Technology news

Bill Gates warns that big tech companies aren’t worried enough about government regulation, in a new interview with Axios today. Calling out “Apple and other tech giants,” Gates argues that companies are inviting government intervention by flaunting hubris, saying they need to be “careful that they’re not trying to think their view is more important than the government’s view, or than the government being able to function in some key areas.”
When Axios

Hookup culture: Also known as the thing that has basically replaced real dating over the past 20 years or so, and the thing that your parents and grandparents bitch about because "nobody has a real conversation anymore."
We all know that's not true, however, and online dating has made a massive impact on more people meeting and talking than every before. And when we think dating sites, we usually think about sites like eharmony and Zoosk and other marriage-minded options. But not every single pe

Hookup culture: Also known as the thing that has basically replaced real dating over the past 20 years or so, and the thing that your parents and grandparents bitch about because "nobody has a real conversation anymore."
We all know that's not true, however, and online dating has made a massive impact on more people meeting and talking than every before. And when we think dating sites, we usually think about sites like eharmony and Zoosk and other marriage-minded options. But not every single pe

Hookup culture and casual dating: Also known as the thing that has basically replaced real dating over the past 20 years or so, and the thing that your parents and grandparents bitch about because "nobody has a real conversation anymore."
We all know that's not true, however, and the glorious combo of online dating and dating apps has forever changed the way that singles connect. When we think dating sites, we usually think about the likes of eharmony and Zoosk and other marriage-minded options.

An armed New Mexico man broke into the house of YouTubers Megan Turney and Gavin Free last month, forcing the couple to hide in their closet and await police. Christopher Giles drove 11 hours from Albuquerque to the couple’s home in Austin, Texas, and his “sole intent was to cause harm to someone who resides there,” according to a search warrant obtained by KXAN. Giles allegedly shot at police, who returned fire, killing Giles.
Both Turney and Free are popular social media sta

Facebook hired Campbell Brown as its head of news partnerships on January 6th, 2017. At the time, Brown wrote that she would “help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook.” In a post that is no longer public, she wrote: “I will be working directly with our partners to help them understand how Facebook can expand the reach of their journalism, and contribute value to their businesses.”
What a difference a year can make. On s

If you’re searching for a new speaker, the market is flooded with options. Whether you’re looking to spend your time listening to music outside, in search of the perfect indoor acoustics, or both, there are hundreds of speakers for you to choose from.
But what about smart speakers? You know, the kind that come with built-in voice assistants and can be found in almost any home at this point? If you have a bunch of "smart" devices lying around your home — perhaps a robot vacuum,

I’m sorry to tell you all: it’s the year of the notch. Android phones that unabashedly ape the iPhone X’s sensor-packed front notch keep on coming, and another, from Chinese phone maker Doogee, is about to arrive.
The Doogee V looks pretty darn close to an iPhone X: there’s the front notch with screen wrapping around it into the corners; a display that nearly touches the bottom of the phone; vertically stacked rear cameras (although they’re centered, rather than se

Fitbit announced today that it has acquired a small, Boston-based software startup called Twine Health for an undisclosed amount.Twine Health probably isn’t a name that will resonate with a lot of people who don’t follow digital health closely, but it’s a collaborative software platform aimed at workplace wellness providers. It tracks chronic diseases and connects patients with health coaches and doctors for guidance. It was founded in 2014, and according to Crunchbase, had ra

Apple is developing a TV drama called Swagger, inspired by Kevin Durant’s childhood. Variety reports that the show will “explore the world of Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) basketball and the lives of the players, their families, and coaches.”
The series will be written and directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood, best known for writing the 2009 Notorious B.I.G. biopic Notorious, and for creating the recent Fox limited series Shots Fired. It will be produced by Imagine Television and

The Rock is starring in a monster movie loosely based off of a video game series, which is just about the most The Rock thing The Rock could do. In the latest trailer for Rampage, the man now known as Dwayne Johnson rocks out with a big ol’ friendly gorilla who — after being infected with an interstellar mutation — is swept up into a city-leveling conflict.
An adaptation of Rampage has been in the works since 2011. The Midway game series lets you control a giant lizard, ape, o

Last month, Digital Ally, a Kansas-based company known for its police body and dashboard cameras, announced that it had secured a patent for a new conducted electrical weapon. This marked the first time in more than a decade that a serious player in the police business showed interest in building a newer and better taser.
Ever since 2003, when one of the two companies making tasers bought out the other, there has effectively been a taser monopoly. If you’ve ever seen a police officer carr

Media outlet Salon is testing an alternative to advertising: mining cryptocurrency through readers’ computers. If you visit the site with an ad-blocker turned on, you might see a prompt to either disable the blocker or choose a “suppress ads” option, as reported today by Financial Times and confirmed by The Verge. According to FT, the latter choice will let Salon put your unused computing power toward mining the cryptocurrency Monero, using a JavaScript-based mining tool from

Apple is expanding its Apple Music student discount pricing to 82 new regions by the end of the month, including Israel, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, and Taiwan, according to iMore’s Rene Richtie. The discount offers 50 percent off the usual subscription price.
The offer had already been available in the US, UK, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand since 2016, but now Apple is expanding it to ”nearly all the countries where Apple Music is available,&

RED, one of the biggest names in digital cinema cameras, may end up working with a huge and high-volume manufacturer to bring the cost of its usually very pricey cameras way down. According to Nikkei, manufacturer Foxconn is trying to partner with RED to produce high-quality 8K cameras that are much cheaper than those on sale today.
“We will make cameras that will shoot professional-quality films in 8K resolution but at only a third of current prices and a third of current camera sizes,&r

AMD has two new Ryzen processors out for desktops with an interesting addition: built-in Radeon Vega graphics, combining AMD’s CPU and GPU architectures into a single chip.
The company is launching two models in the new series: the Ryzen 5 2400G and the Ryzen 3 2200G. Each chip is a four core processor (the Ryzen 5 has eight threads, while the 3 has just four threads) with Radeon Vega graphics— specifically, the Vega 11 architecture for the Ryzen 5 chip, and Vega 8 for the Ryzen 3.T

Amid the avalanche of damning emails and embarrassing text messages that flowed out of the Waymo-Uber trial, what struck me the most was when ousted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski — Kalanick’s onetime business partner who he described in court as his “brother from another mother” — described the race to build self-driving cars as a “zero sum game.”“We need to think through the strategy to take all the shortcuts we can,” Lev

 Microsoft is beefing up its Slack-like collaboration software, Microsoft Teams, with the technology (and the founder) from collaboration software startup Chalkup. Following the acquisition, Microsoft says it will bring some of the features Chalkup had built to the Microsoft Teams for Education product experience. Chalkup was founded in 2013 by CEO Justin Chando, who’s joining Microsoft as… Read More

Facebook is introducing a new feature for posting status updates, called Lists, as reported by TechCrunch. The new feature, which begins rolling out today, is yet another way the company is trying to get people to share more personal content to their own pages, following statuses with colored backgrounds, its Did You Know feature, and all sorts of ways to make anyone use Stories.
Lists appears to be a way for users to create a list of, well, anything they choose, such as places they’d lik

It’s hard to fault anyone for thinking that awkwardness is to be avoided. The familiar, sinking feeling of knowing you’ve embarrassed yourself does not rank high on the hierarchy of desirable emotions.Still, says journalist Melissa Dahl, there is something to be gained in embracing awkwardness—and the much-hated feeling can bring us together. Dahl, a senior editor at New York Magazine’s The Cut, is the author of Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, out today from Portf

Omate has teamed up with Nanoblock to launch a new smartwatch for kids called the Omate x Nanoblock. It’s an adorable watch with colorful blocks arranged on the wristband. I’d wear it if I were a kid, especially because it has a built-in selfie cam. Even though I find it cute, you should probably still avoid strapping any smartwatch to your kids.
Germany’s telecommunications agency, the Bundesnetzagentur, banned smartwatches for kids in late 2017 and asked parents to destroy t

The UK government has funded the creation of a machine learning algorithm that can be used to detect ISIS propaganda videos online.It’s the latest move by the government to combat the distribution of extremist material on the internet. The tool was created by London-based startup ASI Data Science and cost £600,000 ($830,000) to develop. It will be offered to smaller video platforms and cloud storage sites like Vimeo and pCloud in order to vet their content. It won’t, however,

Being able to update your car’s user interface over the air means better access to new features, with fewer trips to the dealer, and — ideally — a quick fix if something’s wrong. But there are inevitably going to be hiccups when a behemoth like, say, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles tries to update the infotainment system it pushes on many of its sub-brands and something breaks. This weekend, as Jalopnik noticed, FCA sent an over-the-air update to its Uconnect platform that is

Nokia might not be technically manufacturing phones anymore, but Nokia-branded handsets (made by HMD) are reportedly beating Google, HTC, and OnePlus sales. Counterpoint analyst Neil Shah revealed on Twitter that HMD’s Nokia-branded Android phones outsold HTC, Sony, Google, Lenovo, OnePlus, and a number of other manufacturers in the recent holiday quarter. TechRadar reports that HMD sold 4.4 million Nokia-branded phones in Q4 2017, that’s more in three months than Google’s Pix

Amazon is cutting several hundred corporate employees from its Seattle headquarters and global operations, reports The Seattle Times. The cuts are mostly from the consumer retail division and come as rapid growth has reportedly left some of Amazon’s various departments over budget, and some teams overstaffed. Amazon is the second largest US-based corporate employer, and the company has gone on a hiring spree over the past two years — with its Seattle headcount swelling from 5,000 pe

Just ahead of Valentine’s Day, Facebook is adding a few features to Messenger that’ll appear for new couples, ranging from mostly innocuous tweaks to cloying changes that’ll remind both of you that Facebook is always watching and trying to embed itself deeper into the fabric of your lives.
First, after confirming you’re in a relationship with someone, a messenger chat will open up between the two of you, which sounds super helpful in 2018, a year in which it’s tota

Google is bringing its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) capabilities to email today through a developer preview for Gmail. The feature, called AMP for Email, will allow developers to make emails “more interactive and engaging.” Google envisions the feature to be beneficial to users because developers can embed widgets in emails that are constantly up-to-date and include actionable functions that work without leaving your inbox. Google’s existing AMP webpages are an emerging stan

British chip designer ARM is the latest firm to prime the AI pump with specialized hardware, unveiling two new processor designs today that it promises will deliver “a transformational amount of compute capability” for companies building machine learning-powered gadgets.
The designs are for the ARM Machine Learning (ML) Processor, which will speed up general AI applications from machine translation to facial recognition; and the ARM Objection Detection (OD) Processor, a second-gener