Technology news

Air travel can be a truly awful experience that involves being waaaaay too close to far too many people. But there's also something strangely romantic about it. Especially when your trip involves potentially falling in love with a fellow passenger.
Rosey Blair and her boyfriend were on a flight home on Monday night, but their seats were in different aisles. Rosey decided to ask a woman to switch seats with her. In so doing, she may have altered someone's life forever. Last night on a flight

The US government has declared another major Chinese telecom company a possible “risk to national security”: China Mobile. Yesterday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) issued a statement advising the Federal Communications Commission not to allow China Mobile, which is the world’s third biggest carrier after AT&T and Verizon, to operate in the United States.
China Mobile first applied to the FCC for permission to provide US telecom servi

Congressional lawmakers are intent on urging President Donald Trump and his administration to closely examine Sprint’s proposed merger with T-Mobile due to the former’s ties to the Chinese government, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sprint does not have direct ties to Beijing. Rather, it’s that the US telecom is majority owned by Japan’s SoftBank, which has worked with Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Alongside fellow Chinese telecom ZTE, Huawei has been de

Congressional lawmakers are intent on urging President Donald Trump and his administration to closely examine Sprint’s proposed merger with T-Mobile due to the former’s ties to the Chinese government, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sprint does not have direct ties to Beijing. Rather, it’s that the US telecom is majority owned by Japan’s SoftBank, which has worked with Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Alongside fellow Chinese telecom ZTE, Huawei has been de

Fire has returned to California's wine country as the flames thrive on bounties of parched land. 
The County Fire began on Saturday afternoon and since then has devoured over 1,000 acres of land each hour. As of Tuesday morning, the Golden State's largest fire had spread over 70,000 acres in Yolo County and into the edges of Napa County.
The return of fire to the region, which cast ominous, orange glows over San Francisco to the south, is especially unwelcome after last October's firestorms

Top Gun: Maverick has just found a new Goose. Kind of.
As reported by Variety, Miles Teller has been cast in the role of Goose's son, who is now Maverick's new protégé. 
SEE ALSO: Tom Cruise's first 'Top Gun: Maverick' photo has us pretty pumped for this sequel
Goose was Maverick's co-pilot in the 1986 Top Gun, where he was played by Anthony Edwards. The character died in the movie, but apparently his legacy will live on with his kid. 
Teller commented on his own casting

They've changed. They promise. 
To hear the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase tell it, they've turned over a new leaf. Sure, SEC documents revealed scores of customer complaints against them — ranging from allegations of fraud to negligence — but those were in the (very recent) past. These days, insists the company in a series of blog posts and statements to Mashable, Coinbase is a different animal.
But over the course of 2018 its customers have deluged the Be

The US Commerce Department has temporarily lifted a portion of the ban on ZTE that all-but shut down the company almost three months ago. After paying a $1 billion fine, ZTE has been authorized by the United States to continue supporting much of its already deployed equipment and consumer devices. This largely seems designed to keep infrastructure up and running and allow ZTE to deliver security patches to its phones (and other products).
The eased restrictions are temporary, only lasting until

Since the release of Avengers: Infinity War, fans have flocked to a subreddit dedicated to the film’s villain, Thanos. Once mostly a place for jokes, memes, and chatter about the mad Titan’s ideologies, the more than 200,000 members of r/ThanosDidNothingWrong have turned their attention to fulfilling a one-off joke that will decimate their community: randomly banning half of their members. Today, a moderator announced that they’d finally received permission from the subreddit&

Huawei just unveiled the Honor 10 GT, which will be its first smartphone with 8GB of RAM. Its predecessor, the Honor 10, which launched in April for China and in May internationally,only had options for 4GB or 6GB of RAM.
Besides the extra RAM, the new smartphone will have the same specs and appearance as the regular Honor 10. The Honor 10 GT has a 5.8-inch, 2280 x 1080 LCD display with a fingerprint sensor on the home button. It has a notch where the front-facing 24-megapixel selfie sensor is

You’ve seen the YouTube videos. It’s a shaky-cam iPhone shot with a wide-eyed someone giggling under their breath “cat food,” or some other miscellaneous thing they allegedly never talk about or search for near or on their device. The climax of this plot line hits in the following hours or days after they’ve muttered said random phrase, and they’re suddenly served an ad on Facebook of the exact same thing they said before. Preposterous! It’s the classic

Sandy Miller Contributor Sandy Miller is a general partner at IVP. He co-founded investment bank Thomas Weisel Partners and served as a senior partner at Montgomery Securities.More posts by this contributorThe state of the IPO market Lower The Wall, Lift The Market
Sixteen months ago, I predicted 2017 would be “the best year for tech IPOs since the dot-com heyday almost two decades ago.” 
Well, that was not exactly what happened — though 2017 was a good year for IPOs comp

A year after Scarlett Johansson’s appearance in 2017’s adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, in which she played a canonically Asian woman and sparked a conversation about whitewashing in Hollywood, the actor has made yet another questionable decision: next year, she’ll be starring in Ghost director Rupert Sanders’ Rub & Tug, a biopic based on the real-life story of massage parlor boss Dante “Tex” Gill. Deadline broke news of the deal shortly before Variety a

Amazon is expanding its Go cashier-less supermarkets, with the company now confirming a second store coming to Seattle this fall, via a report from GeekWire.The new location will continue the gradual roll out of Amazon’s experimental new retail stores, with locations also in the works for Chicago and San Francisco (although there’s no date yet on when those stores will be opening.) The new Seattle store is said to be almost twice as large as the current one, measuring in at 3,000 sq

Where will you be on the Fourth of July? 
Alex Jones thinks Americans will be fighting in a vicious battle over avocados and soy milk. The often disgraced conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed "performance artist" claimed that Democrats are planning to launch a civil war on Independence Day in a tweet on Monday. 
SEE ALSO: 9 podcasts to listen to if you love 'Black Mirror'
In the video Jones posted, he ranted that "establishment publications" that communicate with the government inst

This is Ode To, a weekly column where we share the stuff we're really into in hopes that you'll be really into it, too.
Many of you have probably thrown on Netflix's delightful three-episode fireplace series, Fireplace for Your Home, to cultivate a cozy aura around the holidays. 
This is a great idea — for apartment-dwellers like myself, nothing says wintertime relaxation like a pungent, fir-scented Yankee Candle and a crackling, roaring fake fire on my television screen. It gives me

Dear Tim Cook: Do you even read books, bro?
Now that iOS 12 has been released in public beta, non-developers are getting their first look at the next-generation operating system for iPhone and iPad. And one of the most anticipated aspects of iOS 12, at least for an e-bibliophile like myself, is the Apple Books app, formerly known as iBooks. 
Hands-on previews with Books have done the rounds already. But they all looked at Apple's built-in library, which is minimal. I couldn't wait to see ho

Facebook announced today that it’s acquired London-based artificial intelligence firm Bloomsbury AI, which specializes in natural language processing. According to a post from the official Facebook Academics page, the company says Bloomsbury’s “expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications.” In other words, as Facebook continues to hand more platform moderat

July 4th sees the release of The First Purge, which in spite of its name is the fourth film in the series that started with 2013’s The Purge. The movies all take place in a near-future America where one night a year, laws are suspended, and virtually all crimes are legal. Supposedly, the idea is that citizens “purge” their most antisocial and aggressive tendencies, which results in a more satisfied, mentally healthy population. But the films are also cynical satires about the

Last week, federal investigators reported that the battery of a Tesla Model S reignited twice after the car’s fiery crash in May. This isn’t the first time an electric vehicle battery has caught fire again after being put out. Why does this happen — and how are first responders being trained to deal with new risks from EV batteries?The lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles are basically the same as the ones in your phone, says Joshua Lamb, a principal investigator at Sand

This piece contains significant spoilers for The Incredibles and Incredibles 2.
It’s been 14 years since Brad Bird’s animated superhero movie The Incredibles hit theaters, but the new sequel, The Incredibles 2, is remarkably consistent with the first movie in a number of obvious ways. It picks up at the exact moment where the first movie ends, with the appearance of the villainous Underminer. It follows up on the date plans Violet made with her crush, Tony, and on the fact that no o

While it likely won’t be the best phone of the year, Oppo’s Find X is an early contender for the most fascinating phone of the year thanks to its pop-up camera module, which quickly raises the front and rear cameras whenever they need to be activated. It seems to work remarkably well for a first-generation product. And now a device teardown from Zol shows how Oppo got the feature working.
Most of the work appears to be done by an actuator in the middle of the phone that lifts and lo

Amazon Prime Day, Amazon’s made up holiday of deals and discounts, is basically Black Friday in July. Dell is making that comparison explicit this year, by running a “Black Friday in July” sale that not-so-coincidentally coincides with Amazon’s annual extravaganza.Like Prime Day and actual Black Friday, Dell’s Black Friday in July sale is happening over the course of a few weeks: July 2 — July 23. Some deals are running now, with mega-discounted doorbusters d

In perhaps the most improbable leak of a movie ever, Sony Pictures seems to have accidentally uploaded the entire, full length movie of Khali the Killer to YouTube early this morning, instead of a new red band trailer announcing the film’s availability on disc and digital that the company theoretically intended to upload, via CBR.The movie has since been removed, leaving nothing behind but a baffling, broken link to the trailer to the crime film that was originally released back in German

Businesses can’t sue Yelp to get defamatory reviews removed, California’s Supreme Court has ruled. The decision overturns a lower court’s ruling against Yelp, affirming rules that shield internet platforms from legal liability over users’ posts.
Yesterday, the court handed down a decision on Hassell v. Bird, in which a law firm sued a disgruntled client for posting falsely negative reviews. Yelp wasn’t directly involved in the lawsuit, but when a court sided with t

Japanese and European fans of the Animal Crossing franchise will be able to purchase a special edition New Leaf Nintendo 2DS XL by the end of the summer. Two other special edition designs inspired by familiar titles will be launching in Japan in the coming months too. (Sorry, Americans, but most specifically me.)
The Animal Crossing: New Leaf model comes in a cool green color with etched out fruit and pine trees. They surround the franchise’s familiar leaf design that is hollowed out into

Samsung has been rumored to be working on an Android Go phone for a while, and today, pictures of the device — purportedly called the Galaxy J2 Core — were leaked by SamMobile.
Aside from showing off what to expect from the device’s hardware, the pictures also reveal that while the phone may be part of Google’s stripped-down Android Go program, it’ll still be running Samsung’s own skinned software. As SamMobile points out, if you read the Android Go website c

If you believe the CEOs, a fully autonomous car could be only months away. In 2015, Elon Musk predicted a fully autonomous Tesla by 2018; so did Google. Delphi and MobileEye’s Level 4 system is currently slated for 2019, the same year Nutonomy plans to deploy thousands of driverless taxis on the streets of Singapore. GM will put a fully autonomous car into production in 2019, with no steering wheel or ability for drivers to intervene. There’s real money behind these predictions, bet