Technology news

It may be a little later to the party than 2018 TVs from other manufacturers, but Vizio’s flagship P-Series Quantum 4K HDR TV is now available to purchase for $2,099.99.
Unlike Vizio’s other models, the P-Series Quantum only comes in one 65-inch size. The main difference (which Vizio charges roughly $800 more for over the 65-inch model of the standard P-Series line) is the P-Series Quantum’s 2000 nits of peak brightness, or double the peak 1000 nits output of the non-Quantum m

If you're interested in eharmony, I'm guessing you're 110% over being single or going through numerous breakups with people you thought you were gonna marry.
Or you're tired of going on dates and having the person randomly stop texting you back, or tired of the "What are we?" conversation ending in some rendition of "I'm not looking for anything serious right now" from someone who is definitely too old to still be playing games.
Yeah, well 10 million other people are tired of the same things, an

Anyone who’s tall enough knows the struggle of trying to squish into the back of an airplane’s seat — so it’s a bit surprising that The Wall Street Journal managed to wrangle the CEOs of American Airlines and Delta, both six feet, three inches, into the cramped coach seats of their respective company’s airplanes to talk about seating space. And while there, both CEOs said that their seats wouldn’t get any tighter, though neither apologized for the scant legro

Philips has a new outdoor version of its smart LightStrip in the works. Creatively dubbed the Outdoor LightStrip, the product appeared in a since deleted post from the Philip Hue Netherlands website, spotted by HomeKit News.As the name suggests, the Outdoor LightStrip is a water-resistant version of the LightStrip for use outdoors. It’s still a Hue light, so you’ll still be able to integrate it into your smart home setup, but with the added benefits of being able to use it outside y

Car ownership ain’t what it used to be. Despite more people buying cars than ever before, the big auto companies are experimenting with alternate ownership models under the assumption that their sales will drop in the future. The most recent example is General Motors, which announced Tuesday a new peer-to-peer car-sharing service, in which owners of GM-branded vehicles would rent their cars to other people.The service, which will be operated under the automaker’s two-year-old Maven

Facebook has signed a new, legally binding agreement with the state of Washington agreeing to remove advertisers’ ability to exclude races, religions, sexual orientations, and other protected classes in certain ad-targeting sectors. The announcement was made today by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who spearheaded a 20-month investigation into the social network, which first came under fire for the practice in 2016 and again last year.“Facebook’s advertising platform

A conservative news outlet spliced together a “satirical” interview with Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, published it on Facebook without noting it was satire, and racked up over a million views in less than 24 hours — many from people who appear convinced it’s real. The video is fake, and for the people who are taking it seriously, it’s news. But it’s not “fake news,” and it shows just how confounding talking about mi

Uber’s self-driving cars are back on public roads in Pittsburgh this week, four months after a fatal crash prompted the company to shut down its testing program in North America. For now, the vehicles will not be driven in autonomous mode, but instead will be manually operated by human safety drivers while Uber continues its “top-to-bottom” review of its self-driving program.
The company’s fleet of Volvo XC90 SUVs have been gathering dust since March, when a self-driving

Science fiction convention Worldcon recently came under fire after complaints from writers and Hugo Award nominees about ignoring or excluding marginalized groups in its lineup.Now, the prestigious convention’s chair, Kevin Roche, has announced that the organization is ripping up the previous programming schedule for the August event and starting from scratch.Worldcon — shorthand for The World Science Fiction Convention — has been no stranger to controversy over its 76 years o

Early Wednesday morning, rocket enthusiasts will have the lucky experience of being able to watch two launches at roughly the same time. Around 7:30AM ET, SpaceX is slated to launch one of its Falcon 9 rockets from the California coast, while European launch provider Arianespace will send up its Ariane 5 rocket from its South American spaceport in French Guiana. If all goes according to plan, the vehicles will launch around 15 minutes apart.
Here’s what’s going up (and down) tomorro

If you’re a student, your laptop is your toolbox, your textbook, your everything — and you need a solid machine that’s going to last you from orientation to graduation. It’s an essential tool, and you need one that you can rely on: No one has the extra cash to be replacing a subpar laptop halfway through school, and you don’t want to be dealing with unexpected repairs when you have papers to write and parties to attend. 
Memory and processors are important when

Getting a quality laptop for college is must. Whether you're saving the group project, watching Netflix during class (bad), or just showing off to your friends, you get through those four years  without one.
Clearly there are thousands of laptop choices on the internet, and lots of great cheap options. Attempting to pick the right one by yourself could take forever. Surprise: We researched the best laptops for students for you. These puppies are about to bring luxury to your learning and ma

Chinese netizens have turned to blockchain to share a censored news story about faulty vaccines given to small babies. Their efforts to repost an investigative piece about a large vaccine maker were largely thwarted by internet monitors, but by sticking the story within the metadata of a cryptocurrency transaction, netizens have been able to outsmart the censors, as first spotted by TechNode.
The investigative piece looked into a government statement that the Shezhen-based Changchun Changsheng

Fyre Festival puppet master Billy McFarland isn’t going to prison, but he does owe the people he defrauded — via the beautiful, doomed disaster that was the one-percenter island music festival, and before that, the fake influencer credit card company Magnises — to the tune of $27.4 million.
Following McFarland’s conviction on two counts of wire fraud by the US Attorney’s office earlier this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission has settled with him and two o

The Massachusetts attorney general is investigating e-cigarette company Juul Labs in a statewide push to end youth vaping and nicotine addiction. Juul Labs controls more than two-thirds of the e-cig market, “and way too much of their product is ending up in the hands of young people and ending up in schools,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said in a press briefing today.In April, the Food and Drug Administration asked Juul to turn over information about its products and

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Google Docs is, at long last, getting a grammar-checking feature, which’ll be able to identify mixed up words (like “affect” and “effect”), incorrect tenses, improper uses of commas and clauses, and more. To do all of that, Google says it’ll be relying on machine translation — the same technology it uses to translate between multiple languages. Except, instead of translating a sentence from, say, French to German, it sounds as though it’ll be tran

As Snap’s Spectacles continue to search for mainstream pickup, the company's vice president of hardware, Mark Randall, has made an exit.In an internal memo obtained by Cheddar, Randall announced that he would be leaving Snap Inc. to start his own company. Randall joined Snap back in 2016 to focus on the company’s leap into hardware with its Spectacles product, a camera-equipped pair of sunglasses. His resignation will bring about another change in leadership when it comes to the com

After years of being banned, Facebook will now be allowed in China — sort of. The company has obtained a license to open an office in China, which is a major breakthrough considering the social media network is still censored for most residents.
The office will be a $30 million subsidiary called Facebook Technology (Hangzhou), located in the city Hangzhou, which is also the headquarters of Alibaba. Facebook will be running a startup incubator that will make small investments and give advi

For a week, we have been seeing reports that the newly released MacBook Pros run hot, which all kicked off after this video by Dave Lee. They run so hot, in fact, that the very fancy 8th Gen Intel Core processors inside them were throttled down to below their base speed. Apple has acknowledged that thermal throttling is a real issue caused by a software bug, and it’s issuing a software update today that is designed to address it.The company also apologized, writing, “We apologize to

Google’s Chrome Browser is now listing all unencrypted sites as explicitly “not secure,” beginning with today’s release of Chrome 68. The change applies equally to all HTTP sites, which will now display a “Not Secure” image in the address bar. HTTPS-enabled sites are unaffected by the change.
First announced in February, Chrome’s design shift is the latest move in a multipronged push by Google for more encryption on the web. Login sites have displayed s

The good news: a headset exists that helps you “see” like a dolphin. The bad news: you’ll have to build this “DolphinView” headset yourself. The other good news: it’s not too complicated or expensive, at least according to its inventor, Andrew David Thaler, an ecologist and the editor-in-chief of conservation site Southern Fried Science.First, the dolphin science: dolphins have excellent eyesight, but they are also able to navigate using echolocation. Essenti

Boots Riley’s directorial and screenwriting debut Sorry to Bother You is the low-budget breakaway of the summer. An absurdist comedy with touches of magical realism and science fiction, it’s about a young black telemarketer named Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) who is struggling with his personal ethics as he learns that betraying his friends and adopting a “white voice” (provided by the ever-lurking comedy weirdo David Cross) will help him win out in a near-future biz

Verizon wants to partner with Apple or Google to stream live TV to homes over its upcoming 5G network, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company is reportedly in talks with both companies, but a partnership isn’t guaranteed to come out of those negotiations.
By enlisting the help of a service like Apple TV or YouTube TV, Verizon could potentially deliver those services at 5G speeds to offer customers more tempting content packages than those presented by traditional cable companie

Amazon announced today that it’s expanding its Whole Foods grocery delivery service to more places, including parts of New York City.This service is a result of Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition of the Whole Foods Market in June of last year. In February, the company started putting that investment to use by announcing that it would begin delivering groceries in select cities within two hours. Today, the service expands to Prime members in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Palm Beach, Long I