Technology news

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally published after Manhunt’s debut at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. It is being reposted to coincide with the film’s premiere on Netflix.
It’s always possible that John Woo could have played the doves straight. The Hong Kong director behind action classics like Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow (and later American a

Hundreds of YouTube channels have had their videos removed from the site following a BBC investigation that found the widespread promotion of an essay-writing service as a way for students to cheat at school.Last week, the BBC published an investigation which found that more than 250 channels had promoted a Ukranian company called EduBirdie, which sells essays to desperate students. The company says that its services are useful for “research into the subject, generating initial input for

In times like these, a good dystopian hellscape is hard to find. OK, that statement does sound like nonsense at first: from The Handmaid’s Tale sweeping the Emmy awards, to the ungodly sums being shoveled towards projects like Netflix’s Altered Carbon and Amazon’s Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, to the ever-expanding relevance of Black Mirror — not to mention, you know, reality — dystopian hellscapes are plentiful. Many of them are beautifully crafted, prof

During last summer’s Champion’s League Final in Cardiff, Wales, South Wales Police began a facial recognition pilot program designed to check event-goers against a database of 500,000 images of persons of interest. Almost a year later, The Guardian reports that the pilot yielded 2,470 potential matches, of which, 2,297 were found to be “false positives.”
In a records request (via Wired), the South Wales Police revealed that at events such as the 2017 Champion’s Lea

Our viewing spot to watch the launch is dubbed the “Gravel Pit” — and it certainly lives up to its name. The area is essentially a large plot of rocks and dirt on the side of a small cliff. It’s touted as the best place to watch the rocket take off. That is, if the fog lets up.
I’m somewhere deep inside Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California, and I’m about to witness the launch of NASA’s InSight lander. The spacecraft is slated to ride into sp

I didn’t used to hate YouTube ads. They were never my favorite part of the YouTube experience, but for almost my entire YouTube-using life, I’ve dealt with the endless cycle of pre-roll ads whenever I wanted to check out the latest movie trailer or clip on YouTube. I understood the basic idea — hosting videos isn’t cheap, and ads help pay for continuing service and even supporting my favorite content creators.Then, a few months back, YouTube Red offered a free three-mont

Porsche has made some bold statements recently about how many of its resources it’s putting behind plug-in hybrids and fully electric cars in the coming years. While its first all-electric, the Mission E, is still more than a year off, the next line of its hybrids has been rolling out over the last year. Following the Panamera E-Hybrid and Turbo S E-Hybrid, there’s the 2019 Cayenne E-Hybrid — the latest plug-in hybrid iteration of one of Porsche’s most popular vehicles.I

“I don’t really listen to music.”
I couldn’t believe it. It was as if my friend had just informed me that he didn’t chew food with his mouth. He seemed like a different species.
I tried to put myself in his shoes. Tried to imagine a version of me that didn’t really listen to music. I couldn’t do it.
But my friend is a few years older than me. I knew a few people, my older brother, for instance, whose musical taste had ossified after college. Maybe after

Donald Glover was the host of last night’s Saturday Night Live, and appeared in one sketch as his character in the upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story: Lando Calrissian. There, he asked a question that’s been raised a lot about the Star Wars universe: where the hell are all the black humans in space?
In the sketch, Glover’s charming Lando hosts the “first-ever summit for all black humans,” on Naboo, which turns out to include just three attendees. It’s a pointed

There are a ton of podcasts out there, but finding the right one can be difficult. In our new column Pod Hunters, we cover what we’ve been listening to that we can’t stop thinking about.
Sandra, the new fiction podcast from podcast studio Gimlet, opens with a short faux-ad: “There’s a reason why everyone’s switching to Sandra, the world’s most responsive and intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator.” In this drama, a company called Orbital

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Overlook Film Festival.
Mysterious disappearances, creepy mansions, and characters trapped in locations far from home are all standard horror movie tropes. But in his latest film, Don’t Leave Home, director Michael Tully mixes those elements together along with a good dose of arthouse filmmaking, creating a dreamy, moody blend that bec

When Epic Games revealed the big surprise of Fortnite’s fourth season earlier this week, fans could both see it coming and retain that giddy kid-on-Christmas-morning feeling. The developer planned the reveal for months: a meteor in the sky hovered over the game’s map since January, and on Tuesday it crashed into the world of Fortnite to create a massive crater with gravity-defying extraterrestrial power-ups scattered about. In addition to the meteor crash, Epic transformed its map i

When Michelle Obama walked onto the stage of Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium Saturday evening, the crowd let loose screams of joy usually reserved for rock stars. 
Audience members, who'd spent the day talking about gender equality as part of the United State of Women summit, listened raptly for 40 minutes as Obama, in conversation with Black-ish actress Tracee Ellis Ross, shared what amounted to life lessons you'd expect from one of the most beloved first ladies in recent history. And when