Technology news

The Fourth of July is around the corner and you know what that means: Colossal sales on all of the usually expensive things like TVs, laptops, and mattresses.
Oh yeah, and I guess fireworks and cookouts and whatever also happen.
But we're most excited about upgrading every room in the house and saving a ton of money while doing it. Now that sets off fireworks in my heart.
SEE ALSO: Fourth of July mattress deals are here to help you sleep a little easier
Find mattress sales at stores like Macy's

The internet fame machine pumps out music stars on the regular — Justin Bieber, Post Malone, Cardi B — but few truly embody the internet in the way that Drake does. The man is a walking meme; our mockery or admiration of the Toronto rapper is forever buoyed to the top of our feeds. Drake is the internet — and he hates it.
For stans, this is nothing new: perennial Sad Boy that he is, Drake has always loved talking (and rapping, and singing) about how much technology and the int

An electric vehicle is the perfect space for a car singalong. 
Belting out a Journey classic from the passenger seat goes hand-in-hand with an electric vehicle, mostly because the cars are super quiet, thanks to those emission-free battery-powered motors. Everyone can hear and appreciate your lyrical skills. Or your passion that makes up for those skills.
SEE ALSO: Volvo's electric garbage truck promises to dramatically reduce noise pollution
To show off how otherwise silent their rides are

Nanette seems more like the name of an elderly Shih Tzu than a groundbreaking comedy special. But Hannah Gadsby's Netflix hour is indeed called Nanette — and it is a radical tour de force that calls out some of standup comedy's worst shortcomings.
SEE ALSO: This Netflix hidden gem is the must-watch comedy for our dark times
Stand-up has always been a dog-eat-dog world. From set stealers to hecklers, the obstacles facing the most privileged of comedians is substantial, and the underrepresen

Facebook and Twitter have, within a few hours of each other, revealed new ad transparency measures this week. In both cases, the company in question reveals more details about what ads each account or page is running. It’s also offering further insights on political ads. Trouble is, it all depends on how much effort the users are willing to put into doing the research. Twitter opened its Ad Transparency Center, which allows anyone to look up a particular Twitter handle to see which ads th

Every year on the Fourth of July, America celebrates its independence with annual traditions like barbecues, picnics, fireworks — and mattress sales.
That's great news, because after a long day of barbecuing in the sun and staying up late scrolling through the hellhole that is Twitter watching fireworks, crawling into bed is the only thing we want to do. 
SEE ALSO: Is this weighted blanket the key to a better night's sleep?
Here's our list of the best mattress deals for July Fourth. A

T-Mobile has started rolling out support for the RCS Universal profile — a new messaging standard that’s supposed to make traditional texting look a bit more like chatting in a modern messaging app, complete with read receipts, typing indicators, and more.
The rollout, spotted by Android Police, is starting with Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge and is supposed to come to more Android devices later in the year. There are a million qualifiers here around how and when everyone wil

When I opened Instagram on my Pixel 2 XL moments ago, I noticed something different: the Stories bar remained visible as I scrolled down my main feed. Usually it stays at the top and doesn’t follow you down, but clearly the company is testing a more persistent, sticky approach to keeping Stories in front of you at all times. That seems awfully annoying to me, but some might find it convenient.
To this point, I think Instagram has developed and built onto Stories very well. They’re f

In 1989, park rangers first spotted Bear 410 as a small cub. 
Since then, she often returns to the banks of the salmon-filled river where she grew up. And again, nearly 30 years later, this old, remarkable bear has come back, claiming her status as the Brooks River's oldest known bear. 
SEE ALSO: From puffins to brown bears: The 10 best wildlife livestreams of the summer
"Each year she returns, I'm more amazed," said Mike Fitz, a former Katmai park ranger who reports on the bear cam fo

It’s time for your vacation, and you know what that means: Get the heck out of here! But wait. You haven’t booked a flight anywhere. Or maybe you’ve just returned from a big trip, and need to plan a quick weekend getaway to ease the re-entry pain. 
SEE ALSO: Going somewhere? These are the best websites for finding flights.
Just because you’ve got a tight budget or are looking last minute doesn’t mean you can’t travel. Quite the contrary, actually. Some of

People are sending a warning to a senator whose stance on protecting abortion rights isn't strong enough for them.
On Wednesday, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, Republican Senator Susan Collins said she views Roe v. Wade — the ruling that ensures nation-wide abortion access — as "settled law." 
"It's clearly precedent," she said on Wednesday when asked about her stance on protecting abortion laws. "I always look for judges who respect p

Ah, the Surface Phone. A quasi-mythical device we’ve been hearing about for years, it’s finally starting to materialize into something more than the tech equivalent of bigfoot. A new report from The Verge suggests the device, codenamed Andromeda, will be a pocketable device that will “blur the lines between mobile and stationary computing.” That’s about what we’ve expected since some of the earlier rumors, but it’s how Microsoft describes it in an inter

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In 2018, standup comedy is almost as inescapable as politics, and the two overlap fairly often. Comedians like to say Trump is good for comedy, but that means holding jokes to a higher standard than the easiest impression or something about Cheetos. 
How do we find humor in times of darkness, division, political upheaval and open hatred? How do we make people smarter and bring them together? With a Netflix subscription, for starters, and with some whip-smart comedy. 
Here are the best

Comcast is currently experiencing a nationwide outage in the US, which explains why users on social media have been complaining that they were unable to connect to platforms like Sony’s PlayStation, Netflix, and Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Essentially, the outage may be causing problems for anyone using Xfinity as an ISP, regardless of what products, apps, or services they’re trying to access.
According to Down Detector, there have been over 11,000 reports of Comcast outages since

Relationships are definitely cool and all. It's fun to get special presents for holidays, and definitely feels nice to have someone to cuddle up with during cuffing season. Sure.
You know what's also cool? Being able to hook up with whoever you want.
SEE ALSO: These are the best dating apps for hooking up
While being single definitely has its perks, you're still gonna want to do the dirty — and let's face it, sliding into someone's DMs or awkwardly going up to someone at the bar isn't the

TL:DR: iHookup is a dating site that's used for exactly what it sounds like, and is a decent alternative to AdultFriendFinder. But beware — it feels just as scammy as it does sexy.Finding a hookup is hard. Tinder and Bumble are the unspoken hookup apps, but swiping anywhere that's not LA or New York City results in way too much swiping on people you know IRL. And on a standard dating site, unless someone puts "only looking for friends with benefits" in their bio, it can be difficult to mak

Apple Maps is finally getting the redesign it needs.
In a deep dive with TechCrunch, Apple detailed the lengths it's gone to over the past few years to rebuild its maps app, which will make its (limited) public debut next week.
According to the report, the new app will be available to iOS 12 beta users in the San Francisco Bay Area next week and will expand to all of Northern California later this year. It's not clear how long the full global rollout might take.
SEE ALSO: How to make the perfect

Parents no longer have to limit their kids to Amazon or iHeartRadio’s music catalogs on their Echo Dot Kids Edition. TechCrunch reports today that Amazon will soon let parents pair their kids’ devices with their Spotify account, and Spotify will automatically filter out explicit language. Parents can turn that option off in Amazon’s FreeTime dashboard.
Amazon is also adding new Disney content, like character alarms and updated “Disney Dailies,” which come from a sk

When you think of mermaids, you probably think of The Little Mermaid's Ariel earnestly yearning to be "a part of your world." What you probably don't think of is a merman dragging himself along rocks and sand to a wagon so that he can be carried to a house on Venice Beach where he will have sex with a woman who is obsessed with love.
And yet, that's exactly what happens in Melissa Broder's new novel The Pisces.
SEE ALSO: Culinary delights: 6 times someone made love to food in a movie
The Pisces

While many of us were sleeping, SpaceX launched tons of supplies to the International Space Station for NASA. 
Hitching a ride to the station aboard SpaceX's Dragon capsule is the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, or CIMON — a new artificial intelligence technology developed by a team of researchers from the European Space Agency, NASA, and IBM.
SEE ALSO: 8 perfect astronaut selfies for when you just need some space
CIMON has a roughly spherical shape, with a childlike drawing of a f

Tinder’s parent company Match Group publicly announced today, in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), that it is now encrypting photos sent between Tinder’s servers and its app. The changes were implemented in February, following the public disclosure of an attack that could have let hackers view people’s profile pictures and swipe actions.Wyden wrote a letter to Tinder back in February requesting that the company encrypt photos. It had apparently already done so (the letter say

The Vivo Nex S smartphone caused a stir for doing away with bezels and notches in favor of a pop-up selfie camera that’s hidden in the top edge of the phone. Now users in China who have gotten their hands on the Vivo Nex S say the selfie camera is making surprise appearances when they’re casually browsing the web or other apps, and the effect is creepy.
As spotted by Abacus, a user on Weibo took a video of the selfie camera rolling out of a Vivo Nex S when you open a chat window in

The summer 2018 anime season is upon us, and with 42 new series and 11 continuing from the spring, there is a lot to sift through. With such a massive slate, we’ve decided to highlight some that might be interesting for anime fans and non-fans alike. (Many of these shows are available for viewing internationally a day after they air in Japan, thanks to streaming services like Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Amazon.)If you like action, horror, and political dramaAttack on Titan Season 3
On an al

Unravel 2, from developer Coldwood and publisher EA, is a beautiful platforming game that invites players to control a pair of adorable creatures made of yarn through a series of stages featuring fantastically rendered photo-realistic environments. It’s also one of the best local co-op experiences I’ve seen. In the game you’ll take the role of two Yarnys, creatures that could be described as tiny string-golems. You run, swing, jump, flip, push, pull, and tumble your way throug

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued to invalidate internet censorship law FOSTA, arguing that its broad scope violates the First Amendment. It filed suit yesterday in the District of Columbia, acting on behalf of several parties who have been affected by FOSTA: the nonprofit groups Human Rights Watch and Woodhull Freedom Foundation, non-sexual massage therapist Eric Koszyk, sex workers rights’ activist Jesse Maley, and the Internet Archive. As part of the complaint, it’s ask

A patent from Facebook came to light earlier this week, depicting technology that Facebook would use to quietly activate a user’s microphone in order to listen to them as they watch ads. How hard can I “nope” out of that? The details: The patent, filed earlier this month, was originally discovered by Metro. It describes a process by which secret messages embedded in TV ads, inaudible to the human ear, would trigger your smart device to record you while the ad was playing.

Microsoft has been working on a new mysterious Surface device for at least two years. Codenamed Andromeda, the device has appeared in patents, reports, and in operating system references multiple times and will include a dual-display design. According to a Microsoft internal document obtained by The Verge, it’s also going to be a pocketable Surface device.
Microsoft describes its Andromeda project as something the company has quietly incubated internally, and that will create a “new

The US Food and Drug Administration approved the first cannabis-derived drug this week, but it can’t be sold until the Drug Enforcement Administration changes how it classifies the specific compound used. So what’s next?Epidiolex treats serious forms of childhood epilepsy and contains the compound cannabidiol (CBD). Though CBD comes from cannabis, it won’t cause anyone to get high; it’s the compound THC that is psychoactive. But because it comes from cannabis and cannabi

In Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of the bestseller Ready Player One, the lines between heroes and villains are clear, because the bad guys are faceless soldiers driving identical cars, while the good guys have shown off their creativity by customizing their personal avatars and rides. But the message of individuality over being part of a collective rings hollow in a world where the heroes are part of a monoculture imposed by the immersive game’s creator, who decreed that to lea

In the hours after yesterday’s deadly Capital Gazette shooting, one critical fact remained elusive: the shooter’s identity. Reports suggest that Jarrod Ramos did everything in his power to avoid being named and that it was only through the use of facial recognition technology that police finally identified him.
Ramos had no identification on him at the time of the attack, and soon after his arrest rumors began to surface that he had filed off his fingerprints to prevent identificati

Google’s UK-based sister company, DeepMind, recently developed an AI that can render entire scenes in 3D after having only observed them as flat 2D images. Broad strokes: AI researchers at the cutting-edge are trying to teach machines to learn like humans. Rather than see the world in pixels, we look around our environment and make assumptions about everything in it. If we can see someone’s chest, we assume they also have a back, even though it may not be visible from our perspectiv