Technology news

The Hollywood Chrises are a marvel among, uh, mostly Marvel men — and Ryan "Deadpool" Reynolds is as much a fan as we are.
Messrs Pratt, Hemsworth, Evans and Pine have been at the top of our minds, feeds, and viewing priorities individually and as a collective group of Chrises since Pratt was cast in Guardians of the Galaxy in 2013.
SEE ALSO: Let's look back at the year in Hollywood Chrises
Now, their cheeky MCU counterpart and fellow sandy haired white male lead, Reynolds, has declared hi

Snow caused a massive crash involving dozens of vehicles on a New York highway on Tuesday afternoon. 
The entire eastbound side of I-90 outside Buffalo was closed after a car accident caused a huge, multi-car pileup. Facebook user Kadire Flowers filmed a portion of the accident from the westbound side of the highway. The video shows numerous cars blocking the highway in near white-out conditions. 
SEE ALSO: A meteorological ‘bomb’ is set to go off along the East Coast, and

Microsoft stopped manufacturing Kinects back in October, but the company’s once vaunted camera sensor has suffered one final death today, as Microsoft confirms to Polygon that it’s discontinued production on the Kinect Adapter, making it practically impossible for new Xbox One S and One X owners who don’t already own an adapter to with their consoles. (The adapter is also used for making use of the the Kinect with a Windows 10 PC.)
Microsoft originally offered the dongle to Xb

It's easy to hate on Logan Paul. A 22-year-old YouTuber with 15 million subscribers, Paul made himself the poster child for shallow and gross behavior this weekend by posting a graphic video in which he finds the body of a man who died by suicide in Aokigahara forest, a sacred site at the base of Mt. Fuji. The video gained a million likes before Paul took it down.
Bad enough that Paul yuks it up in the video while dressed in what can only be described as 21st century clown gear, the archetypal u

In the December issue of The Baffler, journalist Liz Pelly wrote a fascinating, widely discussed dissection of how the algorithms employed by major streaming services — particularly Spotify — are changing music.They’re making it less interesting, less diverse, and more corporate, she argued — more like Muzak, something that seems like music, but is really just background noise made from stock sounds. She called out Spotify’s focus on mood-themed playlists, which ar

A joke gone bad ended in tragedy last week, and it brings into the spotlight one of the worst aspects of gaming culture.
Last week, someone made a fake emergency call (known as swatting) to police in Wichita, Kansas, and the police shot an innocent man. On Friday, police in Los Angeles arrested 25-year-old Tyler Raj Barriss, who reportedly goes by the name SWAuTistic, for allegedly calling in the false report. Social media posts on the incident have continued this week. Let’s hope that thi

Google has secretly been developing a mysterious new operating system called "Fuchsia," and now, Pixelbook owners can finally try it out. 
The tech blog Chrome Unboxed reports that Google quietly released instructions for installing the new  operating system, Fuchsia, on the Pixelbook laptop. The search giant has also released instructions for installing the operating system on the Acer Switch 12 and the Intel NUC. 
SEE ALSO: Official, full-featured Microsoft Office apps just arri

In the whirlwind of a year that was 2017, you'd be forgiven if you forgot that, way back in February, Nicole Kidman clapped weirdly at the Oscars.
SEE ALSO: Stick to your New Year's Resolutions with these classes, products, and helpful ideas
Now, at the time, it was a pretty striking piece of news given the fact that Kidman appeared to have just learned to clap earlier in the evening and was doing her best to mimic normal human behavior. During CNN's live New Year's Eve broadcast on Sunday,

Heads up: All products featured here are selected by Mashable's commerce team and meet our rigorous standards for awesomeness. If you buy something, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.
Holiday shopping may be over, but New Years Resolution season is just beginning. Whether you're looking to get fit, make your house a smart home, get a jump on your finances, or just put a dent in that Netflix queue, you've got to have the right equipment. 
SEE ALSO: Get this VR headset on sale for les

Some smartphone games are listening to what your mic picks up — but not to hear what you say. Instead, they’re trying to hear what you’re watching.
This is something smartphone apps have been doing for a little while now: using microphone access to tell what shows you watch, which ads you hear, and even what movies you see. But a report in The New York Times last week shows the practice may be more prevalent — and more secretive — than consumers might like.
The Tim

Logan Paul was right about one thing: This definitely marks a moment in YouTube history. 
Backlash spread quickly on New Year's Day after YouTuber Logan Paul uploaded a video titled "We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest." In the clip, which has since been pulled from the site, Paul and a few of his buddies discover a man who died by suicide in Aokigahara, at the base of Japan's Mount Fuji, and showed graphic images of the man's body.
SEE ALSO: YouTube star Logan Paul apologis

Every product here is independently selected by Mashable journalists. If you buy something featured, we may earn an affiliate commission which helps support our work.
Somewhere deep within his superhero hideout (or supervillain lair, depending on your point of view), Jeff Bezos is probably cackling with delight at the revelation that Amazon Prime customers had more than 5 billion items shipped to them via the online retailer in 2017.
SEE ALSO: Amazon launches free same-day shipping for Prime mem

Heads up: All products featured here are selected by Mashable's commerce team and meet our rigorous standards for awesomeness. If you buy something, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.
Have you ever wondered if your writing hobby could actually become a career? The good news is that there's a path a whole lot simpler than trying to write and publish a book. May we suggest: copywriter. 
SEE ALSO: These online writing classes can help you finally write that novel
Even if you've binged

Wixen Music Publishing, which licenses music from about 200 artists, including Tom Petty, Neil Young, The Beach Boys, Missy Elliott, and Janis Joplin, is suing Spotify for $1.6 billion, Variety reports.The lawsuit was filed in California last Friday, and alleges that Spotify has been using “thousands of songs” without the correct license. Wixen essentially argues that Spotify doesn’t do enough to identify the rights holders of songs it licenses from labels, as the complaint re

On the last day of 2017, YouTube star Logan Paul posted a video of a dead body in Aokigahara, more commonly known as Japan’s “suicide forest.” The vlog followed Paul and his friends as they encountered the body of a man who, like hundreds of others, had taken his own life in the popular tourist destination. In between Paul’s comments about the seriousness of suicide, the camera zooms in on various parts of the body, while Paul occasionally cracks jokes or laughs. “

It's true – marriage changes people.
SEE ALSO: 'Fifty Shades Freed' trailer is here and OMG can we please just get this over with
Take Ana and Christian. In Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker, they were that annoying couple that gets off on playing kinky sex games in public, while everyone else tries hard not to notice.
Now, in Fifty Shades Freed, marriage has transformed them into that annoying couple that constantly refers to each other (and often themselves) as "Mr. Grey" and

Buddybuild, a Vancouver, Canada-based application development service, today confirmed that it has been purchased by Apple. In a reversal of Apple’s typical statement that “we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans” for “smaller technology companies” bought “from time-to-time,” Buddybuild itself explained exactly what it will be doing within Apple.
The Buddybuild service promises “a continuous integration, continuous deployment, and use

Yosuke Masuda, president of Square Enix, predicted that 5G networks could make high-quality web browser games in the HTML5 format more popular. In a New Years letter today, Masuda also said that new digital payment technologies could also help gaming grow better in emerging territories.
Square Enix is one of Japan’s biggest with sales of $2.2 billion for its most recent fiscal year. Its interest in emerging technologies is important because Square Enix is the kind of company that can make

Microsoft announced today that it will be launching a coalition called Connect Americans Now (CAN) to advocate for the FCC to eliminate regulatory hurdles that the group says are standing in the way of more widespread rural broadband deployment.
In addition to Microsoft, the coalition’s members include The App Association, a software trade organization, and the National Rural Education Association.
Specifically, CAN wants the FCC to “ensure that there is sufficient unlicensed lo

Microsoft and Amazon were supposed to play nice this past year and make their respective digital assistants available on each other's platforms, allowing users to access Microsoft's Cortana assistant on an Amazon Echo, or Alexa on any Windows 10 PC. The company said the cross-platform features would roll out by the end of 2017, but they have yet to make good on that deadline. (Thanks, Thurrott, for first spotting the missed timeline.)
The New York Times reported in August that someone using an

Actress and activist Rose McGowan, who was among the first to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, will star in her own documentary series to premiere on E! this monthCitizen Rose will follow McGowan, now a prominent face and voice in the movement to end sexual misconduct in Hollywood and beyond.
SEE ALSO: The women of Hollywood have a plan to fight back – and not just in Hollywood
The show premieres in conjunction with McGowan's memoir Brave, which is set to release on Jan.

The iPhone X is one of our favorite gadgets of 2017, and basically sets the benchmark for new smartphones. It has an impeccable camera, a gigantic screen that takes up the entire front panel, and a fancy 3D camera used for authentication.
But all of this excitement hasn't been enough to guarantee strong sales. Early signs indicated iPhone X adoption was outpacing iPhone 8 and 8 Plus sales in the first week of availability, but expectations have finally tempered.
SEE ALSO: Why this year in smartp

Harvard researchers have developed a novel, flat lens they say can focus "all the colors of the rainbow." This is a significant departure from the camera lenses made today, which are curved, bulkier, and take up more space.
But there's a catch: The researchers successfully focused light with this lens, which they call a "metalens," but on an extremely small, nanoparticle scale (nanoparticles can be thousands of times thinner than a human hair). While an impressive feat, major tech companies like

The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.
Spoiler warning: This essay includes significant spoilers for “USS Callister.” It does not reveal the ending, but does address

A bunch of odd stuff comes out of Samsung’s C-Lab incubator each year, and today Samsung is unveiling a handful of its latest projects. The highlight is a product line called S-Ray, short for Sound-Ray, that’s composed of three different speakers that are supposed to act almost like headphones — playing music so that only a single person can hear it.
It’s hard to imagine how effectively this will work, but it’s a neat idea. Samsung wants people to be able to listen

Heads up: All products featured here are selected by Mashable's commerce team and meet our rigorous standards for awesomeness. If you buy something, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.
If you're the type of person who can't tell a Phillips from a flathead, you probably find yourself calling mom and dad for help when things break around the house. But 2018 is a new year, and maybe mom and dad would be more impressed with a new you who can caulk a hole in the wall without breaking a sweat.

PRESS RELEASE: REDWOOD CITY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 2, 2018– AEGEA Medical Inc. (“AEGEA”), a privately held medical technology company in the women’s health space focused on the development of its patented Adaptive Vapor Ablation technology for endometrial ablation, today announced it has closed on a $30 million financing with Perceptive Advisors (“Perceptive”). In connection with the financing, AEGEA also raised an additional $10 million f

GUEST: I’ve got this ominous feeling that 2018 could be the year that everything changes dramatically. The incredible breakthroughs we saw in 2017 for deep learning will carry over in a very powerful way in 2018. A lot of work coming from 2017’s research will migrate into everyday software applications.
As I did last year, I’ve compiled a list of predictions for where deep learning will go in 2018.
1. The majority of deep learning hardware startups will fail
Many deep lear

 There may be a reason why that ol’ “Facebook is listening to you talk” conspiracy theory refuses to die – and not just because Facebook’s ad technology has gotten so good, it’s downright creepy. As it turns out, some apps are actually listening. Well, kind of! According to a recent report from The NYT, a number of apps using software from a company called… Read More

It's a new year and evidently a great time for Amazon to tell us how many items the company shipped over the past 365 days. Amazon says today that more than 5 billion items were shipped through its Prime program last year, which includes free same-day, one-day, and two-day shipping. Amazon also says, "more new paid members joined Prime worldwide this year than any previous year."Alongside the new factoid, Amazon published a list of the most popular Prime items. Apparently people love to order b

YouTuber Logan Paul posted a video on New Year’s Eve showing what appeared to be the body of a person who had died by suicide — and by doing so, he may have put his audience at risk. The video, which Polygon reports has been deleted from Paul’s 15 million-subscriber YouTube channel, sparked outrage for its disrespectful treatment of a dead body. But the truth is that turning the remains of a human being into a spectacle is worse than just horrifyingly bad taste: by sensational

2017 was a year of grim milestones, and its tail end offered one more to add to the painfully long list: the first confirmed death from a gamer-initiated swatting. Swatting, the practice of calling a SWAT team to the house of a target by fraudulently reporting a serious crime at their address, has finally done exactly what critics of toxic video game culture have long feared, and claimed a life.
The recent death of Andrew Finch, slain when a feud between two Call of Duty players ended in a SWAT

Wires suck. They’re either always too long or too short, they break easily, and they never ever stay untangled. But now it’s a new year, and what better way to start out 2018 than by cutting out wires completely from your life?
Avido’s new wirelessly charging battery pack, the WiBa, certainly has. The WiBa looks a lot like any other battery pack — it’s a small, oblong rectangle roughly the size of a phone — but it completely cuts the cord. Everything about th

Lyft is partnering with self-driving technology company Aptiv to offer rides in its robot taxis during CES in Las Vegas next week. There will be a safety driver behind the wheel, so the trips will not be completely driverless. Unlike a normal Lyft experience, the cars will only travel to 20 preprogrammed destinations.The news is notable, since most companies that come to CES to demonstrate self-driving technology do so in closed parking lots where they can control every aspect of the experience

Comcast, still feasting on its holiday bounty in the form of net neutrality’s carcass, is starting 2018 off by doing what it does best: price gouging its customers. Along with AT&T, DishTV, and several other providers, it will raise prices in January. These increases will include most of the company’s services. Internet, TV packages, modem rentals, and late charges are all going up. And, even though the company faces several lawsuits for its made-up “Broadcast TV” an

As a new year begins, so too does the 2018 winter anime season in Japan. Now, thanks to video streaming services like Crunchyroll, Amazon, and Netflix, they’re more accessible than ever. (Subtitled versions of most shows are available in America within a day of release.)
With 50 different series hitting the air this season, there’s a lot to choose from, so we’ve picked the highlights and broken them down based on their specific appeal.If you like teen drama and Pacific Rim
Dar

Mario jumps. That’s as certain as the rising sun or paying taxes, which is why it notable when someone tries to beat a Mario game without ‘jumping’ at all. That’s just what YouTuber Gamechamp3000 tried to do with Super Mario Odyssey, inspired by ‘no A button’ challenges with Super Mario 64. Disclaimer: There’s a reason ‘jumping’ is in quotes. It’s probably impossible to beat the game without propelling Mario into the air at a

 Facebook has scored the exclusive rights to live stream this year’s Golden Globes’ red carpet pre-show – a deal that last year went to Twitter. On Tuesday, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) and dick clark productions announced the two-hour event would be exclusively available on the Golden Globes Facebook page from 6 to 8 p.m. ET (3 to 5 p.m. PT) on Sunday… Read More

The problem with great TV in 2017 was that there was so much of it. These days, there are so many TV recommendations and must-sees that leisure starts to feel like homework. (“You absolutely have to watch this! And you have to see it from the beginning! There are five seasons so far!”) That’s why we’re wrapping up our 2017 year-end summary coverage by trying to boil down our favorite 2017 television experiences into something approachable: a single episode that summed up

YouTube star Logan Paul is facing a loud backlash after filming and uploading footage purportedly showing a dead body in the notorious Aokigahara forest in Japan – one of “the world’s most popular suicide sites.” In the the clip, which was originally posted on Sunday but has since been removed, the 22-year-old vlogger sets out to explore the “haunted aspect” of the forrest. But unfortunately, things swiftly get too real when he and his friends stumb

GE is previewing two new entries to its C by GE line of smart lighting products today that are slated to arrive later this year: a ceiling light and a light switch. While they sound pretty basic on the surface, they both come with one less-than-standard feature — the ability to control Alexa and Google Assistant.
The ceiling light is a large disk with a speaker in the middle that’s meant to be the primary light in a room. The light supports voice controls and feedback, so you can ta