Technology news

In a move that’s sure to optimize marathon binges, Netflix has released the latest version of its iOS app with some pretty useful updates. The new version of the app adds forward and back 10-second buttons, which you can also control by double tapping the left or right side of the screen.Until now, if you were used to YouTube’s playback features and tried to do this on Netflix’s app, it would annoyingly zoom into the screen. Now that Netflix’s playback options are the sa

The Federal Communications Commission is looking to raise the minimum rural broadband speed standard to 25 Mbps, more than doubling the current requirement. In general, this would boost speeds in rural areas that receive broadband through government-subsidized programs.Those government subsidies come from the FCC’s Connect America Fund (CAF). The program is paid for through phone bill fees which the Commission then dips into in order to pass funds onto carriers so they can build networks

The length of ads on YouTube can be distressing, but the question is whether people would be okay sitting through a 100-minute commercial if it were actually a full-length movie.YouTube and Warner Bros. Pictures are teaming up for a one-day promotional event that will let users watch The Lego Movie in its entirety during Black Friday. The promotion is to stir up hype for the film’s sequel, The Lego Movie 2 — The Second Part. YouTube viewers will only have 24 hours to watch the movie

Romaine lettuce is making people dangerously ill again, prompting public health officials in the US and Canada to issue nationwide alerts: don’t eat any form of romaine lettuce, and toss any romaine you have. If you don’t know what kind of lettuce is in your fridge, throw it out. Even if you had grand plans for a romaine-focused side dish for Thanksgiving — you know who you are — don’t take any chances.So far, 32 people in the US and 18 in Canada have been infected

Why am I sad that a tiny black puck which streamed games over a Wi-Fi network will soon disappear from shelves around the world? Because too few people experienced the magic that the Steam Link affords.
Over the past couple years, it seemed like PC gaming juggernaut Valve couldn’t give away the gadget fast enough, charging as little as $2.50 for the $50 gadget on sale. That’s probably why the company is quietly discontinuing the device today, though the company will continue support

Car companies often tweak their vehicles for different markets in order to comply with regulations or serve varying customer tastes. But Ford is apparently considering a novel change to cars bound for the Chinese market: removing the “new car smell.”Yes, the fresh but sometimes dizzying smell of a brand-new car might be popular in the US, but it’s apparently off-putting in China. More than 10 percent of drivers in the country complain about aggressively smelly new cars, making

Apple’s holiday commercials are an annual tradition, designed to evoke the strongest of emotions in those who watch the lengthy ads play out.This year’s commercial manages to accomplish that feat, but it looks a little different: it’s fully animated. The commercial feels more like a Disney Pixar short, or a Coca-Cola ad than it does a traditional Apple commercial. There isn’t too much product placement from the company save for a MacBook covered in personalized stickers

A small company in Japan that makes hyper-realistic face masks has found popularity within the tech industry, as reported by Reuters. The masks, which cost about 300,000 yen ($2,650 USD) to create, are made of resin and plastic by REAL-f Co. at the company’s location in Otsu. Image: REUTERS
The company’s founder, Osamu Kitagawa, spent two years developing a method to translate facial data from high-quality photographs to 3D masks, and REAL-f Co. now receives about 100 orders a year.

Last Friday, the app for the blogging site Tumblr quietly disappeared from the iOS App Store, with no apparent explanation. Now, after a weekend of silence, we know why — and it’s a really bad reason. When the app vanished, a page appeared in Tumblr’s help center basically giving the standard “We’re working on it” excuse. The page was updated multiple times over the weekend, each update containing variants on “no really, we’ll get it fixed very so

The FCC unveiled two proposals today to battle the scourge of phone spam, although at least one of those moves is likely to be controversial.In its announcement, the agency said it plans to formally classify text messaging as an information service, a legal distinction it said will be key to battling spam text messages. The classification, the agency said, will allow phone carriers to continue to use blocking technology to stop spam messages from reaching phones.The FCC says the classification

NASA will be conducting extensive reviews of workplace safety at two of its major commercial partners, SpaceX and Boeing, prompted by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s drug use. Both companies are currently developing spacecraft to take the NASA’s astronauts to and from the International Space Station.The reviews are expected to take months and will require hundreds of interviews, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the news. It’s unclear if the inquiries will delay th

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is about to expand to a new class of devices, especially hands-free listening and communications. In a blog post published today, Amazon says it’s made its Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit tool widely available to developers. First introduced back in January, the software development kit was designed as a way to bring Alexa to Bluetooth headphones, headsets, and wearables. Now, with the SDK opening up, that’s closer to actually happening. Qualcomm has

Last month, men in South Sudan engaged in a bidding war over a 17-year-old girl after they saw a post on Facebook advertising her for marriage. Just a few days after the post circulated online, she was purchased by a wealthy businessman to be his wife, according to Reuters.
It’s yet another example of how Facebook’s platform has been abused in developing countries in recent years. In Myanmar, over 700,000 members of the Rohingya community were forced to flee the country due to ethni

Google has tinkered with its Find My Device app so that it displays indoor maps to show you where you might have dropped your phone inside a large building. It’s the result of years of recording the layouts of complex spaces like department stores, malls, and airports. That way, when you lose your phone, you don’t just see that it’s somewhere in the building — you might actually have a clearer idea of exactly where. Besides adding large buildings, the new update to the F

Teens used to try alcohol first, then tobacco, and then marijuana. Now, marijuana is increasingly the first “gateway” substance for adolescents, according to new research.This trend is not because teens are smoking cannabis more than ever. Rather, the change is because teens are smoking cigarettes and drinking less while the numbers for marijuana have held steady, according to Katherine M. Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University and co-author of the new study, publ

Amazon may try to expand its live sports offering for Prime subscribers by bidding on 20 of Fox’s regional sports channels, according to a report from CNBC.Fox’s 22 channels were acquired by Disney during the two companies’ merger earlier this year. Disney, which already owns ESPN, has told regulators that it's willing to immediately sell off those channels to gain approval for the other assets covered by the acquisition. Amazon is looking to bring those channels into its own

Nostalgia is a funny thing, because your emotions trick you into thinking you want something that has absolutely no functional value. This Apple Watch iPod nano concept, published on Behance by Korean designer Joyce Kang, is an example that suddenly makes you appreciate the iPod nano that’s currently sitting in a dusty corner of your drawer.
Spotted by 9to5Mac, the concept images show a silicone case in the shape of Apple’s classic click-wheel iPod, that neatly houses an Apple Watch

Andrew Ng is best known for his work at Google, where he helped establish the Google Brain program, and as the Chief Scientist at Baidu. But his impact in the field of artificial intelligence is probably most profound through his work at Coursera, an online learning center he co-founded. Ng teaches several free or affordable Coursera courses on a variety of topics related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. And if you, or someone you’re forced to work with, doesn’t know

Do you want to really, physically walk around in virtual reality? Is an omnidirectional treadmill too bulky for your taste? A giant hamster ball too confining? Redirected walking too trippy? An empty warehouse too expensive? If so, I’ve got good news: Google is trying to patent a design for VR roller skates.
Google applied for a patent on some “augmented and/or virtual reality footwear” in May, and the application was published last week. Its “motorized footwear” l

A man in a blue checkered shirt sits at a table set with three things: a spoon, a pint of Ample Hills Creamery Peppermint Pattie ice cream, and a hefty burrito. Wordlessly, he tears the heaping burrito in two. He picks up one of the halves — roughly the size of his own fist — rips off a hunk, and dumps it unceremoniously onto the ice cream. He digs his spoon into the ice cream, deposits the creamy glob into his mouth, and chews while staring directly into the camera without blinking

Google’s Digital Wellbeing features, designed to help you more responsibly use mobile software and prevent distractions, have officially exited the beta phase and are now available for all Google Pixel phones running Android 9 Pie, per 9to5Google. Android One devices are also receiving the features, which can be found under the Android settings menu once you download the Digital Wellbeing app from the Google Play Store. (If you signed up fro the beta, your version of Digital Wellbeing wil

Last week, Instagram started rolling out its new dashboard that showed how much time you spend on Instagram, and now, it’s Facebook’s turn: the company is rolling out the feature in the actual Facebook app now, via TechCrunch.Facebook announced the new dashboards for the Instagram and Facebook apps back in August as part of the “time well-spent” movement that has been sweeping across the tech world. Unlike Facebook’s dashboards, Apple’s Screen Time and Google

It seems there is yet another massive internal strife brewing up in the blockchain space. KodakOne – a cryptocurrency project that promised to bring photographers a new stream of revenue – purportedly owes thousands of dollars in outstanding invoices to contractors the firm recruited to build the platform. In a series of email exchanges reviewed by Hard Fork, a group of contractors has accused KodakOne for failing to pay up their contracting fees in the agreed timeframe. The contrac

If you’re not from Canada, you might be surprised to learn that the capital of the Great White North isn’t Toronto. It’s Ottawa. This is one mistake that any Canadian would tell you they’ve heard more times than they’d like to admit. Yet, in many ways, it could be argued that the same misunderstanding goes for the country’s tech capital as well. Time and time again, Toronto beats out Ottawa on global and national rankings for best tech hub — with Ottawa

Facebook is experiencing a rare outage that is making the popular social network site — along with Facebook Messenger and Instagram — unavailable to users across the United States as well as parts of Europe and South America, according to third-party site Down Detector’s outage map.Facebook has officially acknowledged the issue on its social media platforms (ironically, Twitter is likely your most reliable source due to the outage), and the company’s support dashboard no

Microsoft is making it easier and more secure to sign into a Microsoft Account today. The software giant is now supporting standards-based FIDO2 security key devices to allow anyone to sign into their Microsoft Account without a username or password. Microsoft is enabling the security key or Windows Hello support through its Edge browser, and it’s the first company to support password-less authentication using the FIDO2 WebAuthn and CTAP2 standards.
If you have the latest Windows 10 Octob

Financial regulators of North Dakota have ordered a dodgy Russian cryptocurrency company to cease and desist operations in the state, after discovering it had impersonated a bank in Liechtenstein to falsely market an initial coin offering (ICO). In a statement released Monday, state securities chairman Karen Tyler explains how the scammers assumed the identity of Union Bank AG, using its reputation to issue and market a fake version of the banks’ proposed cryptocurrency bea

The latest Pokémon games can be played with a special peripheral that is shaped like an actual pokéball that you can throw to catch monsters. But since the controller is ball-shaped, makes sounds, and comes attached to a rope-like holster, pets everywhere are confused. What do you mean this cool new toy isn’t for your real furry friend?
The Poké Ball Plus is an attractive proposition for Pokémon collectors, and one of its biggest draws is that it gifts players

Our blockchain and cryptocurrency event is coming up on December 12-14 in London! It’s fast approaching, and we couldn’t be more excited – so for loyal readers of Hard Fork, we’re giving away five free tickets. Enter our lottery here. Together with our lineup of speakers (including Thomas Power, Kavita Gupta, and Mustafa Al-Bassam) Hard Fork Decentralized will answer the unanswered questions about the industry – from scalability to diversity, and everything in betw

After a lengthy delay, the Spyro Reignited Trilogy finally hit shelves last week. I’ve been playing it nonstop ever since, and as a longtime fan of the little purple guy, I’m more than satisfied with it, though admittedly it does come with a few control issues.   We all go into a game review with a little bias — we’re human, not score-spitting automatons (full disclosure: Activision provided me with a code). But I’m going into this with more personal

Tech companies like Google, Apple, and Uber should be forced to share mapping data with rivals firms and the public sector, the UK government has been advised by a data advocacy group.In a report published today, the Open Data Institute (ODI) said that “data monopolies” were stifling innovation in the UK. These companies duplicate one another’s efforts, said the report, while using their large financial clout to gain insurmountable leads over would-be rivals. If they shared da

Fortnite’s next major tournament series will be the first time anyone can compete in the game for cash prizes. Today, developer Epic announced its “Winter Royale” competition, an open tournament with a $1 million prize pool that will start later this month. It’s an expansion of the tournament feature that Epic launched in October, but it has the important addition of winning actual money. Previous cash tournaments were restricted to pros or other invited players, like po

Syed Rahman is caught in the middle. The Vanderbilt University sophomore from Long Island City, Queens, has long dreamed of a job in the tech industry, but the public housing projects in his neighborhood convinced him that the only way to make it is to find a job in the so-called “Silicon Alleys” of Manhattan.
That was until Amazon announced plans to build one of its HQ2 corporate campuses in his hometown just five blocks from the Queensbridge Houses near where he grew up. According