Technology news

Hardcore Harry Potter fans have a chance to tour the locations of the Harry Potter movies this summer in a super-exclusive boat tour that sounds like a dream for anyone who wants to see where the films were shot in England.
SEE ALSO: The Harry Potter books are getting another swaggy redesign, so guess you're buying more books!
The Harry Potter river cruise, a unofficial seven-night experience aboard an eight-person barge, will be weaving its way along the Thames River in England this summer, sto

Alphabet, Google's parent company, has a new cybersecurity business born from its X department known as the "moonshot factory."
Chronicle, a new project created to help businesses fight cybercrime, publicly launched Wednesday. 
The company's CEO Stephen Gillett announced the new project in a blog post explaining exactly what the new platform is and what it does. 
For now, it sounds like Chronicle will attempt to make things harder for hackers and help companies with cybersecurity issue

Black Panther season is upon us, and we could not be more ready. A new clip from the film gives us a glimpse of the sibling chemistry between T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright).
SEE ALSO: A lot of kids are going to see 'Black Panther' thanks to this GoFundMe
T'Challa suits up as Black Panther, calling in Shuri as his getaway ride. She's tickled by the high-speed car chase they end up in, never mind the bullets raining down on her brother. She points out that his su

Today in absolutely horrifying things found in nature: a snake slithering around in a shallow body of water wearing a huge fish head. 
The clip, which was submitted to the appropriate subreddit r/WTF on Tuesday, was a hit on the notoriously deranged forum. If you can shock r/WTF, you've got some seriously messed up content there.
SEE ALSO: Snake makes a sudden appearance on driver's sssssside windowIt's unclear where the clip originated, but the snake masquerading as a fish may not be as si

TV writers, producers, executives, and assistants have been anonymously sharing their salaries in a widely circulated Google spreadsheet this week as part of an effort to help people working in the entertainment industry achieve pay parity, The Hollywood Reporter reports.The spreadsheet is broken down by type of job (staff writer versus assistant versus executive), with columns for position or title, studio, network, amount of experience, and whether a person identifies as a man or a woman, or

Troubled EV startup Faraday Future scrounged up new funding at the end of 2017, and even made a surreptitious appearance at CES, wooing CNET and a few paid YouTube influencers with the intoxicating speed of its electric car. But turmoil still exists inside the company, and the latest casualty is company’s head of HR, Crystal Peterson.
Peterson, who was Faraday Future’s 12th employee according to her LinkedIn profile, resigned last week, multiple current and former employees tell The

Apple's Siri-powered HomePod smart speaker is finally launching on Feb. 9.
There are a dozen reasons why you shouldn't buy one — it's kind of big, it's expensive, it doesn't support the ballyhooed multi-room audio at launch, Siri (lol) — but my biggest concern hinges on its key selling point: music.
Specifically: HomePod only works with Apple Music and that's a huge non-starter for me and most people.
SEE ALSO: Siri can now read you the news on your iPhone
Now, I haven't seen a HomeP

The man who served as Snap’s vice president of product is leaving the company. Snap confirmed to TechCrunch that Tom Conrad, who joined the company in March 2016, is quitting to spend some time outside the tech industry. “It’s time for me to put my energy outside of tech, into music, food, photography and things closer to art than entrepreneurship,” Conrad told TechCrunch.
Before coming to Snap, Conrad had been a longtime employee at Pandora, where he served as chief tec

Just when you thought Big Little Lies couldn't possibly get any better or bigger, here comes Meryl Motherf*cking Streep to prove you wrong.
SEE ALSO: 2017 was the year women took back their own narratives
Streep has just signed on for the second season of the HBO series. She joins returning stars Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman.Welcoming #MerylStreep to our tribe of fierce #BigLittleLies womenpic.twitter.com/zFoLH7eBwF
— HBO (@HBO) January 24, 2018Streep will play the mother of Perry W

Is there anything Leslie Jones can't do? The Saturday Night Live cast member delighted us with her Trump impression in 2017 and and now she's doing impressions of impressions to prepare for Will Ferrell's hosting gig. 
SEE ALSO: Jessica Chastain breaks character in nihilistic SNL game show sketch
While most SNL promos usually showcase the host, the latest is just Jones recreating some of Ferrell's iconic characters, including Craig Buchanon, Steve Butabi, and of course cowbell aficionado Ge

In upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, Apple plans to introduce a new Privacy icon that will appear whenever the company’s own first-party apps ask to use your personal information. Apple already has numerous privacy safeguards and transparency measures in place across both operating systems that alert users when apps are requesting their location, calendar, photo library, contacts, and so on. But this new icon seems to have a specific purpose: it’s likely designed to thwart phishin

Back in December, the unsavory hobby of a Reddit user by the name of deepfakes became a new centerpiece of artificial intelligence debate, specifically around the newfound ability to face-swap celebrities and porn stars. Using software, deepfakes was able to take the face of famous actresses and swap them with those of porn actresses, letting him live out a fantasy of watching famous people have sex. Now, just two months later, easy-to-use applications have sprouted up with the ability to perfo

Warning: Spoilers for the eighth season of The Walking Dead ahead.
The Walking Dead may be killing off Carl Grimes in the upcoming mid-season premiere but at least it's giving him a special extended episode to send him off with.
The upcoming ninth episode of Season 8 of The Walking Dead will be 82 minutes in length instead of the usual 60 minutes, Entertainment Weekly reported Wednesday, likely to give Carl a proper send-off after he was bitten by a zombie in the previous episode.
SEE ALSO: 'The

As of today, there’s a new company under the Alphabet banner: Google X announced a new spinoff focusing entirely on cybersecurity, dubbed Chronicle.Billed by Google X chief Astro Teller as a “digital immune system,” Chronicle focuses on detecting threats by analyzing and storing security-related data within large enterprises. Using Google’s infrastructure, the company claims to be able to detect threats faster and at a broader scale than existing systems, which is potent

One way to find life outside our Solar System is to peer into the atmospheres of distant planets, looking for gases that may be produced by living organisms. A group of scientists thinks we should look for two gases in particular: carbon dioxide and methane.Most astronomers advocate looking for oxygen as a sign of extraterrestrial life. Oxygen is abundant in Earth’s atmosphere because there are many plants and other organisms that constantly pump out the gas. Without life on Earth, oxygen

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 story of murderer Lizzie Borden is best known from the ill-advised children’s rhyme, but at Sundance 2018, she’s been given a more thoughtful, biopic-style treatment with the film Lizzie. Directed by Craig William Macneill (Channel Zero) and starring Chloë Sevigny, the film pulls from historical a

In an earnings call last night, United Airlines said it would add more “basic economy” fares in its bid to better compete with the new crop of low-cost carriers. The announcement sent the company’s stocks tumbling, but more distressingly, it will increase the likelihood that consumers will get lured in by the rock-bottom prices without being fully aware of how much flying basic economy sucks.
Most of the major carriers offer some class of basic economy fares. On the surface, i

Disgraced YouTuber Logan Paul has returned to YouTube less than a month after releasing a insensitive vlog showing a man who had died by suicide.
Paul has used his comeback, which he knew would be widely viewed and criticized, for suicide awareness. The video bluntly begins with a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and facts about suicide popping up on screen. Author and spokesperson for suicide awareness, Kevin Hines, shares Paul the story of his suicide attempt.
The clip then cuts away to Paul loo

The battle is on for states striving to preserve fair internet usage.
A month after the Federal Communications Commission's widely criticized decision to essentially kill net neutrality, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is taking action.
Cuomo signed an executive order to protect net neutrality in the state of New York on Wednesday,  making it the second state to enforce such measures.
SEE ALSO: This Burger King video is the net neutrality explainer you never knew you needed
The order states

SpaceX is about to light a very big candle.
SpaceX is planning to launch the first flight of its big new Falcon Heavy rocket "in a week or so," according to a tweet sent out by Elon Musk on Wednesday. 
The announcement came just about an hour after the Musk-founded company fired up the Falcon Heavy's 27 engines for a test in which the rocket was held down on its pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. 
SEE ALSO: The government shutdown is screwing over SpaceX
Apparently, th

One of Google Allo’s biggest features, when compared to regular SMS texting, was the AI-powered Smart Replies that Google brought over from Google Assistant. But if you, like most people, don’t actually use Allo, you’ll soon be able to take advantage of smart replies in the regular Android Messages app, as announced by the Project Fi Twitter account.Messaging on the go? Smart Reply for Android Messages lets you text with a tap, rolling out starting today on Project Fi. pic.twi

After a long silence on social media, Logan Paul is finally addressing the backlash to a controversial video in which he filmed a the corpse of a suicide victim in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. The video sparked immediate backlash online, and Paul removed the video from his channel and posted two apologies in the days that followed. On January 3rd, he tweeted “taking time to reflect no vlog for now see you soon,” and hasn’t been heard from since — until now.“I k

The story might be familiar by now: The material in our lowly pencils — graphene, a version of carbon — could change the world. There’s graphene-enhanced eyewear and graphene-inspired condoms, but is this all hype? Beyond the buzzwords, what exactly is graphene, and what are its real possibilities?Graphene-inspired eyewear might not amount to much, but graphene really could hold the key to advanced bullet-proof armor and lighter and safer smartphones, say scientists Joseph Mea

In an announcement today, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he has signed an executive order that would require internet service providers with state contracts to abide by net neutrality rules, even though the FCC recently voted to repeal those rules.
Contracts after March 1st will include a net neutrality agreement
On Monday, Montana’s governor signed essentially the same order; both require service providers with contracts to abide by the widely agreed upon tenets of net neutrality: no bl

Today, SpaceX simultaneously fired up all 27 engines on its new massive Falcon Heavy rocket — a crucial final test for the vehicle before its first flight in the coming weeks. An hour after the test, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the test was good, and that the Falcon Heavy will launch in “a week or so.” When SpaceX gives an official target day and time, it’ll be the first time a definitive launch date has been given for the rocket’s inaugural voyage, a fligh

To see Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua crawl over a giant Hello Kitty stuffed animal and fall over each other, you’d think they were just normal macaques — and indeed, what’s special about them isn’t immediately visible. They’re clones created in China using the same technique that over 20 years ago gave the world Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult sheep. Their existence proves that animals as complex as monkeys can be cloned, too.
The two macaques were born less

After launching in the US a little over a month ago, Amazon’s Echo Spot is starting to ship internationally. Its first stops are the UK, Germany, and Austria, where the small new Alexa device goes on sale today.
The Echo Spot is Amazon’s second Echo device with a touchscreen. And while it can do all the same things as the much larger Echo Show, its clock-like shape and size mean it’s better used in much different ways, like as a bedside alarm. At least, so long as you’re

 The way Facebook processes what the world writes is about to get a bit more cosmopolitan.
As Facebook’s scope continues to grow globally, the way it rolls out features has been complicated by the fact that there are more than 100 languages currently supported on the site. When it comes to building text boxes that users can type status updates into, this isn’t that difficult of a… Read More

The hot console topic of 2017 for the games industry may have been about the mid-generation, but this year the focus is on Nintendo — specifically, the Nintendo Switch. According to the latest annual survey from the Game Developers Conference, now that the Switch is a proven hit, more developers are interested this year in creating games for Nintendo’s tablet.Organizers polled nearly 4,000 developers, who say they have a growing interest in Nintendo’s newest console. Thirty-si

US spaceflight startup Rocket Lab put three commercial satellites into orbit during its rocket launch this past weekend — but it turns out there was another satellite that hitched a ride on the vehicle too. The company’s Electron rocket also put into orbit a previously undisclosed satellite made by Rocket Lab’s CEO Peter Beck, called the Humanity Star. And the probe will supposedly become the “brightest thing in the night sky,” the company announced today.
“e

Microsoft has faced continued concerns around its collection of data with Windows 10. France previously ordered Microsoft to stop tracking Windows 10 users, the EU has voiced its concerns, and the EFF has blasted Microsoft over its data collection. While the software giant revealed what data Windows 10 really collects last year, it’s going one step further with the next update to the operating system.
Starting this week, Windows 10 testers will be able to access a new Windows Diagnostic D