Technology news

So I had a bunch of stuff to do today so this is late. This isn’t my fault. You’re at fault for demanding I take time out of my busy way of tweeting curse words at an account that I believe to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Grand theft crypto 600 mining computers were stolen in Iceland according to some guys with some really long names! The 600 computers over the course of 40 years could mine at least half a Bitcoin. It’s a difficulty joke folks! Anyway, genuinely wonder how this affect

Artist Plastic Jesus collaborated with Joshua 'Ginger' Monroe to make this statue of Harvey Weinstein come alive. 
The name of the installation is 'Casting Couch.' It features Harvey Weinstein wearing a robe and holding an Oscar statue near his groin area.
The statue can be found in the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, by the Dolby Theater, which is also the same place where the 90th Academy Awards will be held. 
Plastic Jesus says the statute took 2 month

Hey, friend, have you heard the good word? About the blockchain?
No? It's this idea of a distributed ledger that can't be retroactively altered and will certainly revolutionize... oh, hm, I'm losing you, aren't I. That's totally OK! Thankfully, the good folks at the Blockstack Berlin conference are here to enlighten the uninitiated with totally brilliant stock art. 
SEE ALSO: Say hello to Buttcoin and the community celebrating Bitcoin's fall
Over the course of the March 2 conference the pre

Time's Up, the movement launched by more than 300 women in the entertainment industry to fight sexual harassment across all industries, is encouraging women to share their personal stories online this March.
In honor of Women's History Month, the campaign partnered with StoryCorps — a nonprofit working to document stories of Americans across the country — to launch an online community where women can come together to share their stories.
SEE ALSO: The Oscars have 'carved out' a momen

Twitter’s CEO has officially waved the white flag and called for outside help fixing the site’s toxicity. Specifically, he’s asked for help defining a metric of “conversational health” on Twitter. While it’s good to see Twitter attempt to find a system for controlling the behavior of its users, human beings are too complicated to be algorithmically guided into playing nice. It’s no secret that Twitter has, in recent months, been forced to face its epide

Most people think of smart bulbs when they think of connected lighting, but we’re now starting to see connected lighting applications outside the bulb. I brought a few different LED lights on Circuit Breaker Live this week to test: the Nanoleaf Aurora, Lifx Beam, and the C By GE Sol. Each of these is more of a design statement. I’ve previously reviewed the Sol and enjoyed my time with it. The circular ring of light ranges from a bright blue tint to a warmer yellow. It can’t ha

The deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last month isn't fading from the public eye — instead the students who survived the massacre are keeping the national conversation about gun violence and gun control going with rallies planned across the country later this month.
Large crowds are expected at the March 24 March For Our Lives rallies in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, so Lyft is offering free rides. The ride-hailing company's cofounders, John

Stars: they're just like us! And it looks like Game of Thrones couple Rose Leslie and Kit Harington take avoiding spoilers for the upcoming final season of the show as seriously as their biggest fans.
The lovebirds began their courtship on screen while Leslie was playing the fiery wildling Ygritte, who Harington's Jon Snow fell in love with in a very real way. Not even death could part these star-crossed lovers, though, since Harington proposed to her long after her character had died from an ar

The first VR experience based on author Brandon Sanderson’s popular Stormlight Archive series has arrived. The Way of Kings: Escape the Shattered Plains marks the first time that the books have been translated to a visual medium, giving fans the chance to put themselves in the shoes of one of the series’ main heroes, Kaladin Stormblessed, as well as get the chance to see what a possible film or TV show adaptation could look like further down the line.The Way of Kings: Escape the Sha

Rest easy, fellow humans; robots probably aren’t going to enslave or eliminate humans for at least another decade or so. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference last week, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt downplayed the popular doomsday scenario, stating: Everyone immediately then wants to talk about all the movie-inspired death scenarios, and I can confidently predict to you that they are one to two decades away. So let’s worry about them, but let’s worry about them in a while.

In a few years time the Droids from Star Wars are going to seem like relics. Today’s robots might be better suited for sewing clothes and building cars, but tomorrow’s could be as indispensable and ubiquitous as our smartphones are. A group of researchers in Europe recently published a white paper unveiling their experiments in teaching robots to anticipate human movements. The team’s work, to create “robots that can predict human actions and intent, and understand human

Samsung just released its new Oscars-themed ad for the recently announced Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus phones. The ad was directed by Dee Rees, who teamed up with her DP from Mudbound, Rachel Morrison.
The 60-second spot begins with two women deciding they want to make something using the phones, but they’re not sure where to start. A bunch of celebrities and influencers jump in to answer that question, often drawing from their own bodies of creative work.
Actress and director Issa Rae, for inst

This week, Google is expanding its “featured snippets,” the portion of text that is returned above a search result to give you quick answers without having to click through, as reported by TechCrunch.
In a blog post, Google explains it is adjusting this function because the questions we ask can be multifaceted and mean different things. For example, the terse, sample query “garden needs full sun?” could mean “what garden plants need full sun?” or “what

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for h

 The initial hype around bots — applications that run partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other AI tech to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done — may have waned a bit, but a startup building the equivalent for the enterprise world, in a fast-growing field called robotic process automation,… Read More

A big appeal of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One was its reverence toward the pop culture of the 1980s, from movies to video games. As the big-screen Steven Spielberg adaptation inches closer to theaters, the marketing masterminds at Warner Bros. have been tapping into that nostalgia with Easter egg-filled trailers, and now there’s an online arcade with a number of vintage games to play.Ready Player One takes place nearly 30 years in the future, where the real world has fallen

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 35 percent of US adults use Instagram — an increase of 7 percent from 2016. Other findings confirm most of what we’ve come to know of other social media platforms: Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter tend to be more popular among the young crowd, especially 18 to 24-year-olds. YouTube is the most popular online platform, used by 73 percent of all US adults and 94 percent of those ages 18 to 24. That means virtually all college-aged people con

Almost as quickly as it came together, Donald Trump’s video game summit seems to be falling apart.Last week, in the aftermath of the school shooting in Florida that killed 17, Trump held a meeting on school safety at the White House where he said, “We have to look at the internet, because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds, and their minds are being formed, and we have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it.

If you’re willing to switch to Sprint (or add a new line) to save on the iPhone X’s regular $1,000 asking price, the carrier is running a somewhat decent deal right now. People who sign up for the company’s Sprint Flex 18-month lease program will pay $20 per month for the base model iPhone X. Usually that recurring payment is $41.67.
Sprint claims this to be “the lowest price” among carriers, but that’s slightly deceptive. When Sprint says lease, it really me

Yesterday, Twitter issued a call for proposals to measure its “contribution to the overall health of the public conversation” so that it could help “encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking,” and discourage “abuse, spam and manipulation.” It’s the kind of high-minded request that you’d expect from a platform that presents itself as a powerful civic forum for the digital age. But measuring the “public conversation&r

Nintendo’s Pro Controller for the Switch is a solid gamepad, but it’s also a pretty expensive add-on. If you already have a Dual Shock 4 laying around, this tiny USB adapter might be a better (and cheaper) alternative. 8bitdo — a company best known for its aftermarket retro-style controllers — has just released a new device called the 8Bitdo Wireless USB Adapter. It’s available for $19.99, and it allows you to use a number of controllers with the Switch. It include

Netgear’s Arlo line of wire-free security cameras aren’t exactly the cheapest cameras on the market, but they’re super popular, cute to look at, filled with features, and now they’re getting Google Assistant support.
Once you add your Arlo cameras to the Google Home app (most of the Arlo line is supported), you can ask Google Assistant to pull up any of those camera feeds. You can stream the video to Google Assistant on iOS and Android, but the real fun is in the Chromec

The California Highway Patrol is using decoy buses in an attempt to catch the people responsible for shooting metal pellets at the charter buses that Apple and Google employees use, as reported by Fortune.
Since January, there have been 20 reported shootings at the company charter buses, with the weapon thought to be a BB gun. While no one has been injured, CHP Golden Gate division commander Ernest Sanchez tells ABC7 that “[The shooter has] damaged windows, they’ve dented the exteri

The Australian government is considering a bill that would make it illegal for ISPs to falsely advertise high internet speeds. Under the proposed legislation, lying about internet speeds would become a fineable offense that could cost ISPs that violate the law up to $1 million AUD.
Andrew Wilkie, a member of Parliament who introduced the bill this week, told Motherboard, “People are getting worse than dial-up speed when they’ve been promised a whizz-bang, super-fast connection.&rdqu

Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa has gone quiet today in an unintended, real world reproduction of the company’s Super Bowl ad. A regional outage impacting Amazon’s servers has led to Alexa becoming unresponsive on Echo products and other devices that support the assistant; I just tried a simple weather inquiry on the Echo Dot in my living room, and the signature blue ring stayed lit up for about 15 seconds without any answer. A tone eventually sounded, and Alexa said it had l

For a certain class of Oscar viewers, the Best Original Screenplay category has always been the one to watch. That’s where the best films end up — the movies too smart or creative to be fully appreciated by the broader Academy, and certainly not widely accepted enough to get into the Best Picture race. It’s the category for movies that challenge traditional notions of filmmaking. In the 1950s, it was where arthouse icons like Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Franço

For some people drawing comes naturally. But, if you’re anything like me, your stick figures look like misshapen horrors for whom death would surely be a relief. Enter Sketch AR: the AI-powered app that aims to make you a better artist regardless of your current skill. The idea is pretty simple: you draw a few plus-signs on a piece of paper, wall, or sleeping friend’s face and then point your smartphone’s camera at it. From there you can cycle through point-by-point lesso