Technology news

It looks like Lexar is back on its feet.Back in 2017, the staple company in the world of digital storage threw in the towel and announced that it’d be ceasing retail operations that year. But according to an announcement spotted by CameraJabber earlier this week, the company is back in business, and will be ready to return to producing and globally shipping flash storage as of this fall.“I’m extremely excited to re-introduce the Lexar brand to our worldwide customers,” L

The US Department of Justice is reportedly trying to have Facebook break the end-to-end encryption of its popular Messenger chat app so that the government can spy on a suspect’s “ongoing voice conversations” in a criminal investigation related to the notorious MS-13 gang. Facebook has so far pushed back against the DoJ’s request, according to a new Reuters scoop on the situation.
End-to-end encryption makes it so that only the participants of a conversation can see the

If you believe the headlines that have been circulating over the past few weeks, staring at screens is ruining our eyes. “Blue light from phones, tablets could accelerate blindness and hurt vision, study finds,” USA Today declared. Only, that particular study didn’t actually test the blue light that comes out of screens — and it didn’t look at the light’s effects on actual eyeballs.We’ve been through this before: there is some evidence that blue light c

Say it ain't so. 
The company that almost single-handedly introduced us to binging video has apparently gone decidedly old-school with the latest innovation being tested on its platform. That's right, Netflix is running commercials. 
SEE ALSO: Netflix has tons of hidden categories — here's how to see them
So reports Cord Cutter News, which notes that the streaming giant is showing some subscribers ads for other video content between shows. 
We reached out to Netflix in an at

Dermatologist Sandra Lee — better known as Dr. Pimple Popper — is not your typical Instagram star. Instead of beauty tutorials or fashion hauls, Dr. Lee is known for her oozing, explosive, forever satisfying pimple popping videos. 
SEE ALSO: Navel stones to ingrown toenails: Can you handle YouTube's grossest videos?
She has a TLC show, a skincare line, and now she's released "Pimple Pete," an Operation-like tabletop game where players gently pull stubborn zits out of poor acne-p

Crazybaby Air 1S
$159View Product
The Good
Good sound •with powerful bass • Lightweight and comfortable
The Bad
Large •not-so-portable carrying case • Lousy battery life • Bluetooth pairing process can be stressful
The Bottom Line
While the Crazybaby Air 1S are truly wireless earbuds, a bulky carrying case with only 12-hours of battery life makes it a hard sell with a bass-heavy mix and a problematic pairing process.
Mashable Score3.0Cool Factor2.0Learning Curve3.0Perfo

The Movado Group, which sells multiple brands, including Lacoste, Tommy Hilfigerand Hugo Boss, has purchased MVMT, a small watch company founded by Jacob Kassan and Kramer LaPlante in 2013. The company, which advertised heavily on Facebook, logged $71 million in revenue in 2017. Movado purchased the company for $100 million.
“The acquisition of MVMT will provide us greater access to millennials and advances our Digital Center of Excellence initiative with the addition of a powerful brand m

Bloomberg reports today that Amazon is reportedly working on a new device that’ll record live TV with the goal of letting users play content back on their phones later. The device, which is internally called “Frank,” would have physical storage and connect to Fire TV boxes. It’d rely on the same wireless technology that allows Amazon’s Echo speakers to pair with those boxes. Bloomberg’s source says the product isn’t official yet and might not roll out.

Laptop on the fritz? We got you.
SEE ALSO: Best cheap laptops: 10 options for under $500
It's the freakin' weekend and that means another round of laptops have gone on sale. And as the end of summer and beginning of school crawls ever closer, you know retailers are starting to drop prices big timeAmazon, Walmart, and Best Buy are here with the deals you seek.
As usually, Amazon and Walmart have an assortment of laptops available, including big discounts on the Lenovo IdeaPad and Google Pixelbook

Netflix’s latest test feature is a video promo that plays in between episodes of a series you’re watching. The test is only appearing for select users globally and it’s a full-screen video of content Netflix’s algorithms are recommending to a viewer, as spotted by TechCrunch.Users who have spotted the test feature have taken to (since deleted) Reddit and Twitter to voice their annoyance at having their show-binging interrupted by an ad for other shows. A bug appeared for

Rumors this week have surfaced that Twitch is trying to encroach on YouTube’s territory by offering deals to its top stars if they’ll come and stream on Twitch instead. Twitch‘s motivation appears to be hunger for a slice of that sweet YouTube advertising pie. A report from Bloomberg indicates Twitch is making a concerted effort to pull YouTube’s talent for its own site. Bloomberg’s sources name Will Smith, lifestyle vlogger Gigi Gorgeous, and prankster T

We’re seeing a lot more households that choose to stream their favorite shows instead of watching them on cable.According to newly released analytics from the media pros at Comscore, that number has spiked by 58 percent in the past year. The total number — 4.9 million — is a whole 5 percent of US households that choose to stream over Wi-Fi-based services, without the bells and whistles of traditional paid TV.Comscore specifically looked at “pure play” systems: stre

Waluigi might not be in the upcoming Super Smash Brothers game, but he’s still in the hearts of gamers across the internet who like their anti-heroes tall, dark, and pointily mustachioed.One of these fans, who simply goes by “Asher,” has gone so far as to pen a dark, Lynchian reboot starring none other than that other purple prince, Waluigi. The plot — if you can call it that — involves shadowy figures, a closeted romance between Waluigi and Wario, and hundreds of

Nvidia has been teasing its upcoming GeForce event for weeks now, and it looks like the company will unveil a new series of GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards on Monday. While Nvidia typically launches Ti (Titanium) versions of its most powerful graphics cards after the base models are launched, VideoCardz.com reports that Nvidia will launch both an RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti next week.VideoCardz has provided what it claims are specifications for Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and it will alleg

Mutiny, which is part of the current batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator, helps business-to-business, software-as-a-service companies present a message that’s customized to each visitor on their website.
Co-founder and CEO Jaleh Razaei said this concept is alive and well in the analog world: When she was at VMware, sales reps were given materials to help them tailor their pitch for each prospective customer. Then, when she was one of the early employees at HR services startup Gus

Twittertried to downplay the impact deactivating its legacy APIs would have on its community and the third-party Twitter clients preferred by many power users by saying that “less than 1%” of Twitter developers were using these old APIs. Twitter is correct in its characterization of the size of this developer base, but it’s overlooking millions of third-party app users in the process. According to data from Sensor Tower, six million App Store and Google Play users installed the

What if there was a way to give everyone suffering from conditions like paralysis or Locked-in syndrome the means to operate prosthetic devices and tech gadgets using mind-control? Well, there is – or at least, there will be. IBM Research recently developed an end-to-end proof-of-concept for a method of controlling an off-the-shelf robotic arm with a brain-computer interface built using a take-home EEG monitor. To accomplish this, the researchers developed AI to interpret the data from th

As government regulation for commercial drone usage seems to be trending in a very positive direction for the companies involved, there is an ever-growing opportunity for drone startups to utilize artificial intelligence to deliver insights without requiring much human effort.
Sterblue, a French drone software startup that is launching out of Y Combinator’s latest class of companies, is aiming to get off-the-shelf drones inspecting large outdoor structures up close with automated insights

Sony knows you want Android Pie, and it’s working on it. It promises to get it to you by November, so long as you own an Xperia XZ2, XZ2 Premium, XZ2 Compact, Xperia XZ Premium, XZ1, or XZ1 Compact. To tide you over before the update actually reaches your phone and you see all your upgraded friends enjoying it, Sony has published an infographic to teach you about phone updates.It’s not Sony’s fault that updates are slow; blame it on the machine that is a new Android OS rollout

Ariana Grande’s fourth studio album Sweetener is out today, and while it’s upbeat enough to sound like a bubbly celebration of the pop star’s domestic bliss with SNL fiancé Pete Davidson, there’s a subtler — and darker — undertone to it. In addition to a handful of references to the dissolution of her last relationship with rapper Mac Miller, Grande’s latest work gets a sense of urgency from the way she’s coped since the bombing at her conc

HTC is bringing the U12 Plus in flame red to the US and Canada. It’s now available for preorder from the company’s website and ships next month. The other colors, blue and black, were already available for purchase, but it’s the flame red one that stands out.
The flame red color changes depending on what light it’s under, sometimes looking violet or gold in photos. A bunch of smartphones have appeared in iridescent shades lately, like the Huawei P20’s twilight colo

Cryptocurrency projects can crash and burn if developers don’t predict how humans will abuse their blockchains. Once a decentralized digital economy is released into the wild and the coins start to fly, it’s tough to implement fixes to the smart contracts that govern them. That’s why Incentivai is coming out of stealth today with its artificial intelligence simulations that test not just for security holes, but for how greedy or illogical humans can crater a blockchain communit

As limited partners increasingly demand greater exposure to emerging market opportunities, venture capital firms with a focus on Asia are bulking up their funds and chasing deals in an increasingly competitive race to own stakes in the next generation of local startups with global aspirations.
Over the last year, firms, including DCM Ventures, GGV Capital, Matrix Partners China and Qiming Venture Partners, have all significantly increased the targets for their new funds. If each firm hits t

Netflixis testing video promos that play in between episodes of shows a viewer is streaming, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The promos are full-screen videos, personalized to the user, featuring content Netflix would have otherwise suggested elsewhere in its user interface – like on a row of recommendations, for example. The promos also displace the preview information for the next episode being binged, like the title, description, and thumbnail that previously appeared on the right

Puerto Rico has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently. From the mayor being arrested on fraud charges, to the the effects of hurricane Maria and the local government being forced to seek a federal bailout for $123 billion in debts. After such a terrible year, many would expect the overall mood on the island to be sombre. But as soon as you set foot outside San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, you’re met with bright colors, wide smiles,

Samsung’s latest Galaxy Note 9 has a nifty new feature: for the first time, the S Pen stylus has Bluetooth and can be charged instantly using a supercapacitor. Sticking the S Pen into the phone for 40 seconds gives it enough juice for 30 minutes of use, so battery life should no longer be a worry. But how exactly does this technology work? And what else could we use supercapacitors for?Supercapacitors (or ultracapacitors) store energy and, in some ways, are the opposite of batteries. Batt

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare,Michael Markmanand Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Tuesday, August 7, 2018.
Waiting for the midterms, Twitter meets the Constitution, uncommon carriers, straw man superheros.
G3: Helping Hands — Elisa Camahort Page, Francine Hardaway, Maria Ogneva and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 3, 2018.
@stevegillmor, @fradice, @mickeleh, @kteare
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
Liner Notes
Live chat stream
The

I’m consistently amazed by the lengths people will go to for their free-to-play mobile games. In this case, a librarian in Utah managed to blow thousands of dollars on Game of War. According to the Herald Journal, the former librarian, Adam Winger, used city credit cards to fund his digital addiction. He was put on administrative leave sometime last year after he was apparently unable to account for $89,000 of missing funds, and resigned from his position three months later. The

The scourge of women’s pockets — tiny, useless bubbles of fabric you can barely get a pack of gum into, let alone an iPhone X — is a well-documented, often criticized phenomenon. And yet, there’s been very little data to back up a wealth of anecdotal evidence. The Pudding has finally filled this absence with some scientific findings of its own, which once again remind us that the lady pocket is just too damn small.
According to The Pudding’s findings, pockets in wo

A trio of Mozilla Fellows recently released a browser extension designed to keep Facebook‘s advertisers from pigeonholing you. We’ve argued that Facebook should pay users for their data, but in lieu of that, at least this tool makes it harder for the social network to exploit it. Fuzzify.me is a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox that collects information as you browse Facebook. It shows you which advertisements you’ve seen and, if available, gives Facebook‘s r

In the future everyone will be naked for fifteen minutes. It’s with this novel thought in mind that I connect with a model named Nazanin who will walk me through the new world of bi-directional teledildonic cam life.
I was there to test a new device from Kiiroo called the Kiiroo Launch. This novel sex jar connects with a Flashlight – essentially a masturbator – and can send and receive signals from a remote dildo. When I first explored the Kiiroo system three years ago and foun

Disney’s next animated Star Wars show just got its first trailer, and it’s looking like a light-hearted adventure about becoming a resistance pilot. As originally announced earlier this year, Resistance is being helmed by Clone Wars and Rebels veteran Dave Filoni and stars Kazuda Xiono, a emotive newbie who seems a little over his head.
The show’s one-hour premiere—which will air on Disney Channel, DisneyNOW and Disney Channel VOD, with subsequent airings on Disney XD, o