Technology news

Elon Musk has jumped on the #deletefacebook train, deleting the pages for SpaceX and Tesla from the disgraced social media site and erasing their millions-strong followings. In case you’ve been living in seclusion for the last week or so, Facebook has found itself embroiled in a scandal involving a data analysis firm that is quickly becoming one of the messiest kerfuffles in the site’s history. If you want to know the essential details and how it effects you, read Bryan’s brea

All was not well with Uber’s self-driving car project before the fatal crash this past Sunday in Arizona, which has prompted widespread criticism of the ride-hailing giant’s approach to autonomous vehicle development and forced the company to pause much of its operations surrounding the technology. The goal of offering driverless ride-hailing services to the general public by the end of the year was quickly falling apart, and Uber’s self-driving cars had a record of failing to

Artificial intelligence doesn’t compare favorably to humans when it comes to problem solving. Ask any eight year old child to place a few blocks on a grid in Minecraft and they’ll almost certainly be bored by the task. A computer, on the other hand, doesn’t grasp such difficult concepts so easily. Stephan Alaniz, a researcher with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Technische Universitat Berlin, yesterday published a white paper titled “Deep Re

Imagine if someone extracted and condensed the sheer rugged bad-assery of 24’s Jack Bauer, and put it into a phone. Two phones, actually. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to play around with two ultra-rugged handsets: the Aermoo M1 and the Blackview 9000 Pro. These phones are like nothing you’ll see at your local Best Buy. For starters, they’re intended for a more niche audience of adventurers, construction workers, and anyone who spends time in t

Indie authors who publish through platforms like Amazon or CreateSpace usually don’t have the resources to publish an audiobook, which can be an expensive endeavor with production costs that self-published or first-time authors cannot afford. Now, self-publishing platform and ebook distributor Smashwords has teamed up with production platform and audiobook distributor Findaway Voices to give these indie authors a cheaper way to make audiobooks.
In an announcement, Smashwords CEO Mark Coke

It’s been a bit of a tumultuous week, to put it lightly, but one must always remember that no matter how dire things look on the global stage, there are always makers working obsessively to create something beautiful and useless — like this MIDI-driven, robotic music box.
Tinkerer and music box aficionado Mitxela (via Hackaday) was pleased by this music box that takes punch cards or rolls as input, rather than having a metal drum with the notes sticking out of it. But who wants to pu

Apple proposed new emoji today that would better represent hearing aids, guides, and people with disabilities, in a submission to the Unicode Consortium, as noted by Emojipedia.
Apple wrote in its submission, “Apple is requesting the addition of emoji to better represent individuals with disabilities. Currently, emoji provide a wide range of options, but may not represent the experiences of those with disabilities.”
The new suite of emoji include a hearing aid, people using canes or

Instagram launched in 2010 as a photo-sharing app designed to capture picturesque moments of our otherwise mundane lives. Since then, it’s evolved into a full social network, a messaging tool, and an ad platform, which exists in both mobile and desktop spaces.Now, most Instagram users opt for the mobile experience, replete with its familiar motions — scroll, double tap to like, scroll, scroll. But it’s come to our attention that there’s a population of Instagram users wh

FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg has been rather scarce lately, despite a host of woes besetting his company — but Wednesday he emerged from his cocoon to offer a limp apology, admit they had no control over data like that used by Cambridge Analytica, and that he “will happily” testify before Congress if he’s the right person to do so.
Well, Congress has taken him at his word. “You are the right person to testify before Congress,” wrote the leaders of the House Ene

Dropboxwent public this morning to great fanfare, with the stock shooting up more than 40% in the initial moments of trading as the enterprise-slash-consumer company looked to convince investors that it could be a viable publicly-traded company.
And for one that Steve Jobs famously called a feature, and not a company, it certainly was an uphill battle to convince the world that it was worth even the $10 billion its last private financing round set. It’s now worth more than that, but that f

Dropbox made its public debut today, with the stock soaring nearly 40% on its first day of trading — meaning the company will now be beholden to the same shareholders that sent the company’s valuation well north of $10 billion.
As a file-sharing and collaboration service, Dropbox’s first principle is going to be user trust, CEO Drew Houston told TechCrunch after the company made its debut. This comes amid a tidal wave of information throughout the week indicating that data on 5

Today, Trump signed into law a massive $1.3 trillion spending bill that will fund the federal government through the rest of fiscal year 2018, and the deal is quite generous to NASA. Practically all of NASA’s programs get a funding boost, and the space agency even gets money that it didn’t ask for — notably, the funds needed to build a second launch platform for its next big rocket.
The spending bill gives NASA an extra $350 million in 2018 to make the structure, which will be

HBO’sSilicon Valley is returning to the air with Season 5 debuting on Sunday. To prep fans, HBO released a virtual reality experience where users will be able to explore Erlich Bachman’s hacker hostel and interact with a ton of easter eggs from the show.
HBO showed off some “behind-the-scenes” footage of Richard and Dinesh playing through the experience and it’s all a bit to meta to handle.
You can rip a bong, open up some Fage yogurt, play the piano and pretty muc

Cloud storage and collaboration company Dropbox — which started 10 years ago as a small startup in the San Francisco-based Y Combinator incubator program — went public today, and its shares were up nearly 36 percent as of market close this afternoon. The successful performance makes Dropbox the biggest tech IPO since Snapchat’s in March 2017. Dropbox ended the day of trading, under the ticker symbol “DBX,” with a market valuation of around $10 billion.We knew Dropb

We’re still far away from the 2019 opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the twin expansion lands that will be opening at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World, but the narrative groundwork for the new parks is already being quietly set up. Specifically, the new novel Thrawn: Alliances from Timothy Zahn will send Darth Vader and the Grand Admiral together on a mission to Batuu, which io9 notes is the same planet that will serve as the setting for Galaxy’s Edge.Disney hasn&rsquo

Logitech’s G513 mechanical keyboard is in a class all its own. If you ever accidentally stumble upon The Bat Cave and catch Bruce Wayne playing Overwatch in his off time, this is the keyboard he’ll be using. For the past few weeks I’ve been using a pair of G513s as my daily driver for work and my after hours keyboard for gaming. It’s a beautifully designed gaming keyboard that hits all the right notes. And it maintains a small footprint with surprisingly few sacrifices.

Dropbox was off to the races on its first day as a public company.
After pricing above the range at $21 per share, raising $756 million, Dropbox kicked off its first day soaring to $31.60, and closing the day at $28.48. This is up almost 36 percent.
It’s surely a sign of public investor enthusiasm for the cloud storage business, which had initially hoped to price its IPO between $16 and $18, then raised it from $18 to $20.
It also means that Dropboxclosed well above the $10 billion it was

The swipe is where the similarity ends. Raya is less like Tinderand more like a secret society. You need a member’s recommendations or a lot of friends inside to join, and you have to apply with an essay question. It costs a flat $7.99 for everyone, women and celebrities included. You show yourself off with a video slideshow set to music of your choice. And it’s for professional networking as well as dating, with parallel profiles for each.
Launched in March 2015, Raya has purposeful

The vastness that makes the Amazon rainforest so diverse and fertile also makes it extremely difficult to protect. Rainforest Connection is a project started back in 2014 that used solar-powered second-hand phones as listening stations that could alert authorities to sounds of illegal logging. And applying machine learning has supercharged the network’s capabilities.
The original idea is still in play: modern smartphones are powerful and versatile tools, and work well as wireless sound det

As Dropboxhad its IPO moment this morning, more than 10 years after launching, we can finally put one myth to rest. Dropbox and Box were never targeting the same customers.
As Anshu Sharma, founder at Prekari, a stealth startup and former partner at Storm Venture tweeted earlier today:
If you are a VC and still don't get why Box and Dropbox are fundamentally different businesses, maybe stay away from SaaS. https://t.co/4O7Xks8Dbb
— Anshu Sharma(@anshublog) March 23, 2018Same goes for inves

Chinese search giant Baidu has received approval to begin testing its self-driving cars in Beijing, Reuters reports. It is a sign of China’s strong support for the industry in the wake of the first pedestrian death from an autonomous Uber vehicle in the US.Baidu, which is known as China’s version of Google, received a permit to test its vehicles on 33 roads spanning around 65 miles (105 kilometers) in the city’s less-populated suburbs, the firm said in a statement. Baidu is se

Trump’s third national security advisor, John Bolton, shares at least one thing in common with his first one, Michael Flynn: both men have ties to Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm at the center of a new Facebook privacy firestorm.
In a new story, The New York Times reports that John Bolton’s political action committee The John Bolton Super PAC hired Cambridge Analytica in August 2014, “months after the political data firm was founded and while it was still harves

Cambridge Analytica may have used Facebook’sdata to influence your political opinions. But why does least-liked tech company Facebook have all this data about its users in the first place?
Let’s put aside Instagram, WhatsApp and other Facebook products for a minute. Facebook has built the world’s biggest social network. But that’s not what they sell. You’ve probably heard the internet saying “if a product is free, it means that you are the product.”
And

China’s media regulator has cracked down on online video spoofs and parodies, according to state-run media outlet Xinhua.
Video sites now must ban any videos that “distort, mock, or defame classical literary and art works,” the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television stated in a directive yesterday. Reuters noted that the directive was marked “extra urgent,” which is uncommon and means that citizens must comply immediately or risk bei

Apple today submitted an official proposal to the Unicode Consortium, requesting a greater variety of emoji representing those with disabilities. The company says it wants to fill a gap that exists in the language of emoji. The emoji include an ear with a hearing aid, a person making the ASL sign for “deaf,” a person walking with a cane, people in two different wheelchairs, and two kinds of prosthetic limb. It also includes both a guide dog in a harness, and a service dog in a vest,

Steven Soderbergh’s new movie Unsane fits into a long line of “Who’s the crazy one here?” stories. Films like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing, and modern equivalents like Flightplan and The Forgotten all hinge on protagonists being told they’re deluded, and that someone they clearly remember never actually existed. Unsane plays a similar game, with The Crown’s Claire Foy as a fragile, angry woman convin

What does winning the AlexaSkills Challenge earn you from Amazon?Apparently, in addition to the $20,000 Grand Prize, you might also have your skill yanked from the Amazon Skill Store without warning. At least, that’s what seems to have happened to the grand prize winner from the recent Alexa’s kids competition, Pretzel Labs. Its winning submission, a fun skill called “Kids Court” where parents and kids settle arguments together using Alexa, has disappeared from Amazon&rsq

While everyone was looking at Dropbox’s debut, Pivotal Software dropped its IPO filing. 
The enterprise cloud computing company is majority-owned by Dell, which came about after its merger with EMC in 2016. It was spun off from Dell, EMC and VMware in April 2013.
Since then, it raised $1.7 billion in funding from Microsoft, Ford and General Electric.
Here’s how it describes its business:
Pivotal looks to “provide a leading cloud-native platform that makes software dev

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, the Federal Communications Commission is contemplating a new rule that would prevent small and rural mobile providers from receiving federal subsidies if they utilize electronics from Chinese manufacturers including Huawei and ZTE. It’s possible the rule will be proposed as soon as Monday, according to the Journal, but it could also be postponed or shelved. If the FCC moves forward and unveils the rule, it would be the latest measure

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds creator Brendan Greene told a crowd on the final day of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that he’s happy that Epic Games’ Fortnite is expanding the genre he was instrumental in helping pioneer. “It’s great that the battle royale space is expanding and Fortnite is getting battle royale game mode in the hands of a lot more people,” Greene said.His answer was in response to an audience question about his thoughts on F

We’ve been wondering what, if anything, Apple will do to make its forthcoming low-cost iPad stand out (aside from the price). And now we might have an answer: it could support the Pencil stylus. As of now, only iPad Pro models support it.
The rumor comes from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who wrote in a note today obtained by MacRumors, that “the new low-price 9.7-inch iPad ... will likely support Apple Pencil.” Kuo believes that Apple may want to do this as a way to &l

If there’s one thing I learned from my time as both a journalist at The Wall Street Journal and Forbes and, now, advising a global venture capital firm on communications, it’s that storytelling can make or break a company.
This is especially true the more complicated and arcane a company’s technology is. Stories about online-dating and burrito-delivery apps are easily understood by most people. But if a company specializes in making technology for hybrid-clo

It’s no secret that much of the legal industry is build on reusable content. Most law firmshave their own customized set of standard documents (like NDAs or Wills), but lawyers or associates still have to customize these documents by hand each time a client needs them drafted.
Lawyaw, part of YC’s Winter ’18 class, is building software to automate this process by letting lawyers turn previously completed documents into smart templates.
Here’s how it works: Lawye