 2017: while writing up this list of the biggest stories to break this year, I could have sworn Palmer Luckey had parted ways with Oculus more than 12 months ago. There’s been so much to keep up with that even some of the year’s industry-shaking stories managed to slip through the cracks.
VR has had an interesting year filled with some amazing ups and unexpected downs. These are the most essential stories that will shape