Technology news

The next time Indiana Jones appears in film could mark a major change for the franchise. In an interview with The Sun, filmmaker Steven Spielberg told the publication that it may be time for the roguish, Nazi-punching archaeology professor to take “a different form.” Graciously, Spielberg means a woman, not a snakeperson. According to Spielberg, however, this would mean changing more than the gender of the character. “We’d have to change the name from Jones to Joan. And

An eastern Chinese city is now telling its shops and restaurants to swap their Wi-Fi routers for government-approved routers or else pay a penalty. Stores located in Qingdao, Shandong Province will have to pay up to ¥100,000 ($18,589) if they don’t comply, according to Abacus.
Shops and cafes that offer Wi-Fi hotspots have received a notice from police to “improve Qingdao’s internet security management” by switching routers. Abacus learned that the brand of router wa

Twitter has defended its handling of misinformation and abuse in the aftermath of this week’s shooting at YouTube’s headquarters. In a blog post titled “Serving the Public Conversation During Breaking Events,” trust and safety VP Del Harvey laid out how Twitter tried to provide “credible and authentic” information about the attack, even as some users spread hoaxes about the shooter’s identity.
Harvey writes that Twitter doesn’t have a system for v

Facebook began speaking with hospitals last year about the possibility of matching anonymized user profiles with health data in an effort to improve medical care, according to a CNBC report exposing the program. Facebook confirmed its work to CNBC but said it had hit “pause” on the program last month — presumably following the Cambridge Analytica scandal — to focus on “doing a better job of protecting people’s data” and being clearer about how it’

Amazon is rolling out a new feature to the Echo today called Alexa Announcements. It’s pretty much what it sounds like: you’ll be able to use your Echo to make announcements to other Echos in your household It’s basically a one-way intercom. Say you want to tell your kids dinner is ready. According to Amazon, you’d tell your Kitchen Echo “Alexa, announce that dinner is ready,” and the device would repeat that message to everyone else in your home. The announc

HBO has released a new full-length trailer for its upcoming adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, which shows off the world’s hellish dystopian society in which books are banned and burned.
The film will star Black Panther’s Michael B. Jordan as Guy Montag, a fireman who comes to question his job, while Shape of Water’s Michael Shannon plays Captain Beatty, the captain of his station. 99 Houses director Ramin Bahrani wrote and directed the movie.
This traile

The much-anticipated Supreme Court case US v. Microsoft — which could have decided the extent of American jurisdiction over foreign servers — is now, for all intents and purposes, dead. On March 30th, the Department of Justice moved to drop the lawsuit as moot, and today, Microsoft filed to agree with the motion. While the Supreme Court has yet to officially drop the case, it’s a foregone conclusion that they will.Both the government and Microsoft agree that the newly passed C

Earlier today, an Amazon leak hinted at the HD remake of the original Spyro trilogy, a remaster long whispered of the in the rumor mill. A page for Spyro Reignited Trilogy first surfaced on Amazon this morning, with little fanfare. I wanted to believe it, but held myself back. I’ve been burnt crispy by that hype flame before. Then, shortly after, Activision came through with an official trailer and release date. Witness it, in all its polished glory: When I was a

Since people can store personal data in blockchains, the technology could fall under the purview of the upcoming European change to privacy law. But blockchain technology may be fundamentally incompatible with Europe’s new privacy rules, Washington, DC think tank Coin Center said today in a new post.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will take effect on May 25th this year, more than two years after it was first signed into law. Under the new rule, if an EU citizen requests tha

Facebook is adding a new augmented reality feature called target tracking, which lets people launch AR experiences by pointing their phone at an image. Target tracking is in a closed beta for developers, but Facebook users can check out simple, animated experiences on posters from Ready Player One and A Wrinkle In Time. They can also get the experience by scanning a QR code. A toolkit for developers should be released publicly later this spring.
This is a very standard augmented reality feature

In FX’s oddball superhero series Legion, protagonist David Haller (Dan Stevens) spends the first episode of the second season acting as an audience proxy by asking the questions that the rest of the characters aren’t. What happened to Summerland, the woodland retreat for mutants that was the setting for much of the first season? Why are the other main characters now taking orders from a guy with a basket on his head and a trio of singing mustachioed women? What is going on?
After sp

Facebook leadership is still grappling with the ongoing Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, but that doesn’t mean the quest to destroy Snapchat has taken a break. According to TechCrunch, the company is currently testing three new features for its ephemeral messaging Stories product that aim to make the feature a more prominent part of the mobile Facebook app.These tests include making the Facebook camera the default option when a user chooses to update their profile status; making

A little under a year ago, Apple tried to assuage everyone’s fears that it had given up on the Mac Pro for good. At the time, it said the device wouldn’t arrive until 2018 at the earliest, and gave us the beastly iMac Pro to whet our appetites in the meantime. Now the company has made it clear we won’t get our hands on the top-of-the-line, modular Mac Pro until 2019. The company recently invited TechCrunch back to its campus to discuss the new Mac Pro, and Apple

Last November, Amazon announced that it had acquired the rights to produce a multiseason show set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The Hollywood Reporter now says that Amazon’s show might include material from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and that it must go into production “within two years.”
As the race for high-quality television content has heated up among streaming services, Amazon has been on the hunt for big, ambitious televisi

If you’re a writer, whether in-house or freelance, you know that the actual work of writing is only a fraction of what you have to do each day. You probably also have a never-ending list of emails to respond to, new topics you need to pitch, and general followup inquiries to make. With all of that going on in your inbox, taking the time to write out every single email from scratch makes no sense. In the past, I used to dread opening my email altogether. It only revealed how much time I wo

Google is expanding YouTube TV to support Firefox, as spotted by YourTechExplained, marking the first browser to work with Google’s over-the-top streaming service that isn’t Chrome (which you’ll recall is also owned by Google.)
The added Firefox support comes from a quietly updated support page noting the change, although sadly it just seems that only Firefox is getting the update from Google for now — there’s no word on Safari, Edge, or other browsers getting Goog

Mophie has announced a new wireless charger, the Wireless Charge Stream Pad Plus, via MacRumors. It’s essentially an updated version of the Wireless Charging Base that the company announced in partnership with Apple when the iPhone maker first launched the iPhone X and iPhone 8 with wireless charging last year.Like the Wireless Charging Base, the Wireless Charge Stream Pad Plus is a Qi-based wireless charger, but unlike the earlier version — which has the hallowed position of being

Facebook has a lot of problems right now, but one that’s definitely not going away any time soon is fake news. As the company’s user base has grown to include more than a quarter of the world’s population, it has (understandably) struggled to control what they all post and share. For Facebook, unwanted content can be anything from mild nudity to serious violence, but what’s proved to be most sensitive and damaging for the company is hoaxes and misinformation — espe

Marvel’s Black Panther will be the first film shown in Saudi Arabian movie theaters in 35 years. The Guardian reports that the film will kick off on April 18th with a gala premiere in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia banned public movie screenings 35 years ago due to religious concerns, but the decision to reverse that ban was made in December of 2017. Sony’s The Emoji Movie screened in the country earlier this year along with other animated films, but those showings took place in a state-run c

Delta and Sears said today that a data breach may have leaked the credit card information of hundreds of thousands of customers, as first reported by Reuters. The breach occurred at an online support service company, [24]7, which powers both Delta and Sears’ online chat platforms.
Last year, [24]7 suffered a malware attack from September 27th to October 12th, but the company only informed Sears and Delta in mid-March this year about the breach, according to Sears. Delta said in a statemen

Telling the family that dinner’s ready or reminding the kids it’s time for bed won’t require as much shouting if you’ve got a smart home with Echo speakers scattered around. Today Amazon announced a new feature called Alexa Announcements, which will let you simultaneously broadcast a voice message to every Echo in the house.Users already had the intercom-style ability to carry on two-way conversations between rooms, but the one-way Announcements function is meant for the

Researchers are using VR as an empathy tool to help neurotypical teachers understand their students with autism. There have already been attempts to use VR to help autistic children and adults find new ways of coping. Autism Speaks, for example, funds a virtual reality training program designed to help improve social skills. But a team of researchers at the University of Malta decided to work on the problem from the other direction — namely, using VR to help teachers understand the lived

Amazon is improving its parental control dashboard to allow parents to adjust FreeTime settings like screen time limits, bedtime curfews, whitelisted apps, and more from any web browser. Previously, those controls could only be changed from the actual kids’ edition Fire tablet. Now they can be accessed and updated from any smartphone or PC that a parent has access to. They can also enable or disable the web browser remotely.The Parent Dashboard lets parents remotely keep an eye on the con

Careship, the German marketplace for in-home senior care, has raised €6 million in further funding. The round is led by Creandum, the European early-stage investor best known for being an early backer of Spotify, and will be used by the Berlin startup to further expand nationally.
In addition to Creandum, European ‘impact’ investor Ananda Ventures joined the round, with participation from existing backers Spark Capital, Atlantic Labs, and Axel Springer Plug and Play. Careshiphad

There existed a glitch that allowed users to make an absurd amount of money in Cryptokitties that no one has been aware of, or so this guy is claiming. Robert Durst, a ‘full stack engineer with a slight blockchain obsession’, described his experience of ‘hacking’ Cryptokitties on hackernoon. Durst exploited the ‘likes’ feature to dominate the Cryptokitties marketplace. He says that, while the rest of the users were busy manually liking their kitties, he

Olympus’ Pen E-PL9 has been out in Europe since last month, and now it’s finally making its way to the US today. Like the European release, the US launch of the Olympus Pen E-PL9 will offer white, black, or brown colors, sold either as just the body for $599.99 or in a $699.99 kit that includes a 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 EZ lens, 16GB memory card, and a camera bag.The Pen E-PL9 is an updated version of the 2016 E-PL8 model in Olympus’ Pen Lite series of pocket mirrorless cameras. It l

Doogee has built a name for itself the last few years thanks to super-cheap smartphones with thin bezels. But while previous designs have been rather uninspired, an upcoming model, the Mix 4, actually looks pretty sweet. Instead of hiding cameras, sensors, and speakers in a thin bezel or notch, the Mix 4 hides them using a sliding mechanism. It’s the 90s all over again. A video by YouTuber Mrwhosetheboss shows off a dummy prototype with a 6-inch screen, provided to him by the company

After the premiere of A Quiet Place at SXSW, the film’s director, John Krasinski, explained that he picked up the script after a simple pitch: “What if it’s a family, and they can’t make noise, and you have to figure out why?” This explanation goes a long way toward illustrating A Quiet Place’s goals. The film hits all the necessary beats for a straightforward horror film in an eerie post-apocalyptic setting. But it’s more effective as a portrait of a f

Gym-goers trying to book a class online may find themselves out of luck today. MindBody, a software that services fitness brands like ClassPass, Pure Barre, SLT, and Flywheel for online scheduling and class management, is down due to a system-wide outage.Users trying to book or access reservations will instead need to contact their gyms directly, whether that means picking up a phone or interacting with a human in person. The service appears to have been down since around 8AM ET, taking down th

Richard Branson’s fledgling space tourism company Virgin Galactic performed a powered flight of its spacecraft today, the first since a fatal crash in 2014.Virgin’s spacecraft is unlike others because it is launched mid-flight by a larger plane called White Knight Two. This particular version of the spacecraft, dubbed SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, has performed seven glide tests since it was built in 2016. Like those previous tests it was carried high above the Mojave Desert by White Knig

Apple’s long-awaited update to the 2013 Mac Pro won’t be released until sometime next year, the company confirmed in an interview with TechCrunch. We’ve known since a press roundtable in April 2017 that Apple was “completely rethinking” the Mac Pro, in the words of marketing chief Phil Schiller. Now, we have confirmation that the product is arriving next year after some speculation that it could make an appearance this year at a fall hardware event typically reserv

Note: this is only for editorial tips. For advertising, technical support, and other inquiries, go here.In accordance with best practices set by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, this page is being served over HTTPS without third-party analytics or ad trackers.
Some of our most important stories start with tips. We’re always looking for information about the companies and products that shape the way we live, insight into the government agencies responsible for public health and the env

Friday morning, SpaceX was prepping for what should have been an otherwise routine launch — sending 10 satellites into orbit for long-time customer Iridium — when the company made a strange announcement. During the livestream leading up to the mission, a SpaceX employee explained that the company would have to cut off footage from the Falcon 9 rocket once the vehicle reached orbit. And the host said restrictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were to blame.

Uber said it would suspend its licensed service in Greece after new legislation was passed that would impose stricter rules on ride-hailing. Like in other European countries, Uber has long faced opposition from taxi owners in Greece for taking their business.According to Reuters, the new regulations require each trip to start and end in the fleet partner’s designated headquarters or parking area, something Uber does not do. A digital registry of all ride-sharing platforms and their passen

The rise of chatbots and smart speaker-powered voice assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, has produced the need for specialist analytics so developers can track how well those conversational interfaces are working. Hoping to take a chunk of this nascent market, including competing with Google’s own chatbot analytics product Chatbase, is Istanbul and San Francisco-based Botanalytics.
Previously backed by 500 Startups, the company quietly raised $1 million in seed funding late last yea

Nintendo’s upcoming Labo cardboard accessories for the Switch look really fun. But if you can’t wait another few weeks to build your own cool Switch gizmos — or rightfully recognize that Lego is a far superior building material than corrugated paper — you can get started on your DIY projects a little earlier with Lego Switch accessories (via MotherBoard).The Lego Switch accessories come from YouTube vmln8r, who took a 3D-printed Switch accessory rail (like how the Joy-Co

HP is aiming its new ZBook Studio x360 laptop at creatives who might need a portable and convertible device that supports intensive workloads. Similar to what HP did with the ZBook X2 last year, the x360 features consumer-style form factors and specs similar to those of a workstation PC.The laptop comes with options for Intel’s latest Core i5 and i7 processors (with 6 cores) or even high-performance Xeon chips, Nvidia Quadro P1000 graphics, up to 4TB of local PCIe NVMe storage, and up to

It’s been a rocky few years for Apple when it comes to professional users, thanks to failures like the rebooted Mac Pro and Final Cut Pro X that drove many people away. Lately, the company has been trying to fix that with products like the iMac Pro (and the still promised the return of a more traditional Mac Pro sometime down the line) and a steady stream of updates for its pro applications.The latest Final Cut Pro update looks to continue that momentum, adding two major new features to t

Just a few days after the Google Lunar X Prize ended without a winner, the X Prize Foundation announced today that it’s relaunching its competition to send a private spacecraft to the Moon. The competition will be “non-cash,” meaning it won’t have prize money for whichever team first completes its mission to the lunar surface — at least for now. The foundation is looking for a new sponsor that can replace Google and provide funding.
“We are extraordinarily gr

From the permissioned blockchain networks of IBM to the newly introduced Hashgraph technology, some of the largest technology and financial conglomerates have been testing the applicability and potential of blockchain with the Internet of Things (IoT) market since the beginning of 2016. Yet, with nearly $4 billion invested in blockchain research and development, not a single company has been able to demonstrate the successful integration of blockchain technology with IoT. In order to integrate

In the past year, Louis Vuitton has been dipping its toes into fashion tech, starting with introducing its $2,450 Tambour Horizon smartwatch last summer. Now, it’s released something a bit more accessible (but still ridiculous) in price: a $370 luggage tracker called the Louis Vuitton Echo. The device lets you track your suitcase via the LV Pass app, available on both Android and iOS, and it comes with a three-year service subscription to Sigfox. The Sigfox subscription allows you to the

Procurement isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but for large businesses, it’s an area where inefficiencies can quickly affect the bottom line. Simply getting a complete view of all of the products and services that a company buys is a challenge in itself, though, which in turn makes it hard to find savings, ensure compliance with company policy or government regulations or detect potential fraud. Suplari wants to change this by bringing its AI systems to bear on this problem

It looks like OnePlus has a pair of wireless earbuds in the works. As spotted by Nashville Chatter, a listing on the Bluetooth certification site reveals the existence of a product called the OnePlus Bullets Wireless. Since OnePlus already has two pairs of wired earbuds called the Bullets, it’s pretty clear what this product is going to be. The only big question the name leaves is whether they’ll be fully wireless or still include a wire that wraps around the neck.
OnePlus has alrea