Technology news

Doja Cat (real name: Amala Zandile Dlamini) is a 22-year-old LA artist who makes music she’s described as “trappy-go-lucky,” and this week she’s scored her latest viral hit in “Mooo!” — where she raps the chorus “bitch, I’m a cow” while dancing around her bedroom in front of a homemade green screen while dressed in a cow costume. The video quickly blew up the internet, earning 1.3 million views in six-ish days.
Dlamini told Noisey the

A former member of Tesla’s in-house security team has told the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company silenced internal investigations into alleged criminal activity at the Gigafactory in Nevada, according to a summary of his formal complaint. Those investigations focused on claims of massive theft and “substantial drug trafficking.” The complaint also includes allegations that Tesla spied on employees’ electronic devices.
It’s the second known whistle

Google’s latest plan to tackle the retail market involves a two-floor store in Chicago’s Fulton Market. If it pans out, this would be the tech company’s first permanent retail location. The space would total 14,000 square feet across several interconnected brick buildings, according to The Chicago Tribune. This planned store would be several blocks south of the company’s Midwest HQ.
This isn’t Google’s first attempt at a brick-and-mortar store, which would be

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It’s really (really) hard to make it in today’s world without a computer of some kind. Nobody wants to do school or work projects on a phone. You’ve gotta get yourself a real laptop. 
Unfortunately, laptops cost money. If you’re not careful, you can end up spending well over $1,000 for a machine with impressive specs. But

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About a thousand Google employees have signed a letter protesting the company’s efforts to build a censored version of its search engine in China, as reported by The New York Times. The letter calls for more transparency and consideration of the human rights issues involved, as internet monitoring and collaboration with the Chinese government is used to stifle dissident voices and even put activists’ personal information at risk.
The letter reads “currently we do not have the

This review previously ran in April to coincide with a special online release. It is being updated to coincide with the film’s return to theaters in limited release.
Do You Trust This Computer? is not a particularly subtle watch. The documentary, from filmmaker Chris Paine, is dedicated to the dangers of artificial intelligence, and while it didn’t make a splash in theaters, it was promoted enthusiastically by Elon Musk, who tweeted about the film and paid for it be streamed for fre

Last week, Verizon randomly announced a new, close partnership with Apple. Phase one of their alliance is pretty great if you’re a Verizon customer: you get six free months of Apple Music — so long as you’re on one of the carrier’s current postpaid unlimited data plans. Verizon didn’t share many details when the deal was first announced, but today it’s actually available to sign up for. The free half-year of Apple Music is open to current, new, and former sub

Los Angeles streetwear brand and crystal shop Advisory Board Crystals has teamed up with Wikipedia to release a surprise clothing collaboration. The result is a single long-sleeve T-shirt with ABC pledging all proceeds toward the Wikipedia Foundation.
The shirt sports a combination of the Wikipedia logo and familiar visual elements of internet design to represent appropriated concepts. “Knowledge is power and awareness is survival,” says Advisory Board Crystals in their description.

Facebook has secured the rights to broadcast UEFA matches in much of Latin America, the association said yesterday. This can give Latin American soccer fans the chance to tune into their favorite sport without the need to pay to watch on their local TV station.
The contract includes a free live stream of both the organization’s Champions League and Super Cup matches, adding up to 32 matches per season. A ton of Latin America’s top players take part in these leagues every year, makin

A Melbourne, Australia teenager is facing criminal charges after accessing Apple’s backend network multiple times over a year, according to Australian newspaper The Age. He apparently did this out of love, his lawyer says, because he admired the company and “dreamed of” working there. He managed to download 90GB of “secure files” and customer accounts, although it’s unclear exactly what part of the network infrastructure he accessed.
He reportedly developed m

Sony has officially surpassed Canon to lead the full-frame camera market in the United States. The company claims to have taken a lead “in both dollars and units” sold. But it likely won’t have too much time to rest on its laurels, given that Nikon is expected to be looking to muscle in on Sony’s full-frame mirrorless cameras next week.
Additionally, as DPReview points out, those numbers are probably a little unfairly skewed toward Sony, given that Canon (the old, longti

The embattled film-subscription service MoviePass launched its promised new subscriber plan today, the one it previously announced would replace its existing standard one-movie-ticket-per-day plan. As predicted, the new plan is meant to allow subscribers to see three movies per month for a $9.95 subscription fee. But it also adds unexpected new restrictions: according to an email gradually rolling out to subscribers, MoviePass will curate a daily shortlist of movies each day that will be availa

For the most part, Bluetooth hearing aids have been easily compatible with iPhones, but Android fragmentation has made it difficult for hearing aid manufacturers to provide support to Android devices. Now Google is working to bring native hearing aid support for streaming on Android.
streaming android on your hearing aid will be easier
Google announced today that it’s working with Danish hearing aid manufacturer GN Hearing to create a new hearing aid spec for Android smartphones called AS

After years of warnings and several delays, Twitter finally made good today on its promise to kill off key features of popular streaming apps. In a blog post today, Twitter said it would remove access to APIs needed to power push notifications and an auto-refreshing timeline. Rob Johnson, a director of product, said Twitter would stop supporting those APIs so it could focus on its own native applications.
The changes affect popular third-party Twitter apps including Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Talo

Earlier this summer, Disney got the approval it needed to move forward with its plans to acquire 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets, allowing it to add franchises like Alien, X-Men, and others to its vast library of holdings. Now there’s an indication that that transfer is underway: Fox is pulling Dark Horse’s license to publish Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics.Joss Whedon recently spoke with Comic Book Resources about a new comic adaptation of his Dr. Horrible musical, sa

Pokémon Go is getting some better parental control options in the near future, with developer Niantic adding a new Niantic Kids log-in platform that will let parents better manage their children’s privacy in the augmented-reality app.Niantic Kids adds a new portal that gives parents the option to review and approve their kids’ in-app permissions before they start playing, and offers better control over what personal information gets shared in the game. The Niantic Kids platfo

Pokémon Go is getting some better parental control options in the near future, with developer Niantic adding a new Niantic Kids log-in platform that will let parents better manage their children’s privacy in the augmented-reality app.Niantic Kids adds a new portal that gives parents the option to review and approve their kid’s in-app permissions before they start playing, and offers better control over what personal information gets shared in the game. The Niantic Kids platfo

The next version of Android Messages brings an updated look, and more importantly, the ability to change to dark mode. The interface is a little bit cleaner and strips out some of the color and dull gray backgrounds in favor of a whole lot of white. There’s also now a toggle to ‘enable dark mode,’ which changes the background to black and darkens your text. The update is gradually rolling out now.
Besides the feature to enable dark mode, the biggest changes seem to be a new fo

Diablo III is coming to the Switch, according to a since-deleted post from Forbes that was spotted by Reddit user Riomegon that has since been confirmed by an official Blizzard announcement.The Switch port of the game will 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 some Nintendo exclusive in-

It’s been about a month since Disney fired former Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn after several alt-right figures resurfaced some of his old, offensive shock-humor tweets about pedophilia. During that time, fans, colleagues, and the Guardians cast have vocally tried to get Gunn reinstated. In spite of the campaign to paint Gunn as an actual pedophile, many people believed the implicating jokes, some a full decade old, no longer reflect Gunn as a person — and the director

Adam Fisher grew up in Silicon Valley, but left to pursue journalism in New York. Though he continued writing about technology and the internet, he found that the stories reported from afar were different from the stories that he had heard growing up.“Silicon Valley has made a huge amount of money and it’s usually presented as a business story of our times,” says Fisher, “but that business story is embedded in a larger story, which is a cultural story and it’s real

Android Pie, the latest OS from Google which was previously limited to Pixel phones and the Essential phone, is arriving on Moto phones. Motorola announced yesterday that the updates will hit eight phones sometime this fall.
Notably missing from the line-up is the Moto E5 which launched earlier this year, and the Moto G5, a pretty great phone from last year. That means E5 and G5 owners are missing out on the latest Android Pie features like system-level gesture controls (though Motorola has its

When Johnson Controls announced GLAS back at CES, the flagship feature of the $319 translucent smart thermostat was its integration with Microsoft’s Cortana smart assistant. Now Cortana has company: ahead of its upcoming August 24th release date, the company has announced that GLAS will support Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, too — but there’s a catch.Only Cortana on the device itself
GLAS itself does feature a built-in microphone and speaker, which will let users talk to a

Elon Musk is well known for trying to disrupt old industries. He builds spacefaring rockets in-house and makes them reusable, dramatically lowering the cost to leave Earth. He showed electric vehicles can be made and sold in large quantities, because if they’re fun to drive, people will want to buy them. But when the question of batteries was raised on a Tesla earnings call in the summer of 2017, Musk asked for help:“Can someone please come up with a battery breakthrough? We’d

Ask the elderly, toddlers, or the very drunk: walking can be tough. And the times when it is, you need a helping hand to keep you on the straight and narrow. For humans, that might mean a walking stick, but for robots, you can get more creative. The Aerial-Biped, a new robot designed by researchers from the University of Tokyo, uses something much more modern: a quadcopter.First spotted by IEEE Spectrum, the Aerial-Biped is an interesting experiment in how to make life easier for walking robots

After a couple of teasers, Netflix has released a full trailer for the upcoming second season of Iron Fist. This time, it seems Danny Rand will be going up against another student of K’un-Lun: the Steel Serpent.After the events of the show’s first season and that of The Defenders, and with a bit more control over his powers, Danny Rand (Finn Jones) has taken on the role of protector of New York City, fighting low-level bad guys on the streets along with Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick

Google is making changes to its Wear OS app review process that could improve the quality of software on the platform. It’s also reportedly working on a fitness coach/assistant for wearables. Put together, it sure seems like the company is preparing for some sort of wearable release. Google said yesterday that Wear OS apps will have to go through a mandatory “light review process,” perhaps in an effort to improve the Play Store offerings ahead of announcing a rumored Pixel Wat

Over the past decade, strategy game League of Legends has come to be defined by Summoner’s Rift, the three-lane battlefield where its lengthy matches take place. But that could soon change. This week developer Riot Games launched a new ten minute mode, inspired by faster-paced games like Fortnite. Called “Nexus Blitz,” it’s the first of many new experimental modes Riot plans to introduce over the next year. And depending on feedback, each has a chance of becoming permane

Grocery giant Kroger and autonomous vehicle startup Nuro launched their driverless delivery service Thursday in Scottsdale, Arizona. It is the first market for the two companies, which first announced their partnership back in June.To start out, only one store is involved in the experiment: the Kroger-owned Fry’s Food Store on East McDowell Road. Customers can place orders via Fry’s website or mobile app. Grocery orders can be scheduled for same-day or next-day delivery. The deliver

Best Buy announced late yesterday that it has acquired GreatCall,the company behind the JitterBug phone for seniors, for $800 million. The company currently focuses primarily on its emergency response service that has over 900,000 paying subscribers. The service is accessible through a range of connected devices and wearables, like the Jitterbug, which include a button that’s preprogrammed to dial GreatCall’s emergency assistance hotline.services over gadgets
In its release, Best Bu

Two Black Fridays ago, on the tail end of a holiday hangover, I succumbed to my consumer urges and bought an Xbox One. The bonus of this particular bundle was, in my bleary eyes, the console itself: a deep teal color with a slick controller to match. It arrived even more beautiful in person, with one catch: Its controller, by default, still required two AA batteries.Microsoft’s competitors, Sony and Nintendo, sell consoles free of drugstore-shelf batteries. The Switch’s JoyCons fit

Today Asus is announcing the new Zephyrus S gaming laptop, and it comes as competitors like Razer and MSI are regularly putting out thinner laptops with even thinner bezels. That’s what the Zephyrus S is designed to take on; it’s the company’s thinnest gaming laptop to date and an alternative to other, beefier Asus gaming laptops.There will be two Zephyrus S models available, with the first being sold exclusively at Amazon. The first SKU will retail for $2,199, is equipped wit

A small, useful Facebook feature is doing a lot of good. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post yesterday that birthday fundraisers, in which users can request that their friends donate to a cause for their birthday, have raised over $300 million for more than 750,000 non-profits. The service only launched last year. He said those organizations range from food banks to animal shelters to Alzheimer’s research. In June, Facebook said it would donate $5 for every birthday fundraiser started, so

Microsoft first started testing its new and diverse Xbox Live avatars with Xbox owners back in June. The software maker is now making these available to all Windows 10 users today ahead of their official release in October. A new Xbox Avatar Editor is downloadable from the Microsoft Store, granting Windows 10 gamers access to the new avatars.
While the new avatars are rather basic right now, can you fully customize your online character with body type options, clothing, and props. Microsoft is

Microsoft first started testing its new and diverse Xbox Live avatars with Xbox owners back in June. The software maker is now making these available to Windows 10 testers today ahead of their official release in October. A new Xbox Avatar Editor is downloadable from the Microsoft Store, granting Windows 10 gamers access to the new avatars. You may need to be part of Microsoft’s Xbox Insider program to fully access the editor, though.
While the new avatars are rather basic right now, can