Technology news

Actor Tom Baker is best known for his long-running stint as The Doctor in the British TV series Doctor Who, and will soon be returning to the franchise with a new novel, Doctor Who: Scratchman, based on a script that he and a co-star wrote while acting in the show.The book will hit stores on January 24th, 2019, according to RadioTimes (via io9), which says that Baker began writing down ideas with co-star Ian Marter between scenes while filming the series in the 1970s. He later turned them into

Bitcoin is in the middle of an astounding price drop, reaching prices as low as $3,520 in recent days and wiping out all gains from coins purchased this year. As of press time, the price was hovering around $3,900, a roughly 40 percent drop from two weeks ago. The result is the worst price drop since April 2013, refreshing old doubts about the soundness of bitcoin as an investment vehicle.
It’s a dramatic turn from 2017, when the value passed $15,000 in the beginning of December to peak j

Video game, comic book, and book publisher Rebellion is expanding into film and television with the launch of a $100 million studio, which Variety says will serve the company’s upcoming motion picture projects.The company purchased a former newspaper shop in Didcot, west of London, which will provide 220,000 square feet of space and a 25,000 square foot soundstage.Rebellion is known for video games like Sniper Elite and Alien vs. Predator, as well as comic books like 2000 AD, which featur

Google settled a racial discrimination claim brought by a contractor who says that the company failed to adequately protect him from being “treated as a terror suspect,” while on the job for Google Maps, reports The Guardian.The Guardian says that Google retracted a contract offered to Ahmed Rashid (an alias), after he complained about being racially harassed on the job. Rashid, whom the paper identifies as a UK citizen of Moroccan descent, told the paper that he worked as a third-p

Starting this week, Ohio businesses will have a new way to pay their taxes: Bitcoin. The Wall Street Journal reports (via TechCrunch) that the state of Ohio has opened a cryptocurrency portal, ohiocrypto.com, which will allow businesses to pay with the digital currency.The WSJ says that Ohio appears to be the first state to allow people to pay with a cryptocurrency, and that the idea originated with State Treasurer Josh Mandel. The site’s FAQ cites the state’s track record with inno

A true apology consists of a sincere acknowledgement of wrong-doing, a show of empathic remorse for why you wronged and the harm it caused, and a promise of restitution by improving ones actions to make things right. Without the follow-through, saying sorry isn’t an apology, it’s a hollow ploy for forgiveness.
That’s the kind of “sorry” we’re getting from tech giants — an attempt to quell bad PR and placate the afflicted, often without the systemic chang

There was an Olympics this year. Black Panther, too. If that surprises you to remember — as it surprises me — that’s because so much else has happened since. (“Everything happens so much,” wrote the Twitter account @horse_ebooks in the summer of 2012, which is as good a motto for these days as any.) Things are speeding up, or at least they seem to be.That speed has increased, too, in recent years — and that’s no coincidence, given how much the global me

Starting Monday, businesses in Ohio will be able to pay their taxes in bitcoin — making the state that’s high in the middle and round on both ends the first in the nation to accept cryptocurrency officially.
Companies who want to take part in the program simply need to go to OhioCrypto.com and register to pay whatever taxes their corporate hearts desire in crypto. It could be anything from cigarette sales taxes to employee withholding taxes, according to a report in The Wal

After a Thanksgiving holiday hopefully filled with lots of food and leftovers, take a load off by staring at a lengthy view of the Earth’s ever-changing surface from space. Alexander Gerst, a German astronaut with the European Space Agency, recorded the longest continual timelapse of Earth from space, made with images taken aboard the International Space Station. In just 15 minutes, viewers sore over the Earth as it changes from day to night, glimpsing locations all over the world.
The ti

There’s no better time to take the plunge on a new game console or finally pick up a game you’ve been reading and watching YouTube videos about for months than Black Friday. Typically, every major retailer, as well as the game publishers and console makers, has a handful of solid deals on hardware, software, and accessories. The Sony PlayStation 4 Slim bundle appears to have been popular, as it’s sold out mostly everywhere, though the whole Xbox consoles lineup, and a number o

The state of the US healthcare system has created a boom in crowdfunded medical campaigns as patients struggle to pay for treatment. In 2017, campaigners raised $930 million through GoFundMe — nearly half of the money raised by the site. Some hospitals have taken notice. Splinter highlighted a recent example in which a woman was denied a heart transplant because of the state of her finances, and suggested that she set up a “fundraising effort.”
The patient in question is Hedda

Walmart’s Black Friday discounts are coming to an end, though several items are still discounted. The Xbox One X is $100 off, though the stock of PS4 1TB bundles with Spider-Man, and Nintendo Switch bundles with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe have each sold through. For any items that you buy, Walmart will offering free two-day shipping for orders of $35 and up.
We’ll be adding and removing items in order to reflect what’s currently available, and make sure to check back to The Verge for

Facebookfounder Mark Zuckerberg may yet regret underestimating a UK parliamentary committee that’s been investigating the democracy-denting impact of online disinformation for the best part of this year — and whose repeat requests for facetime he’s just as repeatedly snubbed.
In the latest high gear change, reported in yesterday’s Observer, the committee has used parliamentary powers to seize a cache of documents pertaining to a US lawsuit to further its attempt to h

The UK Parliament used a rarely-used procedure to compel an app developer to seize a number of internal Facebook documents related to the company’s decision-making process preceding the Cambridge Analytica scandal, reports The Guardian. The documents reportedly contain “significant revelations” about the decisions that set the stage for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.The paper reports that MP Damian Collins, the chair of Parliament’s Culture, Media, and Sport Select Com

Even the best of us have experienced a night of drinking that we regretted the next morning. The awful feeling of being hungover is something that you have to suffer through, but there are things out there that can help.
So if you're looking to build the perfect hangover kit for your buddy, definitely take a look at a couple of these necessary items. Who knows? Maybe you might want to grab some of these things for yourself too.
1Gatorade
Image:gatorade / amazonHydrates and restore electrolytes w

In 2008, Illinois passed a law that, a decade later, remains the toughest standard for biometric privacy in the nation. The Biometric Information Privacy Act imposes strict rules on how companies can collect sensitive information from a person’s body, requiring consent before obtaining data like fingerprints.While other states have since passed similar laws, Illinois’ allows consumers to file lawsuits if they believe their rights have been violated under the law. This week, that led

What can we learn from DETECTIVE CHINATOWN 2? Quite a lot, actually. The 11th biggest box-office hit of the year, it vastly outgrossed the likes of SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY, A STAR IS BORN, and CRAZY RICH ASIANS. You may never have heard of it, though; like OPERATION RED SEA, the 10th biggest hit of the year, it made all of its money in China.
What can a slapstick-meets-Sherlock-Holmes comedy tell us about technology? Quite a lot, if we read its subtext. One striking thing: it’s hard to thi

NASA's InSight lander has been hurtling through the solar system for over seven months. Now its time has come. 
InSight is set to land on Mars.
InSight — sent to observe Martian earthquakes and study the planet's ancient interior — is expected to land in a flat, barren plain on Mars on Monday at around 3 p.m. ET. 
Plummeting down to Mars is always perilous, so NASA mission controllers — and InSight's adoring public — will anxiously await the landing results back

The holiday shopping season can feel as tired and drawn-out as "The 12 Days of Christmas," what with all of the ads and deals you've been inundated with since practically the end of October. But if there's a single sale that rises above the rest like a partridge atop a pear tree, it's the sale on online classes that just began in the Mashable Shop. 
Read on to see which courses are available at massive discounts, and to find out how you can save an extra 20% on your purchase through Cyber M

There's no place like home for the holidays, or so it's said. But between the jam-packed airports, flight delays, crowded roads, and fickleness of winter weather, traveling to said home might not always seem worth it. 
Still, canceling your trip isn't really an option once you've got everything booked — and besides, you'll break your mom's heart if you tell her you can't make it this year. (She's making your favorite potato dumplings, after all.) 
All thi

As we hang out with family and friends this holiday season, it’s interesting to look back on the Bitcoinmania that we endured one Thanksgiving ago. Aunts and uncles asking about internet money as you passed the mashed potatoes while trying to explain the concept of decentralization in a way that made it seem like you knew your stuff.
Well, as we near a year since many of the top tokens hit their all-time-highs, we’ve seen the prices come crashing down as more manageable expectations

On Friday, a group of Wikipedia vandals replaced Donald Trump’s lead picture with an image of a penis, a vandalism successful enough that it was eventually picked up by Siri. But in the days since, the same page has been hit with a string of more sophisticated attacks determined to keep the penis vandalism in place in violation of Wikipedia standards.
At least five edits have been made to the Donald Trump page in the days since the initial attack, often disguising the penis picture a more