Technology news

Netflix has decided “not to move forward” with gamifying children’s shows, the company announced today. Previously, Netflix had been testing out a new feature for children that let them earn “patches” for watching episodes of certain shows. The feature was meant to incentivize kids to watch select Netflix Originals.
Netflix said in a statement today to The Verge: “We’ve concluded the test for patches and have decided not to move forward with the feature

Facebook may not be the only competitor Snap needs to worry about. 
Twitter is reportedly working on a new Snapchat Discover-like feature that emphasizes photos and videos tied to specific events, according to CNBC.
SEE ALSO: Twitter is working to expand its verification to everyone
The news follows an earlier report from Bloomberg that Twitter was working on a Snapchat-like camera feature.
Details are scarce, and CNBC notes that the feature may never end up seeing the light of day, but the

TypingDNA has a new approach to verifying your identity based on how you type.
The startup, which is part of the current class at Techstars NYC, is pitching this as an alternative to two-factor authentication — namely, the security feature that sends unique codes to a separate device (usually your phone) to make sure someone else isn’t logging in with your password.
The problem with two factor? TypingDNARaul Popa put it simply: “It’s a bad user experience … Nobody

Tech companies like Facebook and Google, have recently announced that they’re banning ads for digital currencies. It turns out that Reddit has been banning cryptocurrency ads since early 2016, but just never announced it outright in a press release, as first spotted by Motherboard. Today, Reddit extended its policy, to block cryptocurrency-related Google cached ads as well.
The banning might seem odd, given that Reddit is a burgeoning platform for cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and given its

Lyft is teaming up with Magna, a major automotive supplier, to build and deploy self-driving cars. It’s another example of the ride-hailing company hedging its bets by partnering with a wide array of automakers, suppliers, and tech startups as it seeks to make autonomous vehicles available on its app-based platform.Magna, a Tier 1 auto parts producer, will be investing $200 million in Lyft as the two companies embark on a multi-year partnership to develop self-driving systems that can be

The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of Firefox today that can prevent some websites from asking to send notifications to your device, as reported by Ars Technica. In addition, this version of Firefox — release number 59 — also stops some sites from accessing your device’s camera, microphone, and location unexpectedly.
The new feature prevents your notification center from getting cluttered with piles of news stories from various sites. When turned on, all website

Toys R Us is closing or selling all of its over 800 remaining US stores, according to a report from the Washington Post, signaling an end of an era for the famous toy store. The news was apparently announced to workers today by CEO David Brandon ahead of a bankruptcy court hearing on March 15th.In a later conference call with staff, Brandon apparently pinned the blame on vendors and customers who failed to support Toys R Us during the holiday season — typically the busiest and most lucrat

As anybody who watches Netflix's new Queer Eye will tell you, the Fab 5 are miracle workers.
Antoni (food and wine), Bobby (home), Jonathan (hair and grooming), Karamo (culture), and Tan (clothes) take people from all walks of life and glow 👏 up 👏 their 👏 whole 👏 damn 👏 existence. 👏
SEE ALSO: Forget the cooking — how come Antoni smells weird sh*t in each episode of Queer Eye?
The question is: How do you re-create that experience for your

Spotify is testing a voice search feature that lets users more quickly access their favorite artists, tracks, albums, and playlists. The feature, which appears based on a 2017 experiment involving a “driving mode,” has begun appearing inside the iOS app for a small number of users. I got early access to the test and tested out the feature set. In short, it’s an excellent step forward for navigation in app that has historically required too much tapping and typing to get where

Now Spotifylistens to you instead of the other way around. Spotify has a new voice search interface that lets you say “Play my Discover Weekly,” “Show Calvin Harris” or “Play some upbeat pop” to pull up music.
A Spotify spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that this is “Just a test for now,” as only a small subset of users have access currently, but the company noted there would be more details to share later. The test was first spotted by Hun

Google has begun experimenting with using light field photography to capture more realistic virtual reality scenes, the company announced in a blog post today. A new demo app was also released that will be available on the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets to show off what the company’s VR team has captured.
Light field photography was made popular by futuristic camera company Lytro. Instead of only capturing the light that comes straight in through a camera’

WhatsApp has agreed to stop sharing data with Facebook (its parent company) until the two companies can do so in a way that complies with the EU’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to a report from TechCrunch.
The news comes after the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded an investigation into the two companies to determine whether or not WhatsApp could legally share users’ data with Facebook under UK laws. The ICO report dete

Tech billionaire Elon Musk may now be entering the media industry — or he may be joking about entering the media industry, or maybe he’s just joking about the name of the new media company he’s created. Or maybe it’s all true.On Wednesday, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla tweeted “Thud!” with no context, leading many to speculate for hours that it was just one of Musk’s now-signature idiosyncratic Twitter moments. Then, later on in the afternoon, Musk elabor

It's no secret that Siri is way behind other voice assistants like the Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa when it comes to comprehension and total number of skills. 
Apple has drastically improved Siri over the years, adding new features and upgrading its voice to sound more human-like, but its ongoing shortcomings really revealed themselves in the recent launch of the HomePod, the company's first product that's almost entirely controlled by the voice assistant.
So how did Apple screw up S

Barack Obama has filled out his brackets, people, which means March Madness may now officially begin.
On Wednesday, the former POTUS, basketball fan, and Cool Dad of America™ carried out the very important tradition of sharing his NCAA Men's and Women's Basketball Tournament brackets to his 101 million Twitter followers.
"Just because I have more time to watch games doesn't mean my picks will be better," Obama joked, probably recalling last year's brackets, which were ruthlessly dissected

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning was released from prison less than a year ago, after being arrested in 2010 for leaking military secrets. Since then, Manning has filed to run for the US Senate in Maryland, campaigning on a platform of prison abolition, healthcare expansion, and open immigration. She’s also a critic of digital surveillance. At SXSW this week, she condemned the way that ubiquitous data collection and powerful algorithms have expanded into more parts of American life, asking s

Lyftis partnering with Magna,one of the largest tier-one automotive industry suppliers in the world, on autonomous vehicle technology. Lyft CEO and co-founder Logan Greenexplained that this will help them get their self-driving tech into various automaker vehicles around the world. Lyft will be working directly with Magna on “co-developing” an autonomous driving system, with collaborative teams from both companies working on the project.
Magna is also investing $200 million in L

The European Union may soon require Google and other search engines to provide more information on their ranking algorithms and create a complaint process for those who believed they were unfairly demoted, according to the Financial Times. The requirements, featured in an unreleased proposal, are reportedly designed to level the playing field between tech giants and other businesses, which the agency believes might otherwise fear standing up to them.
The European Commission has been planning to

You’re probably familiar with quizzes from online publishers like BuzzFeed. But what if a quiz could actually help you sort through tough decisions and complex topics, not just which Sex and the City character or Disney princess you most closely resemble?
That’s basically what Y Combinator -backed startup called Delphia is promising. CEO Clifton van der Linden said the company works with publishers to create applications that help their readers make decisions.
Van der Linden is a Ph.

Naeem Ishaqis leaving his role as chief financial officer of bulk e-commerce company Boxed.
Ishaq joined Boxed in 2016, following a stint as head of finance, strategy and risk at Square. A Boxedspokesperson confirmed Ishaq’s departure, and sent the following statement from CEO Chieh Huang:
Naeem is a world-class financial talent. Over the last two years, he has been indispensable in helping build and grow Boxed to what it is today. We will miss his energy, focus and enthusiasm for our comp

Robots can already complete a wide variety of tasks for their human overlords, but they may soon be about to conquer the final frontier: making pizzas.
As first reported by ZDNet, Little Caesars has received a new patent for an "automated pizza assembly system," or what is essentially a robot that makes pizza.
SEE ALSO: Pizza Hut vs. Domino's vs. Papa John's: Trash Pizza, ranked
The patent describes it as "a robot including a stationary base and an articulating arm having a gripper attached to t

United Airlines can't seem to get things right when it comes to pets on their flights.
Per the Guardian, a German shepherd named Irgo bound for Kansas City, Mo. was accidentally sent to Japan on Tuesday evening. When his family went to the airport to pick him up, they were presented with a great dane instead. 
Apparently, it was the great dane, not Irgo the German shepherd, that was supposed to be sent to Japan.
United issued the following statement to Mashable, and noted that the mixup occ

YouTubehas a plan to combat the abundant conspiracy theories that feature in credulous videos on its platform; not a very good plan, but a plan just the same. It’s using information drawn from Wikipedia relevant to some of the more popular conspiracy theories, and putting that info front and center on videos that dabble in… creative historical re-imaginings.
The plan is being criticized from a number of quarters (including this one) for essentially sloughing responsibility abou

Producers for The Crown admit that Claire Foy was paid less than her male counterpart... despite having more screen time and playing the title character.
This is just the latest in a wave of salary discrepancies in Hollywood. While many argue Matt Smith was paid more due to his initial fame from portraying the Eleventh Doctor in the Doctor Who series, many are curious as to why this pay gap was still the case in season 2.    Read more...More about Entertainment, Netflix, Mashable Video

At SXSW yesterday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that the platform would start adding information from Wikipedia to conspiracy-related videos within the next few weeks. “We will show a companion unit of information from Wikipedia showing that here is information about the event,” she said. The company is “using a list of well-known internet conspiracies from Wikipedia” to pull from. However, YouTube appears to have left one party in the dark: “We were not gi

An experiment carried out at One Tree Island in Australia's Great Barrier Reef offers a stark warning of the growing risks that corals face as the oceans become more acidic with time. Ocean acidification due to the burning of fossil fuels could pose a severe risk to the integrity of these marine structures, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
For the study, marine scientists pumped carbon dioxide-infused seawater across a patch of Australia's Great Barrier Reef to sim

Reddit has announced it is launching native promoted posts in its mobile apps, as reported by Marketing Land. The in-app promoted posts will behave like a standard Reddit post, and will be available as early as next week.
In an email to advertisers, Reddit said that the app now accounts for 41 percent of all time spent on Reddit, with 330 million monthly users accessing the site via mobile devices. Of these users, those who are logged in spend 30 percent more time per day on the site than those

In honor of Pi Day, Chaim Gartenberg and I cooked up a tiny little Raspberry Pi project for yesterday’s episode of Circuit Breaker Live.
We started with a simple concept: a button that says “Why?” when you press it, in honor of our favorite podcast. So we knew we’d need a button, some sound files, a little bit of Python code, and, of course, a Raspberry Pi.
A new Pi is $35, but we found an old Raspberry Pi 2 in my desk drawer, which was up to the task. (Newer Pis have bu

Heads up: All products featured here are selected by Mashable's commerce team and meet our rigorous standards for awesomeness. If you buy something, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.
Identity theft is one of the most pervasive crimes of the 21st century – affecting millions of Americans each year. 
In fact, in 2016 fraudsters were able to make off with $16 billion from more than 15 million victims in the US alone, according to a study by New Javelin Strategy and Research.&nbs

Google’s Pixel phone has one hell of a camera, and one of the reasons for this is AI. Google has used its machine learning talent to squeeze better shots and shooting modes out of a tiny smartphone lens. And now, the company is open-sourcing one of these AI tools — a piece of software that underpins the Pixel’s portrait mode.As announced in a blog post earlier this week, Google has open-sourced a lump of code name DeepLab-v3+. This is an image segmentation tool built using con

Advancements in AI technology have paved the way for breakthroughs in speech recognition, natural language processing and machine translation. A new startup called Voicery now wants to leverage those same advancements to improve speech synthesis, too. The result is a fast, flexible speech engine that sounds more human — and less like a robot. Its machine voices can then be used anywhere a synthesized voice is needed — including in new applications, like automatically generated audiob

The NRA had a pretty tactless response to the National School Walkout on Wednesday. 
March 14 marks one month since the tragic mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. that left 17 people dead, and students nationwide are walking out of classes to honor those who died and protest gun violence.  
On a day being used to remember children killed by an AR-15, the National Rifle Association, a pro-gun lobbying group, tweeted a photo of an AR-15 with the caption, "I'll control my own guns, thank you.

For how massive Reddit is in terms of user base, it’s really gotten by for a long time having a product that advanced about as quickly as Drudge Report. That’s been changing lately, as the company has looked to mature their platform with user-centric features that make surfing content easier and keep everything a bit more connected.
The company didn’t raise $200 million from top investors just because they thought the company could deliver memes more beautifully. The company ha

Equifax's former chief information officer has been indicted for insider trading, making him the first executive to face criminal charges following the company's massive data breach that exposed the personal data of more than 145 million Americans.
Jun Ying, who was the company's CIO at the time the company was hacked last summer, will be arraigned in federal court this week on charges of insider trading, according to the Department of Justice.
SEE ALSO: The utter stupidity of the Equifax breach

Stephen Hawking's computer-generated voice is so iconic that it's trademarked — The filmmakers behind The Theory of Everything had to get Hawking's personal permission to use the voice in his biopic.
But that voice has an interesting origin story of its own.
SEE ALSO: The world reacts to the death of the much-loved Stephen Hawking
Back in the '80s, when Hawking was first exploring text-to-speech communication options after he lost the power of speech, a pioneer in computer-generated speech

On March 4th, former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious in Salisbury, England. They were the victims of an apparent poisoning. The poison was identified this week as a nerve agent called Novichok, part of a group of chemical weapons said to be extremely potent that we know very little about.Even before the lab results were out, it looked like the Skripals were the victims of a nerve agent: Yulia Skripal was unconscious, seizing, vomiting, and had l

Microsoft is beginning to roll out its new Outlook.com design to all users in the coming weeks. The redesigned Outlook.com first entered into beta back in August, and Microsoft also recently started testing UI and feature improvements to the calendar and people sections of the mail service. The new design for mail inside Outlook.com will now be standard for all users in the coming weeks, with no need to toggle the beta mode on.
All Outlook.com users will also be able to opt-in to try out Micros

After Stephen Hawking earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge in 1965, the celebrated theoretical physicist went on to do his finest work in roles throughout the university, including as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics between 1979 and 2009. 
In the wake of his passing, Cambridge University shared an affecting tribute to Hawking featuring, per its video description, the physicist's remarks from his 75th birthday party last year.  Read more...
More about Stephen Hawking, Culture, Space, and Web

Walmart is the latest retail company to step up its home delivery game for online grocery orders. On Wednesday, the Arkansas-based big-box chain said it would expand its online grocery delivery to more than 100 metro areas across the US by the end of the year, up from six markets now.Additionally, the service that allows customers to order groceries online and have them ready to be picked up at the store will be expanded to 2,200 stores this year, up from 1,200 now. Walmart is leveraging its va

Former Equifaxexec Jun Ying has been charged with insider trading, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ying is accused of knowing that Equifax had been hacked and selling company shares before the public was notified.
Ying, who was “next in line to the be company’s global CIO, allegedly used confidential information entrusted to him by the company to conclude that Equifax had suffered a serious breach,” says the SEC release. He sold $1 million in shar

Lighting can make or break the right photo — when it comes to static environments inside virtual reality that users can move around in, this becomes exponentially more true.
Today, Googlereleased a new app for VR devices focused on helping users make sense of “light fields.” They’ve also got a blog post running down some of the research work they’re doing.
Light fields — in a practical sense — are basically different perspectives of a point in space base

It's 2018, and the No. 1 issue I have with the multitude of Apple products I own is not how fast they work or how well they're built: it's the fact that they all come with the wrong connectors. 
This seemed like a temporary problem, or one that could get fixed by throwing money at new peripherals, accessories, and yes, more dongles. But it didn't — it just keeps getting worse. 
SEE ALSO: Does the Size of Your Dongle Matter?
Here's a sample of what I'm dealing with. My iPhone X do