Technology news

Purdue Pharma, which manufactures a range of pain medications such as OxyContin, announced yesterday that it would no longer promote opioid drugs to physicians, and has laid off more than 50 percent of its sales force.In a statement to The Verge, a Purdue spokesperson says that “we have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers.” Accordingly, the company has laid off more than 50 percent of its sales force,

Apple has just released its HomePod speaker, and like with other new devices, it’s created some new videos to show users how to use it. MacRumors spotted the trio, which explain how to use Siri, adjust the settings, and how to use the touch controls.The first video shows how to control the device with Siri: you can ask it to play songs from various genres or different playlists, and you can control the volume by telling it to get louder, or to play at a certain percentage. You can also te

Nvidia reported better-than-expected earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter that ended on January 31. The company said it’s earning non-GAAP revenues of $1.72 a share on revenues of $2.91 billion. Analysts had expected $1.16 a share on revenue of $2.68 billion.
It makes you wonder if all of those rumors about cryptocurrency mining driving up the prices of graphics processing units (GPUs) are true. But for the past couple of quarters, Nvidia hasn’t acknowledged much contribution to it

Phone Case of the Month is a monthly series in which we live with, and subsequently review, our time with a phone case. Phone cases are one of our only ways to express individuality with our smartphones, so what do our phone case choices say about us?
I’ve stuck my phone case to all sorts of things over the past couple months, like my bathroom mirror, random windows in bars, laptops, walls, a windshield, other phones, and glass tables. People immediately want to stick my case to the neare

In March 2017, Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris laid in a hospital bed with fractured ribs, a fractured left arm, pelvis, and jaw, along with a ruptured spleen and collapsed left lung. 
On Saturday, less than a year after he slammed into a tree while backcountry snowboarding, McMorris claimed an Olympic bronze medal in the men's slopestyle event. 
SEE ALSO: These LGBTQ Olympians are here to break records (and tiny queer hearts)
"I’m trying not to think too much about the past t

Olympic officials have confirmed that a cyber attack took place during the event’s opening ceremonies in Pyeongchang, according to Reuters. The organizers say that while television and internet access was affected, it “it had not compromised any critical part of their operations.”
According to reports, internet access and Wi-Fi shut down on Friday during the game’s opening ceremonies. The website for the games also went down, preventing attendees from printing out ticket

Though we're just a few days into the 2018 Winter Games, it's possible you're already suffering from Olympics whiplash. 
Signs of Olympics whiplash include: Devotion to your country's team.
Regular googling of the time in Pyeongchang, South Korea
A strong need to keep up with multiple concurrent events, despite the disheartening truth that it's impossible to see every event in real timeSEE ALSO: Ranking every sport in the Winter Olympics, even the ridiculous ones
We feel you. We're Oly

New research out of MIT’s Media Lab is underscoring what other experts have reported or at least suspected before: facial recognition technology is subject to biases based on the data sets provided and the conditions in which algorithms are created.Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, recently built a dataset of 1,270 faces, using the faces of politicians, selected based on their country’s rankings for gender parity (in other words, having more females in office). Buol

In January, The Verge reported that the Trump administration was preparing to end US support for the International Space Station by 2025, prompting outcry from Congressional officials. The Washington Post says that it has viewed an internal NASA document that outlines the agency’s intentions to privatize the station after funding ends in 2024.According to the Post, the document says that the decision to defund the station doesn’t mean that it will be de-orbited in 2025, but says han

GUEST: For nearly three decades, internet cafés have filled an important niche across the globe. Also known as cybercafés, these establishments have provided online access to travelers, and to persons who do not have internet services at home. Thanks to the astronomical growth of virtual reality technology, a new business model is emerging that promises to transform the industry. Welcome to internet café 2.0 — the VR café.
Traditional internet cafés have

The 2018 Winter Olympics have begun in Pyeongchang, South Korea, where athletes from 92 countries around the world will compete in over a hundred separate events for the gold. There’s more to it than just the games though: there’s the technology that brings the event to viewers across the world.
The games run from February 9th through February 25th; follow along for all of our coverage. Continue reading…

Imagine, if you will, a President of the United States that truly understands AI’s potential: how to use it, when to trust it, and how to stop it if necessary. Is this prospect terrifying or exciting? It’s hard to say for sure. It seems obvious that up-and-coming generations will bring a new, if not radically different perspective to government, in part because they are the world’s first digital natives. While those born in the mid-80s were early adopters of technology in thei

Last year, Kela Ivonye relocated from his home base in Louisville, Kentucky to Silicon Valley for an extended period of time to participate in not just one, but two startup accelerator programs. But even though the two-time founder appreciated the funding, mentorship, and partnerships he gained from these experiences, he was committed to returning to Louisville to build his startup, MailHaven.
“We are really focused because we’re here [in Louisville],” says Ivony

I spent last night staring into a hypnotic grid of fuzzy Travis Kalanicks, as reconstructed by an AI.
For the last couple of days, I’ve been experimenting with FakeApp, a program that uses Google’s TensorFlow machine learning to morph faces in videos. The app is mostly associated with pornographic “deepfakes,” where celebrities’ faces are pasted onto a porn actor’s body. (That’s been widely deemed nonconsensual pornography and banned everywhere from Por

If you think you were excited watching SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch, here's how Elon Musk handled it.
On Saturday, National Geographic shared an exclusive clip of the SpaceX CEO taking in Tuesday's launch. 
SEE ALSO: SpaceX just launched the Falcon Heavy, its most powerful rocket, and landed 2 boosters
"Holy flying fuck, that thing took off," Musk said as the Falcon Heavy rose from its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center. The clip shows the CEO running outside to watch the rocket his com

Last year, credit rating agency Equifax announced that hackers had stolen personal information for 143 million US consumers, including names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses, drivers license numbers, and some credit card numbers. The Wall Street Journal writes that more information was leaked than was previously reported.The revelation comes from a document submitted to the Senate Banking Committee, which says that hackers accessed additional personal information beyond what was

Within three years, deep learning will change front-end development. It will increase prototyping speed and lower the barrier for building software. The field took off last year when Tony Beltramelli introduced the pix2code paper and Airbnb launched sketch2code. Currently, the largest barrier to automating front-end development is computing power. However, we can use current deep learning algorithms, along with synthesized training data, to start exploring artificial fr

Sega’s action-adventure series Yakuza first launched in 2005, and Yakuza 6: The Song of Life is the final chapter to protagonist Kiryu Kazuma’s story. His journey has been uniquely Japanese, tackling underground criminal organizations with geopolitical tones, commenting on the way people use technology, and showcasing the country’s culture. Sega’s North American localization team at its subsidiary Atlus acts as the mediator between Western audiences and the streets of Kam

Tumblr is beloved by users who leverage the site's visual and practical features to confront taboo topics and politics. The blogging platform is also frequently derided by those who mock its progressive activists as "social justice warriors."    
Yet no measure of contempt seems to deter Tumblr from fully embracing advocacy and activism. The site has an aggressive plan to promote online and IRL activism in the coming year, and it's particularly interested in registering new voters

Last year, I asked a friend for some advice. He admitted, first, that he was underqualified to give it. (This is how happy people preface everything.) Then he sent me a lyric from a Los Campesinos! song from 2008, implying that I should go ahead and consider it applicable to my present romantic imbroglio.It went like this: “I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love / is to like the other slightly less than you get in return.”“Hmmm,” I told him. “Yea

About one act into the new Indian movie Pad Man, a man experiences a brutal, mortifying pad leak. 
The man in question is Lakshmi Chauhan (Akshay Kumar), testing a homemade sanitary pad he made for his wife. Needless to say, it's not effective, and the scarlet specter leaves Lakshmi dripping goat's blood off his bicycle until he abandons it and jumps into the river (honestly, same).
Pad Man is based on the true story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, a South Indian man who made it his mission t

I'm a decent skateboarder, and electric skateboards terrify me. 
Most electric skateboards are remote-controlled. When I push the button to start the board, it tends to jerk abruptly into motion, because my hands are uncoordinated, and my fingers are thick and clumsy. When I do manage to get it moving, my finger quivers, because if it slips and pushes the throttle by accident, the board will abruptly shoot forward, and I'll fall off and die, probably. 
But after a good deal of searchin

Niantic, the company behind Pokémon GO, has recently announced that they’re working on a follow-up to their monumentally successful Augmented Reality (AR) game. Pokéballs and Pocket Monsters move aside; and wands and wizardry will take their place as next AR craze will be J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter being brought to life. And my kids — and millions of kids just like them — will be eagerly awaiting the day they can hit download and start casting spells from

French company MWM has announced a new product called Phase that sits on your turntable and allows you to DJ vinyl without the use of a needle. Phase wirelessly translates a record’s movements into timecode, which can then be read by Digital Vinyl System (DVS) software like Serato and Traktor.
Debuted at this year’s NAMM show, Phase is a pair of small rectangle-shaped transmitters with sticky bottoms that you affix to the top of a piece of vinyl. As a record plays or is scratched Ph

Standalone headsets represent an enormous leap forward for VR technology, with companies like Google, Facebook and HTC early to market.
An all-in-one VR headset, or standalone, puts everything in the headband needed to convince you that you’re in another world. It is a single integrated piece of hardware, like a phone or tablet.
The first VR headsets available to consumers require multiple pieces to work. This includes Rift, Vive, Gear VR, Daydream View, Cardboard, PlayStation VR and Windo

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If you've left your Valentine's Day gift shopping to the last minute, you can't go wrong with flowers. 
A perennial favorite, they're perfect for any occasion and any relationship whether you've been together fifty years or fifty days. You can bring flowers out to dinner, send them to a long distance l

  Smartphones rule our lives. Having information at our fingertips is the height of convenience. They tell us all sorts of things, but the information we see and receive on our smartphones is just a fraction of the data they generate. By tracking and monitoring our behaviour and activities, smartphones build a digital profile of shockingly intimate information about our personal lives. These records aren’t just a log of our activities. The digital profiles they create are traded betw

Imagine the world a decade from now. It’s no longer ruled by powerhouse countries such as the US or China, but by a handful of tech corporations that know everything about us; what we need, buy, say, and ultimately what we desire. So join me for a short imaginary trip to our possible future. Welcome to the FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon) Republic! We’ll see that the trend started back in 2018, the year that personal assistants really started gaining traction.

GUEST: The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force in May and will radically change how companies collect, store, manage, and use data. A shockingly high number of businesses are still unaware or simply not ready for GDPR. As a startup investor, you can’t afford to be ignorant of the legislation.
Unlike the infamous Cookie Law of 2011, GDPR can not simply be dealt with through a few minor changes to a privacy policy. The EU has learned from the flaws in that d