Technology news

Disney opened its impressive, immersive Pandora: The World of Avatar park last year, allowing visitors to go to go and experience the world of James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. Disney announced that it’s making a rather cool addition to the the park: a towering, walking mech suit that will be piloted by actors.
The 12-acre park features its own story set a generation after the film, in a place called the Valley of Mo’ara, where tourists are brought to the planet via a company

Last month, we came across a new phone case, which combines the style of a classic Nintendo Game Boy with actual playability. It comes with a handful of classic games like Tetris, Tank, Frogger, and others, and it’s certainly aimed at a nostalgic audience. It looks like a classic Game Boy: a D-pad, a pair of A/B buttons, and buttons to turn it on, reset the gameplay, make a selection, and turn the sound on and off. And, of course, it has a square monochrome LCD display that mimics the ori

The two most vital concepts in most video games are learning and dying. Only by learning can you avoid death, and only through death can you learn. It’s a loop that has existed since the earliest days of the medium. By leaning into and toying with that fundamental relationship, indie game Minit achieves something that feels referential and nostalgic and yet unique and exhilarating all at once.
The game, out this week on Steam as well as PS4 and Xbox, was created by developers Jan Willem N

I love all smart, connected planters because I can’t keep a living thing alive, but they also seem to keep failing. Parrot attempted a smart pot with its Parrot Pot, which was discontinued. Another company, Edyn, launched with a successful Kickstarter campaign and later a partnership with Home Depot, but it now appears to be struggling. Still, companies want to keep trying to make smart planters. Click & Grow sells a bunch of different indoor planters with timed lights and water reser

Weeks after it suspended UK data firm Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has preventedCanadian data firm AggregateIQ from using its platform, according to the National Observer, pending an investigation after it reports connected the two amidst the ongoing privacy scandal that has shaken the social media company.In a statement to the National Observer, a Facebook spokesperson says the company has been suspended from the platform “in light of recent reports that AggregateIQ may be affiliated wi

Did you hear Alexa’s creepy, disembodied, and irrelevant laughter the other day? If not, you can count yourself lucky. As we adopt more devices for our homes and bodies, we open the door to more vulnerabilities and errors. Nobody expects new technology to work perfectly, but the recent system failures like and operating errors — like those of Alexa and Oculus Rift — offer a valuable lesson for consumer and developers about IoT. Basically, it illustrates just how far we are fro

Spring cleaning is upon us, which means that now is the perfect time for a tech refresh. If your phone is ready for an upgrade, you’ve got some good options this week. Verizon is taking 50 percent off new phones like the iPhone X and Galaxy S9 when you trade in an eligible phone. If you’re looking for an unlocked, mid-priced phone, the Huawei Mate SE is still at its introductory price of $229.99 ($249.99 MSRP) at most retailers including Walmart, B&H, and Newegg.You’ll pro

“Sometimes, you just have to get a knife in your hands and make it clear which way the stabby end is pointing.”So begins Margaret Killjoy’s novella The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, the first of a pair of books that introduces a fantastic world of magic in America’s decrepit heartland, featuring a band of genderqueer, anarchist demon hunters. The two books are short, sharp, get straight to the point, and present a fantastic world that can be consumed in a single sitting.

I first gave up on Windows Phone back in December 2014. Microsoft’s mobile platform was being left behind, and I was tired of not getting access to the apps everyone else was using. It took Microsoft a few years to finally admit Windows Phone is dead, and the company is no longer planning to release any new hardware running its mobile OS or update it with any features. I recently switched on an old Windows Phone to create a silly April Fools’ joke about returning to using it as my d

YouTube has had a bit of a rough time recently. With concerns around inappropriate content and brand safety mounting, the platform has taken a few arguably necessary and cautious steps to protect its users. The latest move is that the platform has pulled the plug on displaying ads on the videos of those with under 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in the last year to prevent ‘bad actors’ from misleading and exploiting the system.    But whilst there is incred

Out of the numerous companies I’ve worked with in the past years, most use Google Docs to submit and collaborate on draft articles and documents. Google’s productivity suite has become the defacto work platform for millions of people and organizations across the world. And with good reason: It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s already available to every user who has a Google account (which includes more than one billion active Gmail users). However, one problem I&

Behind every great woman, there is often another great woman who has encouraged her and listened to her and advised her, rather than tried to compete with her. That’s the way that it should be, according to Shine Theory, a concept that was crystalized by journalist Ann Friedman in 2013 and embraced by women in the last presidential administration at the urging of Barack Obama himself.
As Obama’s former senior advisor Valerie Jarrettrecalls its genesis in the White House, numerous wom

After a bit of a hubbub among developers this morning who were pissed that in a few months their third-party Twitter apps could lose essential functionality, Twitterannounced that they would be delaying the sunset of certain APIs in an effort to make sure developers have enough time to make changes.
The current date the APIs were set to retire was June 19, and developers of apps like Twitterrific, Tweetbot and Tweetings were getting understandably antsy because third-party devs hadn’t been

In the run-up to Mark Zuckerberg’s first appearance before Congress, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden issued a warning to the company about what it can expect from lawmakers if it doesn’t radically alter course.
“Mr. Zuckerberg is going to have a couple of very unpleasant days before Congress next week and that’s the place to start,” Wyden said at the TechFestNW conference in his home state of Oregon on Friday.
“There are going to be people who are going to say Facebo

It’s been a week filled to the brim with customer security compromises, and here’s one more to add to the pile. A day after Sears, Kmart and Delta confirmed that they’d been impacted by a breach of data firm, [24]7.ai, Best Buy issued a public statement noting that it’s in the same boat.
At last count, Sears, Kmart and Delta believe that thousands of customers have potentially had data exposed. In its own statement, Best Buy seems slightly more optimistic about its own nu

AggregateIQ, a Canadian advertising tech and audience intelligence company, has been suspended by Facebookfor allegedly being closely connected with SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, reported the National Observer.
News broke late last month that AIQ, which was deeply involved with (and handsomely paid by) pro-Leave Brexit groups, was not the independent Canadian data broker it claimed to be. Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who blew the lid off the Cambridge Analytica story, e

YouTube plans to release a non-algorithmic, whitelisted version of its YouTube Kids app some time in the near future as a way to avoid inadvertently suggesting questionable or graphic content to children, according to a report this evening from BuzzFeed News. The modified version of the app will also be restricted to videos from hand-selected channels that a team of human curators at YouTube will approve.The decision, though it has yet to be officially announced, comes amid longstanding concern

Visitors to Backpage.com today were greeted by a simple message from the U.S. Department of Justice, noting that it had seized the classifieds site. According to the static image, the move was a joint effort that included the FBI, IRS and the U.S Postal Inspection Service.
The action, while brash, perhaps wasn’t unexpected. The site has come under scrutiny from authorities in recent years for its adult ads, which helped make it the second largest classifieds site behind Craigslist.Aft

Logistics may not be the most exciting application of autonomous vehicles, but it’s definitely one of the most important. And the marine shipping industry — one of the oldest industries in the world, you can imagine — is ready for it. Or at least two major Norwegian shipping companies are: they’re building an autonomous shipping venture called Massterly from the ground up.
“Massterly” isn’t just a pun on mass; “Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship&rdqu

Skype is finally getting a call recording feature, only 15 years after it was first released. It should be noted that Skype isn’t building its own recording software but relying on third-party apps, including Xsplit, Wirecast, and Vmix. These products, among others, have allowed you to record Skype calls for years, but now it sounds as if Microsoft wants a more streamlined version.Windows 10 and Mac users will be able to record calls if they switch their desktop Skype client over to &ldqu