Technology news

Harlan Ellison, the 84-year-old author of some of science fiction’s best-known stories, has died. His death was announced on Twitter by Christine Valada.
In addition to short fiction, Ellison also wrote for the movies and TV, most notably penning “The City on the Edge of Forever” — he was vocal about his dissatisfaction with how his script was rewritten, but the filmed version is still generally considered the finest episode of any Star Trek series.
Ellison also made his

Apple may soon be using LG as an alternative supplier for its OLED panels used in its iPhone X devices, anonymous sources told Bloomberg.Having LG as a secondary supplier will help the tech giant source OLED displays more quickly and cut costs. Previously, Apple solely relied on Samsung to supply its OLED displays, meaning that the South Korean company could charge higher premiums since it had a monopoly.Bloomberg reports that LG will supply between 2 million to 4 million OLED displays in the i

The science fiction genre has lost one of its greatest — and most controversial — authors. Harlan Ellison, who wrote and edited groundbreaking sci-fi anthologies, short stories, and television episodes, died at the age of 84, according to his wife, via an associate.
Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1934, and published his first short stories in 1949, before moving to New York City to focus on writing science fiction. Throughout the 1950s, he wrote hundreds of short stories, an

When John Lasseter, Pixar’s former chief creative officer, left the esteemed animation studio in early June 2018, the public word on his transgressions were vague. Lasseter reportedly had “missteps” that made some people feel “disrespected and uncomfortable.” Today, a former Pixar employee has detailed how things at Pixar have been, and it’s much worse than Pixar had previously disclosed.
In a guest column for Variety, edited from a much lengthier original po

A data privacy bill in California is just a signature away from becoming law over the strenuous objections of many tech companies that rely on surreptitious data collection for their livelihood. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 has passed through the state legislative organs and will now head to the desk of Governor Jerry Brown to be enacted.
Update: The Governor has signed it and the bill will take effect at the end of next year:
Got the call informing me that @JerryBrownGov signed #

Hi, everyone. Let’s talk about how to read patents again.
There’s a raft of headlines today claiming that Facebook has a patent on secretly turning your phone mic on when it hears a signal from a TV. The story appears to have picked up in Metro UK, which ran the headline “Facebook wants to hide secret inaudible messages in TV ads that can force your phone to record audio.”
Here’s Gizmodo, in classic Giz style: “Facebook patent imagines triggering your phone&r

Content creation has seen immense growth in recent years, with a shift in focus from mainstream content providers such as traditional television studious to internet-era startups either seeking to expand their portfolios or seeking to increase premium user memberships through exclusive content introduction.
In America, this scene has been predominately owned by Amazon,Netflix and Hulu, introducing critically acclaimed titles such as The Man in the High Castle, Orange Is the New Black&n

After months of speculation around how Amazon might enter the healthcare market, the e-commerce giant announced today that the company will be acquiring pharmaceutical startup PillPack. The acquisition sent standard brick-and-mortar pharmacy stock prices plunging, and signaled a potentially huge disruption in the United States healthcare market.
The terms of the deal have yet to be disclosed, but TechCrunch reported that the acquisition went for just under $1 billion. In a press release, the co

AT&T has agreed to pay a $5.25 million fine to settle an investigation into a pair of nationwide 911 outages that occurred in early 2017. The Federal Communications Commission said the first outage, on March 8th, lasted about five hours and affected 12,600 callers. The second, on May 1st, lasted 47 minutes and resulted in 2,600 failed 911 calls.
“Such preventable outages are unacceptable,” the FCC wrote in a statement announcing the settlement. “Robust and reliable 911 ser

Early Friday morning, SpaceX will launch its 15th cargo mission to the International Space Station for NASA, sending up nearly 6,000 pounds of supplies on top of its Falcon 9 rocket. On board the vehicle are shipments of food and water for the six astronauts living on the ISS, as well as new science experiments and technologies to be tested out in microgravity. And within that haul includes the first ever AI robot “crew member” to live on the station.
The robot’s name is CIMON

Honda is ceasing development of Asimo, the humanoid robot that has delighted audiences at trade shows for years but never really matured into anything more than that, the Nikkei reports. But while the venerable bot itself won’t be taking any new strides, the technology that made it so impressive will live on in other products, robotic and otherwise.
Asimo (named, of course, after science fiction pioneer Isaac Asimov) is older than you might guess: although it was revealed in 2000 as the fi

California lawmakers passed one of the toughest data privacy laws in the United States today, as they faced pressure from an even stronger ballot measure in the state.The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 is set to dramatically change how businesses handle data in the most populous state. Companies that store personal information — from major players like Google and Facebook, down to small businesses — will be required to disclose the types of data they collect, as well as all

A couple years ago, startup publisher Serial Box launched with an aim to publish stories in a slightly different way: tell a longer story by breaking it up into manageable, shorter stories, written by a team of writers. Now, the publisher is experimenting with a new way to deliver even shorter stories: via push notifications.Since its launch, the publisher has released a number of serials in recent years, including The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, a fantasy spy thriller set during the heigh

Motorola is teasing a press event in August that contains a “big announcement,” likely for a new flagship smartphone. In a statement to The Verge, Motorola says the news will “change the way people use and interact with their phones.”
The event takes place in its Chicago headquarters on August 2nd at 2PM local time, and the company says it’s going to present “a whole new way to connect,” which is Motorola’s very exaggerated way of hinting that the

The SD Association has announced a new card specification that should increase maximum storage on SD cards to 128 terabytes and provide much faster data transfer speeds of 985 megabytes per second.
Right now the maximum storage space on an SD card is 2TB, and that limit was promised as far back as 2009, but still hasn’t been reached. In 2016, SanDisk unveiled a prototype 1 terabyte SD card that would make it the biggest in the world, but it’s still not available to purchase. At the

The right music can make a boring photo or video epic, so Instagramis equipping users with a way to add popular songs to their Stories. TechCrunch had the scoop on the music feature’s prototype in early May, and now it’s launching to iOS and Android users in 6 countries including, the U.S. Thanks to Facebook’s recent deals with record labels, users will be able to choose from thousands of songs from artists including Bruno Mars, Dua Lipa, Calvin Harris and Guns N&rsqu

Instagram Stories are about to get even busier, with the addition of licensed music. Starting today, users will be able to add background music to their posts on their Stories, with a thousands of songs offered directly in the app (including actually popular music by artists like Bruno Mars, Demi Lovato, and Maroon 5). Instagram says new songs will be added daily.Adding songs to Stories works through Instagram’s sticker feature, just like polls and sliders — you’ll drag and dr

Regardless of what you may think of Facebookas a platform, they run a massive operation, and when you reach their level of scale you have to get more creative in how you handle every aspect of your computing environment.
Engineers quickly reach the limits of human ability to track information, to the point that checking logs and analytics becomes impractical and unwieldy on a system running thousands of services. This is a perfect scenario to implement machine learning, and that is precisely wha

Instagram may be coming up with a new feature that lets college students list their school and find their classmates on the platform. Jane Manchun Wong looked through Instagram’s Android app code and saw the feature under development.
The still-unreleased feature lets you link to your school in your Instagram bio so that other students can find you. When you add a school, Instagram will also prompt you to list your graduation year and your major.
You could already easily find classmates t

A developer of Facebook quizzes under the brand NameTests has been found to have exposed the personal information of as many as 120 million Facebook users, according to a report from TechCrunch. The company behind NameTests, German app maker Social Sweethearts, created popular social quizzes like “Which Disney Princess Are You?” and distributed them on Facebook, and it has around 120 million monthly users on the platform. Self-described hacker Inti De Ceukelaire wrote a Medium post

Overwatch has revealed the latest hero to join the roster of the popular online multiplayer shooter — Wrecking Ball: a hamster named Hammond who pilots a giant, rolling, machine-gun equipped mech suit. That’s a series of words that I would wager have never been put together in that sequence before today.
Wrecking Ball will be the 28th member of the roster. He’s a tank-class hero, with fast mobility options that lets him roll around the battlefield, and some serious durability

The last time somebody tried to adapt the game franchise Halo into a TV show, the result was the mediocre digital series Halo: Nightfall. But now Showtime is giving the franchise the prestige pay-cable treatment, greenlighting a new TV series based on the game. Network president and CEO David Nevins is calling it “our most ambitious series ever.”
The network has ordered a 10-episode first season for Halo, with Awake creator Kyle Killen serving as showrunner. Filmmaker Rupert Wyatt (

Facebookmade two announcements about ad transparency today — one around the ads purchased by any Page and another around expanding its recently announced archive of political ads.
It seems like ad transparency is a big focus today, as Twitter just launched its own Ads Transparency Center, allowing anyone to see ads bought by any account.
In terms of bringing more transparency to Facebook Pages, the company says there will be a new section in Pages allowing users to bring up general informa

For YouTube creators, catching the eyes of potential new viewers starts with a good, custom thumbnail. It’s a skill many video-makers have honed over time, even making the effort to teach other creators what makes an appealing image: high quality images of faces, bright backgrounds, concise text. Currently, however, YouTube is testing out a feature that it hopes will improve auto-generated thumbnails — a move that has some creators on edge.Over the next few weeks, YouTube will be ru

NASA announced yesterday that its highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope is delaying its launch — again.
It was announced in March that the mission would be delayed until 2020, which is already two years past its original launch date of October 2018. But after accepting the recommendations of an independent review board, NASAhas announced that the launch has been rescheduled for early 2021.
According to the report, technical issues and human error have “greatly impacted the de

Moov, the wearable maker best known for its line of fitness trackers with their accompanying digital coaches, is today branching off into mindfulness. The company is the latest to join the self-care craze, with the launch of a new app focused on mindfulness and meditation, Sanity & Self. However, unlike most of today’s meditation apps, Sanity & Self is aimed only at women.
Explains Moov’sco-founder Meng Li, the idea to build a mindfulness app came to her after becoming a moth

Last year, Matt Groening announced he would be working on a new animated series called Disenchantment for Netflix. Where his series Futurama was a comedic take on science fiction, Disenchantment will be his take on fantasy tropes. The trailer openly frames the show as a counterpart to Futurama (set in the future) and The Simpsons (set in the present). It introduces a medieval fantasy world called Dreamland, as a king lifts the hood off a “no good pile of scum” prisoner, only to disc

Eighteen more Chromebooks are getting support for Linux apps on Chrome OS, with laptops based in Intel’s Apollo Lake architecture now able to run the applications, via XDA Developers.
That list includes computers from Lenovo (Thinkpad 11e Chromebook), Acer (Chromebook Spin 11 and Chromebook 15), Asus (Chromebook Flip), and Dell (Dell Chromebook 11) — check the full list at XDA’s site to see if your machine is included.Previously, Linux apps worked on the Google Pixelbook and S

It seems like a simple concept: when rendering something in augmented reality (like, say, a Pikachu in Pokémon GO) and something in actual reality (like, say, a human, or a car, or a planter) passes in front of it, make the rendered object appear to be “behind” the real one.
In practice, it’s pretty damn hard. A device would need the ability to tell which pixels are close, or far, or somewhere in-between. While adding more cameras (or lasers!) to the mix can help, achiev

Twitteris unveiling the Ads Transparency Center that it announced back in October.
This comes as Twitter and other online platforms have faced growing political scrutiny around the role they may have played in spreading misinformation, particularly in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
For example, House Democrats recently released thousands of Russian-funded political Facebook ads, and Facebook will reportedly release its own ad transparency tool this week. (In fact, as this story publishes,

Oculus is updating its Medium virtual reality sculpture app with some new features and (according to Oculus) better performance. Medium 2.0, as the new version is called, follows the beta launch of Oculus’ larger Rift Core 2.0 software refresh. It adds artistic tool options that users have requested, more generally refreshes the interface, and supports the Vulkan API for better graphics optimization. Also, once you’ve finished a sculpture, you can now import it directly into your Oc

Niantic Labs, the San Francisco-based game developer responsible for creating the massively successful augmented reality game Pokémon Go, plans to open up the underlying AR platform behind its products to third-party developers.In a meeting with reporters yesterday at its headquarters, CEO John Hanke gave a detailed overview of that technology — what Niantic calls its Real World Platform. It’s the engine behind the AR experiences in Ingress, Pokémon Go, and the upcomin

AnitaB.org, the organization behind the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, has released its second-ever diversity report.
As of today, AnitaB.org employs 59 people — 27 white people, seven black people, seven Latinx people, 13 Asian people, 1 Native American person, three people of two or more races and one person with an unspecified race. At the leadership level, AnitaB.org appointed Brenda Darden Wilkerson, a black woman, to serve as its CEO and president. The organiz

Eighteen months since its initial release, Oculusis delivering some major updates to its Medium “immersive sculpting tool” in a free 2.0 update that’s being released today.
The artistic tool is one of the company’s few first-party apps on the PC Rift platform. Today’s updates focus primarily on performance bumps, a UI revamp and some features the company says were frequently requested by users, including snapping grids and increased layer limits.“This is the c

And there we have it: Bird,one of the emerging massively hyped Scooter startups, has roped in its next pile of funding by picking up another $300 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital.
The company announced the long-anticipated round this morning, with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joining the company’s board of directors. This is the second round of funding that Bird has raised over the span of a few months, sending it from a reported $1 billion valuation in May to a $2 billion valuati

Asimo, Honda’s adorable, humanoid robot, is no more. The company announced it would cease production of the robot in order to focus on using Asimo’s technology for more practical use cases in nursing and road transport, as reported by Nikkei Asian Review.
Work on Asimo, whose name stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, first began in the ‘80s and it was eventually unveiled in 2000. The first robot to walk on two legs, Asimo can, among other things, recognize multiple

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund which was previously known as Microsoft Ventures, has been making a series of investments in the last few weeks. Today, it’s leading a $5 million Series A round into Cerebri AI, a startup that uses machine learning to help companies track, analyze and predict their customers’ behavior.
The University of Texas Horizon Fund, WorldQuant Ventures and Leawood Venture Capital also participated in this round for the Austin-based startup, which brings Cere

Last October, EA shuttered Dead Space studio Visceral, but it kept one project alive: a new, story-driven Star Wars adventure helmed by Uncharted creator Amy Hennig. Development was to continue at EA Vancouver — but it looks like that might no longer be the case.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Hennig revealed that she left EA in January, and is currently in the process of forming her own studio. She’s looking to build up a smaller team to potentially focus on VR projects. “I’m d

Above Unlimited. Unlimited &More. Unlimited &More Premium. These are the names of new mobile data plans introduced in just the last month by Verizon and AT&T. In an era without net neutrality, we’ve drifted far, far away from the days when “unlimited data” was a simple concept that meant you could use your smartphone to its full capabilities without any handcuffs or confusing limitations.Carriers will tell you that the fundamental, underlying promise of unlimited d

It’s summer in New York, and I’m starting to see people rolling around on hoverboards once again. But the self-balancing gadgets aren’t anywhere near as everywhere as they were a year or two ago. They’re getting boring, and maybe it’s time for something new: something like self-balancing roller skates.
Segway announced today that it’s working on a pair of “e-skates” called the Drift W1. They look like something out of The Jetsons with their black-

For the last few months, fans have been clamoring about an unpatchable hardware exploit that allows people to jailbreak the Nintendo Switch. The excitement around being able to do nearly anything on the console is less theoretical now: people are messing with online games, getting banned by Nintendo, and even locking each other’s consoles over piracy.As reported by Polygon last week, one of the most visible consequences of Switch hacking is that a small number of players are running into

Given the far-ranging, universe-shaking implications of Avengers: Infinity War just a few months ago, it’s hard to remember that there are still stories to be told within the Marvel Cinematic Universe that don’t take place on cosmic stages, or have world-shaking stakes. Ant-Man and the Wasp, the third and final MCU film planned for 2018, jumps back in time and scale from Infinity War. Instead of taking in the fate of every sentient being in existence, it focuses on the attempts to r

Razer has a pair of new keyboards out today, the Huntsman and the Huntsman Elite, which offer a new spin on mechanical keyboards: they’re Razer’s first models to feature opto-mechanical key switches, which combine the tactile clicking of a mechanical keyboard with optical, IR-based technology that detects when the key is pressed for far faster actuation.It’s a clever solution that allows Razer to offer even better responsiveness for gamers who need it, while still keeping the

We’ve known for some time that DC Comics has been preparing its own digital streaming service, but today, the company revealed that the platform will go far beyond just TV shows. DC Universe isn’t a streaming platform so much as a subscription service for all things DC, including comics, TV shows, and movies. A beta version will be going live this August.The new original TV shows that will premiere on the service have already been announced: the live-action Titans is scheduled to de