Technology news

I’m not the first person to write this on the internet, and I won’t be the last, but good lord, DO NOT EAT TIDE PODS. Unfortunately, what started as a fairly ridiculous meme about how delicious-looking the detergent-filled gel pods are has spiraled into a dangerous meme, with people actually filming themselves eating the blighted poison packs for a shot at 15 minutes of internet fame in the “Tide Pod challenge.”
That buck stops here though, with YouTube commenting that i

Early last year, an ad agency approached Jonas Hansson, product manager for Mercene Labs in Stockholm, to see if he could create a quite unorthodox advertisement for Ikea: a magazine ad that asked pregnant women to pee on the page to reveal a discount for a crib.
“At first, I didn’t believe it was serious,” Hansson says. But the agency, Åkestam Holst, was serious, so Hansson got to work.
The ad debuted last week in the Swedish magazine Amelia, and prompted a flurry of me

Samsung only briefly touched upon 5G at CES last week, but behind closed doors, the Korean company was reportedly showing off Exynos 5G, a prototype 5G-compliant modem designed for mobile devices. Described by BusinessKorea as part of Samsung’s plan “to significantly reduce its reliance on U.S. telecom modem chips for 5G smartphones,” Exynos 5G could enable next-generation Samsung phones to use an even higher percentage of Samsung-made components. The company expects

Nintendo revealed a new line of games for the Switch. Nintendo Labo has players creating special docks for the Switch and its Joy-Con controllers to make new experiences. Its first products, the Robot Kit and the Variety Kit, will come out on April 20.
In the reveal video, examples including creating a cardboard piano, a robot-like backpack, and a fishing pole. Nintendo Labo combines real-world crafting and game controllers and then uses the Switch to turn them into digital experiences. The

Microsoft is promoting its Minecraft boss to the head of the company’s games studios. Matt Booty’s new role sees him oversee Microsoft Studios, second only to Microsoft’s games chief Phil Spencer. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella previously promoted Phil Spencer from head of Xbox to a new role overseeing all games, associated hardware, and game strategy.Spencer reports directly to Nadella, with Booty now reporting directly to Spencer. Both changes are designed to improve Microsoft&

Nintendo has long been the quirkiest major video game publisher, a company eager to buck industry trends in pursuit of fun. Last year, as competitors at Sony and Microsoft continued to turn consoles into living room PCs, Nintendo released a comparatively underpowered tablet that blurred the line between portable and home gaming, and turned it into a huge success.
Now, the company plans to follow up the red-hot debut of the Switch with a new initiative that taps into what Nintendo president Tats

Apple is giving its employees $2,500 bonuses in restricted stock units following the passing of new US tax law, according to a report from Bloomberg.The stock will be granted to most employees worldwide in the coming months, according to the report. It cites unnamed sources within Apple, who claim that Apple employees below a senior level title of “director” will be eligible for the bonuses.
9to5Mac obtained the letter sent to employees announcing the bonus, which says that the comp

In the age of HQ2, every new office announcement seems to send cities’ hearts racing. Apple’s announcement that it would accelerate investments in the U.S., add 20,000 new jobs over the next five years, and open a new campus in the next year was no exception.
On Twitter, the Apple announcement quickly drew comparisons to Amazon’s announcement last year that it would be opening a second headquarters somewhere in the U.S.Listen, we know everyone's been talking about #AmazonHQ2. B

Microsoft announced today that Phil Spencer has appointed a new boss of games to handle the role that the executive had previously handled as head of the company’s games business.
Spencer will serve as executive vice president in charge of all things games at Microsoft — including hardware, games, and platforms. But Matt Booty, the former head of the Minecraft business, will now be corporate vice president of games in charge of all of Microsoft’s studios. The various studio exe

A couple years ago, Hasselblad released a 200-megapixel, Multi-Shot version of its H5D medium format camera. Now it’s back with a bonkers, 400-megapixel version of the H6D: the H6D-400c.
Hasselblad’s Multi-Shot technology is pretty straightforward: it takes four 100-megapixel images, shifting the sensor by one pixel for each capture, and then two more shots that shift the sensor by half a pixel. By combining all six stills, the resulting file is a single 400-megapixel (23200 x 17400

Amazon has added a new $10 and Under section to its app and website, featuring, as one could infer, items that are priced $10 or cheaper. All items have free shipping, regardless of whether a user has Prime membership. The feature, first spotted by TechCrunch, looks to compete with budget shopping apps like Wish — which offers a similar array of budget products — that have been increasingly encroaching on Amazon’s space.The $10 and Under section can be found both on Amazon&rsq

It’s been just over a month since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to put an end to Obama administration net neutrality rules. After repealing Title II, the FCC ultimately put the future of the internet into the hands of internet service providers (ISPs), effectively killing the open internet. And while we’ve yet to see the fallout from the move, some are already thinking of a backup plan. The most popular of these, if you’re flush with cash, is to create your

Microsoft has promoted Matt Booty, a leader in the Minecraft games business, as corporate vice president of Microsoft Studios, making him one of the top game executive reporting to his boss, Phil Spencer, executive vice president for games.
The appointment fills a key post within the games group after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella promoted Spencer to executive vice president in a strategic role overseeing all games, game hardware, and game platform strategy at Microsoft. That promotion left the jo

NASA’s ambitious initiative to fly astronauts on commercial spacecraft continues to suffer from schedule delays, as well as questions regarding the program’s safety — and Congress isn’t happy about it. Members of the House Subcommittee on Space held a hearing today in which they grilled representatives from NASA and its commercial partners about the program, known as Commercial Crew. They voiced concerns that the commercial vehicles might put human crew members at risk,

EXCLUSIVE: Minecraft is the best example of Microsoft’s modern approach to gaming platforms. The publisher acquired the block-building phenomenon and developer Mojang in 2014 for $2.5 billion, and it has since shaped that investment into one of its most active live services. The growing Minecraft Marketplace is at the center of that.
Each month here at GamesBeat, I take a closer look at the Minecraft Marketplace and its best-selling content. You can take a look at past results right h

Drunk droning is apparently a thing, and one that’s officially illegal in the state of New Jersey. Gov. Chris Christie signed the bill into law on his last day in office this past Monday, banning the use of drones while under the influence of alcohol, narcotics, or other hallucinogenics. The new regulations follow similar thresholds as the state’s drunk driving laws, which prohibit drivers from operating a vehicle when their blood alcohol content is 0.08 percent or higher. The law a

GUEST: Over the past few years, economic inequality has become a topic of focus for economists, politicians, and leaders of industry. Tech titans are starting to discuss concepts like the future of capitalism, universal basic income, and wealth redistribution as the technology they’ve developed starts to automate more and more jobs.
New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have seen average wages rise at an unprecedented rate, while smaller towns across middle America have, in man

GUEST: Much of the conversation about tech in the workplace centers on jobs that will be replaced by AI, as well as the technology’s impending effects on workplace dynamics. Without question, this is a revolution in the making, and some businesses will thrive within it while some get left behind. However, let’s not forget that this cutting-edge tech is still not a one-size-fits-all solution. There are some tasks that artificial intelligence excels at, and others that the technology w

Twitch is getting a new chief operating officer and some new vice presidents to help it continue to develop and launch community products on a steady schedule. The company, which now calls itself a “social video service,” wants to keep its lead in broadcasting live video to the internet, and its new leadership is coming in to provide more tools to keep content creators and their audiences engaged.
Above: Twitch COO Sara ClemensImage Credit: Twitch
The new executives include three hir

DJI has sent out invitations for an “Adventure Unfolds” event next week on January 23rd. There’s not a lot of information included about to expect, just a teaser video with some dramatic music, drone shots, and what might be close-ups of a new drone.
But according to DroneDJ, the Chinese drone company is rumored to be announcing a new “Mavic Air” drone, a possible successor to the company’s existing ultra portable Mavic Pro model that would be smaller, faster

Tell them the tears in your eyes are from witnessing the beauty of Bitcoin as art, not because the dip below 10K has you curled into a corner crying. Symphony of Blockchains is a mesmerizing live 3D visualization and audio experience that’s not just gorgeous, but also incredibly informative. IOHK, the creators of Cardano, and digital art studio Kuva, have combined efforts to create something that you just have to see to believe. Users at the IOHK.io website are invited to explore the conc

A small surprise was nestled in the middle of Apple’s announcement of a $350 billion contribution to the U.S. economy today: Apple confirmed that it will repatriate the giant pile of cash it has held overseas. According to the release, Apple expects to pay approximately $38 billion in U.S. repatriation taxes, which means that it will be using a special corporate tax break to repatriate approximately $245 billion in profits created outside the country.
Prior to the passage of the

Social marmots die younger than their more withdrawn counterparts, according to scientists who studied yellow-bellied marmots for over a decade. The scientists spied on the marmots through binoculars for six hours a day.For a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists studied 11 colonies of marmots at a site in Colorado from 2002 to 2015. (They observed them from about the distance of a football field, so as not to disturb them.) Since yellow-bellied mar

Instagram is testing a new “Type” feature within Stories for users to share text-based messages as an alternative to photos or video, as reported by The Next Web. Though this was originally spotted last December among users in Japan, it’s now appearing for select groups in Europe, as well.
The feature appears as a separate option at the bottom of the screen when within Stories, alongside the other usual options like Boomerang and Live. Once Type is selected, you can write and

(Reuters) — Bitcoin skidded below $10,000 on Wednesday, halving in value from its peak price, with investors gripped by fears regulators could clamp down on the volatile cryptocurrency that sky-rocketed last year.
The price of bitcoin, the world’s biggest and best known cryptocurrency, fell to as low as $9,500 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, the lowest since Dec. 1.
Bitcoin had touched a peak of almost $20,000 in December — and indeed crossed over that threshold on s

Our most sophisticated crime-predicting algorithms may not be as good as we thought. A study published today in Science Advances takes a look at the popular COMPAS algorithm — used to assess the likelihood that a given defendant will reoffend — and finds the algorithm is no more accurate than the average person’s guess. If the findings hold, they would be a black eye for sentencing algorithms in general, indicating we may simply not have the tools to accurately predict whether

In a menacing turn of events yesterday, Bitcoin investment lending platform BitConnect abruptly announced it is shutting down its lending and exchange services. But while this sudden “curveball” might have come as a massive surprise for thousands of gullible investors, the writing was on the wall all along. The company, which made its foray into the cryptocurrency scene with an initial coin offering (ICO) in late December 2016, swiftly cemented its position as one of 2017’s be

As part of an announcement today, Apple said it would pay $38 billion in taxes to bring money held overseas back to the United States.
Apple was a major winner of recent changes to the tax code, which significantly cut corporate payments. The company has about $250 billion in cash stored overseas, but under changes to tax law, companies can bring that money back to the US with lower penalties.
Apple had already stored $36.3 billion to pay the bill and move the cash. The company also said in its

In May 2015, researchers in central Kazakhstan witnessed something really strange: thousands of saiga antelopes began acting a bit weird, becoming unbalanced, and then just plopping on the ground within a few hours — dead. Over the course of just three weeks, more than 200,000 saigas died, or about 60 percent of the global population.“I had never seen anything like it,” says Richard Kock, a wildlife veterinarian and professor at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK. “I

Apple plans to open a new campus in the US for its technical support staff and to hire an additional 20,000 employees over the next five years, the company said today. The new location will be announced later this year, and Apple indicates that it could expand in the future to hold employees from other divisions of the company.
Beyond that, the company hasn’t offered many further details. It’s not clear how large the campus will be nor whether Apple intends to make this a flagship c

Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, The Shape of Water, contains many of the director’s hallmarks: it’s a meticulously rendered fairy tale about outsiders and misfits, it’s obsessed with ghosts of the past, and it puts a marvelous movie monster front and center. But The Shape of Water is also a romance, which presented a particularly unique challenge for the filmmaker and his collaborators. Design-wise, the merman who serves as the film’s romantic lead is a clear rif

Google announced today that it would start rolling out a fix tomorrow for an issue Android users have encountered with devices like the Home smart speaker clogging up a network.
It’s supposed to fix a software bug that occasionally causes a Cast streaming media connection to fill a home wireless network with unneeded packets, slowing down the user’s network. The first part of the fix is a patch to the Google Play Services that run on Android phones. It’s unclear if an update fo

Building on prior announcements of its plans to invest in U.S. manufacturing and job creation, Apple today announced that it will increase its Advanced Manufacturing Fund from $1 billion to $5 billion, create 20,000 new jobs, and contribute over $350 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years.
Made public just ahead of its February 1 earnings call, Apple’s new plan anticipates over $30 billion in U.S. capital expenditures over the next five years, including the opening of a

Comcast Cable is gearing up to push viewers to its wide variety of on-demand and live programming for the upcoming Winter Olympics. It’s going to be a combination of traditional and digital TV.
Comcast has been working on the features since the last Olympics games, and about 18 months ago it started building tech for 4K HDR for PyeongChang in South Korea. The 2018 Winter Games start on February 9 and run through February 25, and they will be broadcast by Comcast’s sister company NBC

Honolulu Civil Beat managed to get a screenshot of the system that was used to accidentally launch the wrong emergency alert. It’s an absolute mystery why such a high-impact task has an absolutely horrible interface: As a UI designer, I was stunned and embarrassed that these types of interfaces are out there. A bad interface can cause harm to people. So I decided to spend the evening redesigning the part of the Emergency Alert System’s UI where the decision is made to send an alert.

Slack today announced several new features coming to its new shared channels, including the ability to make them private. Shared channels, currently in beta, are channels which can exist on two different Slack workspaces, enabling different organizations to work together. The new update adds private shared channels, which, as it sounds, are Shared Channels that are hidden except to the invited. Private shared channels can be public on one end and private on another, or private on both, dependin

Slack calls its channels for group chat and project management the workplace of the future, and today announced that channels shared between two companies can now be set to private. Even team administrators won’t be able to see files and conversations shared in private shared channels between specific employees or team members. Before today, shared channels were also visible to other team members.
Private shared channels may come in handy for limited company partnerships, or instances

 Who needs Amazon when you can make your own online distribution channel? At least, that’s the idea behind Grove Collaborative, a natural home care products company that ships natural cleaning brands like Method and Mrs. Meyer’s. Co-founder Stuart Landesberg started the company in 2014 after working with retail brands during his time as an investor at TPG. He noticed how limited… Read More

Google today announced a new project to improve its mobile search results: factoring page speed into its search ranking. As the company notes, page speed “has been used in ranking for some time” but that was largely for desktop searches. Starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches on Google as well.
In November 2014, Google started labeling sites as “mobile-friendly” to denote pages optimized for phones. The company then spent the next f

Facebook is launching a new investigation into whether Russian propagandists coordinated a disinformation campaign around last year’s Brexit vote. In a letter to the head of a parliamentary committee on digital affairs, UK policy director Simon Milner says Facebook will conduct “detailed analysis of historic data” over a period of several weeks. It’s looking for accounts that it may have missed in a December probe, which found little evidence of potential Russian interfe

Representatives for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter faced questions from lawmakers today about how terrorist content is detected and removed from the internet.
“The companies that our witnesses represent have a very difficult task.”
The hearing, in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, was the latest moment of high-profile government scrutiny for Big Tech. “The companies that our witnesses represent have a very difficult task: preserving the en

Popup Dungeon is a roguelike dungeon crawling role-playing game, which is nothing new — but this one includes a customization tool that enables players to modify the game’s characters, weapons, abilities, and enemies. Developer Triple B Titles successfully raised $100,000 through a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 and entered pre-alpha in December for backers. Today, it’s revealed new gameplay footage including how its creation tool works. Triple B and publisher Humble Bundle

What’s so interesting about talking robots? From The Tin Man and C3P0 to HAL 9000, humans have long fantasized about bringing their lovable idiosyncrasies to metal and silicon. Now, as intelligent assistants and chatbots become real presences in our lives, owing to impressive technological developments in machine learning and natural language understanding, a look at that history shows personality, not technology, is actually just as necessary for success. The chatbot story begins in the

Epic Games announced today that an updated map for its hit shooter Fortnite: Battle Royale is coming on January 18.
Fortnite: Battle Royale is a free-to-play game available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. While the original Fortnite focused on cooperative action, this standalone mode takes inspiration from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. It drops 100 players in a large, open map and gives them the goal of being the last person or team standing. According to Epic, the game has attracted

Native Instruments today unveiled Sounds.com, an online sample bank for music production. If you’ve ever been frustrated trying to find the perfect snare, or wished you could just grab some loops and score your video, this might be the answer to your prayers. Typically gaining samples for music production involves digging through the crates (buying a lot of used records), scouring dozens of websites, or purchasing prohibitively expensive software banks. Native Instruments is trying to cha

Google’s Project Fi has tweaked its plans to make the service more attractive to heavy data users. The MVNO has launched a new feature called Bill Protection that will cap your $10 per GB data bill at $60 a month, while still allowing you to use as much data as you want, essentially creating its own version of an unlimited data plan.Prior to today, Project Fi users were charged $10 per GB no matter how much data they used, which could become quite costly for heavy users. Bill Protection s