Technology news

Last summer, LG faced a class action lawsuit over bootloop issues with its G4, V10, V20, Nexus 5X, and G5 smartphones. The lawsuit reached a settlement today, with LG offering afflicted device owners in the suit either $425 in cash or a $700 rebate toward a future LG device, according to Android Police. The issue, related to manufacturing defects on LG’s end, meant some owners of those devices were left with inoperable phones or phones that were stuck in a never-ending reboot cycle, hence

 Life sciences startups in Asia are getting another boost with the $10 million investment in Engine Biosciences — a biotech company that’s applying machine learning to genomics for drug discovery. With its headquarters in both Singapore and San Francisco, the company has managed to attract some impressive investors from both the U.S. and Asia. The round was co-led by Danhua… Read More

Over the course of the last several years, every major social platform has been plagued by fake news. Now Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has a fake news problem of its own.Because of how the search engine’s autofill feature works, people who visit Bing looking for news videos may be redirected to a flood of fake news videos, all generated by a single source. You can see how it works for yourself: click on the “News” tab from Bing’s homepage. The page autofills th

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.
In spite of all the focus on gender inequity in the film and TV industry over the past few years, the discrepancies are still dire. The visibility of the #MeToo movement and the sexual-abuse scandals that have rocked Hollywood may give the impression that women are making gains in the industry, but statistics still sh

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles released its annual autonomous vehicle disengagement report today. In the report, all companies that are actively testing self-driving cars on public roads in the Golden State disclose the number of miles driven and the frequency in which human drivers were forced to take control of their driverless vehicles. The biggest takeaway is that this is still Waymo (née Google) and GM’s party, and everyone else is playing catch-up.this is sti

Grapevines are drought resistant enough that California’s wineries may be able to dial back the irrigation and keep their plants alive, new research says. That’s good news as the state heads into what looks to be another dry year. There is a catch, however: while the study suggests vines might survive a thirsty spell with minimal watering, it doesn’t say if they’ll still make enough grapes to keep wine glasses full.Researchers investigated how different varieties of grap

After a few months of tweaking the News Feed in order to make it more personal and harder for fake stories to spread, Facebook says that overall usage has dropped by “roughly 50 million hours every day.”That’s a huge and potentially scary number for Facebook — its goal, after all, is to get people to use more Facebook and see more Facebook ads — but company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been warning this moment would come, and he’s argued that in the long run, it&r

Microsoft posted its second quarter of its 2018 financial results today, reporting revenue of $28.9 billion and net income of $7.5 billion. Revenue has jumped 12 percent year-over-year during the holiday quarter, and the trend of Microsoft’s success with the cloud has continued. This time around, Azure revenue has increased by a massive 98 percent.
Surface revenue is up just 1 percent, probably due to the only new Surface device in the quarter being the Surface Book 2 that launched in mid

Popular GIF hosting and creation site Gfycat has come out against the rising new trend of artificial intelligence-generated fake pornography, according to Motherboard. Colloquially known as “deepfakes,” after the Reddit user who popularized the technique back in December, these short-form videos typically feature porn stars with the faces of celebrities, with the face swapping achieved by feeding a neural network with thousands of photos and videos and then training the network usin

A California appellate court has ruled that Tinder’s variable pricing for Tinder Plus, which charges more for users over 30, is discriminatory as it makes an “arbitrary, class-based generalization” about users’ incomes, as reported by Quartz.
The case against Tinder was brought forth by Allen Candelore, who argued that the company’s age-based pricing is a violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act and the Unfair Competition Law. Tinder Plus charges $9.9

Remember the iPhone 5C? Apple’s foray into making a plastic-cased, brightly colored line of theoretically cheaper iPhones may not have lasted long (largely due to people preferring the nicer aluminum models and the fact that they weren’t actually all that cheap), but Sharp’s new Android One S3 phone looks like it’s picking up the style of Apple’s short-lived experiment, with a few improvements, via GSMArena.The Android One S3 costs 32,400 yen (roughly $300), puttin

YouTube TV, the Google-owned video site’s over-the-top pay-TV service, is the first digital-only offering to become the official video partner of a US sports team. YouTube is partnering with Los Angeles FC, the newly created Major League Soccer team in the area, in a multiyear deal that will grant YouTube TV subscribers exclusive access to locally televised games on all channels YouTube offers. YouTube TV’s logo will also be placed on LAFC jerseys, while the company will provide LAF

Harley-Davidson has been toying around with the idea of an electric motorcycle for about four years now, but yesterday the company committed to putting one into production. There are no specs just yet, but Harley executives say to expect it to hit the market “within 18 months.”The new bike will presumably build on the somewhat meager performance specs of LiveWire, the prototype electric motorcycle Harley-Davidson rolled out back in 2014. That bike was able to go from 0-60 mph in und

Governments, journalists, experts, and more have issued or written guidance on how to understand bitcoin. But none of these guides are as helpful as Square’s new illustrated story about the birth of Bitcoin that even small children can understand.
The explainer, called “My First Bitcoin and the Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto” and titled in blazing ombre letters, uses colorful illustrations of machines and whirring gizmos to explain Bitcoin, all drawn by Square’s Cash App bra

Scientists have successfully tweaked the DNA in human heart cells to correct mutations that cause a deadly disease. If the gene-editing technique is proven safe, it could permanently cure children with a genetic disorder that leaves them wheelchair-bound by their early teens.
The genetic disease targeted in this study is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a disorder that affects about one in 5,000 males and causes the progressive wasting away of skeletal and heart muscles. Researchers to

A new discovery of stone tools from about 385,000 years ago has anthropologists rethinking the history of technology. The stone tools, found at a site in southern India, were sophisticated blades chipped from chunks of quartz, which is a technique that experts previously thought came to India only about 125,000 years ago.Archaeologists analyzed more than 7,200 stone tools and found that this sophisticated tool-making technique, called Levallois, began replacing clunkier and more primitive stone

Google has updated its Flights app with a pair of new features that should help weary (and wary) travelers get to grips with the next trip to the airport. The first uses machine learning to predict upcoming flight delays, and the second breaks down exactly what different airlines mean by “basic economy” — explaining what amenities are and are not included in so-called last class.Predicting flight delays is probably the most interesting of these two. According to a blog post fr

HMD Global has slowly been bringing its resurrected version of the iconic Nokia 3310 to the modern age. The company first released a basic 2G version that really could only do calls and text, then came a 3G model (that included support for US networks), and now, per earlier rumors, it’s finally getting a proper LTE variant, via Pocket Lint.The new device follows in the footsteps of the 3310 and 3310 3G as the creatively named Nokia 3310 4G, and it shares a virtually identical design to it

Dystopian science fiction has spent more than a century in the popular imagination, but the more popular it gets, the more it confronts a major existential dilemma: making people fear a dark future is no longer a useful tool in preventing it. Dystopian futures have never been more piercingly relevant. We live in an era when many of the genre’s most far-reaching prophecies have come true, from radical inequality and authoritarian doublespeak to irreversible climate change and unsettling br

Essential told users yesterday that they won’t be receiving a stable release of Android Oreo 8.0, even though it’s been available through the company’s beta program for the past few months. Instead, Essential says it’ll bring Oreo to phones with a public release of 8.1 because of “several stability issues” in 8.0. The company says making this change pushes the public release back a couple weeks, although it still doesn’t specify an exact date for the ro

Google is experimenting with several new formats to improve its snippets function after the feature came under fire last year for displaying wildly offensive and inaccurate search results. The company has previously said it is taking steps toward improving results, and in a blog post yesterday, it announced it is testing new options including “near matches” and showing more than one snippet for some search queries.Near matches are displayed snippets that might not be exactly what yo

Organizers of the Game Developer’s Conference have rescinded plans to give the annual Pioneer Award to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell after numerous game developers pointed to reports of sexually inappropriate comments and behavior by Bushnell in the early days of Atari. Although the behavior, which reportedly included provocative hot tub meetings and fostering a “fraternity” culture at Atari, had long been documented in multiple interviews and books, it has sparked new criti

Independent filmmakers don’t have a lot of security, but they do have a certain amount of freedom. Working outside the studio system, often on shoestring budgets and on personal projects, they have more leeway to barf their ids up onto the screen, sometimes with deeply bizarre results. The majority of the feature-length independent movies and VR projects that hit the Sundance Film Festival every year are looking for some form of traditional distribution, and are designed to appeal to some

For the first time, scientists in China have created new ears for five children using their own cells grown in a 3D-printed mold.All five kids, between the ages of six and nine, were born with one underdeveloped ear, a condition called microtia. Though kids with microtia do tend to have hearing loss in their deformed ear, most of the time they can hear fairly well out of the other one. So, the new ears were grown for cosmetic reasons. First, the scientists made a 3D-printed model of the childre

There are three simple things to remember before you get to the airport for your flight: don’t forget your ID, don’t try to bring any weapons on the plane, and don’t buy a ticket for your pet peacock.Yes, a woman at Newark International Airport tried to board a United flight to Los Angeles with her “emotional support peacock,” a phrase that had never been uttered in all of recorded history until yesterday. A travel show called The Jet Set posted photos of the incid

Uber announced today that it will begin offering bike-share options for users in San Francisco, thanks to a partnership with a New York City-based e-bike company called Jump. The inclusion of bike-share in Uber’s app will certainly be seen as a boost to the nascent bike-share industry, which has been experimenting with electric and dockless options as it grows across the world.Starting next week, Uber users who are interested in taking two wheels instead of four can tap the “bike&rd

The Super Bowl isn’t for another few days, but Amazon is getting a jump on the big game with the release of a star-studded Super Bowl ad. The commercial imagines a world in which the company’s Alexa assistant has “lost her voice,” leading a frantic Jeff Bezos to seek out replacements in the forms of various celebrities.
As the minute-and-a-half ad unfolds, Alexa users discover that instead of Alexa’s neutral, semi-robotic tones, their requests to, say, get a recipe

Amazon is rolling out its own branded QR codes named SmileCodes. The SmileCodes allow mobile shoppers to activate offers from Amazon by scanning the codes when they see them in the physical world. Amazon says SmileCodes can only be activated via the Amazon app and are secure and exclusive to Amazon users.
Amazon has reportedly been testing the codes in pop-up shops and at Amazon Lockers in Europe over the past few weeks. The codes will debut in the US in magazines including Cosmopolitan and Sev

The best part of the iPhone X is not its display, it’s not its camera, and it’s not its price. (Okay, fine, the price is the worst part of the iPhone X.) Nope, the best part of the iPhone X isn’t found in its hardware or spec sheet at all: it’s the gesture-based interface.
The iPhone X’s gestures, which replace the functions of the home button found on every prior iPhone, are the most intuitive, natural, and, frankly, fun interactions I’ve ever had using a sm

Samsung’s semiconductor business is booming, with the company recently overtaking Intel as the world’s biggest chipmaker. But the South Korean firm is not resting on its laurels, and is currently looking to expand into the buzziest contemporary market for processors: cryptocurrency mining.As reported by TechCrunch, Samsung has confirmed it’s in the process of making hardware specially designed for mining cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. A spokesperson for the firm t

Samsung says foldable OLED displays and Bixby will help drive the company’s growth this year in its Q4 earnings report released today. The company said it would adopt innovative technology like foldable OLED screens to further distinguish itself from competitors. Samsung also says it will enter new businesses related to AI and smart devices through an expansion of its much-maligned Bixby voice assistant technology.
Phones that unfold into seamless full-screen tablets have been long rumore

Monster Hunter World was a risky venture for Capcom: a vast, expensive game for home consoles in a series mostly popular in a country where home consoles no longer are. But new numbers out of Japan today, along with an announcement earlier in the week, suggest that the bet has paid off big time.
According to figures from Famitsu, which tracks Japanese retail sales, Monster Hunter World has sold more than 1.35 million copies in the country since its release on Friday. That doesn’t include