Technology news

An investigation revealed over the weekend that the American Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is secretly monitoring and tracking hundreds of American citizens. They’re not on any kind of watchlist — the TSA just deems their flight patterns worthy of suspicion. This program, called “Quiet Skies,” requires the TSA to keep an eye on certain US citizens when they’re in the airport. These citizens haven’t been accused of any crime, and they appear to

It’s often said that a fresh pair of eyes can be essential for innovation. Altogether, Jeff Bezos’ four children have eight twinkling eyes and the common sense to slap an Echo Plus on an iRobot Roomba, an invention that is more or less what analysts are expecting from Amazon next in the form of a mobile Echo robot.In an Instagram post, dad Bezos proudly showed off his kids’ handiwork: blue painter’s tape haphazardly holding down the Echo to create an Alexa on wheels. Wha

T-Mobile and Nokia have announced a $3.5 billion deal that will see Nokia provide T-Mobile with “complete end-to-end 5G technology, software, and services” as the carrier continues to build out its 5G infrastructure.“We are all in on 5G,” commented T-Mobile’s chief technology officer Neville Ray in the announcement. Nokia will help build T-Mobile’s 5G network on both the 600 MHz and 28 GHz millimeter wave portions of the spectrum, in accordance with the 3GPP&

Elon Musk is at it again. For a very limited time today Tesla listed a “Limited Edition Tesla Surfboard” at its online shop. It would have set you back a cool $1,500 if you were able to snag one before the limited run of 200 sold out. Now they’re going for up to $5,000 on eBay. But I won’t be covering it. The board is a collaboration with two expert board makers, Lost Surfboards and Matt “Mayhem” Biolos, so the quality, presumably, is quite high. That said, L

Uber’s big push to dominate the future of the trucking industry is dead. The ride-hailing company has decided to shutter its self-driving truck project, according to TechCrunch. A spokesperson confirmed the decision.
Employees who have been working on Uber’s self-driving trucks will be shifted to the company’s larger autonomous car efforts. Uber says it will continue working on its in-house lidar project, and that Uber Freight, the company’s on-demand logistics side-proj

After the revelation that MoviePass borrowed $5 million to keep its service up and running last week, things aren’t looking good.
MoviePass subscribers, myself included, were met on Monday with a blank screen where their choice of screening should be. Navigating around dozens of theaters only shows a message that “There are no more screenings at this theater today.”
Twitter noticed too, and people are starting to sound the death knell for the beleaguered monthly movie subscript

LG is continuing its quest to corner the market on ultra high-end handsets with a new entry its Signature Edition series, via 9to5Google. Started last year with a modified version of the V30, Signature Edition phones are LG’s pricey ceramic devices that run in the ballpark of $1,800.The second version, unveiled today, is basically an LG V35 in a ceramic body. (The V35, announced back in May for $900, is pretty much a G7 ThinQ in the body of a V30.) The back of the phone is made out of zir

Uberis shuttering its self-driving trucks unit, a beleaguered program borne out of the company’s controversial multi-million acquisition of Otto nearly two years ago.
The company said Monday that Uber Advanced Technologies Group will stop development of self-driving trucks and instead focus its efforts on self-driving cars.
“We recently took the important step of returning to public roads in Pittsburgh, and as we look to continue that momentum, we believe having our entire team&

As the economy has chugged along, so have retail sales, which last year capped their strongest year since 2014. Online sales have been especially brisk, growing 16 percent between 2016 and 2017 alone, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, which estimates that consumers spent $453.5 billion online last year.
Of course, with every booming market comes supporting cast members that benefit. Such is the case with eight-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based Optoro, which itself jus

Google is injecting a little Chrome into its VR platform, bringing the web browser to Daydream headsets, the company announced today. It’s been a long time coming considering the depths of Google’s WebVR experimentation on desktop and mobile Chrome.
The Mountain View tech giant announced it was working on this quite a while ago, back at I/O 2017.
Google has been moving pretty slowly with any big Daydream updates lately, all while Facebook’s Oculus has driven heavy news to

Googleis promoting its top lawyer, Kent Walker, into a global policy position, CNBC reports. Walker, Google SVP and general counsel, has already been a public voice in the company’s recent privacy tangles, but will move into a formal role as senior vice president of global affairs, overseeing Google’s policy, trust and safety, corporate philanthropy and legal teams.
Last year, Walker joined Richard Salgado, Google’s Director, Law Enforcement and Information Security, to head to

Google is making it easier to reschedule meetings on Calendar — and avoid all that unnecessary Slack chatter — with a new feature that lets participants propose alternative times from within the app itself. The organizer of the meeting is then given the option to review and accept the new time or reject it. All attendees’ availability windows, if their calendars are shared with co-workers, will also now be displayed in a side-by-side view, so it’s easier to propose times

Ecobee is launching a “Peak Relief” pilot program for its smart thermostats that will automatically cut down on heating and air conditioning during the day’s peak hours to help curb the cost of temperature control.
The company says that this program will be customized specifically for each individual’s home by taking electricity rates, comfort preferences, the local weather forecast, and the home’s energy efficiency into account. Peak Relief bundles this data and r

Gripping something with your hand is one of the first things you learn to do as an infant, but it’s far from a simple task, and only gets more complex and variable as you grow up. This complexity makes it difficult for machines to teach themselves to do, but researchers at Elon Musk and Sam Altman-backed OpenAIhave created a system that not only holds and manipulates objects much like a human does, but developed these behaviors all on its own.
Many robots and robotic hands are already prof

Apple released a fresh beta version of iOS 12 today, and with it came an apparent look at the next AirPods case, as first spotted by 9to5Mac. We had an idea this case was coming at some point and that it would likely include a charge status indicator light on the outside. The case might also support wireless charging, and we’re probably going to hear about it during Apple’s annual fall hardware event, so prepare yourself accordingly. Now, get ready for a zoom.
Here is the newest ima

Epic Games’ Fortnite has clearly transformed the gaming industry, but more importantly, it unleashed a wide assortment of dance moves which have become cultural phenomenons themselves. From the backpack kid’s floss dance during Katy Perry’s SNL performance, to Thanos who danced his way into Marvel movie edits, every Fortnite dance is a special treat that’s made all the more enjoyable by the unexpected places they’ve turned up.
The latest example is in the form of a

A meaty first report by the UK parliamentary committee that’s been running an inquiry into online disinformation since fall 2017, including scrutinizing how people’s personal information was harvested from social media services like Facebook and used for voter profiling and the targeting of campaign ads — and whose chair, Damian Collins — is a member of the UK’s governing Conservative Party, contains one curious omission.
Among the many issues the report raises are&

The bedroom community of Frisco, Texas might seem like an unusual place to find a self-driving vehicle. But here in this city of nearly 175,000 people, there are seven.
And as of Monday, they’re available for the public to use within a specific sector of the city that has a concentration of retail, entertainment venues and office space.
Drive.ai, an autonomous vehicle startup, launched the self-driving on-demand service Monday that will cover a two-mile route. The service will be oper

A dark theme option for YouTubeusers on Android is in the early stages of rolling out to end users, Google confirmed to TechCrunch, following a number of reports and sightings of the dark mode showing up for users in the app’s settings. The feature has taken a bit longer to launch than expected – YouTube first announced a dark mode for its mobile app back in March, when it launched on iOS. At the time, the company said the dark theme for Android was coming “soon.”
Five mo

China’s progress towards its goal of becoming the world’s leader in AI by the year 2025 remains unchecked. While its efforts still lag behind the US, thanks to the likes of Google and Microsoft, there’s an alarming amount of research indicating the gap is shrinking. It’s only been a year since TNW reported China’s announcement it was shifting its national strategy to claim the artificial intelligence crown. In that time China has advanced its agenda to a startling

Dropbox just doubled the amount of storage it provides to customers of its Professional tier, from 1TB to 2TB. The company notes in a blog post that the rise in collaboration around “ultra hi-def” files, like 4K video and interactive presentations, means the general conception of how much cloud storage is acceptable for pro work is changing. So Dropbox is deciding to gift its users a bit extra at no cost. The current Professional plan, which is a beefed up version of Dropbox’s

Twitter today announced it had selected two finalists in its months-long search for a “health metric” — essentially a giant, figurative dipstick by which it can tell how well everyone’s getting along on the site. Twitter selected researchers with dazzling bona fides, but the company should also disclose what, if anything, it could do with their findings. Last March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey waved the figurative white flag and announced he was calling on someone, anyone to

On July 20th, Walt Disney Studios issued a surprise announcement that it was firing James Gunn, director of the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Guardians of the Galaxy and its 2017 sequel. The studio was responding to an unearthed series of off-color jokes he made on Twitter between 2008 and 2012. Those tweets made light of pedophilia and child abuse, leading to online outrage.Gunn issued an apology on Twitter, stating in part, “Many people who have followed my career know when I started,

DJI has a new version of the Mavic Pro on the way, and thanks to a mistakenly published advertisement, the company has now confirmed to CNET a few of the drone’s specs and features ahead of its official reveal. The big change with the new Mavic 2 Pro is that users will be able to swap lenses on the drone for a 2x optical zoom version (a configuration DJI is calling Mavic 2 Zoom) that can shoot as wide as 28mm and as tight as 48mm.
Switching lenses is a feature that the company has typical

When Epic Games announced that it would be investing a hefty $100 million in Fortnite e-sports and launch a competitive world cup for the game, there was a lot of excitement. Fortnite is already a massive cultural phenomenon, and here was a chance for it to make a splash in the burgeoning world of e-sports. The successful Fortnite Pro-Am at E3 was followed by the launch of Summer Skirmish, a series of eight weekly tournaments featuring $8 million in prizes. But despite some big money and many o

Could user profiles and better personalization features be coming to Amazon’sPrime Video app at long last? The company’s new Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke just teased that a major upgrade to Amazon’s streaming video app is in the works – and she already has it running on a phone in her office, she said.
The exec was speaking at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in L.A., according to reports from AdWeek [paywall], TheWrap, and

Every artificial intelligence startup or corporate R&D lab has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how humans annotate training data to teach algorithms what to look for. Whether it’s doctors assessing the size of cancer from a scan or drivers circling street signs in self-driving car footage, all this labeling has to happen somewhere. Often that means wasting six months and as much as a million dollars just developing a training data system. With nearly every type of business racin

Google is officially adding the Chrome browser to its Daydream virtual reality platform. As of today, people using the phone-based Daydream View headset or the standalone Lenovo Mirage Solo can access Chrome from their home screens. The VR version of Chrome mostly has the same feature set as its desktop counterpart, but there’s an added “cinema mode” that optimizes web video for VR viewing. Just as importantly, Chrome supports the WebVR standard, so users can access web-based