Technology news

When we wrote about gaming startup Kahoot passing significant milestones of 70 million users on 51 million educational quizzes in January, we mentioned that the Oslo, Norway-based startup was closing another round of funding. Now, that has come to pass: Kahoot has announced that it has raised $17 million, at a valuation that sources close to the company confirm to us is $100 million.
The funding comes after a change in leadership and strategic direction for the company: its American CEO Eri

Paid Content by Wendy's The Mashable House is back! And as expected, it’s a must-see experience for SXSW attendees.
Every year people flock to the Mashable house for the most entertaining, memorable, and Instagrammable experiences of the internet, IRL. And thanks to Wendy’s, this year was no different."Keep it Fresh, Not Frozen" PhotoBoothFrom day one (49 years ago, to be exact) Wendy’s has believed in serving fresh, never frozen beef on every burger. Every day. Something the o

L’Oreal announced today that it has acquired Modiface, a company that’s had a hand in the creation of many custom augmented reality beauty apps, including those from Sephora and Estée Lauder. L’Oreal didn’t disclose the amount spent, but it did tell Reuters that it now owns Modiface’s numerous patents that help users visualize makeup and hairstyles on themselves. The partnership makes sense in that Modiface has already worked with L’Oreal multiple time

Botnets are fascinating to me. Who creates them? What are they for? And why doesn’t someone delete them? The answers are probably less interesting than I hope, but in the meantime I like to cheer when large populations of bots are exposed. That’s what security outfit F-Secure’sAndy Patel did this week after having his curiosity piqued by a handful of strange likes on Twitter .
Curious about the origin of this little cluster of random likes, which he just happened to see roll in

Zuora,which helps businesses handle subscription billing and forecasting, filed for an initial public offering this afternoon following on the heels of Dropbox’sfiling earlier this month.
Zuora’s IPO may signal that Dropbox going public, and seeing a price range that while under its previous valuation seems relatively reasonable, may open the door for coming enterprise initial public offerings. Cloud security company Zscaler also made its debut earlier this week, with the stock doubl

If you blink during Apple’s latest iPhone ad, you might miss a weird little animation bug. It’s right at the end of a slickly produced commercial, where the text from an iMessage escapes the animated bubble it’s supposed to stay inside. It’s a minor issue and easy to brush off, but the fact it’s captured in such a high profile ad just further highlights Apple’s many bugs in iOS 11.
9to5Mac writer Benjamin Mayo spotted the bug in Apple’s latest ad, and h

Over the years, human drivers have gotten pretty good at communicating intent to the people around them. A little wave of the hand, a nod, maybe some eye contact, and that’s usually all it takes to let pedestrians, bicyclists, and other drivers know what they’re doing. And, if all else fails, we can lean on our horns or roll down our windows and speak our minds (sometimes colorfully). But what happens when you remove the human from the driver’s seat? How will the cars of the f

It was a big debut for enterprise cloud security company Zscaler,which saw its shares skyrocket 106% on its first day of trading. After pricing at $16, shares opened at $27.50, and closed at $34.
This was also well above the original expected price range for its IPO of $10 to $12. The company ultimately raised $192 million. In other words, there was significantly better-than-expected demand for Zscaler.
But not everyone likes a big pop. This means the company could have technically sol

The Tingles team has not done much in the way of promotion, but the app has already built a fairly sizable following in its community. That’s one of the nice things about a targeted product — it spreads fast.In the year since Slovenian co-founders Gasper Kolenc and Miha Mlakar launched, the service has focused almost exclusively on ASMR — autonomous sensory meridian response — those whispered, pleasant-sounding videos that give listeners a sense of low-level euphoria

Society is beginning to wake up to a tremendous shift in one of the most fundamental underpinnings to how we live our lives: the credit system. Even though it’s not commonly known, credit infrastructure has existed about as long as civilization itself. In one way or another, credit systems have always formalized the one essential basis for relationships between people: trust.
Over millennia, the way credit looks, feels and is used has changed dramatically. Today, buoyed by a plethora of te

NASA is asking all cloud gazers to snap photos of the sky and share them with the space agency via an app. The citizen science project is needed to validate data from six Earth-observing instruments on different satellites. And it’s likely to make #CloudTwitter incredibly happy.
The instruments are part of a project called Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), which aims to better understand what roles clouds play in global climate change, among other things. Clouds,

Decent human being Matt Damon, 47, has supposedly perished in an untimely death brought about by mobs of angry #MeToo supporters, according to director Terry Gilliam. In an interview with AFP, Gilliam boldly shines a spotlight on the horrifying plight of the powerful and popular actor. “I feel sorry for someone like Matt Damon, who is a decent human being,” Gilliam says of those original statements. “He came out and said all men are not rapists, and he got beaten to death. Com

The final Infinity War trailer presents a terrifying, monumental threat to earth. Armies clash. Dead bodies are strewn about the screen. Music blares. Impressive percussion stirs up emotions. Lightning cracks. And at the center of it all is… Thanos! The terrifying universe-destroyer! Who, unfortunately, looks like a bald purple plastic mannequin with weird grooves in his chin to make up for the fact that he can’t grow a beard.There’s no kind way to put it: Thanos isn’t

Hacker Adrian Lamo has died at age 37, according to ZDNet and a Facebook post from his father. The circumstances of Lamo’s death are unknown, but a coroner in Sedgwick County, Kansas, reportedly confirmed the news.
Lamo was known in the early 2000s for hacking a number of company networks, including that of The New York Times Company. Sometimes dubbed the “homeless hacker” for his nomadic life, he pled guilty in 2004 to breaching the Times’ internal network and running u

Arriving roughly one hour into a full-day blockchain-themed event called “Initial Taco Offering,” I’m greeted by a sight familiar to many attendees of Austin’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival. There is a throng of badge-wearing, mostly male conference goers — and there are free tacos.The event, a play on the initial coin offerings that have turned digital currencies into some of the buzziest and most fraught investment opportunities on the planet, is being

Newer yacht models nowadays might include IoT devices with routers and switches, whichalso means they can be hackable, just like any other device with an internet connection. As Stephan Gerling of the Rosen Group demonstrated during a security summit last week, modern yachts still have a lot of openings for bad actors to potentially exploit, such as the onboard router having an unsecure FTP protocol.A yacht’s onboard network could have a vessel traffic service device, automatic identifica

There was fierce lobbying in Washington, DC this week over a Senate bill that, if passed, could unleash a swarm of self-driving cars without typical controls onto public roads. The bill pits some of the biggest car and technology companies in the world against consumer and safety advocates who argue that driverless cars aren’t ready for primetime.The bill, AV START, is being held up by five Democratic senators. Their objections range from a lack of safeguards allowing a human to retake co

Alcatel unveiled five new phones last month, and today, it’s announcing that two of them are headed to the United States: the Alcatel 1X and the Alcatel 3V. Of the two, the 1X is the more exciting — it’s one of the very first phones to run Android Go, Google’s new streamlined version of Android designed to perform better on low-end hardware.
The 1X will sell for under $100 (I’m going to go ahead and guess that means $99.99, but Alcatel isn’t giving specifics)

Starting in May, Chinese citizens who rank low on the country’s burgeoning “social credit” system will be in danger of being banned from buying plane or train tickets for up to a year, according to statements recently released by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low &

Microsoft is testing a new change to its future version of Windows 10 which will probably annoy anyone using the operating system. The software giant revealed today that “we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge.” The change means if you have Chrome or Firefox set as your default browser in Windows 10, Microsoft will simply ignore that and force you into Edge when you click a link within the Mail app.
It’s a

Yesterday, Science Magazine published an op-ed about why one woman doesn’t use Instagram for science outreach. The answer, according to this writer, is that women do science communication (or scicomm) because they are forced to by sexism, and, also, these women use too many emoji.This is a shame because the op-ed by Meghan Wright, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, could have been a sharp analysis of gender disparities in science, labor issues, and a specific call for bett

Electronic Arts today announced a revamped progression system for Star Wars Battlefront 2 that pledges to be more linear and fair, following the heated controversy last November when the game first launched.Originally, EA allowed players to purchase randomized loot boxes to unlock new heroes — characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, for instance. Players soon discovered, even prior to the game’s launch thanks to early access programs, that it would take dozens of hours to un

Adult Swim’s hit animated show Rick and Morty finished its third season back in October, and we might not get season 4 until 2019, according to one of the show’s writers. To tide us over, Adult Swim just released a music video for Run The Jewels’ song “Oh Mama,” featuring the mad scientist and his grandson.The video is directed by Rick and Morty director Juan Meza-León (he was responsible for episodes like “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” “The

A couple months after Strava unintentionally exposed military base locations, another app named Ritual is exposing government agencies’ locations and workers’ restaurant routines. Ritual promises to streamline takeout by letting co-workers piggyback off each others’ orders. Users get a notification when their colleagues are ordering from somewhere, and they can then tack their own order onto that one. The app doesn't use location tracking to determine where users work. Instead

The Trump administration has blamed the Russian government for carrying out a series of cyberattacks targeted at US and European nuclear power plants and other utility infrastructure since at least March 2016.
A security memo issued by authorities states that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FBI characterize the cyberattacks as a “multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors who targeted small commercial facilities’ networks where they staged malwar

Today, Facebook issued an apology after users discovered that the platform’s search box was suggesting searches for child abuse videos and underaged girls performing sex acts.
On Thursday night, Twitter user @BennettJonah noticed that typing in “video of...” in the search bar would autocomplete to “video of sexuals” or “video of little girl giving oral.” The explicit autocomplete search terms have seemingly since been removed from Facebook, as observed

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 Galaxy S9 has arrived in the United States and around the world. After unboxing Samsung’s latest flagship phone and fawning over its sleek design (and the inclusion of an actual headphone jack), it probably won’t be long before you find yourself hitting the dedicated Bixby button. If you’re a fan of the assistant and its powerful ability to control apps and change settings, maybe you’ll be doing so intentionally.But a lot of you will inevitably bring up Bixby when yo