Technology news

The bad thing about making your face synonymous with the company you run: When you go M.I.A., everyone tends to notice.
The callout posts began over the weekend. Normal Facebookusers don’t always track the tech press outrage cycle, but a flurry of reporting on Facebook’s mishandling of the private data of 50 million users, and Facebook’s subsequent mishandling of that mishandling — this after everything else — it seemed to stick in their craw.
Worse yet for Facebook

BlackBerry wants you to advertise on its behalf in exchange for the weekly chance to win... wait for it... BlackBerry-branded gear like a bag, mugs, a hat, and more. Okay, and also a monthly drawing for a BlackBerry smartphone. The program, called BlackBerry Smartphone Fan League, has you connect your social media platforms in order to promote BlackBerry and earn points. The more points, the more entries. To win a BlackBerry hat. Or cup. Yay.
To get your first 100 points, you have to connect ei

Disney’s theme parks are about to get a lot more Marvel superheroes. After the successful launch of the Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout! ride last year, the company has announced that it will be bringing more Marvel properties to the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, along with expanded experiences at both Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland.According to Marvel, a new “completely immersive Super Hero universe” will be coming to the Disney’s California Adventu

Another day, another breach. Today, online travel agency Orbitz disclosed that hackers managed to get both credit card data and personal information (though no Social Security numbers and passwords) from users who made their travel purchases on the site between January 1, 2016 and December 22, 2017. In total, the company says, that’s about 880,000 payment cards that were accessed from what the company calls a “legacy Orbitzplatform.”
The hackers also likely accessed other data,

Uber is being accused of its drivers denying rides to a Texas woman with cerebral palsy on “approximately 25 separate occasions” across 2016 and 2017, according to a new lawsuit filed today. The woman claims that drivers repeatedly canceled rides because she requires the use of a service dog. The complaint, filed in Northern California District Court, accuses Uber of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Texas Human Resources Code, and the plaintiff is seeking damage

Skype has teamed up with TripAdvisor so you can now send travel plans and tips right inside the Skype app. It’s also got a new integration with StubHub, a platform for sporting and concert tickets, that lets you browse and share events. Both add-ins are great for those who still use Skype to make video calls and chat with friends and family. Now you can just send and receive travel plans and tickets without downloading any extra apps beyond Skype.
To activate the add-ins, you have to pres

After nearly four days of silence from top executives on the unfolding controversy around Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of user data, Facebook on Tuesday made a statement about what Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are doing. “Mark, Sheryl and their teams are working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward, because they understand the seriousness of this issue,” Facebook told The Daily Beast. “The entire company is outraged

Salesforce announced today that it intends to buy MuleSoft in a deal valued at a whopping $6.5 billion. That’s not necessarily the selling price, but the amount the company has been valued at based on stocks, bonds and cash on hand. The exact price was not available yet, but the company did indicate it was paying $44.89 per share for MuleSoft,a price that represents a 36 percent premium over yesterday’s closing price, according to Salesforce .
What’s more, the deal values

Audible is finally back on Sonos, after a false alarm two weeks ago when the company mistakingly published a blog post saying the integration was available. Audible is now rolling out on Sonos through the Sonos and Audible apps, giving users an easy way of playing their audiobooks on Sonos hardware.Sonos One speakers are already compatible with Amazon’s Alexa and Amazon Music, so it was surprising that the Amazon-owned Audible audiobook service has remained absent from the company’s

Travel booking website Orbitz has announced that it discovered a potential data breach that exposed information for thousands of customers, as reported by Engadget. The incident, discovered by the company on March 1st, may have exposed information tied to about 880,000 credit cards.
The consumer data in question is from an older booking platform, where information may have been accessed between October and December 2017. Orbitz partner platform data, such as travel booked via Amex Travel, submi

Cancer remains the one counterpoint to the march of medical progress that has scored human history over the last 200 years.
Last year 600,920 people in the U.S. died from cancer, and another 1.7 million received an initial diagnosis of the disease. Globally, one in six people die from cancer, according to the World Health Organization.
In the past decade, research in the field has expanded the possible treatments of the disease from surgery (which was the only option until the 20th century)

New York and Massachusetts attorneys general are demanding that Facebook hand over information about how Cambridge Analytica used its data. They announced a joint investigation today following reports over the weekend that Cambridge Analytica improperly acquired data on 50 million Facebook users, which it used as part of President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
According to The New York Times and The Observer, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie, led an initiative starting in

YouTube’svideo ad creation service aimed at helping small business reach YouTube viewers is now available more broadly across the U.S. The company announced this morning that YouTube Director onsite, as the service is called, is now live in over 170 U.S. cities, up from only 9 previously – Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York, Tampa and Seattle.
This is significant expansion, in terms of reaching potential YouTube advertisers who w

Andrew Nix, the CEO of the London-based voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica — which harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission to analyze their voter behavior — has been suspended from his job. In an announcement posted to the company’s site, the board said the suspension was effective immediately.
Nix’s suspension ties directly to footage that was filmed over the last year by Britain’s Channel 4 News

Details continue to trickle out about Huawei’s upcoming P20 flagships, and the latest is about the rumored three-camera system for the top-of-the-line P20 Pro. It’s more or less been confirmed that the P20 Pro will have three rear-facing cameras, but now we know — via WinFuture — what kind of lenses to expect: an 8-megapixel telephoto, a 20-megapixel black-and-white lens, and a main RGB lens that clocks in a massive 40 megapixels.
For those keeping score at home, that&rs

The CEO of controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was suspended today after he was filmed by undercover journalists appearing to encourage the use of beautiful women to entrap politicians as part of election influence campaigns. Alexander Nix will face a “full, independent investigation” of his comments, the company’s board said in a press release.“In the view of the Board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegation

Amazonis currently the second biggest company in the world when it comes to market capitalization. The company is currently worth $763.27 billion (NASDAQ:AMZN) while Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) is “only” worth $762.98 billion.
Amazon has had an incredible quarter. Stock is up nearly 29 percent since early January. As for Alphabet,its shares have gone up and down.
And if you look at today alone, Amazon is up 2 percent, while Alphabet is flat. Alphabet can still pass Amazon again before the

Google has launched a new AR app that’s both simple to use and fun. It’s an app called Just a Line that lets you draw white lines in the air.
Google has termed it an AR experiment, as you can literally only draw white lines. In the advertisement for the app, Google demonstrates plenty of ways to use it, such as drawing stars in the air or fish. The results look like Snapchat filters and Instagram stories, but just floating in the air. And if you’re clever with it and draw hoop

When humanity’s back is against the wall and the robots have us cornered I’d say I’m all for whanging a few with a baseball bat. However, until then, we must be kind to our mechanical brethren and this robotic tortoise will help our kids learn that robot abuse is a bad idea.
Researchers at Naver Labs, KAIST, and Seoul National University created this robot to show kids the consequences of their actions when it comes to robots. Called Shelly, the robot reacts to touches and smac

Syfy has released a first look at the upcoming adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Nightflyers, which will adapt the 1980 novella into a 10-episode television series. While the trailer doesn’t do much beyond show off a few of the actors and offer some behind-the-scenes hype for the show, there’s a clear horror vibe coming across here. As Martin himself teases: “It’s Psycho in space.”
Syfy is betting big on Nightflyers as a major series. The novella follows the

“We don’t need redundant brakes & steering, or a fancy new car, we need better software,” then-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski wrote in an email to Larry Page in January 2016. “To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. I don’t understand why we are not doing that. Part of our team seems to be afraid to ship.” Shortly thereafter, Levandowski would leave to found his own self-driving trucking company, which was qui

Oracleannounced its quarterly earnings last night, detailing that its cloud business grew 32 percent to $1.6 billion in the quarter. That might sound good at first blush, but it’s part of three straight quarters of reduced growth — a fact that had investors jittery over night. It didn’t get better throughout the day today with Oracle’s stock plunging over 9 percent as of this writing.
When you consider that enterprise business is shifting rapidly to the cloud, and that th

Automaker Toyota has temporarily ceases its public road testing of its fully autonomous ‘Chauffeur’ system in the U.S. after an accident earlier this week saw an Uberself-driving test vehicle strike a pedestrian, which ultimately resulted in her death.
Police have stated that initial findings suggest the accident would’ve been extremely difficult to avoid regardless of whether a human or an AV system was in control at the time, because of how quickly the victim crossed in front

Bandai Namco Entertainment announced the latest entrant in its series of Dragon Ball games this week. Dragon Ball Legends is a player versus player (PvP) mobile game that has players from all over the world battle with each other in real time by using their move cards. From all I’ve seen, it looks like a pretty fun game, though I know nothing about Dragon Ball and I have an unreasonable disinterest in card-based games. What made me perk up, though, was when I heard that Bandai Namcoopted t

Facebookis having a bad day… for the second day in a row. Following the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Facebook shares (NASDAQ:FB) are currently trading at $164.07, down 4.9 percent compared to yesterday’s closing price of $172.56.
More importantly, if you look at Monday and Tuesday combined, Facebook shares are down 11.4 percent compared to Friday’s closing price of $185.09. In other words, Facebook was worth $537.69 billion on Friday evening when it comes to market capitalizat

In a press conference today, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence presented its urgent recommendations for protecting election systems as the U.S. moves toward midterm elections later this year.
“Currently we have an election upon us, and the past tells us that the future will probably hold another set of threats if we are not prepared,” Senator Kamala Harris said.
The bipartisan committee offered a set of measures to defend domestic election infrastructure against hostile for

YouTubetoday is rolling out a new feature that will allow video creators to start a live stream from their web cam without downloading encoding software, which can be complicated to set up. Now, streamers will be able to click the “Go Live” button in the YouTube header to start the stream, or visit the URL youtube.com/webcam. No additional configuration will be required, the company says.
The feature currently works only on the Google Chrome browser, but will expand to other bro

After over a year of not releasing any new phones, Lenovo has launched three phones in China today. There’s the main flagship S5 model, and two lower-end budget phones: the K5 and the K5 Play, presumably meant for children.
From a glance, the new phones resemble so many other Android phones, and have more than a slight likeness to the iPhone 6.
The Lenovo S5 has a 5.7-inch screen with an 18:9 aspect ratio and a 2160 x 1080 resolution. The back is made of metal. It’s powered by a Sna

Microsofttoday announced the next version of Windows Server, which launches later this year under the not completely unexpected moniker of “Windows Server 2019.” Developers and operations teams that want to get access to the bits can now get the first preview build through Microsoft’s Insider Program.
This next version comes with plenty of new features, but it’s also worth noting that this is the next release in the Long-Term Servicing Channel for Windows Server, which me

Apple has nearly doubled the number of self-driving cars in its California test fleet, according to new figures obtained by the Financial Times. The company currently has 45 autonomous test vehicles registered with the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, which is up from 27 in late January. That’s more than companies like Waymo and Uber, and second only to General Motors (which performs tests with Cruise, its self-driving division).
The news comes two days after one of Uber’

United Airlines has announced that it is temporarily suspending PetSafe, its program for pets that travel in cargo. The news comes shortly after a United flight attendant reportedly told a passenger to place their dog in the overhead bin, resulting in the animal’s death.
The airline says it is conducting a “thorough and systematic review” for pets that travel in cargo and is partnering with independent experts in pet safety and travel. While the review is being conducted, Unit

At 5AM on a June morning in 1974, seismologist Lynn Sykes awoke to a phone call from the Department of Defense. The voice on the other end of the line asked Sykes to be ready to leave for Moscow that evening. The DoD needed his help to negotiate a treaty that would cap the size of the US and Russia’s underground nuclear explosions.
Sykes, now a professor emeritus at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, was invited because of his unusual expertise. Sure, he was an

Toyota halted the testing of its autonomous vehicles on public roads in the US in the wake of a deadly crash involving a self-driving Uber in Arizona Sunday night. According to Bloomberg, the Japanese auto giant said it would temporarily cease testing its “Chauffeur” program out of respect for its test drivers.“Toyota Research Institute does not have firsthand information on the tragic traffic fatality in Tempe, Arizona on Sunday, March 18,” a Toyota spokesperson said in