Technology news

National Geographic today released the first-ever 3D VR video filmed in space. Featuring footage captured both inside and outside the International Space Station (ISS) the clip is an amazing glimpse of something only a handful of humans have ever seen. The video was filmed by National Geographic in partnership with Humaneyes Technologies aboard the ISS for the TV show “One Strange Rock,” a documentary series focused on describing the Earth as seen by astronauts. Other VR experiences

Google’s AIY Projects (a clever play on “DIY” and “AI” that makes no sense when you actually think about it) pair a Raspberry Pi with the accessories, software, and requisite cardboard to make your own Google Assistant smart speaker or object-recognizing smart camera. They only launched last year, but Google is already back with new and improved versions of both the AIY Vision Kit and AIY Voice Kit (as spotted by 9to5 Google).
The new kits now include a fresh Raspb

Jailbreaking iPhones has fallen out of vogue in recent years, but this upcoming PokéCall jailbreak tweak developed by Reddit user FrozenPenguinToaster might be the best argument for jailbreaking in years. The hack transforms the dull incoming call screen on iOS into a battle from the classic Pokémon Game Boy games, right down to the iconic music.It’s surprisingly functional, too, with contacts showing up as trainers, and presenting the options to answer the call (fight) or h

It’s already hard to remember how little anticipation there was when 2014’s John Wick opened. It looked like yet another dour revenge movie in Mad Max “you killed my family, prepare to die” mode, except this time with Keanu Reeves avenging his dead puppy. Then the film came out and it rightly became a slow-burn hit based on its stylish fights, memorable cinematography, and above all, its compelling look into a classy criminal underworld, as revealed through a thoroughly

Kendrick Lamar has become the first non-classical, non-jazz artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for music for his 2017 album DAMN.The prize listing describes Lamar’s record, which documents the complexities of growing up in his hometown of Compton, as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”
Released almost exactly a year ago and featuring cr

Spring is here and that can only mean one thing: time to shake yourself out of hibernation and bust out that spring reading.
But with so many great books coming out in 2018, it can be hard to figure out just which ones you should pick up.
SEE ALSO: 9 books to read before seeing the movie
Don't worry though — The MashReads Podcast has got you covered.
This week on the MashReads Podcast, we are joined by Cristina Arreola, books editor at Bustle, to chat about spring reading. Join us in

The cryptocurrency world is a strange one, but at least it has a sense of humor. A new game has you riding a little crypto-car along the wildly fluctuating prices of major and minor currencies. It’s quite ridiculous, and it isn’t even a bad game!
It’s called Crypto Rider, predictably, and is very much a spawn of the popular Line Rider type of game, though (hopefully) different enough that there won’t be any cease and desists forthcoming.
You select your car, then pick a c

Many aspects of the media seem to take great delight in pointing out the differences between generations in the workplace. We have all seen the videos where smug parents mock their Gen Z kids for not knowing how to dial a call on a rotary phone or operate a VCR. The truth is these skills 20th-century life skills remain in the analog world. To thrive and survive in a fast-moving digital era, workers are developing a new set of skills and requirements across multiple industries. There is an incre

The Shorty Awards, an awards show for social media brands and influencers, are fine. If you care about them, great, but if you don't, life goes on.
But not according to Adam Pally.
Adam Pally hates the Shorty Awards with all his heart, and made it very clear at last night's 10th annual show. When presenting "Best Overall Instagram," he called the award itself a "glass vagina," and said, "A career highlight will be when I'm done." 
With burns like these, let's just get Adam Pally to host the

Pluralsight,the Utah-based education technology company, has revealed its IPO filing. 
Given the timing of the unveiling, the company is likely targeting a May public debut.
Its core business is online software development courses, helping people improve their skills in categories like IT, data and security. Businesses small and large pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. It also has offerings for individual subscribers.
In the filing, the company acknowledges that it is a com

T-Mobile has to pay $40 million as part of a settlement after the FCC ruled that it violated the law by adding fake ringtones to hundreds of millions of calls over several years. It will also have to act within 90 days and send a compliance report to the FCC once a year for the next three years.
The carrier admitted to adding fake ringtones to make customers mistakenly believe the party they called was hearing their phones ring, when in fact the call might not have been connected yet. The FCC n

Update April 16th, 4:35PM ET: SpaceX is pushing back the launch until Wednesday, April 18th. The company says it needs more time to do analyses of guidance, navigation, and control systems.
Original Story: On Wednesday, SpaceX will send a refrigerator-sized satellite into orbit for NASA to hunt for distant worlds far outside our Solar System. Called TESS, it’s the first NASA spacecraft that SpaceX will launch that is designed to peer deep into the cosmos.
TESS is NASA’s newest exopl

Indiana Jones’ exclamation of, “It belongs in a museum!” is taking a trip into the digital age with a Googleinitiative that will save archaeological sites to the cloud.
Google’s nonprofit Arts and Culture arm is partnering with another nonprofit, Oakland-based CyArk, which flies drones and sets up cameras around historical sites using photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning tech to create dense models composed of thousands of photos and data points. These scans had previou

“Other companies suck in your data too,” Facebookexplained in many, many words today with a blog post detailing how it gathers information about you from around the web.
Facebook product management director David Baser wrote, “Twitter,Pinterest and LinkedIn all have similar Like and Share buttons to help people share things on their services. Googlehas a popular analytics service. And Amazon, Google and Twitter all offer login features. These companies — and many oth

Just last quarter Netflixpassed a $100 billion market cap — and we might already be talking about it as a $150 billion company before too long with yet another big financial quarter that sent its stock soaring.
Netflix, again, beat out some expectations Wall Street held for the first quarter and provided a pretty good outlook for the next quarter as well, where it said it expected to add around 6.2 million new subscribers. In the first quarter, Netflix added 7.41 million new subscribe

In a race to get the long-awaited Model 3 production running as planned, Tesla quietly concealed the true number of workplace injuries at its Fremont, California assembly plant, according to a new report. This offsets reports the company made about a sharp drop in injuries and casts another shadow over the plans to reach mass production targets.
Tesla may have violated state law by failing to report these serious worker injuries, according to an investigation by Reveal and The Center for Invest

Pentagon technology chief Mike Griffin last week announced US military plans to form an office dedicated to procuring and deploying artificial intelligence technology. Meanwhile, the White House still doesn’t have a science adviser. The US military appears to embrace AI at every strategic level, and the creation of a new office to manage the burgeoning technology is further evidence that machine learning is the future of warfare. According to Federal News Radio’s Eric White, Un

Last week, Yubico, the company behind the popular YubiKey USB authentication dongles, announced the launch of its $20 Security Key with support for the FIDO2/WebAuthn standard. With a bit of luck, FIDO2 may just herald the end of passwords and, as the company announced today, Microsoft is putting its weight behind this by announcing upcoming support for the Yubico Security Key for Windows 10 and Azure Active Directory users.
This new feature is currently in limited preview and only availabl

Just in time for the annual RSA conference in San Francisco, Microsofttoday announced a number of new security tools for its business users that range from new tools to prevent phishing attacks to a new service that only allows you to access certain online services if your device also has a clean bill of health.
Attackers know that humans are typically the weakest link in any company’s security protocols and the rise of phishing attacks bears witness to that. Some larger companies have lon

What’s the best way to keep our screens clean? The first, and obvious answer, is to keep our hands themselves free of grime. But there may be another option: self-cleaning coatings created by materials scientists.Recently, Anish Tuteja, a materials researcher at the University of Michigan, developed a clear, smooth coating that repels all liquids and can be applied to any surface. (The research was published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.) There are other repellent

“The percentage of Top 40 music made with our platform blows my mind,” says Spliceco-founder Steve Martocci. He tells me about some bedroom music producers who were “working at Olive Garden until they put sounds on Splice.” Soon they quit their jobs because they were earning enough from artists downloading those sounds to use in their songs. That led them to collaborate with famous DJ Zedd, resulting in the Billboard No. 12 hit “Starving.”
Splice has

Google plans to resume accepting advertisements from alcohol and drug addiction treatment centers following a lengthy period of review, Reuters reports. Google originally stripped rehab-related search terms of advertising on its AdWords platform last September, following an investigation from The Verge detailing how misleading ads from disreputable treatment centers were gaming Google’s algorithms to boost incoming patient numbers.Google says ads will now be vetted directly by Portland, O

We’ve written a lot about the OnePlus 6 as a steady stream of rumors, leaks and official information have given us a solid idea of what to expect from the device. But today, OnePlus’ official Twitter account is heavily hinting at one feature that hasn’t been a prominent part of the rumor mill: water-resistance. Don’t you just hate it when you have to stop using your phone when it rains? So do we 😉 pic.twitter.com/QEnOdm3Xtk — OnePlus (@oneplus) April 16, 20

The Walking Dead is back and careening toward the conclusion of the “All Out War” saga. That means the end of the feud between Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his archnemesis Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) — and perhaps that’s a good thing. Overall, the show’s big bet on Negan has been a bit of a misfire, with ratings hitting staggering lows last year, and Negan himself largely absent from the first half of the show’s eighth season.
But a season-ending climax i

Amber Case ContributorShare on TwitterAmber Case is the former CEO of Geoloqi, a past keynote speaker for SXSWi and at TED, and author of the O’Reilly book Calm Technology: Designing for Billions of Devices and the Internet of Things. She is currently a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. More posts by this contributorHow Facebook Can Better Fight Fake News: Make Money Off the People Who Promote It Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late

Following the passage of a new cybersecurity law and the removal of term limits from Chinese president Xi Jinping, China’s government is conducting a comprehensive crackdown on online discussions and content, with few companies spared the rod by the central government.
Among the casualties has been Bytedance,the extremely high-flying $20 billion media unicorn startup that was forced to publicly apologize for content that degraded the character of the nation. The government forced the compa

When headphone jacks were withheld from smartphones by our all-knowing corporate overlords, we were promised a wireless future as compensation. But in addition to battery life hassle, subpar audio quality, and pairing woes, Bluetooth headphones have one more major drawback: they aren’t Koss Porta Pros.
Koss’s Porta Pro headphones are the greatest headphones ever invented. (Please pay no attention to Vlad.) They’re lightweight, breathable, don’t block out outside noise, a

It’s been almost exactly a year since the “luxury” music festival called Fyre Festival was “fully postponed” (read: canceled forever) after ticket holders found themselves stranded in the Bahamas with nothing but a few tents and some really sad cheese sandwiches. Now, Hulu has picked up a multipart documentary about the whole debacle, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Fyre Festival was launched by Fyre Media, a startup owned by Ja Rule and a 20-something entrepr

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is following in Star Wars’ footsteps with a novelized expansion of its on-screen universe. Barry Lyga’s new novel, Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos—Titan Consumed, will give Avengers villain Thanos his own origin story when it hits shelves November 20th.Thanos has long been teased as the be-all-end-all threat for the MCU’s Avengers; he’ll take center stage during the upcoming film Avengers: Infinity War. But as noted in Ly

Amazon warehouse workers are forced to pee in bottles or forego their bathroom breaks entirely because fulfillment demands are too high, according to journalist James Bloodworth, who went undercover as an Amazon worker for his book, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. Targets have reportedly increased exponentially, workers say in a new survey revealed over the weekend, and as result, they feel pressured and stressed to meet the new goals.
Workers who pick up products for delivery

Sega announced last week that it was making a new mini console based on the Genesis, also known as the Mega Drive. It’s called the Mega Drive Mini — why someone passed on the chance to call it the “Mini Drive,” I have no idea. Sega joins its former rivals Nintendo and Atari on the mini console market, and the Mega Drive Mini appears to be patterned directly on those consoles, in that its tiny and incapable of playing the same media as its original version. #セ|

In response to recent concerns about Facebook’s handling of user data, Bumble has announced it will drop its Facebook login requirement for users. The dating app will allow users to log in and register for an account using a phone number beginning tomorrow, according to a new report from Wired.
The decision comes days after Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress to answer questions surrounding the recent Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. The London-based dating mining firm, whi

Spotify will be announcing news about changes in its mobile app at an event next week, according to an invite the company sent out. The event will feature presentations from chief R&D officer Gustav Söderström, vice president of product development Babar Zafar, and global head of creator services Troy Carter.
Rumors have swirled around the April 24th event since the initial invitation went out a couple weeks ago. At the time, it only instructed recipients to save the date for a ne

Google has partnered with 3D laser scanning nonprofit CyArk to help preserve historical sites around the world that are at risk of irreversible damage or total erasure due to human conflict and natural disasters. The joint effort, called the Open Heritage project, will use CyArk’s laser-scanning technology to capture all the relevant data at a historical site needed to re-create it virtually, so it can be preserved and explored online either on a computer, through a mobile device, or whil

Samsung is fixing last year’s Chromebook Pro by releasing a new model of the computer that is virtually identical, save for one crucial difference: a backlit keyboard, via SamMobile.The new model features exactly the same specifications as the original. It has the same design, the same 12.3-inch, 2400 x 1600 pixel display, and the same Intel Core M3 processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and $599.99 price tag. The lack of a backlit keyboard was always a strange omission given the Chromeb

In a delicious turn of fate Elon Musk has put robots the world over on notice. He recently replaced the highly-touted automation system at Tesla with a better, more intelligent paradigm: humans. Tesla’s Model 3 production facility is regarded as one of the most advanced car manufacturing plants in the world. It’s also been a complete failure. Elon Musk this month personally took over operations. And in true Musk form he’s burning the candle at both ends, rarely leaving the bui

Coinbase,the prominent cryptocurrency exchange, has announced its most significant piece of M&A to date after it agreed to buy Earn.com, the U.S. startup that uses the blockchain for its paid-email service, in a deal worth more than $120 million. In addition, Coinbase has appointed Earn.comco-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan as its first CTO, while the rest of the team will transition over, too.
The deal doesn’t come as a complete surprise as Coindesk reported last month tha

The US Department of Commerce just announced a ban on American exports to the Chinese smartphone maker ZTE. That means American companies like Dolby and Qualcomm won’t be able to export any parts to ZTE for up to seven years. The loss of Qualcomm is particularly damaging, as it severely restricts ZTE’s options for devices in the US market.The Commerce Department says ZTE failed to uphold a plea agreement after it pleaded guilty last year to illegally shipping US equipment to Iran an

Bitcoin enthusiasts on Reddit have come up with a new, ridiculous challenge: posting photos of stores accepting BTC payments from the most unexpected places in the world. The trend seems to have started when an r/Bitcoin user posted a photo of a store accepting payments in BTC in Romania. The user called it “the first signs of Bitcoin going mainstream.” Redditors from other country were not happy with the Romanian claim that Bitcoin acceptance is higher in their country. They decide

This afternoon, SpaceX will send a refrigerator-sized satellite into orbit for NASA to hunt for distant worlds far outside our Solar System. Called TESS, it’s the first NASA spacecraft that SpaceX will launch that is designed to peer deep into the cosmos.
TESS is NASA’s newest exoplanet hunter. The probe is tasked with staring at stars tens to hundreds of light-years from Earth, watching to see if they blink. When a planet passes in front of a distant star, it dims the star’s