Technology news

When Apple debuted Face ID with the iPhone X last year, it raised an interesting legal question: can you be compelled to unlock your phone by looking at it? In an apparent first, Forbes reports that the FBI got a suspect to unlock his phone during a raid in August.
In August, the FBI raided the home of Grant Michalski, looking for evidence that he had sent or received child pornography. They were armed with a search warrant [warning: this documentation contains explicit descriptions of sexual a

Oh no.
Kanye West took to social media on Sunday to tell everyone that he supports the messages of Donald Trump while wearing a MAGA hat. In the same tweet, he wrote that he wants to abolish the 13th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America — the one that abolished slavery.this represents good and America becoming whole again.  We will no longer outsource to other countries. We build factories here in America and create jobs.  We will provide jobs f

Creating unbiased, accurate algorithms isn’t impossible — it’s just time consuming.
“It actually is mathematically possible,” facial recognition startup Kairos CEO Brian Brackeentold me on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.
Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular course of action. Whether it’s the type of information we receive, the information people see about us, the jobs we get hired

Some iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max owners are having trouble charging their devices.
Owners across the web are complaining that some of Apple's latest iPhones are not charging properly when plugged in, MacRumors pointed out Saturday. The problem seems to occur when users plug in their phones while they are in sleep mode and the screens are off.
SEE ALSO: How to use the iPhone’s most useful, most overlooked feature
YouTuber Unbox Therapy was alerted to this problem and performed a test where

VC firms haven’t been the only ones raising hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in a booming market. After 15+ years of being the last industry anyone wanted to invest in, the music industry is coming back, and money is flooding in to buy up the rights to popular songs.
As paid streaming subscriptions get mainstream adoption, the big music streaming services – namely Spotify, Apple Music, and Tencent Music, but also Pandora, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, and others &ndas

The Boston Red Sox should consider signing one of their fans that got ejected from Fenway Park on Saturday.
After New York Yankees power hitter Giancarlo Stanton blasted a home run to the top of Fenway Park's infamous Green Monster at the top of the seventh inning on Saturday, a Red Sox fan took that ball and whipped it back onto the field in protest, hitting Stanton in the arm after a hop as he rounded second base. That's a pretty impressive feat.ICYMI: A fan threw Giancarlo Stanton's home run

While planning a visit to the United States, a British woman unwittingly answered "Yes" to an online travel application query asking if she had ever engaged in terrorist activity.
Accordingly, Mandie Stevenson's U.S. travel application was promptly denied, reports the BBC.
"At first I thought it was a bad dream and then I realised what I had done," Stevenson said on the BBC radio show "Mornings with Stephen Jardine."A screenshot of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ESTA homepage.Image:scr

Saturday Night Live returned for its 44th season this weekend, with The Last Jedi’s Adam Driver returning as host. While he didn’t reprise his role of Matt the Radar Technician from his 2016 appearance, he did jump on another cultural bandwagon: Fortnite.The sketch opens with Dad Driver joining a squad, explaining that his ex-wife’s new husband has been playing the game with his son, and that he wants to find a way to keep up.It doesn’t go well. Driver’s naïve

Saturday Night Live didn't shy away from taking a few jabs at accused sexual assaulter/Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and Kate McKinnon's appearance as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was no exception.
McKinnon as Ginsburg appeared alongside milquetoast Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost to drop some signature Ginsburns and bust some moves at the expense of Kavanaugh. It was hilarious. She also promised not to retire or die while the current administration was in power and even dropped a few f

We cared about Cambridge Analytica because it could have helped elect Trump. We ignored LocationSmart because even the though the company was selling and exposing the real-time GPS coordinates of our phones, it was never clear exactly if or how that data was misused.
This idea, that privacy issues are abstract concepts for most people until they become security or ideological problems, is important to understanding Facebook’smassive breach revealed this week. 
The social network&rsquo

French startup Klaxit connects drivers with riders so that you don’t have to take your car to work every day. And the company recently announced a new feature with the help of Uber. If your driver cancels your ride home, Klaxitwill book an Uber for you.
Klaxit is a ride-sharing startup that focuses on one thing — commuting to work. And this problem is more complicated than you might think. You can’t just go to work with the same person every day because you don’t always g

Deep in the Amazon jungle, ecologist Leandro Moraes filmed a moth sucking the tears out of a sleeping antbird's eye. 
The delicately-performed nighttime feeding is a rarely seen event, wrote Moraes in a report about the experience, entitled "Please, more tears: a case of a moth feeding on antbird tears in central Amazonia."The short clip depicts a moth carefully dipping its tubular mouth into the bird's closed eye. For a brief moment, the antbird opens its eye, but doesn't seem to notice th

Everyone has a friend who knows not to run upstairs when they should be running out the front door.
I’m talking the horror movie fan in your life, who’s so similar to Randy Meeks from Scream or Marty Mikalski from Cabin in the Woods they’ll never, ever investigate a basement or deep, dark forest with you. 
This is the friend who knows “the rules” — they will tell you not to pick up the phone, not to have sex (“sex equals death”), never drink o

Kanye West was the musical guest for the Season 44 premiere of Saturday Night Live. He brought his MAGA hat along.
It was originally supposed to be Ariana Grande, but she cancelled. So instead we got West, performing three songs (not SNL's usual two): A debut of "We Got Love," featuring Teyana Taylor, along with "Ghost Town" (from West's June 2018 album, Ye) and "I Love It," featuring Lil Pump.
Those who attended the show's live taping were also treated — maybe not the right word to use he

Microsoft is holding a Surface hardware event on Tuesday (October 2nd) in New York City, and a new leak reveals the company will announce a Surface Laptop 2 and Surface Pro 6. We’d been expecting Microsoft to refresh both these devices at the event, but we’d also been assuming the new hardware would come with modern USB-C ports. Germany site WinFuture claims that neither the Surface Laptop 2 or Surface Pro 6 will include USB-C ports.
Instead, Microsoft is said to be sticking with it

French startup Ownpage has recently released a new product called Relike. Relike is one of the easiest ways to get started with email newsletters. You enter the web address of your Facebook page and that’s about it.
The company automatically pulls your most recent posts from your Facebook page and lets you set up an emailing campaign in a few clicks. You can either automatically pick your most popular Facebook posts or manually select a few posts.
Just like any emailing service, you can ch

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.
The Gardens Between is about two kids, Ariana and Frendt, exploring surreal islands that are made from objects in their shared memories. But you don’t actually control either character directly — you control the flow of time. At first this seems like a difficult thing t

Scientists don't expect to get their hands on Martian soil anytime soon, so they're making their own.
Created by University of Central Florida astrophysicists, this red soil, called Mars "simulant," is designed to give researchers a useful approximation of the actual, far-off extraterrestrial soil. This might be especially relevant for testing the growth of crops, or how exploration equipment might fare on the surface.
At $20 per kilogram (2.2 pounds), NASA's Kennedy Space Center has already pla

Smart speaker love is in full effect for US consumers, with 24 percent of US households owning a smart speaker, and 40 percent of those households owning multiple speakers, according to Nielsen’s latest study.
Devices like Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Home speaker, and Apple’s HomePod have taken off in recent years, and it seems that trend is continuing, with Nielsen noting that 62 percent of smart speaker owners have purchased their devices in the past six months. Forty-five

This is One Good Thing, a weekly column where we tell you about one of the few nice things that happened this week.
It's been an exhausting few days, so let's take a moment to appreciate Beautiful Illinois. 
I'm not talking about the state of Illinois, though I'm sure it's great. I'm talking about @IllinoisViews, a Twitter account dedicated to posting the most breathtaking photos of their beloved Prairie State. Kind of. 
SEE ALSO: Glowing snow is falling thousands of feet under the sea

Saturday Night Live's recurring Weekend Update sketch is usually a rapid-fire series of one-liners cracking jokes at the top headlines of the week. It's telling that this five-minute segment from the show's Season 44 premiere focused only on one thing: Brett Kavanaugh.
Hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost — who look much more at home here after their questionable Emmy Awards appearance — trade barbs back and forth, touching on Kavanaugh's angry demeanor during Thursday's Senate hearing,

I looked at the TIOBE index today, as I do every so often, as most of the software pros I know do every so often. It purports to measure the popularity of the world’s programming languages, and its popularity-over-time chart tells a simple story: Java and C are, and have been since time immemorial, by some distance the co-kings of language.
But wait. Not so fast. The rival “PYPL Index” (PopularitY of Programming Languages) says that Python and Java are co-kings, and C (which is

This post is part of Science of Sci-Fi, Mashable's ongoing series dissecting the science (or lack of science) in our favorite sci-fi movies, TV shows, and books.
Some days are so damaging to your faith in humanity, you may find yourself idly wishing for the cleansing global firestorm that would follow an impact from the kind of asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
If that's the case, then astrophysicist and planetary scientist Michael Busch has some bad news. Over the las

Remember how we spent the past week feeling like crap as a gang of powerful white men tried to force a disgraceful and clearly problematic Supreme Court nominee through the appointment process?
Well. Whether or not you've, uh, blacked it all out, Matt Damon is here to help us remember.
Damon paid a visit to the Saturday Night Live stage this week for the show's Season 44 premiere. His cold open sketch amounted to a reenactment of IRL Kavanaugh's Thursday sitdown with the Senate Judiciary Committ

Editor's note: The internet has changed how kids learn about sex, but sex ed in the classroom still sucks. In Sex Ed 2.0, Mashable explores the state of sex ed and imagines a future where digital innovations are used to teach consent, sex positivity, respect, and responsibility.As a 12-year-old girl, I didn’t quite know what to make of the sensations that overcame me when I played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.It felt like butterflies, only they fluttered much lower in my stomach, rising

Who doesn't have a love-hate relationship with exercise? 
In a perfect world, you'd have evenly toned extremities and six-pack abs without ever leaving the couch. The problem is that working out isn't fun. Ever. Who wants to go on a run when there are so many television shows to watch and snacks to devour? 
If you're looking to inject a bit of fun into your workout routine, Rock Solid's Whole Vibration Fitness Machine is here for you. Simply turn on the platform so it begins to vi

Earlier this year, Norway's minister of international development visited Ghana.
Minister Nikolai Astrup had a simple request: He wanted to spend some time with his team collecting trash from beaches in the developing nation. 
His team assured him that could be arranged. Then he was asked the most telling question of all: Where would they put the trash once it was collected?
"That's the point," he responded. 
Developing countries like Ghana lack the necessary infrastructure to properly

Go to business school, they said. It will widen your network, boost your credibility, and enhance your earning potential, they said.
While all these things ring true, going to B-school requires shelling out Big Bucks and dedicating a few years of your life to hitting the books, attending classes, and breaking your back completing dissertations — which to some people might seem like a Very Bad Idea™ indeed.
If you don't think the MBA route is right for you, there are still a myriad of

In a time of volatile politics and chaotic news cycles, it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise, to stay informed without getting completely and totally overwhelmed. 
Which is why, despite recent talk of a "podcast bubble," the medium is exactly what we need right now. Podcasts can slow down and really study a topic or event, bringing in the kind of nuance that's too often lacking in our current discourse.
SEE ALSO: 15 podcasts guaranteed to tell you a fantastic story
Sure, par