Technology news

Amazon will further raise a planned wage increase for some workers, and will introduce new bonuses, after controversy over its changes to compensation, according to Bloomberg.The company announced last week that it would begin paying all of its employees at least $15 per hour, but the plan soon led to backlash from some workers, who said that cutting certain incentives, like monthly bonuses and stock options, would lead them to earn less overall. Now, as first reported by Bloomberg, Amazon is m

Amazon will further raise a planned wage increase for some workers, and will offer bonuses as a replacement for previous compensation plans, after controversy over changes to employee payment, according to Bloomberg.The company announced last week that it would begin paying all of its employees at least $15 per hour, but the plan soon led to backlash from some workers, who said that cutting certain incentives, like monthly bonuses and stock options, would lead them to earn less overall. Now, as

Bollinger Motors, a small EV startup from New York, has announced a followup to the eye-catching all-electric B1 SUV that debuted last year. The small company’s next electric vehicle is a pickup truck called the B2, which will offer about three extra feet of length for storing more stuff in the bed.The B2 will be built on the same technological platform as the B1, which means it will feature the same promising specs Bollinger took aim at with last year’s B1. That means it will be po

A leaked research presentation put together by employees of Google shows the extent to which the search giant is grappling with decisions around freedom of speech and censorship. The presentation, leaked to Breitbart News this week and published in full by the organization, is titled “The Good Censor,” and it’s a mix of findings and insights based on interviews and contributions from a number of journalists, academics, and cultural critics. The aim, according to the first slid

Tech stocks tanked today amid a broader stock market slide as nervous investors worried that the 10-year bull run in public stocks may be coming to an end.
The S&P 500 dropped 3.3 percent while Nasdaq composite index (which is the market where many of the largest U.S. tech companies are traded) lost 4 percent of its value, falling 315.97 points. The net result is that the hand of the market is crushing stocks and high-growth technology companies are bearing the brunt of the beating.
A few po

After weeks of leaks, Google officially announced the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones yesterday, but one part of the updated device isn’t sitting well with users: the giant camera notch on the front of the XL variant.Fortunately, for the notch-averse out there, it seems that Google will offer an option to hide the notch by blacking out the entire top portion of the display, via Gizmodo.
For people who prefer a more traditional smartphone look, we’ve added an option to hide the di

Fortnite’s v6.02 update brings on a slew of changes, including a new rocket launcher and the return of the highly coveted Skull Trooper skin in the item shop. But the biggest addition is new limited-time mod called “Disco Domination,” that tasks players with taking over dance floors with sweet moves.
In the 32 vs. 32 mode, multiple dance floors are scattered around the map. Players have to control these dance floors by emoting on them, and the longer players can hold the point

As Apple continues to work on producing a slate of original programming that’s decidedly PG in tone, CNBC reports that the upcoming content will be made available for free to customers who own Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs.The free shows will be offered alongside optional add-on subscriptions to streaming services like HBO Now and Starz in a revamped TV app, according to the report. Apple’s plan to copy Amazon’s Prime Channels model was reported by Blo

The developer behind Stardew Valley, the hit indie farming sim, this week announced the game was coming to mobile devices. The iOS version launches in two weeks, while the Android version is still in development. This, by itself, isn’t exactly surprising. Stardew Valley is the sort of twee indie game that makes the jump to mobile very easily, just like it’s predecessor series Harvest Moon did with the 3DS. (Speaking of which, I’m surprised we’ve never

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has a problem with surfacing results that are blatantly offensive, uniformly exploitative towards women and girls, and full-on racist. And that’s before you even turn the “SafeSearch” feature off. A report from HowToGeek’s Chris Hoffman shows that image searches for innocuous terms such as “Jew” or “Michelle Obama” are met with truly awful suggestions from the search engine itself. Examples include “Jews

Content warning: the following story contains sensitive material regarding racism, anti-Semitism, and the sexualization of minors.
Bing and Yahoo, which is powered by Bing, are both suggesting offensive content within their search features. How-To Geek spotted that Bing’s image search is serving up suggestions for related topics that contain racist terms, the sexualization of minors, and otherwise offensive content. The Verge then found that this problem extends to Yahoo: its homepage sea

AT&T announced today that a DirecTV Now app will be coming to Magic Leap One, a mixed reality headset, in 2019. You can watch the demo video above to see how it works, but essentially, the app will let you watch up to four live streams at once. Why anyone would want to do this with a $2,295 device is unclear, but if you want in on this, Magic Leap’s One mixed reality headset has just started shipping across the US.
The announcement came from Magic Leap’s first developer conferen

Google will no longer continue support for Reply, an experimental app that offers smart reply responses to various messaging apps such as Slack, Hangouts, and Messenger. The app launched earlier this year as part of Google’s Area 120 division that incubates and tests wacky apps.
“As you know, Reply was an experiment, and that experiment has now ended,” Google wrote in an email to beta testers. “While it might still work for the next few months, you may encounter bugs, or

“Funding secured.” When Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted the above statement early August, it kickstarted a series of things: Tesla stock jumped from about $363 to $379. The Securities and Exchange Commission launched a formal investigation into Musk — accusing him of making false and misleading statements to prop up Tesla’s value. The US Department of Justice opened a fraud investigation into Tesla. The SEC charged Musk with fraud, and Tesla and Musk re

As Magic Leap holds the first developer conference for its Magic Leap One mixed reality headset, that headset has started shipping across the contiguous United States, instead of in a set of select markets. The Magic Leap One Creator Edition costs $2,295, just like before, but there’s now an installment plan that starts at $96 per month. All orders are supposed to arrive within 60 days.
The Magic Leap One Creator Edition went on sale in early August, and while Magic Leap has touted it as

Google’s Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL arrived yesterday without too much fanfare. After all, the devices leaked pretty much in entirety over the course of the last two months, leaving little to the imagination when Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh came on stage. But one aspect of the Pixel 3 XL, in particular, that became more pronounced and perplexing now that we’ve seen it in full — and heard Google’s reasoning about its existence — is the rather obtrusive display n

Huawei’s Honor phones have never been about offering top-of-the-line performance or specs, and the Honor 8X — which is coming to Europe and North America — is no different. With a 6.5-inch notched screen, the handset looks superficially similar to 2018 flagship devices that cost four times as much, but its midlevel specs mean that the 8X simply can’t offer the same level of performance. Honor has cut corners to reach this sub-£250 (around $330 USD) price point. But

Once again, NASA can expect even more delays and budget increases for its Space Launch System (or SLS) — the behemoth rocket the space agency is building to take humans to the Moon and Mars.
Today, NASA’s inspector general, which performs periodic audits of the space agency’s programs, released a scathing report on the current status of the Space Launch System’s development — and things look bleak. The rocket, which has already suffered from numerous cost overruns

French startup Skello just raised a $6.9 million funding round (€6 million) from Aglaé Ventures, XAnge, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle and existing investors Thomas Landais, Guillaume le Dieu de Ville and Gilles Blanchard.
The startup is helping bar, restaurant and hotel managers keep track of all the shifts and staffing issues. Skellouses a software-as-a-service approach to help you save time on pesky admin tasks.
After setting up your rules, you can easily generate shifts. Waiters, receptio

The Razer Phone 2 is set to be announced later tonight at a keynote led by Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Previous leaks have shown that it will share a very similar design to the company’s original smartphone. And now, as reported by GSMArena, Amazon has prematurely revealed more details, with a now-pulled listing from Amazon Italy spilling a few key specs ahead of tonight’s reveal.For one, the Razer Phone 2’s rear logo will now light up and be RGB customizable. What a wonderfully

Blizzard first started teasing a team up with Lego for Overwatch sets back in August, and now — after a brief, CGI teaser starring a minifigure Tracer — the two companies have revealed the first set: a buildable version of the robotic hero, Bastion.
Lego Bastion is an 182 piece set that features the character’s “Omnic Crisis orange” skin from the game, along with a “working” machine gun that can fire small Lego bricks across a room, for added realism. S

WarnerMedia — the combined forces of HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros. that AT&T recently acquired in its massive Time Warner deal — is planning on launching its own streaming service in the fourth quarter of 2019, as announced by WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey.
“Our service will start with HBO and the genre defining programming that viewers crave,” commented Stankey in an internal memo obtained by CNN. “On top of that we will package content from Turner and Warner B

After intensifying overnight, Hurricane Michael is now pummeling the Florida Panhandle as a Category 4 storm — the strongest hurricane on record to ever strike the region. Hundreds of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate as Michael’s winds top speeds of 155 miles per hour, NBC News reports.Storm surge is expected to bring flood waters reaching 14 feet high — and the Panhandle is already experiencing “life threatening storm surge, hurricane force winds, and h

Modern TV show creators have to worry about more than good writing, believable characters, and visual style. Online audiences expect to dig into their stories and enjoy analyzing them, almost as if they were games to be won. In the age of fan theory, a good TV show is like a puzzle box waiting to be solved. In Netflix’s animated show The Dragon Prince, some of the clues are apparently hiding in plain sight.
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to sit down with The Dragon Prince co-creators A

Microsoft announced today that it’s joining the Open Invention Network (OIN), an open-source patent group designed to help protect Linux from patent lawsuits. In essence, this makes the company’s library over 60,000 patents open source and available to OIN members, via ZDNet.
OIN provides a license platform for Linux for around 2,400 companies — from individual developers to huge companies like Google and IBM — and all members get access to both OIN-owned patents and cro

Apple has quietly bought Spektral, a Danish machine learning startup that specializes in real-time green screen technology. The $30 million deal actually happened last year, but it was reported today by Danish newspaper Børsen. Apple has been focusing more and more on its AR capabilities lately, and this latest acquisition may be meant to boost the iPhone’s AR features for Memoji or FaceTime or as a part of its plans for an augmented reality headset, which Bloomberg reported may be

Sony officially announced that, after twelve years and countless user requests, it’s finally allowing users to change their PlayStation Network names. It’s opening the feature to the PlayStation Preview program so certain users can test it. The rumor that PlayStation was making this long-awaited change surfaced earlier this month, when developers hinted they’d been told to prepare for the change. It was a pleasant surprise, as it’s something users have wanted for as long

At a congressional privacy hearing this morning, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called for an investigation into the data exposure that resulted in the shutdown of the Google+ social media network. Blumenthal said he plans to send a letter to the Federal Trade Commission later today calling for the agency to take action.
In March of this year, Google discovered a bug in a Google+ API that exposed and had the potential to leak the private information of its users, as reported by The Wall Street

Amazon is following up last week’s Note 9 accessory bundle deal with an even better one. The Note 9 with 512GB of internal storage is $50 off on Amazon, and it comes with a Samsung Gear S3 Frontier smartwatch for free with purchase.
This deal won’t do much to convince people who aren’t already looking to buy a new phone, but this seems to be the best time to buy a Note 9. This the most appealing bundle we’ve seen in terms of savings, and Samsung’s trade-in promotio

New data shows criminals have laundered $2.5 billion worth dirty Bitcoin through cryptocurrency exchanges, and almost all of it ends up in countries with lax Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) regulations. Cryptocurrency research group CipherTrace conducted an analysis of 45 million transactions from the top 20 cryptocurrency exchanges globally in order to find out the prevalence of Bitcoin’s use for criminal purposes. The data, which spans from January 2009 to September 2018, indicates 97 perce

Batman and Superman have had such a pervasive presence in American popular culture that plenty of people who’ve never read a comic book know their pertinent biographical details: the murdered parents, the exploding planet, the Batmobile, Kryptonite, and so on. The DC Comics super-team sometimes known as “the Titans,” on the other hand, have starred in multiple animated series, a few straight-to-video movies, and one feature-length theatrical cartoon released just this past sum

Now that “utility” tokens have become a popular and international way to fund major blockchain projects, a pair of investors are creating a new way to turn tokens into true equities. The investors, Jonathan Nelsonand Laura Nelson, have created Hack Fund, an early stage investment vehicle that allows startups to launch what amounts to “blockchain stock certificates,” according to Jonathan.
“Our previous business model exchanged equity from startup companies for servi

Cryptocurrency exploded like a supernova as prices soared to nearly $20,000 in December 2017. But like a dying star, the crypto-market may now be facing an implosion. According to a new report from technology research group, Juniper Research, the cryptocurrency “industry is on the brink of an implosion.” The research highlights some key market metrics, all of which display cryptocurrencies as being on a downward spiral. “During Q1 2018, cryptocurrency transactions totaled just

For many drivers, Waze is the go-to app for circumnavigating pesky traffic jams. Now, the Alphabet-owned company is making a risky move into ride-hailing — or, more specifically, carpooling. On Wednesday, Waze announced the nationwide rollout of Waze Carpool, a dedicated app that lets drivers offer rides to people who are traveling on a similar route.First launched in the Bay Area in 2016, Waze Carpool has since expanded to five additional states in the US as well as Waze’s country