Technology news

The Great Wall of China was originally built to keep barbarians out, and now the Great Firewall of China strives to do the same kind of thing in our digital era. Allowing the Chinese government to block access to foreign websites and slow down cross-border internet traffic, the Great Firewall is the largest system of censorship in the world. But if you’re traveling to the vast country, you can circumvent it using a virtual private network, or VPN. Take it from us: You don't have to get blo

What a difference a day — one with a public lament — makes. Today the CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov announced that the messaging app is updating again on iOS, putting to a close a six-week freeze, where Apple had stopped allowing Telegram to ship newer versions of the app globally, even while continuing to allow the app to live in the App Store and allowing push notifications to those who already had it installed. Apple has also confirmed to us that it’s now allowing updates of t

Some users in the UK and other parts of Europe are experiencing problems paying for purchases with Visa cards for several hours now, as first spotted by Bloomberg today. It turns out Visa is experiencing a network failure, with the company now saying it’s investigating the issue. The company also confirmed on Twitter that there’s a service disruption in Europe.The outage has caused several banks — including the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Ireland — to issue st

Kanye should have seen the memes coming.
Kanye West released his album, YE, during a livestreamed listening party in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Thursday. While most people were quick to post their reactions to the album's songs, some pointed to the album cover art. 
SEE ALSO: Kanye West's new album finally came, after a lengthy livestream of a campfire
His wife Kim Kardashian West tweeted that Kanye made the album cover on their way to the listening party, taking a photo of the Teton mountain

DC's Geoff Johns may have dropped a serious hint about the Wonder Woman sequel – namely, the year it takes place.
Johns, DC Entertainment President and Chief Creative Officer, shared a teaser on Facebook Friday morning that simply read "WW84," which might point to seeing our hero in 1984.
SEE ALSO: Hollywood hasn't gotten any better about LGBTQ inclusivity onscreenJohns uploaded the image as his cover photo, where it slid largely under the radar until The Hollywood Reporter sniffed it out.

A controversial Googlecontract with the U.S. military will not be renewed next year after internal and public outcry against it, Gizmodo reports. The program itself was not particularly distasteful or lucrative, but served as a foot in the door for the company to pursue more government work that may very well have been both.
Project Maven, as the program was known, essentially had Google working with the military to perform image analysis on sensitive footage like that from drones flying over co

Apple is looking to expand its ad sales business, The Wall Street Journal reports today, which would represent a significant change in the company’s business strategy. Until now, Apple has prioritized hardware sales as its main profit driver, but global smartphone sales are waning as people hold on to their expensive devices for longer periods of time. This means there’s less money in phones and more of a need for Apple to expand its business beyond hardware.
In turn, Apple has repo

Remix artist Nick Bertke, best known online as Pogo, is a musician who turns sounds and songs from Disney films like Alice in Wonderland and Up into dreamy chillwave songs with millions of YouTube views. Last year, he managed to turn Despicable Me into a slick summer jam. But his association with saccharine Disney vibes extends only as far as his music. Earlier this week, a wildly homophobic video surfaced where Bertke states that he views “gays as an abomination” and cheers the 201

Bitcoin true believers have long promised a blockchain-based revolution, but the only true thing of value to come out of Satoshi's white paper is this chill-ass cryptocat.  
Sure, the scams and ransomware and general buffoonery in the blockchain space have all been pretty great, but none of that comes close to this Bitcoin maximalist tabby. 
SEE ALSO: Say hello to Buttcoin and the community celebrating Bitcoin's fall
I mean, just check the dude out. 
He's an absolute unit, with ba

We’re still months away from getting to the next burst of 2018 flagship phones, but a report from Bloomberg this afternoon says one of the biggest of those phones may come sooner than expected. The Galaxy Note 9 is on track to be announced on August 9th, two weeks earlier than the Note 8 was announced last year, according to the report. Samsung reportedly intends to release the phone by the end of August.
If that happens, it’d give Samsung more of a head start against this year&rsqu

Hinge, the dating app that promised a better set of prospects by suggesting matches who share Facebook friends, is about to radically change its course: it’s ditching its requirement that users log in with Facebook. The change will go into effect on Monday, June 5th on Android, followed by a June 12th release on iOS.
While the option to use Facebook won’t be fully removed, users will instead be able to choose to authenticate using their phone number, the company says.
The decision wa

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which is orbiting around the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt, is about to get closer to this celestial object than ever before. In early June, Dawn will get to its final orbit around Ceres — an elliptical path that will take the probe 10 times closer to the surface than it’s ever been. The spacecraft will collect new, more precise data from this orbit until its fuel runs out sometime this fall.That will bring an end to the Dawn mission, which ha

According to the calendar, it’s somehow already June. That means Apple’sannual Worldwide Developers Conference is just around the corner. As matter of fact, things kick off in San Jose on Monday morning at 10AM PT (1PM ET).
As ever, the main thrust of the show will be focused on developers — it’s right there in the name — but Apple also loves to use yearly spotlight as an opportunity to make some big announcements on the consumer side, as well. iOS and MacOS will no

No, this is not a repeat: The NRA has gone and done something stupid on social media. 
Friday marked the start of Everytown's annual "#WearOrange" campaign to fight gun violence. A huge mixture of celebs and everyday folks jumped on board, many sparked by recent school shootings in Parkland, Florida and Santa Fe, Texas (just to name a few, sadly).
SEE ALSO: The Parkland students stopped a huge corporation from donating to the NRAHave you shared your #WearOrange look yet? 🧡🍊

The company behind some major bike-share programs in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago is reportedly close to an acquisition from ride-hailing app Lyft.
A report in The Information Friday says Lyft is closing in on a $250-million deal to buy Motivate, the bike-sharing company that runs Ford GoBike in San Francisco and Citi Bike in New York. They are also in Boston, Portland, Oregon, Chicago, Wasington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. According to "two people briefed about the deal" the

This week, archaeologists unearthed the skeleton of a man in Pompeii who was believed to have died not by eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but by a big ol' stone. Yikes.
Join us as we cover the breaking memes rocking the Internet each week. Let us know below what are some of your favorite memes are this week and we'll see you next week with All the Memes! Read more...More about Memes, Mashable Video, All The Memes, Pompeii, and Culture

Drawing clear lines and definitions around obscenity, pornographic content, and art has always been a complicated business. The current guidance from US Supreme Court on the matter of obscenity is “I know it when I see it,” a standard that relies more on intuition than specificity. For online platforms and distributors, it’s equally murky territory — and one where ambiguity can have real consequences, particularly for smaller creators.
Steam, the largest online distribut

Drawing clear lines and definitions around obscenity, pornographic content, and art has always been a complicated business. The current guidance from US Supreme Court on the matter of obscenity is “I know it when I see it,” a standard that relies more on intuition than specificity. For online platforms and distributors, it’s equally murky territory — and one where ambiguity can have real consequences, particularly for smaller creators.
Steam, the largest online distribut

Samsung users in the UK will soon be able to get AI-powered medical consultations through preinstalled technology provided by London-based tech company Babylon. Those users will be able to consult doctors through video chat and also look up symptoms through the Samsung Health app, as reported by Financial Times.
Interested users will have to pay $67 a year (£50) or $33 (£25) for a single appointment to Samsung, which will share profits with Babylon. Despite the deal, Babylon —

I’ve been writing and editing military science fiction for years. In that time, robots, drones, and artificial intelligence have been slipping onto real-world battlefields. When people think about robots on the battlefield, they often envision something like the Terminator or the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. But the reality is far more nuanced than pop culture would have us believe.
That reality is laid out in Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre, wh

On Thursday, Sam Bee caught the attention of far too many people when she called the president's daughter Ivanka a "feckless cunt."
On Friday, she earned a tweet from our "First Amendment" president too, who called for the show's cancellation.
Frankly, this is one of the nicer things Sam Bee has said about the Trump administration. And American culture is all the better for her willingness to go all in. Of all the late night hosts, Bee has always been the president's most astute critic — h

Instagram revealed today how it organizes users’ feeds, including how it considers different factors in its algorithm. Up until now, Instagram’s feed was sort of a mystery science. Posts from family members and close friends show up near the top, which was the goal of the company’s decision to move away from the reverse-chronological feed in 2016, but the way the app filled in the blanks between those close friends was slightly mysterious.
Instagram product lead Julian Gutman

Google has decided not to renew its contact for a controversial Department of Defense program known as Project Maven, which involved Google helping the US government analyze drone footage using artificial intelligence. The news, reported today by Gizmodo, was announced internally today by Google Cloud chief Diane Greene at a meeting with employees. The contract allegedly expires in 2019. Google was not immediately available for comment.The decision should calm unrest at Google that has been gro

The best kind of smartwatch is one that isn’t trying to loudly, proudly scream, “I’m a smartwatch!” to the entire world.
Instead, a smartwatch should appear no different than any other timepiece in your collection, and its smart features should be subtly integrated so they don’t interfere with personal style. 
That’s what makes the Martian mVoice unique. Despite its otherworldly name, it sports an understated yet sophisticated look, and hides it

VPNs are all up in the hot gossip right now. Regardless of wheather you're a VPN newbie or a seasoned pro, you have one thing in common: You're all for being private on the internet, but aren't trying to go broke.
A solution: The beloved PureVPN is having its biggest sale of the year (and by big, we mean a whopping 82% off.) A three-year subscription is just $69, and we can't believe we just read that.
SEE ALSO: A cheap VPN could be the only thing standing between you and internet freedom
Named

File sharing has come a long way since Napster — but users of torrenting sites may still have security and privacy fears.
This is where VPNs — which encrypt data leaving your computer and make it impossible for others to see what you’re downloading — come in handy. To the uninitiated, these virtual private networks assign a virtual IP address to obscure your real location from others, which is important when sharing snippets of files with other users of a torrenting clien

It's a full circle moment for all of us.
On Friday, Facebook announced that it was killing its embattled "Trending" news section. 
SEE ALSO: I wrote the Facebook report Ted Cruz can’t stop talking about. He’s getting it all wrong.
Then, mere *hours* later, the tolling of the death knell received an appropriate tribute: the news started Trending on Facebook, in the trending section itself. *LE SIGH*R.I.P.Image:screenshot: rachel kraus/facebookFacebook said in a statement that it

Whether your dad's a huge family man or the hardest person ever to shop for, we have a one-size-fits-all gift idea that's perfect for procrastinators.
23andMe DNA kits are 30% off just in time for Father's Day, and are available for free 2-day shipping with Amazon Prime. (The outcome is guaranteed to be interesting, so this is a gift even the most mysterious dads will enjoy.)
SEE ALSO: Best Father's Day gifts for your tech-savvy dad
23andMe tests from over 150 different regions and can give your

On the heels of Hulu’s news of its growing live TV business, which has now reached 800,000 subscribers, the streaming service today announced a major re-organization of it business focused on four strategic priorities, effective immediately. These include “the subscriber journey, technology & products, content and advertising,” says Hulu. The changes see three major execs departing: Chief Content Officer Joel Stillerman, Senior Vice President of Partnerships & Distribut

Lots of random sources seem to think some upcoming iteration of the iPhone X will feature three rear-facing cameras, either this year or next. So here we are: I’m telling you about these rumors, although I’m not convinced this is going to happen.The most recent report comes from The Korea Herald, which claims that both Samsung’s Galaxy S10 and a new iPhone X Plus will feature three camera lenses. It isn’t clear what the third sensor would do exactly for Apple. Huawei inc

Online dating can be a pretty hit or miss experience — can you really trust a total stranger that you met on an app? Sometimes it's good to bring some friends as backup if the date turns sour. Sometimes good friends show up regardless of whether or not you asked.
When Twitter user @backwoodbadi went on a date with someone she met online, her two best friends joined ... in disguise. 
SEE ALSO: 8 of the best dating sites for introverts, wallflowers, and shy people
Dressed in massive cur

Instagramusers were missing 70 percent of all posts and 50 percent of their friends’ posts before the app ditched the reverse chronological feed for an algorithm in July 2016. Despite backlash about confusing ordering, Instagram now says relevancy sorting has led to its 800 million-plus users seeing 90 percent of their friends’ posts and spending more time on the app.
Yet Instagram has never explained exactly how the algorithm chooses what to show you until today. The Facebook-owned

China’s largest streaming service, iQIYI, is bringing one of its most popular television shows to North and South America. The dance-off reality TV show Hot-Blood Dance Crew will now be shown on Rakuten Viki, a popular video platform that allows Americans to stream Asian dramas like Boys Over Flowers, My Love From the Star, and Goblin.It’s a big deal for a number of reasons. China’s iQIYI, which is owned by Baidu, currently has more active subscribers than Netflix. But the com

Three US states announced major investments in charging infrastructure for electric cars on Thursday. In total, California, New York, and New Jersey will put $1.3 billion on the table in the coming years to help chip away at one of the biggest barriers standing in the way of widespread EV adoption.
California’s Public Utilities Commission approved up to $738 million worth of projects over the next five years, the agency announced. Southern California Edison and the Pacific Gas and Electri