Technology news

TeslaCEO Elon Muskwill step down as chairman of the electric automaker and pay a $20 million fine under a settlement reached with the U.S Securities and Exchange commission. Musk will remain CEO and he will still keep a seat on the board, just not as chairman.
The agreement settles what could have turned into a bitter and potentially damaging fight for Musk, the company, and Tesla shareholders.
Musk will resign from his role as chairman of the Tesla board within 45 days of the agreement, wh

Elon Musk has reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the charges filed earlier this week over his abandoned attempt to take Tesla private. Musk will have to step down as the chairman of Tesla within 45 days, and will not be able to take that role with the company again for three years. He will be able to remain Tesla’s CEO during that time.
Alongside the settlement, the SEC also charged Tesla with “failing to have required disclosure controls and procedu

"This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone."
When Brett Kavanaugh pushed back against his third accuser, Julie Swetnick, in a Wednesday statement, the Twilight Zone quote is the one that made the rounds. Now, the daughter of series creator Rod Serling has made it clear that she doesn't approve of the comparison.
SEE ALSO: Congrats to Brett Kavanaugh on getting to be angry
In a Friday tweet, Anne Serling — an author herself — pointed out that her father wouldn't have appreciated t

Google’sbig hardware event, scheduled for October 9, is expected to feature the new Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL phones. But now we know that Google will probably reveal a third-generation model of Chromecast, thanks to one recent Best Buy customer who discovered the device on store shelves.
Whoops.
“GroveStreetHomie” detailed his experience on a Reddit post entitled “I think I bought the 3rd gen Chromecast too early.”
According to the Redditpost, the customer went t

Today in "that sounds nice," a group of biologists studying termite colonies in southern Japan have discovered all-female colonies that function perfectly without even a single male termite being involved. 
SEE ALSO: These hero ants perform dramatic, mind-boggling rescues of their wounded comrades
The lady termites, which reproduce asexually, appear to have been descended from mixed sex colonies but at some point decided that enough was enough and branched out to create new colonies where i

The BMW i3 is getting an upgraded battery — plus a bunch of other improvements —that will give the 2019 model about 153 miles of range. That’s roughly a 30% improvement from the previous model.
The boost in range is noteworthy, yet it still lags behind the Chevy Bolt and the TeslaModel S, Model X and Model 3 vehicles. And it’s only a smidge better than the much cheaper Nissan Leaf.
The upshot: it’s a steady improvement that expresses some continued investment a

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see one of your favorite childhood metal bands start peddling branded coffee.
Korn, the band whose angsty 1994 debut provided the soundtrack for my last two years of high school, has gotten into the coffee biz. This new development, a partnership with J Gursey Coffee, was announced on Friday in a tweet.
The weirdest thing about the announcement video is how normal and... ahem..grounded it is. Yes, pun definitely intended.We are excited to announc

There have been a lot of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, but none have looked as funny as Holmes & Watson, starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. The Step Brothers stars reunite to play the iconic duo in a wacky take on a Sherlock Holmes mystery, complete with the invention of the selfie, a bit part for WWE Superstar Braun Strowman, and a hopeless amount of killer bees.  Read more...
More about Sherlock Holmes, Will Ferrell, Holmes Watson, John C Reilly, and Sherlock Holmes Adaptations

Brett Kavanaugh's seemingly tenuous relationship with the truth is still haunting those who watched him testify on Thursday.
At times, the prospective Supreme Court justice abandoned composure to shed tears and scream, but at his most jarring he straight-up refused to answer questions directly, was unwilling to request an FBI investigation, and, as further research revealed, apparently lied under oath.
In the days since the hearing, people have replayed his testimony in their minds and on their

Google has its annual fall hardware event planned for October 9th, which is when we’ll see the official announcement of the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL on top of the usual slate of Google-made hardware upgrades. One of those upgrades, to the company’s Chromecast line, appears to have been leaked in rather embarrassing fashion by Best Buy, which sold the unannounced product to a customer who picked it up off the shelf, via AndroidPolice.
The customer, who posted a photo of the product an

A team of researchers with the California Academy of Sciences discovered a brand new species of fish — and somehow missed a huge shark swimming right on top of them. The whole underwater encounter was caught on video. And the best part? The divers speak exclusively in chipmunk voices.That’s because the divers use a rebreather gas mixture that lets them dive deeper and spend more time underwater than a recreational diver can, Katie Jewett, a science writer for the California Academy

This first look at Jodie Whittaker as the new Doctor on Doctor Who shows a typically scrambled post-regeneration Doctor — with a catch. The Doctor doesn't know she's a woman yet. To be fair, she seems to take the news in stride and is more interested in meeting her new buddies Ryan and Yaz. 
Still not ginger though.  Read more...
More about Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker, New Doctor, Doctor Who Clips, and Entertainment

The Minecraft universe is set to expand once again. Today at Minecon, developer Mojang revealed a new dungeon-crawler set in the blocky universe. Called Minecraft: Dungeons, the new experience is described as “an all-new action-adventure game inspired by classic dungeon crawlers, where you’ll constantly discover new weapons and items that will help you defeat a ruthless swarm of new-and-nasty mobs. You’ll fight or flee through canyons, swamps, and — of course — min

May Mobilitylaunched its first low-speed autonomous shuttle service in Detroit this summer. By March, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company will be operating in at least three U.S. cities.
The company, which just announced plans to expand to Columbus, Ohio, is planning to add another route in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a rapid acceleration for a company that was founded less than two years ago.
May Mobility is different from other companies racing to deploy autonomous vehicles at a comme

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributorGetting personal: Funding rises for software-driven tastemakers The alumni of these universities raised the most VC in the past year
A lot of people still get paid to sit in offices and do repetitive tasks. In recent years, however, employers have been pushing harder to find ways to outsource that work to machines.
Venture and growth investors are doing a lot to speed up the rise of these worker-bots. So far this year, they’ve poure

In some sense Tesla’s union question is an existential one: is Tesla a tech company or a car company? Car companies tend to have strong unions, while tech companies do not.
Musk runs Tesla like a tech company. Tesla’s done a top-to-bottom redesign of cars, and of the factory workflow. There are sudden pivots, and plenty of investment, despite a lack of profit — so far, so tech. Then you have the cars themselves: have to charge their batteries, the company can push over-the-air

At a Senate hearing this week in which US lawmakers quizzed tech giants on how they should go about drawing up comprehensive Federal consumer privacy protection legislation, Apple’s VP of software technology described privacy as a “core value” for the company.
“We want your device to know everything about you but we don’t think we should,” Bud Tribble told them in his opening remarks.
Facebookwas not at the commerce committee hearing which, as well a

Most deals come and go rather quickly, like eBay’s day-long 15 percent off special on Thursday, but some stick around for a while. Case in point: the week’s best ongoing deal is Sony’s new PS4 Pro Bundle, which includes the 1TB, 4K-ready console, a DualShock 4 controller, and Red Dead Redemption 2 for $399.This is the normal price for a PS4 Pro without a game tossed in, so getting Rockstar Games’ latest for free sweetens the pot. Some bemoan that this PS4 Pro doesn&rsquo

For hobbyist photographers like myself, Hasselblad has always been the untouchable luxury brand reserved for high-end professionals.
To fill the gap between casual and intended photography, they released the X1D — a compact, mirrorless medium format. Last summer when Stefan Etienne reviewed the newly released camera, I asked to take a picture.
After importing the raw file into Lightroom and flipping through a dozen presets, I joked that I would eat Ramen packets for the next year

Telltale Games as we know it ceases to exist. The studio laid off a devastating majority of its staff — around 250 people — last week in response to financial troubles. Many of its projects are effectively canceled. The future of a few others, like The Walking Dead’s final season, remain up in the air. Those who loved the studio’s work have been reminiscing over the past week, and in addition to fans sharing their favorite moments, many former developers have used the st

The Pentagon is going to make one cloud vendor exceedingly happy when it chooses the winner of the $10 billion, ten-year enterprise cloud project dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI for short). The contract is designed to establish the cloud technology strategy for the military over the next 10 years as it begins to take advantage of current trends like Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data.
Ten billion dollars spread out over ten years may not entirely

A Gizmodo report on Wednesday detailed the latest in a long series of Facebook privacy blunders. The report said, and Facebook confirmed, that users with two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled had inadvertently been giving their phone number up to advertisers who used it for targeting purposes. The irony, which I’m assuming isn’t lost on Facebook, is that 2FA is meant to keep you safe online, not expose you. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, there’s little we can do ab

Way back in April, we heard rumors that LG would be launching a smartwatch using Google’s newly rebranded (at the time) Wear OS. Called the LG Watch Timepiece, it was a hybrid that would somehow combine Wear OS with a an analog, mechanical watchface. It was supposed to launch in the Spring. Months went by and we heard nothing. Now it seems it won’t be much longer until its official reveal. According to Evan Blass – you know, that guy who leaks every other phone – LG will

Even if you never log into Facebookitself these days, the other apps and services you use might be impacted by Facebook’s latest big, bad news.
In a follow-up call on Friday’s revelation that Facebookhas suffered a security breach affecting at least 50 million accounts, the company clarified that Instagram users were not out of the woods — nor were any other third-party services that utilized Facebook Login. Facebook Login is the tool that allows users to sign in with a Faceboo

The latest attempt from struggling theater subscription service MoviePass to retain its dwindling user base comes in the form of yet another change to its monthly plan. This time, however, the company is automatically enrolling lapsed former subscribers into its service, saying its choosing those users to be part of a “select test group” to try a version of MoviePass similar to its original one-movie-per-day plan.In an email sent to select MoviePass customers who decided not to opt

I don’t know about you, but for me, this week was bad. It was really bad! Truly, there’s nothing quite like working on the internet, covering internet news, all while the internet insists on reminding you, every single minute of your day, just how enthusiastic the people running your country are about putting sexual abusers in power. Boy, is it bad!
Ironically, this miserable fact is also how the best memes are born. The highest-quality memers online today — much like offline