Technology news

Friday is Lunar New Year, and people are ringing the Year of the Dog by celebrating their pups.
SEE ALSO: How to see the super blue blood moon even from the East Coast
Each lunar year is based on one of the 12 Zodiac signs. In celebrating 2018's Year of the Dog, people are dressing up their pets for the most precious photoshoots. It’s the year of the dog and these two doggies wIsh you joy prosperity and success this New Years新年快乐 (xīn nián ku&ag

Google didn’t violate labor laws by firing engineer James Damore for a memo criticizing the company’s diversity program, according to a recently disclosed letter from the US National Labor Relations Board. The lightly redacted statement is written by Jayme Sophir, associate general counsel of the NLRB’s division of advice; it dates to January, but was released yesterday, according to Law.com. Sophir concludes that while some parts of Damore’s memo were legally protected

Google has conducted a trial to test the efficiency of using its technology to help 911 operators more accurately figure out the location of cellphone callers. The test included tens of thousands of 911 calls over the span of two months in several states, and had encouraging results, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The test was done in conjunction with two companies that have connections into 911 centers, West Corp. and RapidSOS. Under the current 911 system, wireless carriers are norma

Zelle, the standalone Venmo-like payments app founded by major banks, is still relatively new to the game, and its users — much like Venmo users before them — are unfortunately learning now that it’s easy to get scammed through the app, according to a report from TechCrunch.Unlike a notorious Venmo scam, which involves stealing physical goods by using Venmo to pay for them with stolen credit cards or hacked accounts (which the payments company would then reverse, leaving selle

On Thursday morning, I hopped on the new Cigarette Racing 515 Project ONE, and became the first non-employee to experience the potency of Formula One at sea. Its top speed is a delirious 140 miles per hour, and it’s capable of a face-numbing 3100 horsepower. I’m still feeling the tingle of wind burn.
We glided out to sea at a smooth crawl, and once in open waters, the skipper cranked up the throttle. “Wooooo!” I screamed, along with a few expletives, as we coasted along

Well this is frightening. 
Reacting to the news that Coinbase account holders had been mistakenly overcharged (in some cases, thousands of dollars), one individual took to Reddit to suggest a troubling solution: Show up at the cryptocurrency exchange's headquarters with guns. And the person was initially met with at least some support. 
The thread has since been locked from comments by Reddit — with some commenters claiming to have reported the threats to law enforcement —

After raising over $1.3 million on Kickstarter from over 20,000 backers in 2016, the developers behind the remake of System Shock announced that the project is now on hiatus.
Nightdive Studios, a development team known for remaking classic games, announced Friday that its project to remake System Shock is on hiatus as they try to get the project back on track. The announcement, written by CEO Stephen Kick, says that the studio strayed from its development path and tried to do too much.
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Nippon Marathon has entered Early Access on Steam, and the full game will be coming out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC later this year.
Nippon Marathon has one to four players racing through Japan in ridiculous outfits as they dodge Shiba Inu dogs, bicycles, and other weird obstacles. You can also impede your opponents by doing things like throwing fruit at them.
The Early Access version will normally cost $10, but it’s on sale for $8.50.
This is the first game from indep

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If you're unfamiliar with a virtual private network, or VPN, there's no better time to get to know them.
There are a number of reasons why you might want to use a VPN, including but not limited to masking all of your internet traffic or accessing websites and services that may be blocked in certain countries (like in China). 

The Russian troll farm has been hit with its first major indictment. Today, special counsel Robert Mueller laid out his criminal case against Russia’s Internet Research Agency, charging that the agency engaged in a sustained campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election. It’s a major shift for the organization, which has largely escaped blowback from the US, and it gives us the best look yet into how the Russian influence campaign actually played out.
One of the most surprisi

In late July, Snap’s director of engineering emailed the company’s team in response to an unfolding privacy threat. A government official from Dorset in the United Kingdom had provided Snap with information about a recent attack on the company’s users: a publicly available list, embedded in a phishing website named klkviral.org, that listed 55,851 Snapchat accounts, along with their usernames and passwords.
The attack appeared to be connected to a previous incident that the co

ANALYSIS: As Apple’s HomePod has been out for a week, most of the news, reviews, and early problems have already been discussed ad nauseum. But you might have missed two unusual articles from Yahoo’s David Pogue, whose real world HomePod listening test last Saturday created enough controversy to merit a “readers weigh in” follow-up today. After having praised HomePod’s audio in his initial review, Pogue discovered that a panel of listeners preferred the So

Today, Microsoft announced that its digital assistant, Cortana, will now work with IFTTT and a number of new smart home devices, such as the Ecobee, Honeywell Lyric, and LIFX. To set them up, just open Cortana on Windows 10 or launch the Cortana app and add the new products under the Connected Home menu.
The IFTTT compatibility helps open Cortana up to a number of new third-party services. Rather than wait for third-party companies to offer new Cortana features, just as they do for Amazon Alexa

In addition to issuing an indictment for several alleged Russian trolls today, special counsel Robert Mueller also released plea deal documents outlining a strange plan by Ricky Pinedo, a California man who sold bank accounts in order to bypass e-commerce companies’ identification systems.The scheme’s ties to the Russia investigation are still unclear, although the Russian indictment did indicate that the Russian agents acquired fake identities and bank accounts. That said, Pinedo&r

When the Apple Pencil was released, I was briefly outraged by the fact that it wasn’t supported by older iPads, then sucked it up and bought an iPad Pro. Hong Kong-based company Greenbulb is setting out to minimize this dilemma by crowdfunding SonarPen, a $30 stylus that senses pressure via the headphone jack, so it works with any iPad released after 2011.The SonarPen works by turning pressure information into sound waves sent to the iPad through the audio cable, which the iPad then inter

On Wednesday, 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at a high school in Florida, a scenario that has become all too familiar to anyone who reads the American news. Now that the obligatory genuflection at the altar of thoughts and prayers has been completed, pundits and politicians around the country have moved on to the next step in the uniquely American ritual of gun violence: casting about for scapegoats that can bear the terrible weight of blame for these crimes — particularly those

Deadly Premonition creator Hidetaka Suehiro, aka Swery, is teaming up with Arc System Works on a new game: The Missing. It will be out sometime this year, though the studios haven’t announced a date or which platforms it will be on. In fact, they haven’t announced many details at all.
“The title, ‘The Missing,’ has many meanings,” muses Swery in the announcement video. “A missing person, someone who’s lost, or even something lost. Maybe i

When I started the downhill biking sim Descenders earlier this week, I didn’t understand its structure. But after spending a solid hour with it last night, I realized that it borrows its progression from the roguelike platformer Spelunky. That’s a lot different than I was expecting, but it also works well for this kind of game.
Descenders is available now for $25 on Steam from developer RageSquid. It is in the Early Access channel for unfinished games, and the studio is planning to a

Apple has once again started selling Belkin’s $40 “InvisiGlass Ultra” iPhone X tempered glass screen protector in its stores and online after customer complaints prompted a recall in late December. The thin sheet of glass was found to crack far too easily during regular daily use of the iPhone, which led to an avalanche of angry customers. Paying 40 bucks for a screen protector is a questionable choice even in cases where it lasts; plenty of companies on Amazon are selling the

In an effort to placate London authorities who revoked the company’s license last year, Uber announced today that it was making a number of major changes to the way it reports violent incidents in the UK. Uber will now report serious incidents directly to the police, after it was criticized for leaving reporting to the victims. It also says it will create a 24/7 telephone hotline for riders and drivers.Last September, the Transport for London, the city’s transportation authority, sa

Yesterday, Essential revealed three limited-edition colors of the Essential Phone — Ocean Depths, Stellar Gray, and Copper Black. And today the company has announced one final new version of its first smartphone: an Amazon-exclusive “Halo Gray” color that comes with the Alexa app preinstalled.
In case three new Essential Phone colors weren't enough, today we're unveiling Halo Gray, the first Essential Phone to come with Alexa built-in. Halo Gray is available for pre-order excl

EXCLUSIVE: Along with LG’s widely reported mobile strategy reboot earlier this year — in which the company vowed to eschew traditional release schedules — came an obvious question: When will the first new hardware come to market, if not in early spring? Thanks to a person briefed on the company’s plans for a device codenamed “Judy” (in line with LG’s traditional reliance on female monikers), the details are finally starting to come into focus.
Whereas th

There’s a certain breed of entertainment that manages to be nostalgic for a particular era, while still transcending that allure to become a wonderful spectacle on its own. For all of the Ghostbusters and Clash references in Stranger Things, it’s still a tense sci-fi thriller unto itself. The same goes for the excellent comic series Paper Girls, or the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero,” both of which use the time period as a jumping-off point to explore larger themes a

OPINION: IDC shared two interesting smartphone numbers this week: Google Pixel and Essential Phone shipments for 2017. The research firm typically shares shipments for the top five smartphone makers, but interest around these two companies was apparently high enough to warrant a breakout by research director Francisco Jeronimo more than 10 days after IDC’s most recent report.
For reference, Samsung shipped 317.3 million smartphones in 2017, followed by Apple with 215.8 million, Huawei with

A New York district court has ruled that embedding a tweet on a webpage could violate copyright — a decision that could have a wide-ranging impact on social media and publishing. Yesterday, Judge Katherine B. Forrest rejected the defense of several news outlets that embedded tweets containing a copyrighted photograph of Tom Brady, saying they could be liable for infringement even if they weren’t hosting the image on their site. Her decision can be appealed, but the reasoning could a

Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed conspiracy and fraud charges against thirteen Russian nationals and three organizations. The group is charged with defrauding the United States as part of a campaign to influence the US election.
Ten of the defendants were allegedly employed by the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” funded by the Russian government for disinformation efforts. “Defendants, posing as US persons and creating false US personas, operated social media p

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is already a hit, having sold over 300,000 copies just on Steam. The open-world historical role-playing game came out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on February 13. But Warhorse Studios’ game is experiencing performance issues on all platforms.
YouTube channel Digital Foundry has created a video comparing the game running on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, Xbox One, and Xbox One X. You can watch it above.
All versions of the game have problems with muddy tex

Throughout the history of its cinematic universe, Marvel Studios has excelled at creating engaging, entertaining diversions, bringing dozens of characters to life in a string of blockbusters that feed into one another, like a cinematic perpetual-motion machine. What it hasn’t done is make movies that feel consequential. Sure, there was some commentary about war profiteering early on in the Iron Man films, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier glanced upon the idea of selling out privacy

The Trump administration wants to end direct NASA funding for the International Space Station by 2025 — but that doesn’t necessarily mean the US will stop sending people into orbit around Earth by then. Instead, NASA hopes to transition the domain of lower Earth orbit, where the space station resides, to the commercial space industry over the next seven years. But what would it take for private space companies to take over this area of space — and what exactly would they do up

Last year, Ikea announced it was collaborating with Teenage Engineering to create a line of products called FREKVENS (which translates to “frequency”) “in order to throw a really good music party wherever you are.” Now, Ikea has just shared the first look on Instagram of some final prototypes for the collection, which is set to come out early next year.
Inspired by the idea of having everything at your fingertips to spontaneously throw a party, Ikea says that when FREKVE

Aaron Parsons is on a quest to discover the first stars that formed in our Universe around 13 billion years ago. But one thing is getting in the way of his primordial cosmic quest: cryptocurrency.
The mining craze of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum is draining the supplies of graphics cards on the market. And that’s spiking the prices of so-called graphics processing units, or GPUs, super powerful chips that can process huge amounts of data. Without GPUs, astronomers like Parsons can&rsquo

Trion Worlds announced today the next free expansion for its voxel-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game Trove is coming out this spring.
Trove — Heroes will add superhero-themed content. Trove came out for PC in 2015, with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions following in 2017. The MMO is free, but players can spend money on things like costumes and new character classes. Trove has had over 8 million players on Steam, according to SteamSpy. On all platforms, Trove has over 1

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul welcome senior writer Sarah Jeong to the show for the first time. Sarah was at the federal court in San Francisco for Waymo v. Uber trial and has been reporting on it for The Verge, so she lends us her expertise to explain what was going on between the two companies.Also, Dieter explains why so much software is broken and also checks the pulse of the open web with this week’s tech headlines.There’s a whole lot more in between that

The upcoming transition from 4G to 5G cellular technologies has consumers eagerly awaiting the chance to get their hands on smartphones with extraordinarily fast internet speeds. In the meantime, city mayors are grappling with how to get their citizens access to 5G service as soon as possible, without getting bulldozed by telecom companies.
In a blog post written by AT&T executive vice president Joan Marsh, the carrier detailed why it decided to work with three cities — Indianapol

The Walt Disney Company may own the most valuable film properties on the planet. But investors seem to think Netflix could still be in a position to challenge the House of the Mouse and become this century’s leading entertainment media company.
Whoever comes out on top, it seems increasingly clear that the battle is going to come down to these two global giants.
Since the start of this year, Netflix’s stock has climbed from $199.50 per share to $280.31 on Thursday, just slightly down