Technology news

A draft executive order circulating around the White House“is not the result of an official White House policymaking process,” according to deputy White House press secretary, Lindsay Walters.
According to a report in The Washington Post, Walters denied that White House staff had worked on a draft executive order that would require every federal agency to study how social media platforms moderate user behavior and refer any instances of perceived bias to the Justice Departm

Ghosts are everywhere — in haunted houses and on our most popular dating apps.
That's why Party City has developed an adult ghosting costume for women. Plenty of women have encountered someone who just won't stop bothering them on dating apps or over text.
Might as well "ghost" them in real life.
SEE ALSO: Here's a sexy 'Handmaid's Tale' Halloween costume that no one asked for
The costume is now available for $24.99 on the Party City website. As of now, there is only a women's costume.
"If

Apple has all the money in the world, but as the disastrous Planet of the Apps proved, money is no substitute for good taste. 
The 2017 reality show from the makers of your favorite $1,449 phone pitted app developers against each other for the approval of their celebrity ring masters, and in doing so kept clear of all the hallmarks of many of today's most popular shows: Sex, drugs, profanity, and violence. That appears to have been very much by CEO Tim Cook's design, who the Wall Street Jou

Comcast has won an auction to acquire UK telecommunications company Sky, bidding $38.8 billion to overtake Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox after a lengthy bidding war this summer. Comcast’s win paves the way for it to acquire Sky and its 23 million European subscribers and entertainment assets. Sky’s shareholders will now need to approve the deal.Over the course of this year, Comcast and Fox have been locked in a titanic battle over their futures, one that will define the na

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.
Tackling the leap from directing low-budget indies to tentpole features is no easy feat, and Hollywood has a history of being particularly unforgiving when the filmmakers are women. Case in point: director Karyn Kusama, who burst onto the filmmaking scene in 2000 with her debut feature, Girlfight. Five ye

Tesla likes to do things differently. 
So when Electrek reported last month that the electric car company was allegedly working on a new key fob for its Model 3, we should have known it wouldn't be just your standard blob of a BLE device. Thanks to newly released documents filed to the FCC, we now know that's exactly right. 
SEE ALSO: Your Tesla is probably vulnerable to hackers, but there's an easy fix
According to the filing, the as-of-yet-unreleased fob is actually shaped like a min

The Room has been ranked with Plan 9 From Outer Space as a strong contender for the “best” worst movie ever made — and it’s now available in its entirety on YouTube.
Written, directed, and starring Tommy Wiseau, The Room belongs in the same category as Plan 9, and Coven (which was immortalized in the 1999 documentary American Movie) as a paean to moviemaking by people who have no idea how to make a movie.
The combination of passion and ineptitude is what m

Comcast has outbid Twenty-First Century Fox for the UK’s Sky, a final step in what’s been a years-long takeover battle between the two media conglomerates.Comcast’s final offer gives Sky a roughly $39 billion price tag.The acquisition of Sky, which has 23 million subscribers in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Italy, will give Comcast a much stronger foothold in the international market and much-needed ammo to compete with Amazon and Netflix in the streaming wars.
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Sorry cats, but when it comes to climbing tall buildings, you've got nothing compared to raccoons.
In Ocean City, New Jersey Friday, a raccoon was spotted a jaw-dropping nine stories up a building. The raccoon proceeded to leap off the building, hit the soft sand with its little raccoon feet, and scamper away.
SEE ALSO: A carb-loving raccoon broke into a woman's home and ate all of her bread
Watch this little acrobat in action:DAREDEVIL RACCOON: Incredible video shows a raccoon climbing roughly

A draft executive order from the White House surfaced last night that would direct federal authorities to “thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws.” However, White House officials say that the document hasn’t gone through any sort of formal policymaking process.
Bloomberg obtained a copy of the draft executive order, noting that it directs antitrust officials and other federal agencies see if any “online platform&rd

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News.More posts by this contributorIn VC fund creation, have we passed the peak? Supergiant VC rounds aren’t just raised in China
Many corporations are pinning their futures on their venture investment portfolios. If you can’t beat startups at the innovation game, go into business with them as financial partners.
Though many technology companies have robust venture investment initiative

Singapore Blockchain Week happened this past week. While there have been a few announcements from companies, some of the most interesting updates have come from regulators, and specifically, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The financial regulator openly discussed its views on cryptocurrency and plans to develop blockchain technology locally.
For those who are unfamiliar, Singapore historically has been a financial hub in Southeast Asia, but now has also gradually become the

Google wants the world's information to be universally accessible, unless that information just so happens to relate to its reported efforts to build a censored Chinese search engine that tracks its users.
According to the Intercept, which first broke the story of the project codenamed Dragonfly in early August, the Mountain View-based search and advertising giant is going to great lengths to keep information about its plans secret — even from its own employees. 
SEE ALSO: Google's se

Fintech promises to be one of the hottest topics at Disrupt Berlin 2018, and you can take that to the bank — see what we did there? On 29-30 November thousands of attendees will descend on Berlin, and what better way to get your fintech business in front of them than to exhibit in Startup Alley?
Oh wait, we know a better way — apply to be a TechCrunch Top Pick and exhibit at Disrupt Berlin for FREE! Our highly discerning editors will review every application and choose up t

Ted Cruz's social media team has reached a dark new low.
Right before Senate hopeful Beta O'Rourke's debate with Cruz last night, where the sitting Senator skirted the question about whether police violence against African-Americans was a problem, Cruz released a seemingly innocuous video on Twitter featuring O'Rourke.
In it, Beto denounces the murder of Botham Jean, who was mysteriously killed in his apartment by an off-duty police officer.
SEE ALSO: Internet roasts Texas GOP for allegedly shar

Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 movie The Room is often proclaimed to be the worst films ever made. If you’ve ever been curious about just how bad the film is, now’s your chance: Wiseau just posted the entire film up on YouTube.The film follows a love triangle between Johnny (Wiseau), Mark (Greg Sestero), and Lisa (Juliette Danielle), along with a bunch of unrelated and unresolved bizarre subplots. It was panned by critics, but since its release it’s become a cult favorite, and was

Do guys like Louis C.K. or Charlie Rose deserve a comeback? Does any disgraced sexual predator? What has to happen before such a comeback is even possible?
These questions have been rattling around online for some time, though C.K.'s recent attempted return to stand-up raised the volume. Now, Jane Fonda has some advice for all those disgraced men to consider before they start mulling a comeback.
SEE ALSO: The Louis C.K. apologists are missing the point
"Guys are trying to make a comeback and the

This is One Good Thing, a weekly column where we tell you about one of the few nice things that happened this week.
Nothing like a little wholesome parent-child bonding. 
In this extremely cute video, a little kid dressed like Spider-Man acts out every child's superhero daydream with some much-appreciated help from dad.
SEE ALSO: 'Marvel's Spider-Man' Review: You really can do whatever a spider canCan we talk about the sound effects dad added to make this a truly authentic experience? Incre

This week Facebookhas launched a major new product play, slotting an algorithmic dating service inside its walled garden as if that’s perfectly normal behavior for an ageing social network.
Insert your [dad dancing GIF of choice] right here.
Facebook getting into dating looks very much like a mid-life crisis — as a veteran social network desperately seeks a new strategy to stay relevant in an age when app users have largely moved on from social network ‘lifecasting’ to mo

Renaud Laplanchespent ten years building LendingClub. In the process, he created an industry from scratch. Circumventing conventional banking channels for consumer credit began in 1996 when Chris Larsen started E-LOAN, which ultimately led to Prosper Marketplace. But LendingClub, which Laplanche founded in 2007, was and remains the poster child for the business of marketplace lending. The industry’s short history has been volatile, characterized by both triumphant hype and utter lack of co

This morning, The Wall Street Journal released a report that details the state of Apple’s yet-to-be-unveiled streaming service. It highlights some of the difficulties Apple has faced in striking the right tone for its content, particularly when it comes to “gratuitous sex, profanity or violence,” and cites sources who expect the launch of the streaming service to be pushed further back.The report opens with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s reaction to Vital Signs, a show based on th

Last week was Apple’s time to shine with the introduction of the iPhone XS and XS Max and Apple Watch 4, but the tail end of this week was all about Amazon. It announced more than 10 products at its hardware event in Seattle, consisting of a few redesigned popular sellers, and several additions to its Alexa-powered arsenal.Preorders for most of its new tech are open, and the products should start shipping in mid-October. If you think you can hold off, we’re likely to see discounts f

Two months after Vice President Mike Pence announced the plan to create a Space Force, the military is fighting over how to make it happen. This week, an internal Air Force estimate leaked to the press that said the Space Force would cost nearly $13 billion to create. And an Air Force organization is arguing that we shouldn’t create the Space Force at all, but rather rename the Air Force.
This is just the beginning of a debate about the right way to move forward with the Space Force, says

YesOJO’s Switch projector dock was a surprisingly clever way to play your Switch on the go with friends. Now the company is following that up with another slick Switch solution: a portable speaker dock that turns your Switch into a miniature boombox.
Launching on Indiegogo next year
The Switch speaker dock is designed to use with a Switch in tabletop mode, but YesOJO says it should offer dramatically better sound than the Switch’s onboard speaker (in addition to a far more sturdy ba

On Friday morning, Twitter posted a single word to its Twitter account: “The.” Average users began replying, telling a story one word at a time. When it was done, the first thread read: “The beginning of the end is near. Yay.”
Had it been posted a month or so, it’s likely the world would have written off Twitter’s “the” as a pocket-tweet. But if you’ve been paying attention to @Twitter for the past few weeks, you’ve noticed an undeniab

Lime, the 18-month-old, San Francisco-based company whose bright green bicycles and scooters now dot cities throughout the U.S., launched a pilot program in Tacoma, Washington, today, but that tiny victory might have felt short-lived. The reason: on the opposite side of the country, a Limerider was killed today by an SUV while tooling around Washington D.C.’s DuPont neighborhood. The local fire department shared video of the rescue, which shows that the victim, an adult male, had to b

Like any Nintendo fan, Chris Taylor is stoked for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Chris, though, isn’t sure he’ll live long enough to see the game hit shelves on December 7. Taylor was first diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, about three years ago. After an exhaustive fight, he decided to end treatment earlier this year. “I am a little worried that smash’ll be out of reach for my lifespan though and that mega sucks if I’m being real with yall,” h

The coolest mission you haven’t heard of just hit a major milestone: the Japanese Hayabusa 2 probe has reached its destination, the asteroid Ryugu, and just deployed a pair of landers to its surface. Soon it will touch down itself and bring a sample of Ryugu back to Earth! Are you kidding me? That’s amazing!
Hayabusa 2 is, as you might guess, a sequel to the original Hayabusa, which like this one was an asteroid sampling mission. So this whole process isn’t without precedent, t