Technology news

EA has confirmed that Anthem, the company’s upcoming open-world, multiplayer action-RPG from developer BioWare, has officially been delayed to 2019, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal (via Polygon.)Anthem was originally announced at E3 2017 as a wholly new property, with a planned fall 2018 release date that it seems it will no longer be making. At the time, EA showcased a flashy gameplay demo, showing off giant exosuit wearing “freelancers” in an online world

Amazon is expanding Alexa’s ability to send messages by allowing it to send SMS text messages to any phone, instead of just messaging other people through the Alexa app, via TechCrunch.
The new feature only works for Alexa users with an Android device that also have the Alexa app installed. To set things up, navigate over to Conversations tab, then “Contacts,” then “My Profile,” then switch the “Send SMS” feature to on. There’s no word as to when

Every January, cinema fans don their boots and heavy coats, gear up for extensive line-standing and bus-waiting, and flock to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival. Founded in 1978, Sundance has become America’s biggest independent film festival, and it’s often the launch point for films from around the world that were made outside the studio system, and are looking for recognition and distribution deals. Some years, Sundance has a bigger impact than other years. 2017&rsqu

Last month, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) subpoenaed cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and the company Tether, which has launched a popular coin of the same name, anonymous sources told Bloomberg today.Tether claims that all of its coins are backed by US dollars held in reserve or other fiat currencies, although it hasn’t provided hard evidence to confirm this. Tether’s current market capitalization is $2.2 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com, driven by the r

When I saw Asus’ Blue Cave router, which was announced last May and is now going on sale, I assumed the unique carved-out shape must enable some innovative new way of amplifying Wi-Fi signals to better blanket a home.
But it turns out, it’s not for that at all. It’s just a hole in a square designed to look cool. And while I’m glad Asus went out on a limb and made a weird looking router, even Asus seems to acknowledge that it was a lot of work for nothing.
Just read this

Hawaii officials said Tuesday that they had fired the emergency management employee who sent a false ballistic missile alert earlier this month. The administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency has also resigned in the wake of the incident.
The report said several problems contributed to the event
The state released the details of its investigation into the incident, following an FCC report earlier today that included some overlapping details. The state’s report said “ins

EXCLUSIVE: Not everyone has a family member or college buddy working at a top investment bank, which can make it harder to break into the industry. The Lobby wants to help these candidates by connecting them directly with Wall Street insiders through one-on-one calls. The New York City-based startup will be graduating from Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch in March, but its service is launching out of beta today.
“It’s become clear that if you don’t come from a privileged

Google’s numerous safeguards designed to prevent malicious apps from reaching Android users led to the removal of over 700,000 apps from the Google Play Store in 2017, the company said today. That’s a 70 percent increase over the total removals in 2016. “Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier,” Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn wrote in a blog post. “99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identifie

In a move that will bring unbridled joy to social media managers and influencers everywhere, Instagram is now allowing business profiles to schedule posts, the company announced on its Business blog today. Currently, the feature only works for photos, not videos, and it’s only available through third-party social management tools for now. This means that if you want to get your hands on scheduling features, you have to pay for subscription services like HootSuite, Sprout Social, or any on

Razer is hitting the game-broadcaster market hard with its recent product launches, and that continues with its new Seiren Elite USB microphone. This $200 mic is shipping now, and Razer is positioning it as a USB alternative to expensive pro setups that use XLR mics, mixers, and other equipment.
The Seiren Elite features a number of features that should appeal to streamers frightened of XLR cables. It uses a recording pattern to capture the warmth of your voice, but it also has its own dedicated

Corsair’s snack-proof gaming keyboard, the K68, was pretty great when it launched last year, demonstrating a remarkable resistance to soda and snacks. But it had one fatal flaw (okay, two, if you count pouring an entire bottle of Mountain Dew on it for science) — it only came with boring red LED lights.
Fortunately, Corsair has a new variant of the K68, the K68 RGB, which adds the whole spectrum of colors to your keys. Like Corsair’s other LED-equipped accessories, the K68 RGB

World of Warcraft is preparing for the Battle for Azeroth. But even before the massively multiplayer online role-playing game’s seventh expansion launches later this year, Blizzard Entertainment has been adding a lot of new experiences and important changes to WoW.
Earlier this month, Blizzard implemented level-scaling to WoW’s older zones. This gave players more flexibility while running new characters, also making it easier to play with friends who were at different levels. And tod

Amazon’s Alexa is now able to send SMS messages to a contact in a user’s smartphone, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat today. At launch, text messages can only be sent with smartphones running the Android operating system in the United States.
No details were made available about when SMS with Alexa will be available outside of the United States, or when Alexa will be able to read you your latest text messages. There are no plans to add iOS support due to limitations Apple

The Grim Reaper eventually arrives for us all — whether you’re on PC or mobile. Next Studio’s darkly comic puzzler Death Coming will launch on iOS this February.
In Death Coming, players are the Grim Reaper’s apprentice and must collect souls. They do this by manipulating the environment and causing Final Destination-esque accidents to befall unsuspecting victims. But the game isn’t morbid; it presents a colorful pixel art aesthetic along with tongue-in-cheek h

GUEST: Artificial intelligence promises to improve human welfare and make the world a safer, more meaningful, and more educated place. However, a real and imminent fear is that biased AI will deepen inequalities.
Smarter computers, at our behest, are helping us build a more satiated world. As Aldous Huxley would appreciate, satiation, when indulged, becomes mere habit. We don’t question how we make decisions anymore, and no one really even knows how the most advanced AI does what it does.

As a privacy and public policy adviser, Dipayan Ghosh once worked to improve Facebook from the inside. Now a fellow at the New America Foundation, from 2015 to 2017 Ghosh helped to develop Facebook’s public positions on issues related to privacy, telecommunications, and ethical algorithms.
Ghosh, who previously served as a White House technology adviser under President Barack Obama, was troubled by the results of the 2016 election, and the role Facebook played in influencing voters. He qu

Facebook is banning all advertisements for cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin and initial coin offerings, as part of an “intentionally broad” policy against deceptive marketers. Product management director Rob Leathern explained the decision in a blog post, saying Facebook will no longer accept ads that “promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.” He says the decision isn’t permanent, th

While the tech industry offers some of the highest-paying and fastest-growing jobs in the U.S., obtaining one is still out of reach for many Americans. Particularly for those who are looking to make a career change, it’s expensive. Tuition for six-month coding schools can run upwards of $10,000, and some graduates still have to complete an internship or two before employers will consider them for an entry-level job engineering job.
Enter Lambda School, a nearly year-old startup that aims t

For victims of revenge porn and other explicit material shared without consent, legal remedies have arrived only within the last decade. But thanks to AI-assisted technology, anyone with an online presence could now end up starring in pornography against their will — and there’s little that the law can do about it.For the past several weeks, a subreddit called “deepfakes” has been saturated with doctored images that depict famous figures, mostly women, engaging in sexual

Anaheim’s National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show featured plenty of traditional instruments, but as always, there was also a lot of cool music tech. From pro DJ hardware to gadgets that upgrade the instruments you already own to innovative music education tools and apps, NAMM showed that now, more than ever, the worlds of music and tech are intersecting in interesting ways.
Aside from checking out the newest pro-level gear in areas like DJing, speakers, and headphones, there

EXCLUSIVE: A new startup called Astound emerged from stealth today with a big vision: to cut down on service requests using artificial intelligence to drive automation. The company’s overall goal is to help employees at large enterprises handle their own service requests, rather than require the intervention of more experienced technicians.
Astound’s product targets four concrete areas: predicting which agents should receive which support tickets, providing those agents with relevant

Facebook’s feet are being held to the fire again — this time, its being criticized by those hoping to protect children. Child advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) today wrote an open letter to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg today in which they outlined their objections to Facebook’s child-centered app, Messenger Kids. The letter has been signed by more than 100 organizations and individuals. The CCFC wraps up the letter by asking Facebook to delete

US regulators today subpoenaed one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges as questions mount over a digital token called Tether. A popular substitute for US dollars on various crypto exchanges, Tether provided an easy way for investors to ride out storms in volatile markets without removing money from the marketplace and converting it back to fiat currency. Its value, however, was due to its reported ties to the US dollar with each Tether token (USDT) being worth exactly one doll

People with a traumatic brain injury are more likely to be diagnosed with dementia even 30 years later, according to a new study that looked at data spanning nearly half a century.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has long been associated with dementia, but there have been few long-term studies of this link. In today’s study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, researchers looked at a dataset of all Swedes that were at least 50 as of December 2005 — totaling about 3.3 million people

After it launched with mixed reviews, more than 100 child development experts, health advocacy groups, educators, and parents have called on Facebook to shut down Messenger Kids, a spinoff of the company’s messenger app that’s specifically designed for children ages six to 12. The collective, led by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, addressed its open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, warning that the app is “harmful to children and teens,” and that it could &ld

On June 16th, 2015, a new division within Japanese publishing giant Square Enix posted a short, handwritten message online. “The ‘good old days’ are coming back,” it read. “To every RPG fan in the world… this is for you.” Square Enix made its name in the ‘80s and ‘90s with classic JRPGs like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest, and around 2013 president Yosuke Matsuda had noticed that a number of Western developers were finding

Staying connected from 33,000 ft is getting easier, according to the Routehappy 2018 Wi-Fi Report. Not only are more airlines installing Wi-Fi hardware onto their jets, but it’s also getting faster and more capable. Almost half of all available seat miles (ASM, which is a unit of measurement that quantifies an airline’s passenger capacity) come with a chance of Wi-Fi access. 47 percent of all ASMs pack Wi-Fi, up 10 percent from the 2017 report. Unsurprisingly, US airlines are at the

Apple is now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission to determine whether the company’s iPhone-slowing software update violated securities laws, according to a Bloomberg report. The inquiry is in early stages, and it’s uncertain whether an enforcement action will follow.
Last month, Apple admitted that software updates were responsible for slowing down iPhone 6 and newer devices, explaining that iOS would quietly reduce processor p

The family of Robert Godwin Sr., a Cleveland man whose killing was shared on Facebook video, has sued the platform for negligence and wrongful death. Fox 8 Cleveland reports that the suit was filed on January 19th, accusing Facebook of conduct that was “intentional, willful, malicious, in bad faith, and in reckless disregard for the right of Mr. Godwin.” It says Facebook should have spotted and alerted police to a video where Godwin’s shooter announced his intent to kill, shor

The Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) will be handing out accolades to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Vlambeer founder Rami Ismail, and Double Fine Productions founder Tim Schafer. It’s the award show’s 18th year, and it will be held during the Game Developers Conference at 6:30 p.m. Pacific on March 21 at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. The event will also be livestreamed for viewers to watch remotely.
Voters from the International Choice Awards Network (ICAN) and

One of the more fun results of the age of infinite apps is serialized fiction, presented in installments so tiny that calling them “digestible” is sort of like calling a single almond “dinner.” There are good chat fiction apps that use texting as the medium for compelling stories. There are bad romance novels that are more fun to read with GIFs.
There’s also Yarn, a chat fiction app owned by Mammoth Media. Mammoth raised $13 million in a Series A round of funding t

Apple is facing a new investigation from both the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission that looks to determine whether or not the company has violated securities laws with its software updates that slowed down users’ iPhones, according to a new report from Bloomberg.The news comes as the latest in a string of inquiries into Apple’s software updates. The company is also facing a criminal probe in France (where planned obsolescence is illegal), an invest

Gesture controls without clear navigation bars aren’t just for the iPhone X. Some Android smartphones let users save screen real estate by using home button gestures, and now OnePlus’ newest Oreo beta build for the OnePlus 5T includes a feature that disables the navigation bar and instead prioritizes gestures. We haven’t had a chance to test this yet, but Reddit user MisterMrMister uploaded a video of the gesture controls in action.
You can see that the phone’s navigatio

Autonomous cars are supposed to be just around the corner, right? Well, not exactly. Every year, car companies flock to CES and the North American International Auto Show in Detroit to show off their cool self-driving car concepts. This year was no different, with a plethora of weird wheels from Mercedes, Toyota, Nissan, and others making their debut. And while cars are undoubtedly getting smarter and the technology is getting better and better, the day that you’ll be able to buy a self-d

iPhone X owners may soon be able to use Face ID to approve family purchases. As spotted by 9to5Mac, in iOS 11.3, purchase approvals on a parent’s device can be done through Face ID, after a one-time request to enter their password.
Previously, iPhone X owners found the Ask to Buy iOS feature that allows parents to control what children buy with their phone didn’t work with Face ID. Parents had to enter their passwords manually for every purchase, to the chagrin of many customers.
It

Blizzard Entertainment has opened orders for World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Battle for Azeroth. And buying the game early gives you access to some goodies right now.
While Battle for Azeroth will launch later this year, a preorder now gives your account a free level 110 character. This is the max level before Battle for Azeroth raises it to 120. Leveling a character can take a long time, so having one start at level 110 can save you a lot of work. So, if you’re ti

Pinterest today announced it has hired Google computer vision research lead Chuck Rosenberg to be the company’s head of computer vision and lead its visual search engineering team.
During his nearly 15 years at Google, Rosenberg led image search and image understanding groups at the search giant and helped the company implement its first neural nets.
Pinterest has been about more than pins for some time now, investing heavily in talent to improve its computer vision features. With the emer

Kevin (played by Macaulay Culkin) did a good job protecting his home in the film Home Alone. Now Swiss startup Mitipi is running with that idea with Kevin, a virtual roommate that can help make your home more secure.
As in the film, Kevin simulates someone being at home using intelligent lighting and sound effects. The device is another example of the Internet of Things, or making everyday objects smart and connected.
You can connect to Kevin via an app and control it. You can also record your o

Google today shared details of Google Play’s efforts to protect Android users with its teams of engineers, policy experts, product managers, and operations professionals that monitor the store for misleading, inappropriate, or harmful apps. In 2017, Google removed more than 700,000 apps that violated Google Play’s policies, or 70 percent more apps than the year before.
Google does not share total Google Play app numbers anymore, so we have to rely on third-party estimates to put this