Technology news

Anyone who's been through a high-school algebra class surely remembers using a TI graphing calculator.
But who had a calculator like this one? 
Apple started the trend with the rose gold iPhone, and now you'll be the coolest kid in class with the new rose gold color option for the TI-84 Plus CE. (Note: It's more of a light pink color.)
The timing is pretty perfect, with students starting back-to-school shopping soonAmazon and OfficeDepot offer the rose gold model for $119.99. I remember pay

Across the country over the past year, corporations have gobbled up prominent alt-weekly and local publications, only to either tear them down to the studs, or totally destroy them. 
In Los Angeles, former LA Weekly staffers think that a mysterious shell company went a step further. The staffers theorize that it purchased the traditionally liberal and progressive LA Weekly, only to gut, then reincarnate it, in order to promote the business interests and conservative agenda of its (partially

Game of Thrones stars — they're just like us! Especially when it comes to being mortified at having to watch those graphic sex scenes with their parents.
Maisie Williams gave an interview to The Australian recently and described just how weird it was to work around the nearly NC-17 levels of raciness when she first joined the show at 14-year-old. 
SEE ALSO: All the times we watched awkward sex scenes with our parents
Her family did their best to protect her underage eyes, especially w

Earlier this week, reports emerged that Google was working on tailoring its search and news apps for China in order to comply with the country’s censorship laws. Now, it appears the tech giant is also taking steps to bring its cloud business to the country.According to an unnamed source who spoke to Bloomberg, Google is looking to partner with major Chinese cloud and server providers to deliver services such as Google Drive and Google Docs to the country. The goal, they say, is to run the

The Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission today requested that the Supreme Court vacate an appeals court decision upholding net neutrality in 2016. If the court decides to grant the motion, the previous decision to support the rules would be removed, clearing the path for re-litigation in the future when it comes to classifying broadband.
In December, the FCC voted to undo the 2015 Open Internet Order which established net neutrality rules by forbidding broadband provi

It’s long been rumored that Apple will release a larger “iPhone X Plus” model this fall, but we may have just gotten our best confirmation yet of the new device: a leaked icon found in Apple’s own firmware that seems to shows off the new phone. The image was discovered by notable Apple firmware reverse-engineer Guilherme Rambo, along with another leaked icon for the bezel-less iPad that first leaked through the latest iOS 12 beta earlier this week.Rambo notes that the ic

The NRA says it's in deep financial trouble, and a lot of Twitter isn't buying it, as evidenced by the way they've turned a rhetorical trope on its head. 
SEE ALSO: Sacha Baron Cohen, crime-fighting Obama show why satire is a dying art under Trump
Rolling Stone reports the NRA is complaining, as part of a lawsuit against the state of New York, that the state pressured insurers to cut ties with the organization. Without the necessary liability insurance, the NRA says it will be “unable

Two months after announcing the product at its F8 developer conference, Facebook istesting its dating app internally with employees. Independent app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who regularly uncovers new Facebook features by scouring the source code, found evidence of the app Friday and posted it on Twitter. The company confirmed to The Verge that the product is in testing but declined to comment further.
“This product is for US Facebook employees who have opted-in to dogfooding Faceboo

The Intercontinental Exchange, the operator behind the New York Stock Exchange, has announced that it is creating a new company called Bakkt that will hold and manage people’s cryptocurrency. The platform will be powered by Microsoft cloud tech and plans to begin with trading and converting bitcoin to US dollars and other fiat (government-backed) currencies as “bitcoin is today the most liquid digital currency.”
Bakkt represents a significant marker for cryptocurrency. The NYS

Remember Gamefly — that game rental service you may have gotten a gift card for that one Christmas? The company announced earlier this week it was shutting down its digital streaming service, effective at the end of this month. The streaming service was rolled out in 2015 exclusively on Amazon Fire TVs, though it later added support for other devices. It allowed you to stream the game without the console itself — the info page boasts, “All you need to start playing is a compat

Researchers sent a nuclear waste container on a 14,500-mile odyssey by truck, barge, cargo ship, and train in an effort to understand how well radioactive fuel would stand up to travel.That’s important to find out because one day, the goal is to store all the radioactive fuel that’s used up and spit out by nuclear power plants in the US at a central, underground repository. There’s still a political struggle over where that repository will be, so right now, spent nuclear fuel

Sometimes smart contractscan be pretty dumb.
All of the benefits of a cryptographically secured, publicly verified, anonymized transaction system can be erased by errant code, malicious actors, or poorly defined parameters of an executable agreement.
Hoping to beat back the tide of bad contracts, bad code and bad actors, Sagewise, a new Los Angeles-based startup has raised $1.25 million to bring to market a service that basically hits pause on the execution of a contract so it can be arbitr

An international team of physicists recently published research indicating quantum computers aren’t the way to go for those hoping to break the second law of thermodynamics, the one that says there’s no free lunch in the universe. Perpetual motion has long been the dream of those of who don’t want to do any work but still want to reap the rewards of a job well done. If you can imagine a machine that requires no fuel to run, or a motor capable of producing an electromagnetic cu

A Y Combinator-backed startup, JetLenses, is taking on the major contact lens e-commerce sites, like 1-800-Contacts, Lens.com, and other online ordering systems offered by major retailers, such as Walmart. The startup’s goal is to bring down the cost of prescription products by automating the overhead associated with these businesses, in areas like prescription verification, order tracking, compliance and fulfillment, then pass those savings on to customers.
The company also promises fair

Before social media, the music industry would take an album, pick some singles, and promote what they thought the hits should be. Those vetted songs would then likely be what you’d hear on radio stations and at the club. In 2018, it doesn’t work like that at all: the song of the summer is collectively decided by the fans, meaning that, nowadays, any unassuming tune can take over the airwaves if the internet likes it enough.
The current and indisputable domination of Drake’s &l

Alex Garland, known for high-concept science fiction films Ex Machina and this year’s Annihilation, has a new project: Devs, an eight-episode limited series about a computer engineer who begins investigating the company she works for after she suspects that they’re responsible for the death of her boyfriend.The series will star Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina’s silent android Kyoko) as Lily Chan, a software engineer at a “cutting-edge tech company” called Amaya, while Ni

Smartphone users in India are demanding answers after people on Twitter began posting screenshots of their phones’ contact lists with a strange number included in it. Users are claiming that they didn’t add the contact to their devices, and no one company or person knows how it got there in the first place.
The contact, 1-800-300-1947, is an old toll-free number for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and it’s been showing up in contacts lists originating fro

Smartphone users in India were demanding answers after people on Twitter posted screenshots of their phones’ contact lists with a strange number included in it. Users claimed that they didn’t add the contact to their devices, and for much of Friday, no one company or person could explain how it got there in the first place.
The contact, 1-800-300-1947, is an old toll-free number for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and it’s been showing up in contacts list

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Disney had approached Turner Broadcasting, which currently holds the rights to broadcast the majority of the Star Wars films, looking to buy back the rights to stream the franchise on its forthcoming streaming service, only to be roundly rebuffed. The incident highlights a problem that other media companies will no doubt face as they work to establish their own streaming services: navigating a patchwork landscape of IP ownership to bring home the programming t

NASA has announced the names of the first astronauts who’ll fly to the International Space Station on American-made, commercial spacecraft.
The crews will fly to the space station on rockets built by NASAcommercial partners Boeing and SpaceX. “Today, our country’s dreams of greater achievements in space are within our grasp,” said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, in a statement. “Today’s announcement advances our great American vision and strengthens the na

This week, reports surfaced that Google is working on a search app and a news app that will be censored to comply with Chinese laws. The new software could be seen as a turnabout of the company’s previous stance against censorship that it has held for years, dating back to Google’s decision to effectively pull its search business out of China in 2010. Google, at the time, said it was standing up against censorship. So what has changed since 2010, and what has stayed the same?The Int

A 280-character tweet might not seem like a lot of space, but if you’re crafty enough, it’s actually just enough to program a video game.That’s the challenge that security engineer Alok Menghrajani gave himself: to squeeze a CD-ROM holding a retro-style video game into the space of a single tweet. After two weekends, he’d succeeded — the resulting code is a video game that can be booted up in a virtual machine, or burned onto a physical disk. The game, Menghrajani

Truly wireless earbuds are exactly what their name promises. Over the last couple years, we’ve seen the introduction and early evolution of this new category of headphones. They eliminate all wires, neckbands, and other tethers between the two buds in your ears, offering a level of convenience, lightweight comfort, and flexibility that traditional Bluetooth earbuds and headphones can’t match. There are no tangled cord nightmares to sort out. They can’t get caught on an item of

Here we go again. The New York Times yesterday reported that Amazon had removed products from its online marketplace featuring Nazi symbols. I’ve just got one question for whoever wrote that article: What products did Amazon remove? A quick perusal of the Amazon marketplace, as of the time of this writing, will reveal a plethora of Nazi memorabilia items, Neo-Nazi products, and more. In fact, the only items I can’t find on Amazon from our previous coverage of its hate group-related

In the thrilling conclusion to our three-part epic miniseries, “Apple doesn’t make the laptops we want,” Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss how nothing really matters because Apple is a phone company worth $1 trillion.
Samsung, Amazon, and Tesla earnings are also discussed, along with Farhad Manjoo’s “Frightful Five” thesis.
Then, in “The Bezel Wars,” our hosts discuss the Surface Go, iPad rumors, and the Windows 10 S life Dieter has been living.
Pau

Forking over your cold, hard cash isn’t the only way you can score a ticket to Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. We’re looking for volunteers willing to trade their time to help us produce our biggest, most ambitious Disrupt conference ever. And what do you get in return? One complimentary Innovator Pass that gives you access to all three days of Disrupt. Interested? Apply here to volunteer today.
This is a chance to attend the show without spending a dime while getti

Walmart’s ongoing battle with Amazon for the retail crown is expanding well beyond retail, and it’s forcing one of the largest companies in the world to reexamine its DNA. In the last six months alone, Walmart has partnered with scores of tech firms to better compete with Amazon and make progress in markets that may become pivotal years down the line. It’s also begun rethinking how it views itself: a traditional big-box retail giant that now hopes it can be nimble enough to co

Crypto skeptics rejoice! A new way to short the cryptocurrency market is coming from dYdX, a decentralized financial derivatives startup. In two months it will launch its protocol for creating short and leverage positions for Ethereum and other ERC20 tokens that allow investors to amp up their bets for or against these currencies.
To get the startup there, dYdX recently closed a $2 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitzand Polychain, and joined by Kindred and Abstract plus angels, includi

Even as the wealth of Jeff Bezos balloons and Amazon eats everyone’s online retail lunch, there are still a few other e-commerce entrepreneurs faring rather well.
In 2011, eBay purchased GSI Commerce for $2.4 billion, at the same time divesting wholly from the sports merchandise business in Fanatics and significantly from the sites ShopRunner and Rue La La, which together were set up under a new holding company named Kynetic that was put under the control of GSI CEO Michael Rubin.
Sev