Technology news

YouTube will add information from Wikipedia to videos about popular conspiracy theories to provide alternative viewpoints on controversial subjects, its CEO said today. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said that these text boxes, which the company is calling “information cues,” would begin appearing on conspiracy-related videos within the next couple of weeks.Wojcicki, who spoke Tuesday evening at a panel at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, showed examples of informa

Chinese reporter Liang Xiangyi eye-rolled during another reporter’s long-winded question at the National People’s Congress yesterday and the moment has gone viral. Many Chinese residents have created dozens of videos, GIFs, memes, and illustrations inspired by the scene, having identified with Liang’s frustration. (Since Liang dressed in blue and the other reporter dressed in red, the moment has also birthed blue and red memes.)
Chinese state-run media has responded by censori

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 Interactive Festival.
Leigh Whannell’s Blumhouse collaboration Upgrade premiered at SXSW in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Whannell is the Australian director best known for writing the first three installments of the Saw franchise and all four Insidious movies, so his expertise has long been megaplex horror and critical disdain

It’s been more than a year since Amazon first tapped into Twitch’s customer base with perks to improve their experience. Now, the online giant will start offering free games from their archives for Prime customers to keep.Twitch announced Tuesday that, starting on Thursday, those customers would get a pair of free games, Superhot and Oxenfree. Starting on April 1st, new titles will be released, such as Tales from the Borderlands and SteamWorld Dig 2. This is the first time Amazon an

Google Assistant’s routines are rolling out now. Google initially announced it was following the footsteps of Amazon and adding multistep smart home routines last October. They allow you to take several actions (toggling lights, changing the thermostat, etc.) with a single voice command. Google gave more details last month when it teased the approaching launch of routines in the US. Today, Google Assistant’s support page for the routines went live, revealing there would be six routi

If you tried to share a New York Daily News article about police brutality on Facebook today, you may have run into trouble. The article was blocked from sharing on Facebook for much of the afternoon, with some users receiving a message that the content had been blocked because it “includes content that other people have reported as abusive.”
The Verge confirmed the block shortly after noon ET. Facebook prevented the article from being scraped by the company’s link tools, and

Google and LG are set to present an 18-megapixel 4.3-inch OLED headset display with 1443 ppi and a higher refresh rate of 120Hz during the Display Week 2018 trade show in late May. The display will have a wide field of view and high acuity. The advanced program for the expo was spotted by Android Police via OLED-Info.
Those specs make the forthcoming headset better than most of what’s on the market. Screens like the new HTC Vive Pro and Oculus Rift only boast total resolutions of 2880 x 1

Whistleblower, activist, and Senate candidate Chelsea Manning spoke extensively at SXSW about the dangers of unchecked data collection and misplaced trust in algorithms. “The algorithms that I worked on in Iraq have found their way into policing, and also into the way the corporate world works, whether it’s your credit report or advertising data,” said Manning, who was released from prison last May after former President Barack Obama commuted her 35-year sentence for leaking c

Following Ikea’s acquisition of TaskRabbit last year, the furniture company is introducing an assembly service to some of its US stores. Ikea said Tuesday it will start lining up “taskers” from the contract labor service with customers who don’t want to assemble the company’s furniture (or want to preserve a little of their sanity after putting a bookcase together). When you purchase items in the store or online, Ikea will be able to book an appointment as soon as

Despite the fact that so much of our communication now happens online, TV and film have traditionally done a bad job of translating our texts, emails, and DMs to the screen. There are a lot of good reasons why: text communication doesn’t have the inherent drama of face-to-face dialogue. It dates itself quickly. And, as Tony Zhou pointed out in his video “A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film” on Vimeo, dedicating precious screen time to depicting, well, another scre

Android Oreo 8.1 is now out on the Essential Phone, the company announced on Twitter today. Essential Phone users just have to check their phones and download the update. Android Oreo 8.1 had previously been out on beta for Essential beta testers. Essential has said that it was skipping a release of Android 8.0 because of “several stability issues.”The new version of Oreo includes a faster start up and sign in, smart text selection, instant apps, and the ability to play a windowed v

Google is now adding captions to image results in an effort to give images more context. Image captions are set to roll out globally this week on the Google app on Android and iOS, and in mobile web browsers. There’s no word yet on whether the feature will roll out to desktop browsers, which have a slightly different look than mobile web browsers.
Now when you Google search for images, each image will have a caption in bold. The captions will be the titles of the web page where each image

Going to space did change the bodies of the first US astronauts — but it was more linked to the long time they spent wearing uncomfortable space suits than the time they spent in zero gravity, according to new research.The US sent humans into space for the first time during Project Mercury, whose six flights spanned 1961 to 1963. Before and after the flights — which ranged from 15 minutes to 34 hours — astronauts were tested for heart rate and activity, body temperature, urina

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 documenting my journ

The workout social network Strava is still attempting to respond to privacy oversights that led to the exposure of military bases around the world earlier this year. The company announced multiple changes to its heat map today, including the restriction of data viewing to anyone but registered users. The heat map also won’t display routes with little activity and will only populate once several different users have worked out in the area. The map will also refresh monthly to clear any dat

General Motors is preparing to launch its own peer-to-peer car-sharing service this summer, according to Bloomberg. Car owners can list and rent out their own personal cars when they aren’t using them, much like Airbnb users do with their homes and apartments. It’s another sign of the auto industry exploring new ventures as it seeks to insulate itself from changes in vehicle ownership models.The new peer-to-peer rental service would most likely be launched by Maven, GM’s car-s

SmartThings, the Samsung-owned home platform, has been down for nearly a full day, which is frustrating for those who have smart home appliances that rely on the service.
The platform has just issued an announcement: “The issues impacting North American users have been largely addressed and we are seeing improvements to app loading and device control. Our teams are continuing to work on restoring full functionality and will provide an update when available.”
At 2PM ET yesterday, Sma

SmartThings, the Samsung-owned home platform, has been down for nearly a full day, which is frustrating for those who have smart home appliances that rely on the service.
The platform has just issued an announcement: “The issues impacting North American users have been largely addressed and we are seeing improvements to app loading and device control. Our teams are continuing to work on restoring full functionality and will provide an update when available.”
At 2PM ET yesterday, Sma

Google added its Assistant to the iPhone last year, effectively giving a consolation prize to those who use both it and Apple’s devices. But on Tuesday, Google gave Apple users another token: Assistant on the iPad.According to the company, Assistant on the iPad does what Assistant for the iPhone can do, which is essentially a more limited range of functions than on an Android device. But Google says it can still do things such as “dim the lights,” cast to your TV, text, or mak

Magenta, Google’s research project that looks at how AI can help people be more creative, just released an open source experimental instrument called NSynth Super. NSynth Super utilizes Magenta’s NSynth, Google’s neural network that generates sounds, and directions for building your own NSynth Super are available on Github.
The NSynth Super is a piece of hardware that brings the NSynth technology to life. As Douglas Eck, research scientist on the Google Brain team, says in the

I think most of us would agree that Samsung’s claim that the Galaxy S9 “reinvents” the smartphone camera is some major hyperbole. But for now the S9 stands alone as the only flagship with a variable aperture camera, so the new feature is getting a lot of interest. We already covered a teardown from iFixit, but another posted today by Jerry Rig Everything gives a much closer look at the mechanics of those aperture blades.
Once Zack pries open the S9 and gets down to the camera

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference will be held in June this year. Apple is planning to return to San Jose again in 2018, between June 4th and June 8th this time around. Developers can apply for tickets now through March 22 at 10AM PT / 1PM ET through Apple’s WWDC site, and tickets will be issued randomly by March 23rd.
Last year’s event was packed with announcements, including the HomePod, a new iMac Pro, iOS 11, a 10.5-inch iPad Pro, macOS High Sierra, watchOS 4,

It’s a seller’s market for domains suggestive of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains. The domain name Tokens.com sold for $500,000 in February. Cryptoworld.com sold for $195,000 in January. Eth.com sold for $2 million at the end of 2017. Blockchain.us wants $3.45 million, and Ethereum.com is asking for $10 million. In this climate, a domain like Crypto.com is likely worth millions of dollars. But Matt Blaze, who has owned it since 1993, isn’t selling.
“No, my doma

My name’s Ed Zitron and I used to be a spy until- “Bitcoin has crashed to $0, you’re blacklisted” *Sam Axe whistles*. Volume down So yesterday I wrote almost an entire 450 words about this piece, then my browser crashed and I basically had to throw up my hands and say “no newsletter today” because everything sucks. But it’s an important piece in which a guy called Sylvain Ribes accidentally happened upon major exchanges potentially faking their volume.

Amazon is introducing a neat little offer for Echo users who’ve been considering listening to audiobooks. Starting this week, people new to Audible can listen to an entire book for free via their Echo devices. All you need to do is ask “Alexa, read me ____” and the assistant will start playing the title, no sign-up required. Naturally, the hope is that users will be hooked into the service, but it’s still a welcome addition. There are two caveats. First, you need to be c

Regardless of how you feel about the notch, just about every phone manufacturer has decided they’re cool — apparently even to the point of highlighting the design flair in advertisements. Oppo has started teasing its forthcoming F7 smartphone that’s headed for India, and all of its teasers make a point of drawing attention to its cutout along the top edge.
This shouldn’t be too surprising. At Mobile World Congress last month, iPhone X clones that mimicked Apple’s d

The first trailer for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is here, giving fans a look at what to expect when they journey back to the world of 2016’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them when the sequel to the Harry Potter prequel hits theaters.
Making a return is Eddie Redmayne’s magical zoologist Newt Scamander. He was last seen in New York, tracking down some of his escaped fantastic beasts before getting embroiled in a larger plot with the infamous dark wizard Grindel

Recently, Waymo began inviting members of its Early Rider program in Phoenix to take trips in its fully driverless minivans. These are normal people who signed up back in 2017 to serve as guinea pigs for the Google spinoff’s experiments in self-driving transportation. And, as you can see in this new video released Tuesday, the experience is equal parts thrilling and boring.In the video, the passengers giggle nervously at the sight of an empty driver’s seat, wondering aloud whether p

Ever since YouTube introduced the dark theme to its website last year, we’ve been wondering when it would hit mobile. Fret no more ninjas, goths, and other creatures of darkness – the feature is rolling out today to iOS, while it’ll arrive for Android “soon.” Aesthetic preferences aside, Dark Theme is a lot easier on the eyes when browsing videos in a dimly lit or dark room. It also conserves battery on OLED displays, though it would’ve been nice to have an a