Technology news

Last month, Twitter announced a number of new rules on how users and apps can automate tweets in an effort to cut down on spam and bots that spread propaganda. The company says that users using multiple accounts can “amplify or inflate the prominence of certain tweets,” and according to BuzzFeed, it has just banned a number of accounts that were known for mass-retweeting or for copying and stealing tweets from other users.BuzzFeed says that a number of accounts — such as @dory

At SXSW 2018, I was invited to take part in a four-day immersive story experience called a “SimuLife.“ Mounted by the Austin-based creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, SimuLife is meant to blur the line between fantasy and reality by letting me interact with the story as part of daily life. It’s like David Fincher’s movie The Game, executed in the real world. Other than those broad edicts, I wasn’t given any advance information about the experience. I’m docume

Denmark has the best Lego things. The company opened its Lego House in the country this past year, and it sounds like an absolute dream. It’s filled with unique Lego concepts, like the Fish Designer, which lets visitors build fish out of Lego bricks, scan them, and then watch them live virtually in the space’s digital aquarium. Lego brought the experience stateside for the first time at SXSW this week, where I tested it out and made a fish. I discovered during this process that I do

Elon Musk’s surprise SXSW talk this morning was a heavy and grave affair, full of discussion around all the ways humanity may be doomed in the future: from carbon in the atmosphere, World War III, and above all, runaway artificial intelligence. We have, many times, listened to Musk warn the public about these threats. That’s why the SpaceX and Tesla CEO thinks there is such a strong need to colonize Mars and maybe the Moon — as a safety net for humanity.But here at SXSW &mdash

The station wagon is the vinyl record of the car industry. Rare, purist, and extremely cool when you find one, which means they are primed for a comeback.
So then it’s not shocking that the Buick Regal TourX I test drove stopped folks in New York traffic. It’s still an anomaly on public streets; GM told me only a few hundred have shipped. The first question everyone asked was, “What is it?” Turns out the Buick emblem on the hood, originally created in 1908 and among the o

Look, everything doesn’t need Wi-Fi. The prime example of this is a Wireless Mouse Trap Monitor that a company called Wakefield Technologies is trying to raise money for on Kickstarter.Here’s the premise: you have a mouse trap, but you don’t want to get up and check it. That’s it. You buy this trap monitor, and become even more sedentary. It’s a yellow box that looks like a cheese Lego, it lasts three months on a charge, and there’s an app that’s suppos

Marvel’s Black Panther is continuing its winning streak at the box office. This weekend, it crossed the $1 billion mark in its worldwide box-office totals, after beating out the four-day totals of Disney’s last big movie, Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Box Office Mojo says the latest installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the first to stay in the top box-office slot for four straight weeks. The film was helped by a solid debut in China this weekend, where it earned $66.5 million

Sony has made it a point to come to SXSW, the annual Austin-based tech and culture meet-up, every year with a warehouse full of weird gadgets, demos, games, and other interactive experiences. This year was no different, as Sony opened the doors yesterday on the Wow Factory, its name for the wide-ranging exhibit that blends art and technology borne from its experimental, Japan-based Future Lab program. The experiences in the Wow Factory tend to center on Sony’s display tech, specifically i

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is at SXSW in Austin, Texas this weekend. He stopped by HBO’s Westworld panel to show off a short film about the recent successful launch of the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, and today, he’ll host a Q&A at ACL Live. The talk will be livestreamed at SXSW’s site starting at 1PM ET.The event is called “Elon Musk Answers Your Questions!” No further details were given about moderators or a question-submission process, so this co

The first thing you do in Chuchel, a new comedic adventure game, is feed a green blob in a top hat some water. Give it enough, and it will spew out liquid like a faucet, right into the mouth of a strange fuzzy orange ball. The ball, in turn, will get so rotund that it will roll directly onto the game’s lead character, who has been idly dozing in a cardboard box the whole time but finally awakens. This is far from the strangest moment in the game.
Chuchel is the latest release from Czech d

Making a tie-in video game for Ready Player One fans seems like a maddening task.
After all, what does it mean to be a fan of Ready Player One, a piece of pop culture designed as a wrapper for other, often better pop culture? Does it mean being invested in the journey of digital treasure hunter Wade Watts and his effort to protect the virtual reality world known as OASIS? Or is it more about enjoying its mashup of reference points, like DeLoreans, WarGames, and Rush?
If it’s the latter, f

Sheldon County is a podcast that will never sound the same twice. Every time someone listens to it, they’ll begin by typing a random number into a website. This “seed” will set in motion a Rube Goldberg machine of calculation that will create characters, relationships, jealousies, betrayals, and maybe even a murder or two. These plot points will be turned into a text narrative, read aloud by a voice synthesizer, and then zipped up into an audio file. Each time it will be a uni

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernie Cline’s science fiction novel Ready Player One is due to hit theaters on March 29th, but synthwave band GUNSHIP beat him to the punch with the video to their latest single, “Art3mis & Parzival”.Opening with a short explanation for the world, the song is about the relationship between the book’s two characters, Wade Watts (Parzival) and Samantha Cook (Art3mis), and their lives in the OASIS. The band released a video for the

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 SXSW Film Festival.
As the producer of the recent Oscar winner Get Out and essentially every lauded horror movie of the last five years, Blumhouse founder Jason Blum is one of the biggest names at South By Southwest this year. Friday night, he dropped in on the midnight premiere of an untitled Blumhouse and Bazelevs co-production and took se

After the premiere of A Quiet Place at SXSW, the film’s director, John Krasinski, explained that he picked up the script after a simple pitch: “What if it’s a family, and they can’t make noise, and you have to figure out why?” This explanation goes a long way toward illustrating A Quiet Place’s goals. The film hits all the necessary beats for a straightforward horror film in an eerie post-apocalyptic setting. But it’s more effective as a portrait of fou

Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time hit theaters yesterday, and while the film hasn’t gotten the best of reviews, it’s a classic novel that’s been inspiring readers in the 56 years since it was released. A couple of years ago, British publisher Folio Society published its own edition, complete with original artwork from Sam Richwood and an introduction from author Meg Rosoff.Like the other editions that the publisher has produce

In 2016, China announced that its first human station, Tiangong-1, would make an uncontrolled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, and given the module’s large size and density, some big pieces might survive all the way to the ground. It’s predictably garnered a lot of attention, and the panic just won’t go away.
Of course, there have been the standard frantic articles about the “doomed” station “spiraling out of control.” Some stories have insinuated

Attendees of the the Westworld panel at SXSW got a surprise visit from Elon Musk.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO used the panel to not only inspire a new generation on space exploration, but also drop two epic highlight reels of the Falcon Heavy rocket launch that carried Starman riding in a Tesla Roadster into deep space.
SEE ALSO: At SXSW, Sony's putting people in digital hamster balls
"Life cannot just be about solving one miserable problem after another," Musk said. "That cannot be the only thing.

A surprise guest joined the cast and creators of HBO’s Westworld at the end of the show’s SXSW panel on Saturday. SpaceX founder Elon Musk, a friend of show creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, appeared as a way to end the panel on a note of “optimism”, in Nolan’s words, while also showing the audience an inspirational trailer that Nolan created promoting the February launch of the SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket.
“One of the things that I really used to, when I

Every year at SXSW in Austin, TX, Sony shows off a bunch of experimental projects. This year, the company introduced its Superception Head Light system, which is basically a helmet with a Sony MP-CL1 projector sticking out the front and attached Sony MDR-XB950 headphones on the side. Someone at Sony just strapped a bunch of devices together and attached a HTC Vive tracker to the back so that wearers can move around the room while the projection follows their movements.Sony says the device is su

A machine baked me bread today, and it was delicious. BreadBot attempts to automate bread-making in order to bring fresh loaves to massive grocers, like Walmart and Kroger. The team behind it, Wilkinson Baking Company, has worked on developing a prototype for 10 years, and now, finally, it’s debuting the device at SXSW in Austin, Texas this week.
The bot mixes, kneads, rolls out, and bakes fresh loaves of bread. One loaf takes about 90 minutes from start to finish and the machine rolls ou

Microsoft is adding support for AMD’s FreeSync displays to its Xbox One X and Xbox One S consoles soon. The upcoming Xbox spring update already includes 1440p support on the Xbox One S and Xbox One X for monitors, but the addition of FreeSync will allow compatible displays to sync refresh rates with Microsoft’s consoles.
FreeSync, like Nvidia’s G-Sync, helps remove tearing or stuttering usually associated with gaming on monitors, as the technology syncs refresh rates to ensure

Zoos are giving animals Amazon-esque species ratings, and it's honestly kind of great.
The trend started Friday with the Oregon Zoo in a tweet hashtagged #rateaspecies. Other animal conservancies got in on the fun – including aquariums – providing informative ratings for people looking to, er, buy the products.
SEE ALSO: We're calling 'fake news' on the report that 'Black Panther' caused a surge in black cat adoptions⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ FI