Technology news

High-profile Bay Area denizens are skipping tap water in favor of drinking unfiltered, untreated, and expensive “raw” water that comes straight out of the ground, Nellie Bowles reports for The New York Times. Proponents claim that raw water’s health benefits include naturally occurring minerals and microbes. But the reality for any inadequately treated water from the tap or a spring is that those minerals can sometimes include arsenic, and those microbes can be deadly.The tren

GUEST: If there is one thing I have learned in the last two years in the cryptocurrency world, it’s that things change so quickly in this sector, it can humble anybody. Anyone who says he knows what he is talking about, doesn’t!
Still, it’s New Year’s Day, so what the heck? I’ll put my neck out there with 12 predictions for 2018:
1. Ripple will lose its luster
People will realize that Ripple is a cool business but that it doesn’t actually require a protocol to

The Boeing 747 flew its maiden voyage in early February of 1969, a week or so after I was born. This was not a commercial flight. That wouldn’t come until a year later, in late January of 1970, a week before my first birthday, when the world’s first jumbo jet took off from New York following a bizarre christening with red, white, and blue water by First Lady Pat Nixon. It was just a trial, from the runway near Boeing’s new factory north of Seattle, a building constructed for t

Nintendo ROM hacker Kaze Emanuar has used a conceptually simple tweak to give Super Mario 64 a completely different feel. First Person Mario 64 is exactly what it sounds like: your camera follows Mario’s head movement as closely as possible, turning the game into a dizzying first-person adventure.
In the clip above, Emanuar runs through a few of the ways the game plays differently. Rolls and jumps become “terrifying” with your vision limited to a first-person perspective, and

OPINION: Wearables have become an established category over the past few years, but the subcategory of LTE wearables is still tiny and fragile. Unfortunately, cellular providers are treating LTE wearables like tablets, as if they’re similarly capable of gobbling data at phone-like rates. To encourage adoption, carriers should treat wearables as what they are — trivial additions to their networks — and stop charging unnecessarily high fees for data services.
In 2013, wearab

It’s a brand new year, and that means that it’s time to dust off the reading list and take a look at what’s coming ahead.In the last days of 2017, I finally found some time to catch up on Brian K. Vaughn and FIonna Staples’s brilliant comic Saga. I’ve loved the series, but for one reason or another, I’ve fallen behind. I plowed through the latest three volumes, and was once again enthralled in their vivid world, and can’t wait to pick up the next one.In

LG is pushing TV displays to ever-greater sizes and resolutions (and, most likely, prices) for the upcoming CES 2018. Engadget writes that the company will be showing off a new 88-inch OLED television with an 8K display, promising the biggest and highest-resolution OLED on the market. (You can get non-OLED 8K displays in much larger sizes.) It’s an upgrade over LG’s existing 77-inch panel with 4K resolution, and although there’s no price for this new display, the 77-inch scree

“The Simpsons” has had a lot of great moments, but my favorite came when Principal Skinner hosted Superintendent Chalmers for lunch and hell broke loose.
Now this segment has become something of a meme, with YouTubers trying to outdo each other by making the scene even more ridiculous by doing things like turning it into a Guitar Hero track. But YouTube user Adam Davidson has created the best shit post with his Metal Gear Solid effort.I lost it when the video cut to the grainy, lette

Smart lock company Otto is suspending operations after a failed acquisition agreement. In a blog post late last year, CEO and founder Sam Jadallah says the company made an acquisition deal that limited its ability to fundraise, but the buyer pulled out at the last minute, leaving Otto with no remaining cash. The first locks were supposed to ship within the next few weeks, but “Otto will not ship next month and it may never ship,” says Jadallah. The company will “evaluate [its]

Complaints about automated telemarketing calls jumped steeply last year, and have quintupled since 2009, according to a recent FTC report. The report says that in fiscal year 2017, the agency received over 375,000 complaints per month about automated robocalls, up from only 63,000 per month in 2009. That’s a total of 4.5 million robocall complaints, plus an additional 2.5 million complaints about live telemarketing calls. For comparison, there were 3.4 million robocalls and 1.8 million li

The worst year for tech that most of us can remember in a long, long time is finally over. It is perhaps best summarized as the year the tech backlash finally came of age, setting in motion a long-overdue reckoning.
That’s not to say anyone has learned any fundamental lessons or changed any behavior. We have yet to see whether the protective bubble surrounding Silicon Valley has finally been punctured enough to let a touch of enlightenment seep through.
But before we hack off the gang

(Reuters)  Britain may impose new taxes on tech giants like Google and Facebook unless they do more to combat online extremism by taking down material aimed at radicalizing people or helping them to prepare attacks, the country’s security minister said.
Ben Wallace accused tech firms of being happy to sell people’s data but not to give it to the government which was being forced to spend vast sums on de-radicalization programs, surveillance and other counter-terrorism measures.