Technology news

Tumblr announced earlier today that it will ban all adult content on the platform, starting on December 17th. Now, longtime users are criticizing the company’s auto-detecting algorithms, which appear to be incorrectly flagging some inoffensive images as explicit.Tumblr is giving users until the start date of the ban later this month to appeal, but the inaccuracies are causing concern that blanket bans on such content could sweep up inoffensive posts and continue to drive a wedge between c

Samsung’s Wireless Charger Duo normally runs for $119.99, but as part of Amazon’s “12 Days of Deals” promotion, you can purchase one for $49.99, which is over 50 percent off its usual price. While the charger is made in black or white, it appears that the discount is only valid on the black version.
The Wireless Charger Duo is built with Samsung’s phones and wearables in mind, hence the smaller pad for its Gear smartwatches, though you’ll be able to charge an

Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg will soon be overthrown by Indian music production T-Series as the biggest channel on YouTube, but the controversial creator is using his current spotlight to give back. In a video posted today, Kjellberg announced that he’s currently raising funds for Child Rights and You, an organization seeking to help children in India.In the video, Kjellberg explains that despite the good-natured efforts made to keep him in the lead, there’s also been &ld

Late Sunday night, President Trump seemed to announce a potentially big development in the ongoing trade war with China. The Chinese government, he tweeted after a sit-down dinner with President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit, “agreed to reduce and remove tariffs on cars coming into China from the US.” China currently applies a 40 percent tax on cars imported from the United States, so a reduction or a complete removal — it’s still not clear which — would be a boon t

Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed white supremacists and “dangerous conspiracy theorists” today, reiterating that hateful content will not have a home on Apple platforms.Cook received the first “Courage Against Hate” award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and he used his time onstage to talk about the company’s commitment to preventing hate speech from spreading.
“At Apple, we believe technology needs to have a clear point of view. This is no time to get tie

ThinkGeek, purveyor of gadgets for practically every glorious facet of geek culture, is having a huge sale today across its entire site. The discounts just started, but you’ll only have until 5PM ET today, December 3rd, to take advantage of 50 percent off anything on its store.
If you’re buying gifts for loved ones who are obsessed with video games franchises like The Legend of Zelda, Fortnite, Fallout, or television shows like Doctor Who or Rick and Morty, you’ll probably get

AT&T will no longer offer prorated credits to those who cancel certain services before the end of their billing period, as spotted by Ars Technica. The change will go into effect on January 14th, 2019, and will apply to DirecTV, U-verse TV, AT&T Phone, AT&T Internet, and Fixed Wireless Internet accounts.
Now, no matter when you cancel, you’ll be charged for the full month and the service will continue until the end of the billing period. AT&T already had this policy in pla

Redwood City California Highway Patrol stopped a Tesla Model 3 they suspected was running Autopilot with a drunk driver asleep at the wheel. The incident occurred last Friday, November 30th at 3:37AM PT, when officers observed a car going 70 mph on Highway 101 with a driver that appeared to be asleep.After flashing their lights and sirens in an attempt to pull the car over, the officers deployed a strategy based around their assumption that the Tesla Model 3 was running on Autopilot. According

Google has just pushed out the December security update for Android, and for Pixel users, this release includes over a dozen functional patches to improve performance and early bugs in the Pixel 3 and 3 XL. Most notably, the patch should fix the poor memory management that until now has caused the phones to prematurely close background apps like Spotify.You should be able to multitask without abruptly having your music or podcasts stop after installing the patch. That annoying problem put an ug

Roma lets viewers hear its world before they see it. The latest film from Children of Men and Y Tu Mamá También director Alfonso Cuarón opens with a long shot of a tile floor. It’s situated in the courtyard driveway of an upper-middle class family in early 1970s Mexico City, but the audience doesn’t initially know that — Cuarón only offers them a gorgeous, static image. Like the rest of the film, it was shot by Cuarón himself, in black-and-wh

What matters more: how a phone looks or how it performs? “How it performs” might be the obvious answer, but how a phone looks — its design, screen, and ergonomics — vastly affects how it feels to use. If you have to make a trade-off, sometimes performance is the right choice.
That’s the story behind two of this season’s most promising new phones, the Nokia 7.1 and the Motorola One. Both phones look a lot like new iPhones, with tall screens, dual cameras, and n

Researchers just announced the discovery of the most massive, distant black hole collision ever observed. Excitingly, the huge cosmic crash wasn’t alone. The discovery of three other black hole collisions were announced at the same time, bringing the total number of observed mergers of these incredibly dense regions of space to 10.the huge cosmic crash wasn’t alone
The discoveries were announced over the weekend at a scientific meeting in Maryland, where researchers gathered to talk

Google became the first smartphone company to support built-in eSIMs with its Project Fi (now Google Fi) network last year. Now, it’s expanding that even further with the announcement of several new carriers around the world that will support the feature.In addition to Google Fi, Google is adding support for Sprint in the US, EE in the UK, Airtel and Reliance Jio in India, and Truphone and Gigsky in various other countries over the next few months. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafon

Today, one of NASA’s deep-space probes, OSIRIS-REx, arrived at the space rock it’s been traveling toward for the last two years, an asteroid named Bennu. At noon ET, OSIRIS-REx came within about 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the asteroid, which is closer than ever before. The arrival means that OSIRIS-REx is now starting a new phase of its mission that entails extensively mapping the surface of the asteroid to find the best place to grab a sample of material.
“We have arrived!&r

Skype is getting live captioning and subtitles to help people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The news follows an earlier announcement that PowerPoint is also getting real-time captions and subtitles, and both features will rely on the company’s artificial intelligence work. The Skype option is available by pressing the “more,” or (+), button during a call and turning subtitles on. This can be set as a default, too.
Live captions and subtitles will auto-scroll during a call,

Three years after it first came to Android phones, Apple Music is nearing support for Android tablets, reports 9to5Mac. Version 2.7 of the app, which is currently only available for beta testers, ditches the hamburger menu in the top left in favor of a navigation bar on the bottom, which should make it a lot easier to use on Android devices with large screens.This year has seen Apple significantly open up its music streaming service to let it run on third-party hardware. Later this month, Apple

Tumblr will permanently ban adult content from its platform on December 17th in a move that will eradicate porn-related communities on the platform and fundamentally alter how the service is used. The ban includes explicit sexual content and nudity with a few exceptions, the company tells The Verge. The new policy’s announcement comes just days after Tumblr was removed from Apple’s iOS App Store over a child pornography incident, but it extends far beyond that matter alone. “A

There are still at least a few more opportunities to save on tech gifts for loved ones (or yourself; we won’t tell) before the winter holidays arrive. Retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, and Samsung are hosting daily deals on their online stores that could be your best opportunity to score a low price if you missed out on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
As daily deals become available, we’ll compile them below. Keep in mind that these deals will only be active for the day that they a

Analogue’s Super Nt is a gorgeous, powerful aftermarket Super Nintendo. Ghostly International is one of the world’s premier electronic music labels. Now, the two have joined forces for a limited edition console, complete with custom Ghostly powered startup sounds.
Today, Analogue is revealing the Ghostly LE version of the Super Nt. Like the standard model, it’s a console designed to play your old SNES cartridges on a modern TV, with a whole host of extra features. (You can fin

Barnes & Noble made a new Nook that’s on sale today, continuing its line of recent offerings that prove the Kindle rival is still alive and kicking. The latest Nook is Barnes & Noble’s smallest and cheapest model yet: a 7-inch model that costs $49.99.The book giant announced a new Nook at the start of November that featured the company’s largest display at 10.1 inches. That Nook had 32GB of storage that could be expanded up to 256GB. You can also run Google Play apps o

We thought LG’s 17-inch Gram laptop was on the way, and today, Best Buy listed the device online. The new LG Gram is intriguing not just because it ships with a 17-inch, 2560 x 1600 IPS display, but also because it weighs less than three pounds.By comparison, a 17-inch Windows laptop from HP or Dell weighs almost double that. The Asus VivoBook Pro is on the lighter side at 4.6 pounds, but LG has done better. Usually, 17-inch laptops are thought of as desktop replacements, but the Gram is

A few scammy iOS applications have been taking advantage of Apple’s Touch ID platform by trying to trick users into making payments with false promises of using the fingerprint scans for fitness data, according to ESET’s WeLiveSecurity blog.
The two apps — called “Fitness Balance” and “Calories Tracker” — were spotted by various Reddit users over the last week, and both employ similar tactics. As part of their so-called “fitness tracking,&rd

Microsoft is adding real-time captions and subtitles to PowerPoint early next year. The subtitles and captions are designed to help support the deaf or hard of hearing community, and even allow speakers to include a translation of a presentation. Live captions and subtitles will support 12 spoken languages and display on-screen in more than 60 different languages.
The captions are based on Microsoft’s ongoing artificial intelligence work, and the company has been using similar software to

Last Friday, Madrid’s tough new vehicle emissions controls went into effect, resulting in a drop in traffic by nearly 32 percent in some parts of the city, reports El País. The new rules impose strict restrictions on which vehicles can enter an area of just under two square miles in the city’s downtown. The plan, known as Madrid Central, is an attempt to lower the city’s nitrogen dioxide levels, which have exceeded European limits since 2010 and are thought to cause aro

The recent boom in artificial intelligence has produced impressive results in a somewhat surprising realm: the world of image and video generation. The latest example comes from chip designer Nvidia, which today published research showing how AI-generated visuals can be combined with a traditional video game engine. The result is a hybrid graphics system that could one day be used in video games, movies, and virtual reality.“It’s a new way to render video content using deep learning

Verizon and Samsung have announced plans to release a 5G smartphone in the first half of 2019, representing what will be one of the most high-profile US debuts for the new mobile networking standard. There aren’t any details yet on the device itself, but Bloomberg previously reported that the two companies were in talks to bring a 5G version of the upcoming Galaxy S10 to the US.
Samsung and Verizon will be attending Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii this week, and wi

At a time when it’s still pretty hard to get much 4K content to watch over the air, Japanese public broadcaster NHK began its regular 8K channel service this weekend, becoming the first broadcaster in the world to do so. As you might expect, I don’t have an 8K TV, an 8K receiver, or the correct satellite dish in order to watch at home — almost no-one in Japan does at this point. But NHK has set up theaters and demo stations at a new mall in Tokyo called Shibuya Stream, appropr

Update December 3rd, 6:47AM ET: The crew successfully launched to space on the Soyuz and reached orbit about 10 minutes after takeoff. The Soyuz capsule will spend about six hours in orbit before docking with the ISS at 12:36PM ET.
Original Story: Early Monday morning, a crew of three astronauts are set to launch to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz rocket — the first time people will ride on the Soyuz after the vehicle broke apart mid-flight in October with two passenger

A new report from Bloomberg today reiterates what we’ve been hearing about Apple’s timeline for adopting the next generation of cellular connectivity, 5G, by suggesting the first compatible iPhone won’t come before 2020. Earlier rumors and reports pointed to the 2020 iPhone as the likeliest candidate to add 5G support, even though mobile carriers and Apple’s Android rivals are going to be rolling the new technology out all through 2019.
Citing multiple sources familiar w

Huawei’s Nova 4, the phone that ditches the display notch for a circular “hole punch” cutout, will be released on December 17th, according to a new teaser image posted on Weibo (via MySmartPrice). The handset was first spotted during a livestream for the 18th birthday of Chinese singer Jackson Yee.Huawei isn’t the only manufacturer working on a display with the new form factor. Alongside a tease for its long-awaited foldable smartphone, Samsung also announced a range of

Google has started rolling out transcriptions for Android’s call screening service (via 9to5Google). The Call Screen feature uses Google Assistant to answer the phone on your behalf to screen calls from unknown numbers. The only way to see a conversation before was to witness it in real time — the new transcriptions save a copy for later viewing.To find it, head into the Recent Calls section of the Phone app, find a call that Google’s screening service answered on your behalf,

When I first joined BlaBlaCar as CTO, more than a decade ago, the European tech startup scene was on the edge of a revolution. I was joining a small team and excited to leave my job as a mobile development manager to work on the platform full-time. The technological needs of a fast-growing business change quickly and often. So as the company evolved, so did my role. It was my job to anticipate and respond to these needs, making sure the platform could continue to handle a growing number of

Apple may update its truly wireless AirPods earbuds with support for wireless charging in the first quarter of 2019, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Apple is said to have chalked out big plans for its AirPods in the near future: analyst Ming-Chi Kuo noted that the company is expected to update its truly wireless earbuds with wireless charging support in 2019, and launch an all-new version of its AirPods in 2020. Kuo reportedly referred to the new update as a ‘model with wireless chargi