Technology news

Two months into its existence, Blizzard’s ambitious Overwatch League has seen a lot of positives. Viewership numbers are strong, Blizzard has managed to court big-name sponsors like Toyota, and last month the Shanghai Dragons made Kim “Geguri” Se-Yeon the league’s first female player. But there’s one issue that keeps popping up: players exhibiting toxic behavior. Today, the league made its biggest statement about such behavior so far, doling out punishments to four

Netflix is testing out a new feature for children that lets them earn “patches” for watching episodes of certain shows. The new feature gamifies the streaming experience for kids, incentivizing them to watch particular shows that Netflix has picked out, as reported by Variety.
Shows that have been selected are marked with red locks (for some unclear reason) for users who have been included in the test. Netflix has chosen films and TV shows that are all Netflix Originals, including T

I’ve been bitten by the music production bug recently. The gear is so good these days, how could I fail to make something amazing? All I need is a $699 Roland TR-8S, a $1,349 Elektron Octatrack MKII, and maybe a $119 Arturia KeyStep, and then just a guitar and...
Well, now I’m poor.
For someone who has a setup they like but wants a novel way to tweak parameters with hand motions and maybe trigger a drum pad or two, the Wave wearable MIDI controller from Genki Instruments is an inter

Humans generate more data on Facebook in a single day than exists in all the books ever written combined. That’s not even counting Google Search trends, Amazon and Alibaba’s shopping insights, and Microsoft’s gleanings from having Windows installed on a gazillion devices. Data, unlike gold and oil, is a nearly unlimited resource. So why aren’t we getting paid for creating it? In return for this data — which provides the primary source of income for social networks

With about 2,000 accelerators worldwide, it’s really hard for startups to choose which programs to attend, if any. Especially when the differences are small, but the implications can be enormous. In May last year, I attended a completely new concept, the decelerator Menorca Millennials. Here’s what I learned. Exponential growth, daily active users, and the number of “18 hour-days” are often the main KPIs for building a successful startup. However being faster doesn&rsquo

Amazon is today giving Alexa perhaps its most useful update since its inception: You can now speak to the assistant without saying “Hey Alexa” for every single command. The feature, called Follow-Up Mode, simply allows Alexa to listen for another command for five seconds after your last request. That should make asking Alexa to perform several actions a lot less repetitive, although you still can’t use multiple commands in one sentence like you can with Google Assistant. You c

This week, the Florida Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act, a proposal for the state to stay in Daylight Savings Time all year round. That’s not happening, because the federal government controls time, but the people of Florida have the right idea. Daylight Savings Time begins this Sunday, but it should last in perpetuity, allowing us to live in a world of evening light.It’s easy to complain about losing an hour of sleep, and Daylight Savings is not popular. One 2014 poll foun

This week, the Florida Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act, a proposal for the state to stay in daylight saving time all year round. That’s not happening because the federal government controls time, but the people of Florida have the right idea. Daylight saving time begins this Sunday, but it should last in perpetuity, allowing us to live in a world of evening light.It’s easy to complain about losing an hour of sleep, and daylight saving is not popular. One 2014 poll found th

Facebook’s analytics company released a new app this week, which like many of their products, exists mainly to collect user data and package it up for Facebook.The app is called Bolt App Lock (currently available for free in the Google Play store) and it’s made by the same company behind the controversial VPN service Onavo Protect. The app was released on March 5th, as spotted by Tech Crunch today.
The Bolt App Lock lets you add additional security measures like PIN codes, fingerpri

Amazon has added a new feature for its Alexa voice assistant that you will let you make successive requests without needing to repeat your Echo speaker’s wake word, as noted today by CNET. Amazon is calling the new setting “follow-up mode,” and while it won’t let you nest one request into another, it will let you ask make multiple requests back to back. For instance, you won’t be able to ask Alexa to turn off the lights and change the temperature in the same breath

Martin Shkreli, who became infamous as the “pharma bro” CEO who massively hiked the price of an anti-parasite treatment, has been sentenced to seven years in prison on fraud charges unrelated to the price increase, according to CNBC.Shkreli’s defense team requested only about a year of imprisonment
While Shkreli’s defense team argued he should only receive a sentence of about a year, prosecutors had pushed for at least 15 years, saying Shkreli had not shown remorse for h

Motorola has put together an eclectic selection of Moto Mod accessories for its smartphones, ranging from an Alexa speaker to an instant camera. So it was probably only a matter of time until we arrived at this: a virtual reality headset, custom-built for the Moto Z line and its big, circular camera bump.
News of the upcoming headset was leaked today by VentureBeat reporter Evan Blass, who posted an image of the headset to Twitter. There are no further details yet, such as when it will be avail

Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time is a weird book — and that’s gloriously deliberate. It’s about a family where weirdness is the norm, the natural offshoot of scientific brilliance and wild creativity. But it’s also about how one member of that family struggles with her own awkwardness, unlikability, and temper, and how those faults become assets in a supernatural fight to save her family from a vast interplanetary evil.
The ne

eBay has a storewide 20 percent discount going on today, which also applies to some of the biggest electronics, including the Nintendo Switch. As spotted by Kinja Deals, by using the promo code PSPRING20, you can slash the price of a brand-new, factory-sealed Switch down to $224. (Update: while the original $224 listing has sold out, you can still get the Switch from other retailers for 20 percent off.)It’s probably the best deal on the usually full-price console we’ve seen yet.eBay

Google is opening the gates to something that should ultimately make the Google Assistant a lot more useful: it’ll now allow other companies to create custom commands when the Assistant is built into their products. So the manufacturer of a smart dishwasher that supports Google’s voice assistant could add a command to “start a hypercycle,” even though that’s not a universal feature found on other dishwashers.
Right now, devices with Assistant built in are limited t

Apple filed a patent made public yesterday for a keyboard that resists crumbs. The patent describes two different ways that a keyboard can keep dirt out, either by sealing gaps off or having a membrane beneath each key that would blow out air every time a key is pressed, pushing out unwanted debris.
From the figures shown in the patent, it’s clear that Apple is considering many different approaches and alternatives to create a crumb-resistant keyboard. The patent was filed on September 8t

British Airways is expanding its biometric identification gates to new airports in New York (JFK), Miami (MIA), and Orlando (MCO). These “biometric e-Gates,” which have been in a trial at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) since November 2017, use facial recognition to match flyers with their passport, visa, or immigration photos and can remove the need to show a boarding pass or identification when getting on a plane.Passengers still have to show identification and a boarding

Waymo is expanding the scope of its self-driving experiments, announcing Friday that its autonomous trucks would soon begin delivering freight for Google’s data centers in Atlanta. The trucks won’t be completely driverless, but will be operating on public roads during the pilot, the company said.Waymo is teaming up with sister company Google’s logistics team to “develop our technology and integrate it into the operations of shippers and carriers, with their network of fa

 Onavo, the data-security app maker Facebook acquired in 2013 in order gain insights into mobile user activity across apps, has quietly launched a new app aimed at Android users called Bolt App Lock. Instead of offering a VPN, Bolt App Lock is a tool that lets you lock down any app you don’t want others to be able to open, using a PIN code, pattern, or your fingerprint. Apps that help… Read More

Bose has announced at SXSW that it’s working on its own pair of augmented reality glasses, but not in the way that you’d think. Instead of superimposing data over the world visually, like Google Glass or Intel’s Vaunt glasses, Bose’s AR concept unsurprisingly focuses on audio, adding “audible layer of information and experiences” to the real world, according to a report from CNET.Bose isn’t just working on one pair of glasses, either. The company has bi

Facebook now has all the major music labels behind its recent initiative to use licensed music in videos posted by users on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Oculus.Warner Music Group today announced that it reached a deal with Facebook to add its artists to the mix, joining Universal Music Group and Sony / ATV Music Publishing. As with those earlier agreements, Warner’s stable of musicians and songwriters will earn royalties from fan-created videos featuring their work.The obv

Netflix released season 2 of the Marvel series Jessica Jones on March 8th (International Women’s Day), giving fans the chance to start their weekend binges early. But given that season 1 dropped back in 2015, viewers may need some refreshers before diving in. A lot has happened in Jessica Jones’ world since her debut, including a spinoff show for Jessica’s brief love interest Luke Cage, two more MCU series set in the same world (Iron Fist and The Punisher), and the miniseries

If you’ve kept even just a peripheral gaze aimed at the online gaming community over the last six months or so, you’ve likely seen the explosion in popularity of Fortnite Battle Royale. Epic Games’ cartoony and competitive survival shooter game took a core element of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds — 100 human players parachuting onto an island with an ever-shrinking battlefield — and turned into a worldwide phenomenon. Clips and highlights have inundated Insta