Technology news

The tweet may have become a meme, but the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission isn't laughing at Elon Musk's tweet about taking Tesla private.
The electric car company CEO blurted out on Twitter last week that he plans to buy back Tesla from shareholders. He said he had "funding secured." Now the feds are worried about market manipulation and other violations from that seemingly innocuous tweet.
SEE ALSO: Elon Musk is serious about taking Tesla private
The company followed up with a lengthy b

Hypebeasts: You're in luck. Thanks to a new shirt collaboration between a streetwear brand and the internet's encyclopedia, looking cool and doing good just got easier. 
In an effort to raise money for the donation-fueled Wikimedia Foundation, the brand Advisory Board Crystals released a shirt emblazoned with the Wikipedia logo across the front. The back reads "INTERNET MASTER" in bold letters surrounding a picture of the site's spherical puzzle logo.
SEE ALSO: Ivanka Trump's fashion line i

The Apple iPad Mini 4 Wi-Fi is on sale at Walmart right now for $299.99. Normally, the tablet goes for $399.99, so $100 off is a welcome discount on the Apple device.
SEE ALSO: 6 of the best portable Bluetooth speakers that go everywhere
The Mini comes packed with the dual-core A8 chip for processing, so it will definitely deliver the speeds you'd associate with iPads and iPhones. And with 128 GB of storage, the tablet will be able to handle all those apps and games you may want to play while on

China, the largest gaming market, has not approved any video game licenses for at least four months due to President Xi Jinping's recent government shake up (read: power consolidation), reports Bloomberg.
Although China is notoriously stringent with media censorship, this game licensing freeze is taking the vetting process one step further.
SEE ALSO: Google is developing a censored news app for China
Unnamed sources told Bloomberg that officials are concerned over sex and violence displayed in t

Twitter is planning to roll out changes to its API tomorrow, and it’s already having effects on Tweetbot. Tapbots updated Tweetbot for iOS today and with it came the removal of timeline streaming on Wi-Fi; push notifications for likes, retweets, follows, and quotes; the activity and stats tab; and the Apple Watch app. Meanwhile, push notifications for mentions or DMs will be delayed by a few minutes, and timelines will refresh automatically every one to two minutes instead of streaming on

What's the only thing better than going on shopping spree to Sephora and buying things you definitely don't need? Having a shopping spree delivered right to your house and spending way less than you would in the store for the same amount of stuff.
That's right, ya'll, we're talking about beauty subscription boxes. These are a clutch way to discover new brands and decide if you like a product before buying it at full price, especially when you're too lazy to return stuff to the store (raises hand

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission is looking into whether Apple improperly pressured Yahoo Japan to shut down a game streaming platform that competed with the iOS App Store, according to Nikkei. Yahoo Japan’s Game Plus service allowed people to stream full games made for other platforms and to play HTML5 games on mobile phones, which would have allowed iPhone owners to get games without going through the App Store.
Nikkei reports that Yahoo Japan slashed the program’s budget last

This post is part of Hard Refresh, a soothing weekly column where we try to cleanse your brain of whatever terrible thing you just witnessed on Twitter.
We've all tried our hand at making shapes out of pancake batter — a first initial perhaps, or maybe a crude version of a dog that bears closer resemblance to a Rorschach test.
But making a pancake that actually resembles anything other than a pancake is difficult. Sometimes the batter is too runny, sometimes your pan is too hot, and someti

When a massive wildfire erupts in the United States today, it can leap over formidable rivers, produce whirling tornados of flame, and cause tens of thousands of people to flee. 
These modern infernos — enhanced by a warming climate that makes for profoundly parched land — are burning over twice as much land than they were in the early 1980s, breaking all-time records. 
After flames spread over tens or hundreds of thousands of acres, it can take quite a bit of time for the

Uber brought in $2.8 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2018, but ultimately lost $891 million thanks to increased spending by the ride-hailing company, according to Bloomberg.Uber, which is privately held but chooses to report its quarterly earnings to investors and the public, is seeing some growing pains from its massive effort to scale globally. It’s cash-burn rate wasn’t as bad as the same period last year, when the company reported losing roughly $1.1 billion. But it&

Spoilers up to Castle Rock Season 1, episode 6 below.Castle Rock is, as many have noted, a very slow burn of a show. It lobs mysteries wholesale at the audiences and jealousy hoards their answers, doling out only the smallest, barely noticeable clues as the episodes unfold. 
When Castle Rock does have big reveals, they usually create as much confusion as they clear up, and Episode 6 of the series pretty much nails that approach with...whatever the hell happened to Henry in the woods. 

From the half a billion dollars worth of art stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to the time an Irish assassin scammed his way into stealing the crown jewels at the Tower of London, none of history's memorable getaways quite compare to the hungry thief in Georgia who got away with a trailer full of ramen noodles. 
SEE ALSO: Scott Pruitt’s resignation has inspired as many memes as he had scandals
According to local TV station WAGA, a trailer parked at a gas station in Fayet

Motorola has made a new iPhone X clone called the P30 that comes in an iridescent twilight color reminiscent of Huawei’s P20, as spotted by PhoneArena. When we say clone, the rear of the phone looks nearly identical to the iPhone X, except that Apple’s logo has been replaced with Motorola’s and it doubles as a fingerprint sensor.
Huawei’s P20 comes in twilight, which is a deep purple that can turn into blue, depending on what lighting it’s under. Motorola is callin

Crazy Rich Asians is exactly what it says on the box: a deeply romantic comedy about the crazy, rich, and Asian, and all the eye-popping displays of wealth and sugar-sweet declarations of love that that should entail. 
But what makes Crazy Rich Asians special – what makes it more than an extremely convincing advertisement for luxury tourism in Singapore – is the smart and deeply felt culture-clash story at its core.
SEE ALSO: Awkwafina shares a powerful message about the importa

It looks like Diablo III is coming to the Switch, according to a since-deleted post from Forbes that was spotted by Reddit user Riomegon.The Switch port of the game is apparently going to be released as the Diablo III: Eternal Collection, a $59.99 bundle that will include both the Reaper of Souls and Rise of the Necromancer expansions, along with the other content and updates that Blizzard has released over the years. There are also apparently some Nintendo exclusive in-game items: a Ganondorf-

Unless you have special psychic powers, you can't predict when a disaster will strike. You have no way of telling when you'll get in a car accident and go careening off into a lake, or when you'll run out of gas in the middle of the night. While both scenarios are unlikely to happen with any frequency, it doesn't hurt to prepare. For one, the InGear AutoXscape Emergency Multi-Tool is a handy device that could one day rescue you from a life-threatening situation.
SEE ALSO: This $20 device is half

Android 9 Pie may have gotten the headlines, but Google has also announced that its latest pastry-named OS is coming to its Android Go line with Android 9 Pie (Go edition).The biggest change in Android 9 Pie (Go edition) is increased storage. According to Google’s blog post, the operating system for Android 9 Pie (Go edition) takes up less space on a device, giving users up to 500MB of additional storage out of the box compared to previous versions of Android Go.Additionally, Google is pr

Nintendo isn't afraid to experiment with its consoles. Whether it was the compact design of the GameCube or the motion controlled Wii, Nintendo seems to live and die on its ability to break from tradition. 
The Nintendo Switch is just the latest example of that, crossing that bridge between home and mobile gaming. That also means that Nintendo doesn't usually offer deals on its systems, because there's seemingly no need to, so any sale or deal is one to check out. 
SEE ALSO: Enhance yo

Just like you were tired of hearing your mother telling you to clean your room way back when, you probably think that everyone who says that Excel is worth mastering sounds like a broken record. You can't blame them, though. 
Microsoft Excel is one of the most ubiquitous programs in the world, used extensively in offices  across many industries. It's integral to everything from data crunching to organizing contact information to work automation. So really, learning the inner workings o

Bears are doing it all this summer. They've been caught jumping into pools, sneaking sips of margaritas in hot tubs, and now they're going on liquor runs.
SEE ALSO: The bears of Alaska's bear cam should have left the river by now. Why are they still here?
A black bear was caught on camera strolling into Crazy Bruce's Liquor store in Bristol, Connecticut, on Monday. The bear set off the automatic sliding doors' sensor while walking past, causing the doors to open and allowing it into the store, t

Since Facebook birthday fundraisers debuted a year ago, users have raised more than $300 million for nonprofit organizations, according to a new post from Asha Sharma, the company's head of product for social good. 
SEE ALSO: Facebook's app is now the third-most popular browser in the U.S.
More than 750,000 nonprofits can receive donations via FacebookSt. Jude, Alzheimer's Association, the American Cancer Society, Share Our Strength - No Kid Hungry, and the ASPCA are amo

Coinbase wants to be Facebook Connect for crypto. The blockchain giant plans to develop “Login with Coinbase” or a similar identity platform for decentralized app developers to make it much easier for users to sign up and connect their crypto wallets. To fuel that platform, today Coinbase announced it has acquired Distributed Systems, a startup founded in 2015 that was building an identity standard for dApps called the Clear Protocol.
The five-person Distributed Systems team and its

A team of researchers from Britain’s University of Portsmouth and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory made an enzyme that can eat up plastic bottles. They were playing around with a known enzyme made by a bacteria that can break down plastic, and just so happened to make the enzyme even better. Read more...More about Mashable Video, Bacteria, Plastic Waste, Plastic, and Plastic Pollution

“If your friends told you to jump off a bridge, would you?”It’s a warning you probably heard in childhood, a hypothetical example of the dangers of groupthink. And it likely inspired more impulsive behavior than it prevented. But in the not-too-distant future, parents may have to update this little adage:
“If a robot told you to jump off a bridge, would you?”Because, as it turns out, quite a few probably would.In a study published today in the journal Science Robot

T-Mobile says it has added more new postpaid customers than its rivals each quarter for several years running, and to keep that momentum going, the company is again trying to squash negative perceptions about its network’s reliability and coverage. T-Mobile is now offering free trials of its service in Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Boston, Massachusetts. The company made no mention of this new program during today’s Uncarrier event.Unlike the nationwide Test Drive program tha

Saint Louis University has announced that it will be placing Amazon Echo Dot devices, powered by Alexa for Business, in every student residence hall room or student apartment on campus. While other colleges, like Arizona State University, have put Echo Dots in student housing before, SLU says this is the first time a college will equip every student living space with an Amazon Alexa-enabled device.
SLU’s Echo Dots will come with a unique skill that will allow students to ask over 100 univ

With its seventh expansion, World of Warcraft not only went back to its Horde vs. Alliance roots, it brought almost everything back down to earth for the first time in a very long time. What a great decision.
World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth — so far — seems like the perfect new adventure for the 14-year-old game. I've put nearly a dozen hours into the new expansion since it launched Monday night and it's made me realize how much WoW needed to take a breather from all the world-

With its seventh expansion, World of Warcraft not only went back to its Horde vs. Alliance roots, it brought almost everything back down to earth for the first time in a very long time. What a great decision.
World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth — so far — seems like the perfect new adventure for the 14-year-old game. I've put nearly a dozen hours into the new expansion since it launched Monday night and it's made me realize how much WoW needed to take a breather from all the world-

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called Apple and other US-based technology companies out this week in an effort to drum up support for a boycott of their products and a push to buy Turkish-made gadgets. “Every product that we buy in foreign currency from outside, we will produce them here and sell abroad,” Erdoğan said during a speech in Ankara. “We will boycott the electronics products of the U.S.”He went on to specifically mention Apple and suggest tha

Mobile payment company Square announced today that it’s lowered its chip card read time down to two seconds. The company says the industry average is typically between eight and 13 seconds. That makes Square’s Reader and Register platforms significantly faster than standard card-reading technology for EMV cards, which have rolled out broadly in tandem with retail chip readers in the US over the last five years. The company’s previous milestone was 4.2 seconds in 2016.“Si

For some reason, Google is rebranding Google Drive storage plans under the name Google One. Along with the rebranding, Google is also improving its pricing in ways that give customers more options and more storage at lower prices. It marks the service’s first price cut in four years.
Google One plans start at the same place as Google Drive plans — $1.99 per month for 100GB of additional storage — but the situation improves after that. Google is introducing a new $2.99-per-mont

A year after Taylor Swift's groping trial, the singer is still speaking out. 
In an emotional speech given during her show in Tampa, Florida on Tuesday, Swift sat on a piano bench and reflected on her rollercoaster of a year — which included the 2017 lawsuit she won against radio host David Mueller after he groped her during a meet-and-greet in 2013. 
SEE ALSO: Taylor Swift donated hundreds of concert tickets to a police department in mourning
"A year ago I was not playing in a s

YouTube has removed an ad for The Nun, an upcoming horror film, for violating its “violent and shocking content” policy. As reported by Polygon, the unskippable ad was so upsetting that a tweet warning users against it went viral, racking up more than 135,000 retweets.YouTube doesn’t allow “promotions that are likely to shock or scare” on its service, and the ad is unquestionably a cheap, yet effective jump scare. Its angle is clever, playing on how we consume trai

Big Brother cares.
The Los Angeles metro will roll out body scanners in its subway stations, according to the Associated Press (AP). It will use scanners from the British security company ThruVision, capable of scanning upwards of 2,000 people per hour. According to the AP, Los Angeles is the first city in the US to employ body scanning security.
The scanners will monitor visitors for concealed weapons — both metal and non-metal capable of causing "mass casualties." They're not "necessaril

T-Mobile just announced a major overhaul to its customer service at its latest Uncarrier event, but — in true T-Mobile fashion — it’s also offering a few new perks to customers, Chief among them is a 12-month subscription to Pandora Plus, which will be available in the T-Mobile Tuesday app on August 21st.Pandora Plus typically costs $4.99 per month, so it’s a nice deal, albeit perhaps not as useful as Verizon’s recently announced offer that gives its unlimited cust

Fitbit’s rumored Charge 3 fitness band might include some upgrades taken directly from the company’s smartwatch work. Android Authority says it received leaked images of the device that show off the wearable’s new touchscreen display and physical redesign. That new display, which used to only be tap-enabled, would be able to handle some smartwatch features, like Quick Reply, which allows users to send messages when they receive a call or text. The feature is already available

For his 50th birthday next month, Will Smith will bungee-jump from a helicopter over the Grand Canyon. It’s a dramatic stunt that strikes fear into the hearts of fans (or at least some Verge staffers; you know who you are) who wonder whether it’s possible he’ll spring directly up into the helicopter’s blades.That’s not going to happen. Will Smith isn’t the first one to bungee-jump from a helicopter, and no one — not Smith, not the non-famous adrenaline