Technology news

Four lobbying groups representing some of the largest telecom companies in the country filed a lawsuit Wednesday opposing California’s net neutrality law in an attempt to stop it from going into effect next year.The four industry groups filing the lawsuit were USTelecom, CTIA, NCTA, and the ACA —groups which represent telecom corporations like AT&T; Verizon Wireless; Charter Communications; and Comcast, and mobile companies like T-Mobile. This is the second lawsuit filed followi

Alongside the V40 ThinQ, LG is also announcing its latest smartwatch today. The Watch W7 is easily the company’s most unique wearable yet because of its hybrid design. The W7 has mechanical hands in front of its round, 1.2-inch touch display running Wear OS. (You wouldn’t easily be able to tell from LG’s press images, but I’ll have actual hands-on photos later today.) It will sell for $450 at Best Buy beginning on October 14th; preorders will be available on October 7th.

LG’s new V40 ThinQ smartphone has just been announced... again. The company previously confirmed that the V40 — let’s just ignore the ThinQ part starting now — would have three rear cameras and a 6.4-inch display. Today the full list of features is official, and the end result is LG’s best attempt to compete against the Galaxy Note 9 and iPhone XS Max. Big OLED screen? Check. Powerful specs? Yep.The V40 also retains LG’s signature hi-fi Quad DAC and brings ov

Garmin has announced it is integrating Spotify into its Fenix 5 Plus series of watches. The new integration will allow users with the watch and a Spotify Premium account to download and listen to music offline.
The Fenix 5 Plus is Garmin’s most popular watch, but previous to this integration, you could only control the music on your phone from the watch. Now if you have a Spotify Premium account, you can sync playlists to the Fenix 5 Plus via Wi-Fi and then access the playlists through th

Samsung announced its first QLED 8K TV back in August, and now the 85-inch Q900R smart TV is available for preorder for $15,000. There’s no word yet on whether the 65-inch, 75-inch, and 82-inch sizes will be available for preorder, but the 85-inch TV will be shipping on October 28th — just in time to set up an immersive haunted house and to give your wallet a good scare.Samsung claims that the TV’s “8K AI Upscaling” feature uses its Quantum Processor 8K to remaster

Twitter has released an updated version of its mobile app that includes an option to reduce data usage, as spotted by 9to5Mac. The new feature, called Data Saver, can now be flipped on as an option in Twitter’s settings.Data Saver is already available in several iterations of Twitter, including Twitter for Windows and Twitter Lite. Data Saver, which can be found under Data Usage in settings, allows you to have more control over how much data you’re consuming while using Twitter. Whe

MoviePass subscribers have had a tough go of it over the last six months, with the service changing terms, dropping unlimited moviegoing, limiting access to first-run movies, and in at least once instance, going offline completely because it ran out of money. The myriad changes have removed most of the incentives that made MoviePass a compelling value in the first place, so customers have been using it less and less — and according to the head of MoviePass’ parent company, that&rsqu

KZen, a company run by former TC editor Ouriel Ohayon, has raised $4 million in seed to build a “better wallet,” obviously the elusive Holy Grail in the crypto world.
Benson Oak Ventures, Samsung Next, Elron Ventures invested.
Ohayon, who has worked at Internet Lab and founded TechCrunchFrance and Appsfire,wanted to create an easy-to-use crypto wallet that wouldn’t confound users. The company name is a play on the Japanese word kaizen or improvement and it also points to the id

The competition between third-party sellers marketplaces is getting fierce, and now eBay has accused Amazon of poaching its own independent sellers through its own messaging system, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. eBay sent a cease and desist letter to Amazon yesterday, the report states, after the company discovered more than 50 Amazon sales representatives had sent more than 1,000 messages to eBay sellers trying to convince them to bring their business to Amazon Marketplac

Sprint has begun its soft launch of VoLTE, and starting today, customers in 15 US cities with compatible devices can toggle on the feature. Voice over LTE, which allows for higher quality voice calls through an LTE network, has been available on competitor carriers like Verizon and AT&T for a few years, but the feature is finally arriving on Sprint. Owners of a Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+, or S8 Active in the following markets can access the feature, with more cities and devices to be added in t

Buying a multi-pack of Tile Bluetooth trackers is a good idea, but it’s even better when you get a free Google Home Mini with the purchase.
Starting at $34.99 for a four pack of Tile trackers that loop onto your keychain, Best Buy is including a free Google Home Mini for anyone who buys in. The color option for the Home Mini is up to you, though you may be disappointed to know that the new aqua color isn’t up for grabs.Google’s smallest Home speaker has found its way into so m

Microsoft unveiled a bunch of Surface hardware during a press event in New York City last night. While matte black Surfaces, headphones with Cortana, and a new Surface Studio were the highlights of the hardware side, Microsoft unveiled an interesting change to its Windows operating system. Windows 10 will soon fully embrace Android to mirror these mobile apps to your PC.
The Android app mirroring will be part of Microsoft’s new Your Phone app for Windows 10. This app debuts this week as p

Update 2:38PM ET: The FEMA test Presidential Alert warning successfully out at 2:18PM ET to phones across the country, right on schedule. As expected, the alert followed the existing emergency alert systems on existing smartphones, with the regular tone — although the Presidential Alert heading is new.According to FEMA’s alert, “Some cell phones will receive the message; others will not. No action is required.” — so if for some reason, you didn’t get the noti

To hear director Jeremy Saulnier and writer Macon Blair tell it, their Netflix movie Hold the Dark was both their easiest project to sell, and their most difficult to shoot. Saulnier and Blair grew up together, and have worked together throughout their careers. Blair produced Saulnier’s first three projects (2007’s Murder Party, their 2013 breakthrough Blue Ruin, and 2015’s standout Green Room), and has appeared in all four of his films, most memorably starring in Blue Ruin.
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Electric cars hit a new global sales record in 2017 — 1 million cars sold, with more than half of that in China — but there may be a hitch to mass adoption: the number of adequate charging stations available. Before consumers take the plunge on a new electric car, they need to know that they can charge it.
The number of electric charging stations in the US is small but growing. As of September 2018, there are an estimated 22,000 public charging stations in the US and Canada that are

A pair of astronomers believes they’ve found a moon orbiting a planet outside our Solar System — something that has never before been confirmed to exist. Though they aren’t totally certain of their discovery yet, the find opens up the possibility that more distant moons are out there. And that could change our understanding of how the Universe is structured.
The astronomy team from Columbia University found this distant satellite, known as an exomoon, using two of NASA’s

Facebook recently extended the deletion grace period for terminating your main account from 14 to 30 days, the company confirmed to The Verge. Now, when you go to delete your Facebook account, you have up to one month to reverse the decision if you choose to log back in. Facebook won’t automatically restore your account if you log in, but it says you will have “the option to cancel your request.”“We recently increased the grace period when you choose to delete your Faceb

Toys R Us might not be dead after all. The once-dominant retail toy giant has canceled its planned intellectual property auction that would have tried to repay its creditors by selling off its branding and domains. Instead, the group of hedge funds that owns the company will attempt to resurrect the stores as “a newly-established, independent U.S. business,” according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
It’s a surprising change of heart from the creditors who were prepar

Google Assistant is getting a redesign that better integrates touch into the user experience built around voice. Asking Google to dim your smart lights, for example, will now generate a slider so you can fine-tune the result. The update also adds some of the Material Design touches that Google has been rolling out across its other services, and makes certain visual elements bigger, more informative, and easier to read at a glance.Google Assistant is by many measurements the best voice assistant

MSI’s Optix 23.6-inch curved gaming monitor is $40 off at Newegg after savings and a rebate, bringing it down to $189.99. This deal stands out because this bezel-reduced monitor has a fast 1-millisecond response time, and its 144Hz refresh rate with AMD FreeSync support will make your gameplay far smoother than what you’ll get from a standard 60Hz monitor.
This monitor caps out at 1080p, so it’s not the best choice if you just bought the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti. How

Last week, the Drug Enforcement Agency gave the all-clear for Epidiolex, an epilepsy drug derived from cannabis, to be sold on the market. Though cannabis is still illegal at the national level, Epidiolex is now in the least restrictive category of drug regulation, Schedule V. The move is a good news for pharmaceutical companies that want to develop their own cannabis-based drugs, but it won’t mean much for other cannabis “wellness” products.Epidiolex, made by GW Pharmaceutica

Upwork, the rebranded merger of oDesk and Elance, debuted on Nasdaq this morning, after dropping its S-1 about four weeks ago. Shares opened at $23.00, which represents a 53% jump — shares were priced at $15 before the opening bell by investors, a significant uptick from the company’s revised projection of $12 to $14, which was already an increase from its original $10 to $12 target. The stock trades under the ticker UPWK, and the company will fundraise approximately $102 million of

Google Translate’s iPhone app now includes several regional options for speech input and output. This means that someone using the app to speak English, for example, isn’t stuck listening to someone in Standard American English.
As spotted by All Things How, these new regional speech inputs and outputs for Google Translate now include US, UK, Australia, and India for English; Bangladesh and India for Bengali; France and Canada for French; and Mexico and Spain for Spanish. Having the

Last week, I wrote about the new software update for Wear OS, Google’s smartwatch platform. I thought (and think) that it’s a good update for existing users and potentially a foundation that the company could build on to make something that’s actually competitive with both the Apple Watch or even Samsung’s Galaxy Watch.The update “breathes new life into Wear OS smartwatches,” but the emphasis is very much on existing smartwatches. You see, I also wrote that t