Technology news

At 3:28PM ET I made a discovery that will change humanity for the better. Okay, maybe not humanity, but it will certainly make my life better.
I’m using a 2015 MacBook Pro. I bought it last fall because I needed a new computer, and because I need to plug things in all the time, I didn’t want any of the new Macs. This meant that my new old computer came installed with macOS Sierra 10.12.1. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about High Sierra so I’ve been holding off.
But m

Joss Whedon is leaving the solo Batgirl movie, according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter. In a statement given to the publication, Whedon explained, “Batgirl is such an exciting project, and Warners/DC such collaborative and supportive partners, that it took me months to realize I really didn’t have a story. I’m grateful to Geoff and Toby and everyone who was so welcoming when I arrived, and so understanding when I…uh, is there a sexier word for ‘failed?&r

Election Assistance Commission chairman Matthew Masterson is being removed from his post by the White House and House Speaker Paul Ryan, according to a report from Reuters. Appointed to the commission in 2014 and serving as chairman since February, Masterson was expected to be appointed to a second four-year term.
It’s unclear why Masterson was removed, but the timing is likely to be a significant blow to the ongoing effort to secure voting machines against hacking. Less than nine months

I’ve never seen The Ring because I’m a huge baby, but I’ve now watched a terrifying augmented reality demo of its main villain Samara coming out of the TV screen, just like in the movie. A developer named Abhishek Singh, who has created lots of AR experiences, tweeted his idea of The Ring in AR.
I reenacted a famous scene from 'The Ring' to bring #horror movies to life in AR#madewithunity #ARKit pic.twitter.com/fRU2ul56ki— Abhishek Singh (@shekitup) February 21, 2018Sama

HP’s first Windows 10 PC that’s powered by an ARM-based processor is now available for preorder for $999.99. It’s scheduled to ship by March 9th, and it’s one of the first “always connected PCs” that HP, Asus, and Lenovo have teamed up with Qualcomm to release over the next year or so.The HP Envy x2 is a 2-in-1 tablet with a 12.3-inch touchscreen that has an edge-to-edge 1920 x 1280 pixel display. It looks a lot like the HP Spectre x2, which came out last yea

We’re only days away from the official announcement of the Samsung Galaxy S9, but what might be the most important detail about the upcoming smartphone might have just leaked out: the price, which apparently will start at €841 for the S9 and a whopping €997 for the larger S9 Plus, courtesy of reliable leaker Evan Blass.Pricing. pic.twitter.com/wu4GlK1FCU— Evan Blass (@evleaks) February 22, 2018That works out to approximately $1,038 for the S9 and a massive $1,229 for the S

Ricoh announced a new camera yesterday: the Pentax K-1 Mark II 35 mm DSLR. It’s a refreshed version of the original Pentax K-1 that was released in 2016. (For those who are still using the original Pentax K-1, Ricoh is offering a limited time deal to upgrade the older camera’s circuit board and logo with the new Mark II’s functions and logo. At the cost of $550, customers can upgrade their older gear from May 21st to September 30th this year.)
The new camera has the same 36.4-

Sling TV has added NBA League Pass as another option in the internet TV service’s growing list of add-on content. League Pass costs an extra $29 per month on top of a customer’s regular subscription, and provides access to “nearly 1,000 live out-of-market regular-season NBA games in addition to those separately available on TNT, ABC, ESPN, NBA TV, local regional sports networks, and local broadcast networks,” the company said in a press release.If you’re only inter

A new beauty startup, Proven, is using artificial intelligence to determine the best skincare routines for people based on their skin type and needs, and all of the products will be made in-house.Amy Yuan, one of Proven’s co-founders, uses her computational physics background to build an “AI engine” that pores through reviews of various skincare products, reports TechCrunch. Proven claims the machine has analyzed 8 million reviews, 20,000 ingredients, and 100,000 products usin

UPS announced today that it would be building its own electric delivery trucks from scratch. It will partner with truck maker Workhorse Group Inc to build the first 50 vans that could eventually replace the delivery giant’s fleet of fossil fuel-burning vehicles.The delivery EVs would have a range of 100 miles and will be delivered in 2018, UPS said. “We see this vehicle as being a game changer in the electric truck arena,” Carlton Rose, UPS’s president for global fleet m

A new discovery that Neanderthals were painting cave walls more than 64,000 years ago has anthropologists rethinking the history of art. Found deep in Spanish caves, the rock art was once thought to be the work of humans, but the new dates mean that Neanderthals must have figured out fingerpainting, too.Using a new and improved radioactive dating technique, researchers discovered that paintings in three different caves were created more than 64,800 years ago. That means the paintings were creat

Apple’s iPod is probably the pinnacle of personal audio devices. Sure, Android and iOS phones can play music with their fancy streaming services and gigabytes of storage, but nothing beats the elegant style, refined design, and tactile click wheel of a classic iPod.
Using an iPod in 2018 can be rough, however: 30GB of storage on a hard drive with slow speeds and annoying skipping isn’t a good user experience, no matter how nice Apple’s hardware is. Fortunately, we can fix that

Airbnb is offering discounts on Nest products — specifically the smart home company’s popular thermostats and Nest Protect devices — for top-rated “superhosts” as part of a new initiative to better reward the top hosts on the service.Nest is the first of what Airbnb envisions as a wider store for discounted smart home devices for superhosts, offering a 30 percent discount on Nest thermostats and Nest Protect devices globally. The discount program should be rolling

LG has announced the 2018 updates for its K Series of budget smartphones, with new versions of the K10 and K8 that focus on improved cameras and specs at the cost of some extremely mediocre 720p displays.
The K10 — which comes in three versions: the top K10+, middle-of-the-road K10, and the low-end K10α — all feature a 5.3-inch 720p display, run Android Nougat, and have a rear fingerprint sensor and an unspecified 1.5 GHz octa-core processor.Better cameras, but the same low-re

If wearing a Fitbit on your wrist is too difficult, maybe you should consider a fitness tracker on your face. Eye insurance provider VSP Global is launching a pair of smart glasses today called Level that keep track of a wearer’s movement. They pair over Bluetooth to a companion iOS / Android app. A frame costs $270, which doesn’t include lenses.
The inside of the glasses is relatively simple and what you’d expect. There’s an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer th

After a year in development, Google is flipping the switch on “RCS business messaging.” Essentially, it means that brands can text more multimedia-rich messages to Android users. The idea is that instead of just getting an SMS from a random five-digit shortcode telling you that your hotel room has been booked, you get something much more useful. Something like a message showing the hotel’s address, a picture of your room, and quick-reply buttons that let you jump right into a

It’s been a rough week for Snap. The company’s update for Snapchat has been poorly received, and today, Snap’s stock price took another tumble following a tweet from Kylie Jenner declaring that she was done with the social imaging app.
sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad.— Kylie Jenner (@KylieJenner) February 21, 2018While this may be just an odd case of correlation, it’s hard to deny that Jenner is an influential

Airbnb has announced a new hotel-like tier of service on its platform that the company is calling Airbnb Plus. The news went live today on Airbnb’s website in conjunction with a story in The New York Times ahead of a big reveal event in San Francisco this morning. It confirms rumors that Airbnb has been working on a higher-end accommodations offering that would let it more easily compete with hotels. Airbnb Plus is being marketed as a more standardized style of service that is “veri

 The car leasing and rental market is forecast to be worth $124 billion in 2022, and today a startup that is hoping to get a piece of that action by making the process of leasing a car easier is announcing a Series A in its effort to get there.
Honcker — a New York-based startup that acts as an aggregator and search engine for leasing services, and platform for would-be customers to… Read More

 If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are basic tasks that can free up a human rep to handle the more difficult matters, but it can be exasperating when there is no easy way to talk to a person. Agent IQ, a startup that has developed customer service bots, acknowledges… Read More

After launching its Falcon 9 rocket from California this morning, SpaceX used a giant net to try to recover the rocket’s nose cone as it fell down in the Pacific Ocean. The first-time experiment failed, however: one of the pieces of the nose cone missed the net, which was attached to a ship, and landed intact on the sea surface instead.Also known as the payload fairing, the nose cone is an earplug-shaped casing that sits on the top of the rocket, shielding the vehicle’s payload duri

After launching its Falcon 9 rocket from California this morning, SpaceX used a giant net to try to recover the rocket’s nosecone as it fell down in the Pacific Ocean. The first-time experiment failed, however: one of the pieces of the nosecone missed the net, which was attached to a ship, and landed intact on the sea surface instead.Also known as the payload fairing, the nosecone is an earplug-shaped casing that sits on the top of the rocket, shielding the vehicle’s payload during

A Japanese company is developing a pair of smart glasses that convert words into voice for those who are dyslexic or otherwise have difficulty reading, as spotted by SoraNews24. The glasses, in development since 2012, have been listed on Campfire, Japan’s version of Kickstarter, with the goal of raising $93,500 in order to sell each pair for around $47.
The Oton Glass are glasses with two tiny cameras and an earphone on the sides. Half of the lens is a mirror that reflects the user’

Update February 22nd, 11AM ET: SpaceX successfully launched and deployed its primary satellite after a smooth Thursday morning launch.
Now that the dust has settled from SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy mission, the company is getting back to its routine with another Falcon 9 launch. The rocket is slated to take off from California on Thursday, sending up an Earth-observation satellite called Paz for Spain. But the vehicle will also have two additional satellites hitchhiking along for the ride

Moleskine’s Smart Writing System, the pen-and-notebook set that lets users digitize their handwritten notes onto a companion app, is adding a standalone $180 smartpen to the line. The Pen+ Ellipse is only compatible with the specially textured Moleskine notebooks, so you also have to purchase either the Paper Tablet or Smart Planner for it to work properly, which are $30 each. The Moleskine Notes app is compatible with iOS, Android, and most recently, Windows 10.The Pen+ Ellipse appears t

 Glossier, the nearly four-year-old, direct-to-consumer beauty company, has landed $52 million in Series C funding in what it describes as a heavily oversubscribed round. The financing was led by earlier investors IVP and Index Ventures. The New York-based company — which evolved out of the popular blog Into the Gloss by founder and CEO Emily Weiss — began selling its own make-up at… Read More

The much-anticipated Windows version of Final Fantasy XV is launching on March 3rd, and when the game does finally hit the platform, it will include a Gordon Freeman-shaped bonus. Today, Square Enix revealed that anyone who purchases the game on Steam, from now until May 1st, will get an in-game costume so that you can dress up lead character Noctis as the bespectacled star of the Half-Life series. The getup includes Freeman’s iconic orange HEV suit and glasses, and, naturally, a crowbar

The competition between China and the US in AI development is tricky to quantify. While we do have some hard numbers, even they are open to interpretation. The latest comes from technology analysts CB Insights, which reports that China has overtaken the US in the funding of AI startups. The country accounted for 48 percent of the world’s total AI startup funding in 2017, compared to 38 percent for the US.It’s not a straightforward victory for China, however. In terms of the volume o

Caterpillar, the construction company that’s probably best known for its bright yellow bulldozers, dump trucks, and excavators, has been dabbling in the smartphone industry for the past few years — most recently with the Cat S60, an ultra-rugged phone with a thermal camera built in.At MWC this year, Caterpillar is announcing the successor to the S60, the logically named S61, which updates the specs and brings improvements to the thermal camera. The S61 can show greater image contras

Sometime in the past two years, wire-free earbuds graduated from clumsy to impressively good, and from not quite worth it to the only pair I wear. Apple deserves a lot of credit for this: it managed to get people to wear what look like short cigarette sticks in their ears in exchange for a completely seamless connection between device and earbuds. But there are others that have moved the ball forward, too, like Bragi, Jabra, Samsung, and Bose.Those last two companies have produced what we consi