Technology news

You may have assumed that turning off Google’s Location History option meant that Google is no longer tracking your movements. But the reality is that Google can continue to collect location data and even track you on a minute-by-minute basis, remembering your home address, and other places you’ve visited throughout the day, the Associated Press reports.
AP found that Google continues to track you through services like Google Maps, weather updates, and browser searches — any a

If noise-cancellation is a must-have feature for your next set of wireless headphones or earbuds, it's worth looking at two Bose models that are currently each marked down $50 on Amazon.The Bose QuietComfort 35 II are over-ear headphones that not only offer the company’s best-in-class noise cancellation technology, but also feature support for voice assistants Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.Solid battery life and an extremely lightweight, comfortable build are reasons to go for the QC3

A $25 monthly subsidy that’s meant to help low-income households on tribal lands get phone or internet service will remain in place for the time being, after a court found that the Federal Communication Commission’s plan to largely remove the subsidies seems to have been made without properly considering the harms to customers and businesses.
A federal court said on Friday that petitioners — including tribes, nonprofits, and wireless carriers — were likely to prove that

YouTube, facing increasing pressure from competing platforms, is trying to help new monetization features get off the ground — and it’s even willing to pay creators to promote them. According to a report from Bloomberg, the Google-owned platform is offering creators up to hundreds of thousands of dollars if they agree to use new donation and paid memberships features introduced earlier this year. The move could keep these influencers from leaving the site for rival streaming sites l

Now that the Note 9’s all good and official, it’s time to move onto the next major smartphone. The Google Pixel 3 leaks haven’t quite hit the fever pitch we saw with Samsung’s device ahead of launch — though there’s still time. After all, it seems likely the latest version of Google’s flagship Android handset won’t officially be official until October.
Even so, we’ve already seen a handful of credible links, including a full unboxing last wee

Zombie-like passive consumption of static video is both unhealthy for viewers and undifferentiated for the tech giants that power it. That’s set Facebookon a mission to make video interactive, full of conversation with broadcasters and fellow viewers. It’s racing against Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat to become where people watch together and don’t feel like asocial slugs afterward.
That’s why Facebook today told TechCrunch that it’s acqui-hired Vidpresso, bu

Y Combinatorhas invested $120,000 in Mac’d, a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant that lets customers choose their own adventure from the beginning. I popped over to one of the Mac’d locations last week in San Francisco to get my mac on and chat with the founders.
For starters, the mac and cheese was bomb. Sure, one could argue it’s hard to mess up mac and cheese, but it’s somehow been done before. Trust me, I know this from firsthand experience.
I opted for a relati

A little bot named QTrobot from LuxAI could be the link between therapists, parents, and autistic children. The robot, which features an LCD face and robotic arms, allows kids who are overwhelmed by human contact to become more comfortable in a therapeutic setting.
The project comes from LuxAI, a spin-off of the University of Luxembourg. They will present their findings at the RO-MAN 2018 conference at the end of this month.
“The robot has the ability to create a triangular interaction bet

Fortnite’s journey to Android has been a complicated one. A few months back, Epic Games promised to bring the wildly popular survival sandbox title to the mobile OS, but only after sidestepping the traditional process for doing so. Fittingly, while it now appears to be live for Android, the process of actually getting the game is, well, complicated.If you want to get started, you’ll need to sign up for a beta of the game. That’s right, while the title has been up and running on

Last Friday, the Internet Engineering Task Force released the final version of TLS 1.3. This is a major update to TLS 1.2, the security protocol that secures much of the web by, among other things, providing the layer that handles the encryption of every HTTPS connection.
The updated spec promises improved security and a bit more speed, thanks to the reduced need for round trips as the browser and server negotiate the security settings. And the good news is, you can already use it today, be

Apple is delaying its FaceTime group chats feature. While FaceTime group chats were originally scheduled for the iOS 12 release, developer Guilherme Rambo has revealed the feature has been removed in the latest iOS 12 beta 7 release today. “Group FaceTime has been removed from the initial release of iOS 12,” reads a note from Apple to developers, posted by Rambo. Apple says the feature “will ship in a future software update later this fall.”
Group FaceTime chats will all

Epic Games launched its battle royale hit Fortnite on Android devices last week with a big catch: it was exclusive to Samsung-made phones for a few days as a way to help market the new Samsung Galaxy Note 9. Now, the exclusivity period appears to be over, and beta invite codes are going out to select users of non-Samsung phones like the Google Pixel 2 XL.
If you’re itching to dive off the battle bus on mobile, you might have to hold on just a little while longer: there appears to be a wai

“I’m a planner, and my dream, my whole life, has been to buy a house,” says Dave Barthwell while standing at a podium in front of several hundred mostly black attendees at the end of the first Wakandacon, a three-day convention of cosplay, workshops, tournaments, and panels, all celebrating the Afrofuturistic possibilities inspired by Marvel’s record-breaking movie Black Panther for black people. “I’ve been saving for it my whole life. And I emptied my savings

As with any major software release, Google’s recent launch of Android 9.0 Pie hasn’t gone off without some early bugs and issues. The company just pushed out an Android Auto app update to get its in-car experience working nicely again with Pie, but owners of the original Pixel XL are having some troubles of their own.Users are reporting that Android Pie has seemingly stopped their phone from fast charging when plugged into many chargers. Even Google’s own charger isn’t w

Since the advent of streaming online video, industry insiders have wondered what impact it would have on the future of television. As more companies move toward launching their own proprietary subscription streaming services, the future hasn’t been entirely decided yet, but new clues are emerging, pointing toward a potentially surprising answer: all this disruptive new media is just gradually re-creating familiar old-media models.
Recently, Comcast announced that it struck a deal to add A

Step by step, condition by condition, AI systems are slowly learning to diagnose disease as well as any human doctor, and they could soon be working in a hospital near you. The latest example is from London, where researchers from Google’s DeepMind subsidiary, UCL, and Moorfields Eye Hospital have used deep learning to create software that identifies dozens of common eye diseases from 3D scans and then recommends the patient for treatment.
The work is the result of a multiyear collaborati

When it first debuted in 2012, Telltale’s game adaptation of The Walking Dead felt like something completely new. Sure, there were plenty of zombie games before, but this was different: it focused on human trauma and moral choices, instead of the headshot-fueled action at the heart of other games. Playing as Lee, you became the de facto parent for a young girl named Clementine, and the entire first season of the game was dedicated to keeping her safe.
As The Walking Dead continued, and Cl

Lenovo is adding two new notebooks to its Thinkpad line: the Thinkpad P1 and P72. The former is smaller than Lenovo’s earlier workstation laptops, measuring in at 0.72 inches and 3.76 pounds. It has an HD 4K 15.6-inch display, an Nvidia Quadro P series graphics card, and 8th Gen Intel Core or Xeon processors that can reach up to 4.6GHz speeds. Couple that with 64GB of memory and 4TB of storage, and it seems like a solid video conferencing and document-storing device. It starts at $1,949.

Samsung took the wraps off the Galaxy Note 9 last week, and it announced that the device would work with Samsung DeX, a desktop-style environment you can project to a monitor using a USB-C to HDMI adapter / cable.It sounds fairly simple, and it seems like the Note 9 is closer to fully realizing the smartphone-computer dream: using your phone to power a desktop-style computing interface without needing a mouse or keyboard (while still supporting both).
After all, why shouldn’t powerful pho

After days of speculation and conflicting reports, Elon Musk has broken his silence about his plan to take Tesla private. In a Monday morning blog post, Musk explained that he has been in talks for weeks with managers of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to finance the massive deal, which some estimate could cost as much as $50 billion. But it’s unclear whether Musk’s explanation will mollify federal regulators, who are reportedly looking into whether his statements from la

In 1800, Alessandro Volta invented the first version of the thing we now call a battery. We’ve come a long way from his initial gadget to the lithium-ion batteries that power much of our lives, including our phones, batteries, cars, satellites, and more.
Batteries are undergoing a kind of renaissance. They’re more powerful than ever, and we’ve gotten smarter about how to use them. Besides being an important part of our everyday lives — who doesn’t get stressed out

Right now in America, there are about 2 million homes with solar panels. Considering there are about 90 million single-family homes, that doesn’t seem like a lot. But consider this: we’re now on track to start adding a million new solar-powered systems each year. It’s taken a while to get here, but solar is increasingly becoming a popular option to power the Home of the Future.The number of homes with solar “will tick up pretty quickly,” says Justin Baca, vice pres

Though we rarely give them much thought, batteries — specifically lithium-ion batteries — enable modern life. They run our smartphones, yes, but they also power our Bluetooth speakers, toothbrushes, satellites, and pacemakers. In Australia, a partnership with Tesla will equip 50,000 homes with solar panels and battery packs, transforming them into a single “virtual power plant” capable of storing 250MW. Increasingly, batteries move us: from electric cars to pedal-assist b

Who doesn’t look at the battery gauge on a smartphone screenshot first? When Randall Munroe, proprietor of the popular technology webcomic XKCD, posted a comic titled “Screenshot” in 2014, it captured something of the zeitgeist. Illustration by Randall Munroe / XKCD
Munroe’s insight came just as smartphone penetration topped 75 percent in America, which is the kind of saturation you’d need before something like battery problems became widely relatable. The old bric

Samsung is overhauling its SmartThings product line today, with two key new offerings: a brand new hub, which can now wirelessly connect to your router, and a new Wi-Fi router that includes mesh networking tech from Plume.
The router is the bigger deal. It’s a dual-band model that’s sold in a three-pack and, like other mesh routers, is meant to have units placed all around your home to deliver better Wi-Fi coverage. This is Samsung’s second try at a mesh SmartThings router, bu

They’ve never become the dominant form factor, but tall-and-slim smartphones with screen ratios that add more vertical space are not uncommon. The latest example is from French brand Alcatel, which today unveiled its latest budget device: the Alcatel 7.The 7 costs $179.99 and is available exclusively from carrier MetroPCS. As you’d expect for the price, this is not the most exciting fare. It has a 2.5GHz MediaTek processor (an octa-core MT6763), 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage,

Google appears to be working on dual-boot support for Chromebooks. XDA-Developers has discovered that Google has been working to support an “alt OS mode” for its Pixelbook laptop for months now. Dubbed “Campfire,” an obvious nod to Apple’s own Boot Camp feature, Google’s dual-boot is rumored to support Windows 10 on Chromebooks.
XDA-Developers claims Google is attempting to pass Microsoft’s hardware certification for Windows 10 to allow its Pixelbook to

OYO Rooms, the India-based budget hotel network that’s backed by SoftBank’s Vision fund, has prioritized expansion into China this year but that’s not all it’s up to. Back home in India, it just moved into the event hosting space through the acquisition of a wedding banquet company.
Today, OYO said it has acquired Weddingz.in, a three-year-old company that claims to be India’s largest wedding planner with 4,000 venues across 15 cities. The company had