Technology news

On a Sunday in May 2012, the fossilized skeleton of an eight-foot-tall T. rex relative called Tarbosaurus bataar went up for auction in New York City. The bidding started at $875,000, but there was a catch: the bones had been poached from Mongolia and were in the United States illegally.At the New York auction, a lawyer working on behalf of the Mongolian government dialed up a judge and tried to stop the sale. Nearly 1,000 miles away in Florida, Eric Prokopi, the man who had obtained the bones

A new dating app for Trump supporters that wants to “make America date again” has leaked its entire database of users — on the day of its launch.
The app, called “Donald Daters,” is aimed at “American-based singles community connecting lovers, friends, and Trump supporters alike” and has already received rave reviews and coverage in Fox News, Daily Mail and The Hill.
On its launch day alone, the app had a little over 1,600 users and counting.
We know bec

Facebook is going to begin banning false information involving voting ahead of the US’s midterm elections next month. It’s something the company has done before, but amid growing tensions with Congress and the public, these new rules are set to be tougher and more comprehensive than those prior.
Before the 2016 elections, Facebook banned posts that provided misinformation as to where people could go to vote and at what time polls opened or closed. But in today’s announcement,

The company behind Project Bloodhound, a UK-based initiative to break 1,000 miles per hour in a rocket-powered car, is in dire straits. The Bloodhound Supersonic Car is all but built, and it reached speeds of over 200 mph in a test last year. But the company says it needs to raise £25 million (just shy of $33 million) or it will go broke.Bloodhound Programme Ltd announced on Monday that it has entered into administration, which, like bankruptcy, is a process where control of the company g

A new technology from researchers at Carnegie Mellon Universitywill add sound and vibration awareness to create truly context-aware computing. The system, called Ubicoustics, adds additional bits of context to smart device interaction, allowing a smart speaker to know it’s in a kitchen or a smart sensor to know you’re in a tunnel versus on the open road.
“A smart speaker sitting on a kitchen countertop cannot figure out if it is in a kitchen, let alone know what a person is do

Facebookis expanding its ban on false and misleading posts that aim to deter citizens from voting in the upcoming midterm elections.
The social media giant is adding two more categories of false information to its existing policy, which it introduced in 2016, in an effort to counter new types of abuse.
Facebook already removes verifiably false posts about the dates, times and locations of polling stations — but will now exclude false posts that wrongly describe methods of voting &mdas

Virtual reality video company Jaunt — which helped spur the early growth of VR video — is shifting its focus to augmented reality, winding down “a number” of its VR-related services, and laying off a “significant portion” of its staff.
In a Medium post entitled “The Future of Jaunt is AR,” Jaunt wrote that it would focus on developing technologies that could create augmented reality content at a large scale. “We will be winding down a number

Walmart has big video streaming ambitions. Today, Bloomberg reports that the retailer is in talks with multiple media companies to sell its services through an online store. The publication says Walmart wants to give its Vudu customers the ability to add on premium services, like HBO Now, Showtime, or Starz. Bloomberg attributes the push to declining DVD sales.
Amazon offers a similar service through Channels, which allows customers to sign up for these third-party services. Meanwhile, Variety

Winamp, the legendarily customizable music player, is being revamped as a mobile app that will give you one place to listen to all your music — including playlists, podcasts, streaming radio stations, and more, as reported by TechCrunch.
First released in 1997, Winamp was a popular freeware media player famous for its utilitarian music playback and its wealth of incredible community-made skins. It was acquired by AOL in 2002, then sold to Radionomy in 2014. The last time Winamp was update

As Twitter, like other social media companies, continues to deal with extremism on its platform, a new project is pledging to monitor how hateful users are behaving.A newly released tool called the Exploring Online Hate dashboard is a joint project from the New America Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League, the latter of which is dedicated to tracking hate groups. The dashboard looks for trends in hateful activity through a sample of 1,000 Twitter accounts that the groups say show “ha

Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Internet Explorer and Safari are all dropping support for older versions of the online security protocol TLS, used in practically any encrypted exchange online. While few people or machines are using the long-unsafe TLS 1.0 and 1.1, they’re still permitted in many connections — but not for long.
Transport Layer Security is a community-developed standard that got its 1.0 release nearly 20 years ago. It and its close relative, 1.1, have known flaws that make them

Most Americans say they can’t tell social media bots from real humans, and most are convinced bots are bad, according to a new study from Pew Research Center. Only 47 percent of Americans are somewhat confident they can identify social media bots from real humans. In contrast, most Americans surveyed in a study about fake news were confident they could identify false stories.
The Pew study is an uncommon look at what the average person thinks about these automated accounts that plague soc

AirPlay 2 support is now available for Libratone’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi speakers, the Zipp and Zipp Mini, the company announced on Twitter today.Apple first announced a series of third-party devices designed to work with AirPlay 2 back in May, which included speakers from Sonos and Bang & Olufsen, alongside Libratone. The Zipp and Zipp Mini run for $299 and $249, respectively, which is $50 and $100 less, respectively, than customers would cough up for an Apple HomePod. The Zipp and Zip

The Walking Dead isn’t necessarily known for its nuanced handling of moral complexity. It’s ostensibly concerned with the choices we make and the people we become in a world where law and order no longer exist, but the zombie drama has often treated its right-or-wrong dilemmas as shallow plot contrivances. Characters like Rick or Carl might bemoan their lost humanity in one episode, only to casually slip into killing machine mode in the next, simply because it’s convenient for

Docker, the company that did more to create today’s modern containerized computing environment than any other independent company, has raised $92 million of a targeted $192 million funding round, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The new funding is a signal that while Dockermay have lost its race with Google’s Kubernetes over whose toolkit would be the most widely adopted, the San Francisco-based company has become the champion for businesses that wan

Subscriptions have turned into a booming business for app developers, accounting for $10.6 billion in consumer spend on the App Store in 2017, and poised to grow to $75.7 billion by 2022. But alongside this healthy growth, a number of scammers are now taking advantage of subscriptions in order to trick users into signing up for expensive and recurring plans. They do this by intentionally confusing users with their app’s design and flow, by making promises of “free trials” that

Microsoft first started rolling outs its dictation feature in the Word desktop app earlier this year, and it’s now making its way to web versions of Office. Dictation (speech to text) will be available in both Word and OneNote online in the coming weeks, as part of a push by Microsoft to better help people with dyslexia. The dictation feature lets you simply type with your voice, and it’s availability in the Office web apps will make it more broadly used in schools.
Word and OneNote

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos defended his pursuit of space travel with his Blue Origin rocket venture, telling a crowd at Wired’s 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco that it’s only by taking big risks and pursuing personal visions that humanity can progress in meaningful ways. Bezos became the world’s richest person in July, thanks largely to increases in Amazon’s stock price. He has since faced criticism for how he decides to spend his wealth, although the executive did j

Y Combinatorhas released the results of a survey, completed in partnership with its portfolio company Callisto, highlighting the pervasive role of sexual harassment in venture capital and technology startups.
Callisto, asexual misconduct reporting software built for victims, is a graduate of YC’s winter 2018 class. The company sent a survey to 125 of YC’s 384 female founders, asking if they had been “assaulted or coerced by an angel or VC investor in their startup career.&

The airport security experience is about to see facial recognition technology taking on a bigger role, as TSA today released its roadmap to use biometrics technology in the coming years.Customs and Border Protection has been using facial recognition to screen non-US residents on international flights since 2015, a project that was expedited by the Trump administration. Last year, the US government laid out its plans to start expanding the screening tools to US citizens, which would require them

AT&T customers in Dallas, Texas are experiencing service outages after a fire in one of the telecom company’s facilities in the Dallas area. The company’s customer service account has been responding to customers’ complaints but hasn’t yet offered a timeline for a fix. The blanket statement just references the fire. Service appears to have been down for hours and is affecting AT&T U-verse, which provides internet and TV. Cell phone service isn’t affected.
A

A lot of people leave their jobs because of bosses they can’t stand. Yet it’s seldom the case that a former employee publicly badmouths management after the fact. The obvious risk in doing so: future employers might not want to gamble on this person badmouthing them at a later date.
That isn’t stopping Morgan Knutson, a UI designer who seven years ago, spent eight months at Googleworking on its recently shuttered social networking product Google+ and who, in light of the shutdo

Nio, the Chinese electric automaker aiming to compete with Tesla,reported that it delivered 3,268 of its new ES8 vehicles in the third quarter, beating its own target by 9 percent.
The company planned to deliver between 2,900 and 3,000 ES8s in the third quarter, according to Nio CFO Louis T. Hsieh.
Nio began deliveries of the ES8, a seven-seater high-performance electric SUV, in China on June 28. The company reported that its year-to-date ES8 deliveries, as of September 30, 2

T-Mobile has adjusted its Equipment Installment plan to 36 months for certain devices, as spotted by TmoNews. The company’s normal payment plan has historically been 24 months.
T-Mobile hasn’t made a formal announcement about the change, but it does appear that the 36-month payment plan is being offered for the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, which nixes the need for a down payment and drops the monthly payment cost to $24.17. Additionally, on T-Mobile’s Equipment Installment Plan supp

The smartphone market in China is only going to slump further, Goldman Sachs predicted in an investor note on Sunday. Sales could drop an estimated 15 percent year over year this autumn as companies like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Apple struggle to find interested customers, Goldman said.
Like consumers in the US, phone owners in China often keep older models of smartphones for over a year and don’t trade in their phones for the latest model, contributing to the weak sales numbers. Goldman a

Niantic is one of the few companies in the augmented reality world making some actual goddamn revenue.
As such, it didn’t feel right not to have the company that built Pokémon GO represented at our one-day Sessions AR/VR event this Thursday in LA. I’ll be sitting down with the company’s AR research lead Ross Finman at the event to talk about why augmented reality is so important to Niantic’s future and why AR tech can actually make tomorrow’s games and apps m

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Rolls-Royce has announced a new deal with Intel as part of the engineering firm’s mission to build fully autonomous ships.The company (which separated from car brands of the same name) has been working on autonomous shipping technology since the early 2010s, and it said last year that it wants to launch its first uncrewed ocean-going vessels by 2025. As a first step toward that, it launched its Intelligent Awareness system for crewed vessels earlier this year.The system is comprised of a

The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic mobile audio app that brings together all your music, podcasts and streaming services to a single location. It’s an ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says it’s still all about the millions-strong global Winampcommunity — and as proof, the original desktop app is getting an official update as well.
For those who don’t remember: Winamp was the MP3 player of choice around the t

Hacked Facebook users still don’t know which 15 recent searches and 10 latest checkins were exposed in the company’s massive breach it detailed last week. The company merely noted that those were amongst the data sets stolen by the attackers. That creates uncertainty about how sensitive or embarrassing the scraped data is, and whether it could possibly be used to blackmail and stalk them.Much of the scraped data from the 14 million most-impacted users out of 30 million total people h

Fortnite’s competitive scene is still young, but so far, most tournaments and events have been invite-only, or restrictive in terms of who can actually participate. Soon, though, anyone will be able to throw their hat in the ring.In-game tournaments will be available under the “Events” section of Fortnite, and they’ll be open to anyone who wants to participate. According to Epic Games, winners will be able to win “prizes,” but the developer would not specify

In his first public remarks since leaving the company he co-founded, Kevin Systrom hinted at tensions with Facebook that could have hastened his exit from Instagram. But he also said “there are no hard feelings at all” and that he would continue rooting for the company as he moves on to work on other projects.
“When you leave anything, there are obviously reasons for leaving,” Systrom told interviewer Lauren Goode onstage at Monday’s Wired 25 conference. “No

The Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL can be preordered right now, and will be available to the general public starting on Thursday, October 18th. As far as where you’ll be able to get Google’s 2018 flagship smartphone on launch day, availability is much more limited compared to the likes of Samsung or Apple’s products. That’s because Verizon, for the third year running, is Google’s exclusive carrier partner for the Pixel 3 series. And it’s celebrating the occasion in