Technology news

Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, will leave the company later this year, according to The New York Times. His departure reportedly comes as a result of disagreements over how to handle the spread of misinformation on the social network.
As part of Stamos leaving, Facebook has reportedly broken down and reassigned his security team. Almost all of the 120 employees have now been reassigned to product and infrastructure teams, according to the report; it’s unclear if Fac

With the Oppo R15 officially announced in China today, we have a good idea of what OnePlus’ next phone might look like, since OnePlus often sources designs from the company Oppo, which shares ownership. For instance, the OnePlus 5 bears a strong resemblance to the Oppo R11, and the OnePlus 5T ended up looking almost identical to the R11S.
The OnePlus 6 is rumored to have a 19:9 notched display, according to a leak from earlier this month spotted by Android Central. Likewise, the R15 has a

NASA is giving scientists more choices for how to power their future spacecraft to explore the Solar System. Researchers proposing spacecraft ideas for NASA’s Discovery program — an initiative to develop deep-space missions that usually cost less than half a billion dollars — will be allowed to incorporate a special kind of radioactive battery in the designs for their vehicles. And that could potentially allow these missions to get more science done and go deeper into space.
D

eBay has updated its Android app to include a new augmented reality feature that helps you figure out what box size you’ll need to use to ship your stuff, via Android Police.The AR feature is pretty simple: point your phone at whatever it is you’re trying to ship, and it’ll superimpose an augmented reality box over it so you can figure out if it’ll fit. It’s got a bunch of standard box sizes built in. The idea is that you’ll know that you need to get, say, a

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is now available on mobile in the US, on both iOS and Android. The game has already been live in Asia for quite a while and came to Canada last week, but there wasn’t a launch date for the US.
The US release might have been sped up by Fortnite Battle Royale launching on mobile, another battle royale-style game that takes PUBG’s core design and packages it up with better-looking graphics and some gameplay tweaks that have led to it breaking streami

The world has a new record holder for the largest SSD, and it comes in at 100TB. The Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC100 is a new, massive drive that is currently being tested with select customers and will be available to purchase this summer.The company says the DC100 will utilize 3D NAND flash memory, which can provide enough capacity to store 20,000 HD movies, or 20 million songs, (if people still downloaded music), and is capable of read and write speeds of 500MB/s. Nimbus Data is also fully guaran

IBM is kicking off its IBM Think 2018 conference this week with “5 in 5,” a collection of IBM Research inventions and technologies “that could change our lives in the next five years.” If you want to hear a large corporation tell you about AI, blockchain, and quantum computing all in the same breath, IBM Think sounds like the place to be.
It’s a little hard to tease out the technology from the buzzwords, but, happily, Mashable spotted this gem: IBM is building the

Atari has renamed its upcoming retro mini-console from the Ataribox to the Atari VCS, according to VentureBeat. The device, similar to Nintendo’s NES Classic and SNES Classic consoles, uses a design aesthetic inspired by the Atari 2600 Video Computer System. In an interesting twist, the device will not only play classic Atari titles, but it will also play modern PC games (of the less intensive variety) thanks to the device’s custom AMD processor with Radeon graphics and a Linux-base

President Donald Trump has issued an executive order to ban Venezuela’s new national cryptocurrency, the petro. It’s the first cryptocurrency-related executive order a president has issued and another blow to an already dubious virtual token that’s supposedly backed by oil reserves, as Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro has said.
Trump’s order describes the petro’s initial coin offering as “recent actions taken by the Maduro regime to attempt t

After acknowledging that Trump campaign-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica mishandled the data of 50 million users, Facebook says it has hired a digital forensics team to investigate the company.Facebook has hired a firm to investigate
On Friday, ahead of investigative reports detailing the scheme, Facebook said it had banned the company and its parent organization from the platform after it was revealed that a professor, using a seemingly innocuous app to draw in users, passed the resulting

In a week when all eyes are on Facebook and the subject of how data about us on social media platforms gets used without us knowing, there’s been some consolidation afoot in the world of media-based big data services. DataSift, the London-based company that pulls data from conversations across social, news and blog platforms, anonymises it, and then parses it for insights for third party organizations, is being acquired by Meltwater, the company originally out of Norway but now based

YouTube is testing a picture-in-picture type function for desktop, as reported by 9to5Google. For those who have it, the test will mimic what’s already available on YouTube for Android and iOS, allowing users to minimize and watch a video while continuing to browse.
If this is available on your account, you can play a video and then click anywhere on YouTube to navigate away without having the video disappear. Instead, the video will be minimized as a floating window in the bottom-right c

Facebook’s stock has tanked after revelations that the company had shared the data of up to 50 million users with the political data analytics company Cambridge Analytica. By noon ET on Monday, it’s dropped by nearly 7 percent — the most that Facebook has fallen in a single day in over five years.
Within the indexes for major tech and financial companies like the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500, Facebook was the biggest loser today, reports Bloomberg. The loss cut into Facebook

Facebook is hungry for some of the lucrative game streaming audience captured by Twitch and YouTube, and today the company announced a new software development kit designed to make it even easier to stream PC games live on the social network. The news, announced this morning in conjunction with the first day of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, builds on previous Facebook Live developments, like live-streaming mobile Instant Games announced in December of last year, and a new par

British startup Made.com says that “a new tier 1 global institutional investor” has made an important investment commitment in the furniture company. This mysterious investor is willing to lead a new $56 million round (£40 million) with existing investors Partech Ventures, Level Equity and Eight Roads Ventures also participating.
It sounds like the funding round isn’t finished just yet, so Made.comcould end up raising more than that.
More interestingly, the company has sh

Samsung has confirmed that it has completed its Android Oreo beta tests and has officially begun sending out the software updates to Galaxy S8 and S8+ devices in the US. “After completing extensive testing and beta tests that are standard when we launch a new Android update or product, we are beginning to roll out Android Oreo to select US Galaxy smartphones, starting with the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+,” a Samsung spokesperson told The Verge. “Galaxy Note8 will follow shortly t

A new Indiegogo campaign has appeared to help you monitor your food’s temperature when you microwave it. Called Cmicro, the device consists of a little puck (the actual sensor), a number of different Cmicro container covers it can be attached to, and a small display that’s affixed to the front of your microwave.
The Cmicro system works by putting the sensor on the desired cover — there’s a dome to put over plates, another for cups, and a Cmicro baby bottle with a lid &md

GDC starts this week in San Francisco, and Google is looking to burnish its reputation among game developers with a handful of new announcements. The most newsworthy is “Google Play Instant,” which allows game demos to be played on Android devices simply by clicking a link, rather than fully installing the game. It’s also pointing to improvements in its game ad ecosystem and a new way to set up multiplayer game servers.The goal of Google’s announcements, so far as I can

Police are using Google’s immense collection of location data to find criminals using warrants to request that the tech giant turn over account info from any mobile device that comes too close to a crime scene, reports Raleigh local news agency WRAL. The news service cites court records that show Raleigh police used search warrants to request that Google turn over location data for devices that were close to the crime scene in at least four investigations in the past year that involved mu

A female pedestrian was killed after being struck by an autonomous Uber vehicle in Arizona, according to ABC 15. In response, Uber has pulled all of its self-driving cars from public roads in the state as well as in the cities of San Francisco, Toronto, and Pittsburgh.The crash occurred near Mill Avenue and Curry Road early Monday morning in Tempe, Arizona, police confirm. The Uber vehicle was headed northbound when a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck. The woman was taken to the

The nerve agent attack on former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter sends a powerful message to the rest of the world: the assassins aren’t playing by the rules.On March 4th, Skripal and his daughter Yulia were hospitalized after collapsing in Salisbury, England. They had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The British government, as well as France, the US, and Germany, have blamed Russia for the attack. Britain&rs

The Walking Dead has returned from its traditional midseason break, careening toward the conclusion of the “All Out War” saga and the end of the feud between Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his arch-nemesis Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). But thus far, the show’s big bet on Negan has been a bit of a misfire, with ratings hitting staggering lows last year and Negan himself largely absent from the first half of the season’s episodes.
But a midseason relaunch is an opportunit

Augmented reality startup Magic Leap is taking the first steps toward opening its platform to outside developers. The company just announced a preview of its software development kit and “creator portal,” which will offer resources for people who want to build for its yet-unreleased Magic Leap One headset. You can now download a preview build of the Unreal or Unity engines, designed for what Magic Leap dubs “spatial computing.”
The creator portal touts a set of tutorials

Google Maps shortcuts are live for select users in India, according to a user tip via Android Police. Specifically, the new feature arrived on Google Maps version 9.72.2.
You can select up to four shortcuts at a time from a selection of 14, such as nearby food, malls, metro stations, directions to home, and directions to work. By default, Maps selects three for you to start, with the ability to add one more or swap the default choices to something else. It’s an expanded version of what yo

Kratos has gotten old. That’s the first thing you’ll notice in the new God of War. The upcoming PS4 reboot of the series starts with the angriest Greek in gaming glowering down at a tree that you chop down with Kratos’ new weapon of choice: the Leviathan Axe. As he swings the axe, you can see more scars crossing his arms and chest since we last saw him, and his perpetually scowling face is hidden behind a beard that’s sporting a touch of gray.While much has been made abo

Earlier this year, Google rolled Android Pay and Google Wallet into one service called Google Pay. Now, Google is adding transit tickets to its newly unified mobile payments app. Starting today, riders will be able to board the Las Vegas Monorail using Google Pay on Android phones. Google says more cities and transportation services are on the way.
Riders will have to purchase tickets or daily passes on the Las Vegas Monorail’s website on their computer or phone and save them to Google Pa

Google has launched a new program called Shopping Actions that will allow users to purchase items through Google search and Google Assistant.
On Google search, the Google Express shopping service, and Google Assistant on home devices and mobile, shoppers can now save their payment credentials and make purchases from retailers with instant checkout. In exchange, retailers will give Google a cut of the profit from each purchase, which is different from the usual ad payments retailers make to Goog

As The Verge’s resident headphones obsessive, I’m not supposed to like the AirPods. My initial reaction upon first seeing them many months ago was to pour scorn on Apple’s designers for crafting a pair of expensive and easy-to-lose cigarette butts. The AirPods were the resurrection of the awful Bluetooth headsets of years past, I thought. But this year, I finally got around to testing a pair of the AirPods for myself, and I finally understand why everyone who owns them loves t

The worlds of Studio Ghibli movies are places that I’ve always wanted to visit. In fact, many of them seem like the perfect setting for a role-playing game. I can imagine stopping in the quaint town of Kiki’s Delivery Service for a restorative break in between battles or seeking out important magical items in the Spirited Away bathhouse. Even the cast of Howl’s Moving Castle feels ripped out of a Japanese RPG, with a cursed old woman, a shape-shifting wizard, and a sentient tu

It feels like almost every aspect of Huawei’s upcoming P20 and P20 Pro flagship phones has leaked ahead of the March 27th release date, and now we can add one more leak to the list: the European prices for the phones. According to Twitter user Roland Quandt (via MobileScout), the P20 will cost €679 (around $835) while the larger P20 Pro will run for €899 (roughly $1,106).What you get for ur money when buying the P20/P20 Pro (WEU):
P20 = 5.8in, 4/128GB = 679 Euro.
P20 Pro = 6.1in