Technology news

Tablet sales for Q4 of last year are out, and they tell an interesting story about Amazon superseding Samsung during the quarter with tremendous growth due to large discounts, according to an IDC report. While iPads were still far and away the most popular tablets among consumers last year, with the 9.7-inch iPad and two sizes of the iPad Pro selling a lot of units, Amazon showed the most growth among the top five tablet companies.Amazon was able to knock Samsung into third place in Q4 last yea

SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon Heavy rocket earlier this afternoon at Cape Canaveral, FL, and the live stream of the event was the second biggest in YouTube’s history. The event reached over 2.3 million concurrent views on YouTube, coming in second to the Red Bull Stratos jump, which racked up a ridiculous 8 million concurrent views back in 2012.
The company isn’t done with live streams for the day either — you can currently watch the dummy in SpaceX CEO Elon Musk&rsq

On Tuesday morning, phones across the US East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and in the Caribbean buzzed with a false alarm about a potential tsunami. The warning was a mistake — the result of a technical glitch — but the prospect of a tsunami striking New York City or New Orleans raises the question: how likely is a tsunami in these parts of the US, anyway?Tsunamis can form when powerful quakes jiggle the seafloor up and down. The magnitude 9 earthquake that struck Japan in 2011, for examp

Pornhub will be deleting “deepfakes” — AI-generated videos that realistically edit new faces onto pornographic actors — under its rules against nonconsensual porn, following in the footsteps of platforms like Discord and Gfycat. “We do not tolerate any nonconsensual content on the site and we remove all said content as soon as we are made aware of it,” the company told Motherboard, which first reported on the deepfakes porn phenomenon last year. Pornhub says

You just spent Valentine’s Day doing nice things for your partner or significant other, and I think you should spend the next day doing something for yourself … like finally checking out Rainbow Six: Siege. And Ubisoft wants to facilitate that process by offering up a trial of the game later this month.
Rainbow Six: Siege is getting a free weekend starting February 15 and running through February 18. This trial is for the full game, and you can play online with your friends on PC th

Google’s Research Blog announced today that it would be adding support for augmented realitystickers in the Motion Stills app, via CNET.The feature was first introduced exclusively on the Google Pixel 2 late last year, and added the ability to insert AR versions of characters from Star Wars and Stranger Things directly into pictures and videos. The Motion Stills version is less advanced, and doesn’t use the company’s ARCore platform.Instead, Google takes advantage of a device&

Mere minutes after successfully launching the Falcon Heavy rocket on the first try, SpaceX is now live streaming footage from Tesla Roadster it released into space. Now we know what CEO Elon Musk meant yesterday when he teased that there would be “epic views” if the launch went well.The Roadster is still attached to the Falcon Heavy’s upper stage, which is currently an hour or so into what is supposed to be a six-hour “coast” through the Van Allen radiation belts.

It looks like the cloud of doom-and-gloom hanging over Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. may be in the early stages of receding, as the company today posted its first ever better-than-expected quarterly earnings since going public in spring of last year. Helping the situation even further is an improved user growth rate of 5 percent, up from 2.9 percent in the previous quarter. That indicates that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s redesign of the Snapchat app, unveiled back in November and still in

SpaceX has just successfully launched its new Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time, and just before launch, the company revealed on its live stream that inside the rather unique cargo of a Tesla Roadster, the company had placed an “Arch” storage system containing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation book series.
An Arch is a “5D, laser optical quartz storage device” that is meant to be able to survive even in the harsh conditions of space, built by the Arch Mission Foundati

In Other Waters is a narrative adventure that embraces the unknown. It invites you to explore an alien ocean in the distant future and fill in the gaps with your imagination, armed with nothing more than a radar screen and a diving suit with rudimentary artificial intelligence. It’s the biggest project yet from developer Gareth Damian Martin, who’s raising funds for it on Kickstarter today. The game is slated for a PC release on a to-be-announced date.
When I played a demo of In Othe

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this afternoon and soared to space, carrying its payload — CEO Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster — into orbit. The Falcon Heavy’s flight still isn’t quite over yet, but the rocket has shown its prowess and is likely ready to begin missions for customers.
Adding to the launch’s success, two of the Falcon Heavy’s rocket cores successfully touched down back on Earth after takeoff. The t

Patreon rolled out an update it’s had planned for ages: A feature called “Lens” which functions a lot like … okay, it is Snapchat. Specifically, Lens is a micro-vlogging feature which lets creators post short video or picture updates, either to the general public or their patrons specifically. According to Patreon, “All content disappears after 24 hours, so you can deliver authentic unedited content without worrying about taking the perfect shot.”

Lucasfilm had already announced that The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson will be creating his own new Star Wars trilogy. Now, the company has turned to the team behind HBO’s Game of Thrones to create another. It was announced today on the Star Wars website that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the showrunners behind HBO’s hit adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books, will be writing and producing their own series of films.“David and Dan are some

EXCLUSIVE: Video chat app Holla acquired competitor Monkey today. Holla acquired Monkey’s brand assets and now runs operations for both apps out of Holla offices in Beijing and Los Angeles. Monkey employees, including founders Ben Pasternak and Isaiah Turner, will not join Holla. Additional terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Monkey connects random people for video chat using Snapchat accounts in a style similar to Chatroulette. At times in 2017, Monkey ranked near the top of the Social

Men who drive for Uber earn roughly 7 percent more per hour than women, according to a new study that examined over a million Uber drivers. Women were found to earn $1.24 per hour less than men, and also $130 less per week on average, in part because they tend to drive fewer hours.
The study, which was released today, was a collaboration between the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and Uber’s own economic team. Researchers examined earnings data from over 1.8 million drivers, o

In one of its first mobile augmented reality experiences, The New York Times has launched an iOS-based visualization of four Olympic athletes. If you have a recent iPhone and the Times mobile app, you can see 3D models of figure skater Nathan Chen, speedskater J.R. Celski, ice hockey goalie Alex Rigsby, and snowboarder Anna Gasser overlaid on the real world. By moving close or turning the phone, you can bring up text around specific details, like Gasser’s posture or the protective caps on

Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S9, is due to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month at an event that won’t likely pack too many surprises. We basically know what goes into each new Samsung device from a battery, display, and design standpoint, with a little mystery wiggle room leftover for whatever experimental feature the company tries to push (almost always unsuccessfully) onto consumers. Following some fresh leaks obtained by VentureBeat

Gamers can’t get enough of blocky games, like Minecraft, Roblox, and now Trove. Trion Worlds announced that its free-to-play voxel online game Trove has surpassed 15 million players worldwide.
The massively multiplayer online game had a profitable 2017, launched in China via publisher 360 Games last year, and will soon be available in Japan on the PlayStation 4.
“Trove has been a labor of love for us here at Trion,” said Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman, in a statement. “T

Tavis McGinn applied for a job at Facebook last year hoping to work in market research. He had previously spent three years at Google, where he helped large advertisers refine their marketing campaigns across the company’s family of products. But part way through the interview process at Facebook, the recruiter told McGinn the company had something else in mind for him. How would he like to track the public perception of Mark Zuckerberg?
It was April, and Facebook was caught up in the fal

At 100 qubits a single quantum computer processor would, theoretically, be more powerful than all the supercomputers on the planet combined. We may be closer to that milestone than you think and the world isn’t ready. Quantum computers are spooky devices that don’t follow the normal rules of physics. Instead of bits, like classical computers, they use qubits. You can read our primer on the topic here. One of the biggest barriers to advancing quantum computer hardware is dealing with

Regulators are in uncharted territory trying to regulate illegal cryptocurrency public coin offerings, US officials told Congress today. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman John Clayton had harsh words for those dodging SEC regulations today at a Senate banking committee hearing: “Many ICOs [initial coin offerings] are being conducted illegally. Their promoters and other participants are not following our security laws,” Clayton said. “Some people say that’

You told us, and we listened: we’re taking Circuit Breaker Live, everyone’s favorite live gadget show, to YouTube. It’ll be live on Tuesdays at 4PM ET, starting today. This week, we’ll be playing with the DJI Mavic Air, the Polaroid POP camera, and... something else. I can’t tell you yet, but it’ll be cool. I promise.
Click right here to open the show page on YouTube, and hit that reminder button so you won’t miss it.What is Circuit Breaker Live, you as

Apple today released the second developer beta of iOS 11.3, notably adding previously promised battery health monitoring features, as first spotted by 9to5Mac. The new Battery Health screen appears fully for the specific iPhone models affected by the iPhone throttling debacle, specifically the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 7, and iPhone 7 Plus.
Even though it’s contained in a developer version of iOS, Battery Health is specificall

GUEST: In light of the recent news that the Indiana State Senate failed yet again to pass a hate crimes bill, leaving it as only one of five states without one, I feel compelled to come to the defense of my home, Indiana.
My husband and I are proud to live in Indianapolis. We are proud to call Indiana our home, and my business is headquartered here. But my relationship with the state can be summed up in two words: “It’s complicated.”
It’s been two years since the disastro

Google announced Tuesday it has changed the way people can search for hotels and flights using smartphones in a bid to make trip planning simpler on mobile devices.The company said hotel and flight bookings can now be made through Google Search results. Users can scroll through search results for hotels that include photos, and swipe through those photos without having to leave the list of results. Date and price filtering can also be done through the results page, and users can also now book t

Huawei has announced the Honor 9 Lite, a watered-down version of the Honor 9 from 2017, although it strangely has one or two extra features that the more premium model does not. While the company has released other Lite series phones in the past, they’ve mostly been limited to India and the Middle East. But the Lite 9 will be heading west, with a European release for £199.99 today.
If the price didn’t already tip you off, the Honor 9 Lite is a decidedly midrange phone, with a

Sega is bringing another one of its recent console hits to the PC. This time it’s the competitive puzzle game Puyo Puyo Tetris. This mashup of Puyo Puyo (Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine) and Tetris mechanics hits Steam on February 27. It was previously available in North America and Europe on Switch and PlayStation 4.
Puyo Puyo Tetris features a variety of modes as well as support for up to four simultaneous players. You can play either pure Puyo Puyo or pure Tetris, but the game ge

The European Commission, a group that promotes the interests of the European Union, says it’s going to examine Apple’s Shazam acquisition with the deal’s effects on competition in mind. Multiple countries, including Austria, France, Iceland, and Spain requested that the Commission assess the acquisition to determine whether it’s allowed under a European Union merger law.Basically, these countries want to know how big of a threat Apple owning Shazam could be to local comp

The iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X might not need to significantly slow down their processors as their batteries age to avoid random shutdowns — at least not in the noticeable way that the iPhone 6, 6S, 7, and SE did.
In a letter responding to questions from Senator John Thune (R-SD) that was released today, Apple suggests that the throttling features it added to those phones might not be necessary on its newest models due to “hardware updates” that allow for better performance manag

In response to questions from a Senate committee, Apple said in a letter today that it may offer rebates to customers who paid full price for a battery replacement by making the switch before the company started offering a discount.Apple says it’s “exploring” the idea
In December, it was revealed that Apple used software updates to slow down the performance of some iPhones, a decision the company defended by saying it prevented devices from erratically shutting down. The probl

Google is starting to expand availability of the Jamboard throughout Europe, in what seems to be the first real sign that the company is having some success with its digital whiteboard.
The Jamboard launched last May in the US and Canada, then expanded to the UK in September. Now, Google is announcing that it’ll launch the Jamboard in France, Spain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands next month. The fact that, almost a year on, Google is continuing to roll out

Today, Microsoft announced the dates for its Build developer conference: the annual Windows confab is set for May 7th to 9th. Like last year’s event, this Build will again take place in Seattle, Washington, near the company’s Redmond headquarters instead of in San Francisco, where Build has been held in years past.Build is typically where developers, consumers, and Microsoft partners get an expansive peek at the Windows roadmap and what it means for the future of the OS and all the

Back in 2016, Amazon started selling smartphones for dirt cheap under its ‘Prime Exclusive Phones‘ program. There was one big catch: the phones were saturated with ads, including fullscreen ads on your lockscreen. It turns out seeing ads every time you turn on your phone can get pretty annoying, so now Amazon is getting rid of them. Starting tomorrow, Prime Exclusive phones will no longer be pre-loaded with ads. Better yet, existing users will be able to download an update later thi

Patreon has launched a new feature that it announced last year: a Snapchat Stories-like feed where artists can share pictures and video with patrons. Lens is now available in the Patreon mobile app, after limited beta testing as a separate service. As with Stories, artists record photos and videos on their phone, then post them to a feed where they’ll disappear after 24 hours. If a patron has the app installed, they’ll get a notification for each update, so they can catch the post b

Viz Media has been orbiting video games for a while now, publishing manga adaptations of hits like Pokémon — and it’s now going to publish indie games. It has teamed up with studio Rose City Games, which will also be developing the first title it’s releasing: The World Next Door, an action-adventure fantasy game that’s slated for PC release for an unannounced date.
Viz is best known for its licensing and distribution of Japanese anime and manga outside of Japan, in

Spotify is removing itself from a number of home audio speakers and receivers from the likes of Onkyo, Denon, Marantz, Bang & Olufsen, Pioneer, and Yamaha. Some devices are losing Spotify integration completely, while others will require firmware updates if users want to continue receiving built-in access to their music. The products in question were once all able to independently play Spotify over the internet — no smartphone required.
This isn’t exactly breaking news; the stre

Amazon has announced that starting tomorrow, February 7th, the company is removing the lock screen ads from its discounted Prime Exclusive Phone program. New devices will no longer come with the ads, and there will be a software update that will remove them from customers’ existing devices as well.
According to Amazon, the company is removing the ads to better facilitate the use of fast unlocking technologies like facial recognition and fingerprint sensors (which were already making the l

Nyriad has raised $8.5 million in venture capital for its resilient storage systems that are accelerated using graphics processing units (GPUs). Those storage systems are built to handle problems such as the simultaneous removal or failure of 20 hard disks at the same time.
The Cambridge, New Zealand-based company has now raised more than $11 million to date for its Nsulate software for managing large-scale storage arrays in data centers. The company is targeting the release of its first product