Technology news

Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced that he has signed the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017 into law. The current authorization will expire in December 2023.In an official statement, President Trump says that the bill allows the intelligence community to “collect critical intelligence on international terrorists, weapons proliferators, and other important foreign intelligence targets” outside of the US. He also says that he would have preferred to have signed a pe

There are a ton of Star Wars books out there, ranging from novels to official reference books to unofficial histories and biographies. The New York Times has recently released a Star Wars book of its own: In a Galaxy Far, Far Away, which compiles most of the publications’ coverage on the franchise.The coffee table book begins its coverage in 1973 with a feature about George Lucas, which revealed that he was working on a space opera film. The Times describes the book as the “ultimate

GUEST: Patent trolls, more formally known as Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), are entities that acquire patents for the sole purpose of suing companies in order to monetize them. They also happen to make a habit of piling on a tremendous amount of added work, expense, and stress onto legitimate operating companies.
Preparing for possible litigation has become a standard “cost of doing business” over the years. As the General Counsel of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE USA, Inc.), I&rs

On this week’s GamesBeat Decides podcast, we spent some time diving into some of the tidbits of news from The NPD Group’s annual report. We run down the list of the best-selling games in the United States and more.
The NPD report revealed that, once again, Call of Duty was the best-selling game of the year. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that the PC version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is not on this list. Other standouts include NBA 2K18 and a trio of Nintendo ga

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
The unspoken hope of attending a film festival like Sundance is that you could just stumble upon some small, incredibly effective film that might otherwise have never crossed your radar. That’s precisely the case with The Guilty, an engrossing Danish thriller from first-time feature director Gustav Möller t

Kevin Chou is a freshman among the owners of esports teams. But so far, so good for the CEO of KSV Esports, which owns the Seoul Dynasty team in the Overwatch League. Seoul Dynasty is up 4-0 in its matches so far in Blizzard Entertainment’s brand new esports league, which drew more than 10 million viewers in its debut week.
Chou, former CEO of mobile game company Kabam, acquired a franchise for an official regional Overwatch esports team in Seoul, South Korea, for an estimated $2

Specialty Yu-Gi-Oh! cards can be expensive and run in the thousands of dollars, like Doomcaliber Knight, worth about $700, and the first Japanese promo version of Dark Magician Girl, which could set you back about $1,100, but they don’t come close to the price of one particular card currently on the market. Card Shop Spiral specialty store of Tokyo is selling a card called Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon for a whopping 45 million yen ($406,800).
The card is a one of a kind, which is why it&rsqu

The Sundance Film Festival kicked off on Thursday, so this week has been absolutely packed with trailers as distributors try to hype movies headed to the festival that they’ve already scooped up in pre-show negotiations. I’ve included a few of the bigger films and more striking trailers here, but I’d encourage you to check out The Film Stage’s roundup if you want to see a lot more. Most of these films won’t be playing widely for some time though, so consider it a v

HyperX is at a point where when it announces a new gaming peripheral, people pay attention. It started with its excellent Cloud headset, and it continues with the company’s long-awaited move into wireless audio with the Cloud Flight. Kingston’s gaming division debuted the Cloud Flight at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, but I’ve already spent a couple of weeks with it. And, as expected, it is another impressive headset.
The HyperX Cloud Flight is shipping n

Super Bowl 52 is coming up in a few weeks and if you’re hosting a party for it, I have good news for you. Right now, there are great deals going on for everything you’d need for your viewing party: A TV, some speakers, food, and a little help with the clean-up.
Retailers are marking down TVs of all sorts, including 4K Ultra HD TVs and Roku Smart TVs, so you can see every blade of grass that’ll be trampled underfoot. For the audio, brands like Bose are marking down home theatre

Shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, news sites began reporting that pages for LGBT rights, climate change, and other key issues had been scrubbed from the White House website. This wasn’t quite accurate. The Obama White House’s entire site had been rolled over to an archived address, and replaced with a bare-bones Trump administration version. An administration official said the site was still would be expanded over time. A year later, though, that original al

If you listen to audiobooks, chances are that you’ve probably purchased it from Audible. Now, it looks as though Google will begin selling audiobooks trough its Google Play store. 9to5Google is reporting that the company has begun advertising audiobooks, and that a user’s first audiobook purchase will be 50 percent off.The hub isn’t currently accessible, and 9to5Google says that there’s no indication of when the store will go live. But it seems that the company is laying

GUEST: A year ago, the Midwest saw one of its largest tech exits to-date: the January 2017 $1.1 billion sale of CoverMyMeds to San Francisco-based McKesson Corp. The CoverMyMeds exit was the biggest in Ohio history, and it signaled an upward growth trajectory in exit activity from 2016.
When it comes to Midwest exits, 2017 was an extremely strong year. Through an analysis conducted with data from Pitchbook, Mattermark, and our own proprietary research, Hyde Park Angels looked at the biggest

There’s a new Android app called Skyline that will turn your current location into your wallpaper, as first spotted by Lifehacker. Skyline uses 3D terrain data from Mapbox to show either your current location or specific coordinates to create wallpapers in full detail.
The app can shift the image when you unlock your phone or swipe through your launcher pages, and it features a parallax effect that’s visible when you tilt your phone.
You can toggle the depth effects in settings and

Every year we get served up a heaping portion of concept cars from automakers at CES and Detroit. Weird headlights, huge screens, and a bevy of doors that can’t be bothered to open in a traditional manner. But lately there’s a sense that car companies are just going through the motions. They give us playful ideas like augmented reality and a koi fish that’s your virtual personal assistant, but in the end they dump all their money into more trucks and SUVs. Which is why I&rsquo

2017 was an exciting year for driverless cars: from Waymo testing driverless cars on city streets for the first time, to the UK Government’s plans to launch driverless cars onto the roads in 2021, in the past twelve months we’ve seen faster development of driverless car technology than ever before. This year could be even more exciting. However, in order to maintain momentum, we need to tackle one issue head on: training technical talent. Limitless potential, limited talent pool Sel

The popular myth that strong earthquakes happen during certain Moon phases has no basis in science, according to new research.
Susan Hough, a scientist at the US Geological Survey, pored over 400 years of data from over 200 earthquakes of magnitude eight or larger. She looked at the day the earthquakes occurred, and what phases the Moon was in. And she found no link between the ground shaking and the position of the Earth and the Moon in the sky, according to a study published this week in Seis

GUEST: Just because New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady is good at football doesn’t mean he’s good at Madden. And just because you’re good at marketing doesn’t mean you’re good at esports marketing. While esports may not yet have the same name recognition as soccer, football, or baseball, the prospect of it soon joining their ranks is not too far-fetched.
As the owner of 10 major esports brands, we at Gamurs Group have seen and reported on the esports in

Sketchfab is taking one of its biggest steps yet today and launching features so that users can buy and sell 3D objects.
The startup is supporting the industry standard glTF as its download format, which should make it easy for creators to take the objects purchased from the siteand import them into creativity software.
Google recently launched Poly, which offers similar functionality, but that service is more focused on objects with a limited amount of detail. In addition, Poly l

I spend a lot of my time talking to executives from some of the most iconic companies in the world. They know artificial intelligence (AI) is critical to accelerating business growth, but I’ve been struck by how every one of them is now grappling with how to implement it in their business processes. AI isn’t well suited to perform all tasks, so the challenge is to find ways to optimize the interface between humans and machines. Integrating AI is more than just automating business pr

Apple CEO Tim Cook is the latest in a series of tech entrepreneurs and c-level executives to warn of the potential risks of social media. Speaking in the UK on Friday, Cook said: I don’t have a kid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are some things that I won’t allow; I don’t want them on a social network. He didn’t stop at social media. Cook also said he didn’t believe in the idea that the best technologies are those we become obsessed with.

(Reuters) — U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said he signed into law a bill renewing the National Security Agency’s warrantless internet surveillance program, sealing a defeat for digital privacy advocates.
“Just signed 702 Bill to reauthorize foreign intelligence collection,” Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that extends Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The law renews for six years and with