Technology news

Facebook has no plans to extend the user privacy protections put in place by the far-reaching General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, law to users of its social network around the globe, according to Reuters. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the news agency in an interview that Facebook would like to make such privacy guarantees “in spirit,” but would make exceptions. Zuckerberg declined to explain those exceptions, according to Reuters.“We’re still nailing down details on

Snapchat has allowed Giphy back onto its platform after it was removed when users found a racist GIF on the database earlier this month, Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. confirmed to The Verge. Instagram and Snapchat had both pulled Giphy from their platforms, but Instagram reinstated Giphy last week, with stricter moderation. Snapchat confirmed today that it would bring Giphy back since it has upgraded its moderation.
The GIF initially appeared when users searched “crime” on the G

Any company that’s looking to replace the more than 5 billion pounds of ground beef making its way onto tables in the U.S. every year with a meatless substitute is going to need a lot of cash.
It’s a big vision with lots of implications for the world — from climate change and human health to challenging the massive, multi-billion dollar industries that depend on meat — and luckily for Impossible Foods(one of the many companies looking to supplant the meat business globall

Facebookis showing an unprecedented level of transparency around its latest effort to suspend Russian trolls trying to influence elections and mislead the public as it tries to regain the trust of users and the government. The company shared both stats about the account deletions and samples of the content they shared.
Facebook has removed 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook Pages, and 65 Instagram accounts run by the Russian government-connected troll farm and election interference squad the Int

Spotify’s initial public offering today was both a success and a tepid forecast for the future of music streaming. The company’s shares closed today at $149.60, up 12 percent from the initial reference price of $132, but down from a high of $165.90 when shares debuted on the New York Stock Exchange this morning. That gives the Swedish company a market valuation of around $26.6 billion. According to Reuters, Spotify shares slid from the opening high due to lackluster confidence in Sp

In the quiet, dreamy world of the recently announced game Neo Cab, gig workers are a dying breed. Technology has evolved past the need for flesh-and-blood drivers behind the wheel. Those who remain offer a different kind of service: human contact. “[Riders] want to talk to another human being and connect with them and share their story,” says creative lead Patrick Ewing. “There’s that taxi cab confessions angle that fascinated me — like anybody could get in this ca

Facebook now lets you bulk remove third-party apps, and any and all posts those apps may have published on your behalf, a welcome privacy change that should make it easier to strip access to your profile from services you no longer use. The change, precipitated by the ongoing Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, is part of a series of sudden changes Facebook is making to mitigate fallout from the revelation that third-party developers have had generous access to users’ data and could

At least four people were shot at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno on Tuesday, according to a police spokesman. Three victims were taken to local hospitals. A fourth victim died at the scene, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said during a press conference Tuesday afternoon.Shooting victims included a 36-year-old male in critical condition, a 32-year-old woman in serious condition, and a 27-year-old woman in fair condition, according to Zuckerberg San Francisco Gener

At 12:46PM, an active shooter was reported in an outdoor patio area at YouTube’sheadquarters in San Bruno, California. Police arrived at the scene in a manner of minutes, police chief Ed Barberini confirmed during a brief press conference.
“We have four victims who have all been transported for gunshot related injuries and we have one suspect who is deceased inside the building with a self-inflicted wound,” Barberini added, “who at this time we believe to be the shoo

Spotifyis done with its long-awaited “direct listing” experiment. The music streaming company went public without the IPO.
After completing its first trade halfway through the day at $165.90, Spotify fell to $149.01, 10 percent beneath the open. It was a down day on the stock market, but at a $26.5 billion market cap, it’s up from the private market trading that happened in the months leading up to the IPO.
The top end of that range, $132, was used as a “reference po

If you’re running a software company today, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that most or all of your apps will run in the cloud. Likely Amazon or Google’s. It’s hard to imagine that this wasn’t always the case, but there are still some late adopters migrating their own physical data centers into managed ones. And, as with all trends in technology, this too shall pass. Just when you were getting comfortable with containers and auto-scaling, a new architecture emerg

For those who live under a rock (which, these days, I would recommend), President Donald Trump has become increasingly belligerent toward Amazonand its founder, Jeff Bezos.
In addition to a sequence of tweets against the e-commerce and cloud giant, Gabriel Sherman reported in Vanity Fair yesterday that “Now, according to four sources close to the White House, Trump is discussing ways to escalate his Twitter attacks on Amazon to further damage the company. ‘He’s off the hook on

MITis disassociating itself from Nectome, the Y Combinator-backed startup promising to preserve customers’ brains for the possibility of future digital upload.
Co-founder Robert McIntyre described the procedure as “100 percent fatal” — it involves connecting terminally ill patients to a machine that pumps embalming fluids into their arteries.
The company has collected (refundable) $10,000 payments for a wait list, but its website now carries a note in “Response to r

Following in the steps of a DC-based security robot that ran into a water fountain is a Russian postal drone that crashed into a building mere seconds after its inaugural liftoff, as reported by Reuters.
The test, which occurred in the Siberian city of Ulan-Ude, was meant to carry a package to a nearby village in order to demonstrate a new way to deliver mail. Video captured by Reuters shows the drone taking off from a launchpad, with the package emblazoned with the Russian Post’s blue-an

When Carrie Wade first heard the news that Apple was proposing emoji to represent people with disabilities, she felt happy — then immediately curious about what sorts of emoji Apple had come up with. Wade has cerebral palsy and works at the American Association of People with Disabilities. To finally have emoji made specifically for people like her felt like an important step forward.
“Of course there are going to be people who say this is inconsequential and it doesn’t matter

With 2018 midterms around the corner, the Democrats are looking for their answer to Cambridge Analytica, the Robert Mercer-backed political data firm that either won the 2016 election or tricked everyone into believing that it did, depending on who’s talking.
To that end, a prominent left-leaning accelerator is out with a new graduating class, just in time to gear up for November. Higher Ground Labs seeks to “supercharge” political startups with progressive causes at heart. The

After a racial slur GIF caused Snapchat to remove its GIPHY sticker feature, Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch it’s reinstated its integration. GIPHYhas apologized, fixed the bug that let the objectionable GIF slip through, and reviewed its GIF sticker library four times in an effort to guarantee that offensive content won’t end up in apps that embed it. Instagram had also removed GIPHY, but reinstated it last week with Snapchat saying it had nothing to share yet.
A Snap spokesperson t

Facebook is now expanding a test it started last year to all US users, and the result will be more background information and a useful overview of the publishers and articles you see appear in your News Feed — after the meaningful stuff from friends and family, of course.“We’re making it easy for people to view context about an article, including the publisher’s Wikipedia entry, related articles on the same topic, information about how many times the article has been sha

Nearly half of all European flights may suffer delays today after a system failure at Eurocontrol, the air traffic coordinating body for the European Union, interfered with the ability to manage air traffic demand and capacity, according to the BBC. The system, known as the Enhanced Tactical Flow Management System, is responsible for managing the flow of European air traffic — as well as flights to North Africa and parts of the Middle East — on a daily basis. Eurocontrol operates ou

I was pleasantly surprised by Motiv . Sure, my expectations were low for a fitness tracking ring, but pleasantly surprised is pleasantly surprised is still pleasantly surprised. The $200 Fitbit alternative gets a couple of key software upgrades this week, including, most notably, the addition of Android compatibility, along with some Alexa integration.
Initially launched as iOS-only, the Ring is taking baby steps toward working with the world’s most popular mobile operating system. It&rsqu

Here’s something every tech company agrees on: the world needs more AI engineers. Microsoft is the latest firm to try to answer this demand, and this week, it launched a new course on its tech accreditation scheme (known as the Microsoft Professional Program) dedicated to artificial intelligence.The paid course has 10 modules, each taking between eight and 16 hours to complete online. They cover a range of sub-disciplines, including computer vision, data analysis, speech recognition, and

Spotify launched its initial public offering (IPO) today at the New York Stock Exchange, but unfortunately things didn’t start off on the right foot.
The NYSE hung the flag of Switzerland rather than Sweden outside the building beside two American flags. But Spotify is based in Stockholm, Sweden and not Switzerland. They aren’t even neighbors.
NYSE using the Swiss flag for @Spotify entering the stock market. $SPOT #spotifyipopic.twitter.com/VUBOJFTILF— Joachim Löfstedt (@

Dell is moving on from its Inspiron-branded “Gaming Series” lineup and building a new line of gamer-specific budget laptops. The G3, G5, and G7 laptops have access to Nvidia GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, and 1060 Max-Q GPUs, eighth-gen Intel processors (on up to the new six-core Core i9 CPU in the G5 and G7), an optional 4K display in the G7, and a 17-inch version of the G3. The G5 and G7 even have Killer networking.
The G3 starts at $749, the G5 starts at $799, and the G7 starts at $849. The

If you’ve been dying to send your contacts sweet HD videos, then you’ll be happy to learn Facebook is finally improving the quality of pictures and videos you fire off onMessenger. Now you can feel free to bombard your friends with all the 360 photos they can handle. For those of you who want to use the feature, it works the way you’d expect: to take a 360 photo, you hold up your phone and spin around, and then send it via Messenger. HD videos can be shared from your phone&rsq

Square’s Venmo-competitor, the Cash App, has launched in the UK, bringing peer-to-peer transactions to an already crowded marketplace. Cash App is now available in the UK! Starting with how we began in the US: peer to peer money exchange. https://t.co/v1PsOeaInk — jack (@jack) April 3, 2018 The launch incarnation of the app is fairly threadbare. Users can make payments to other users in the UK, and that’s about it. It’s probably more helpful to talk about what’s mi

A couple days ago, Cloudflare launched its own DNS service at 1.1.1.1, promising that consumers would enjoy greater privacy and potentially faster internet if they switched over from their ISP’s default. Now, those speed differences might not be significant or noticeable enough to the point of making the switch full-time. (We’re talking milliseconds here.) But it doesn’t take many steps to test out a new DNS, so it’s probably worth a quick try if you’re curious or

Spotifyopened on the New York Stock Exchange at $165.90, giving the company a market value of $29.5 billion.
The first trade didn’t happen until 12:45pm Eastern. This is halfway through the trading day, and a record for the latest opening time for a public debut.
Shortly after the open, shares fell to a little above $160.
The digital music company isn’t selling its shares on the stock market, meaning the company isn’t raising any money today. Instead, the event known as a

For months, Seoul resident Ye-won Oh monitored cryptocurrency markets voraciously, refreshing her phone practically every minute of every day. In early 2017, she invested $40,000 in Ethereum, which has become wildly popular in South Korea. Like many young Koreans living through Korea’s difficult economy, she came to see her investment as “the only way out.”The 20-something has an impressive resume: a senior role at a flourishing startup, a college degree from overseas, and wor