Technology news

A recent update to Facebook’s Community Guidelines worried some users that the company was placing strict new limits on discussing sex and sexual orientation — but Facebook says users have little reason to worry.
In October, the company added a new section to its guidelines that covers “Sexual Solicitation.” In it, the company writes that people cannot post content that “engages in explicit sexual solicitation,” which could mean “following, offering, or

The Federal Trade Commission’s top consumer protection official is prohibited from handling the cases involving 120 different companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Uber, according to financial disclosure documents published by Public Citizen today.
Andrew Smith, who heads the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau, would be in charge of handling investigations into some of the country’s largest companies and any consumer protection violations that may occur. But due

Add Aston Martin to the growing list of companies using nostalgia to sell customers on the idea of an electric vehicle future. The British automaker announced this week that it’s starting a “Heritage EV” program where owners of classic Aston Martins can have their cars converted to an all-electric powertrain.Wouldn’t this be sacrilege, you might ask? That’s an argument for another day. Aston Martin’s starting this program for a very specific reason. Cities ar

YouTube’s most impactful moments of 2018 differ depending on who you ask.Most creators would probably point to Logan Paul’s controversy surrounding his time in Japan’s Aokigahara forest, a multimillion-dollar boxing match between some of YouTube’s most prolific individuals, and the seemingly never-ending battle between PewDiePie and Bollywood production company T-Series. There were also multiple breakups between adored YouTubers, the rise of Johnny Johnny Yes Papa as a p

Medical literature is littered with strange cases of humans doing ridiculous things, and doctors trying to clean up the resulting bodily messes. Take the case of a drinking game gone horribly wrong in 18th-century France: one man challenged his drinking buddies to swallow part of his glass. He broke off a piece of the cup, chewed up the fragments, and swallowed them. Needless to say, doctors got involved, securing a place for the drunken night in the annals of history.The true tale of the glass

Qualcomm announced today that it’s working with Mozilla to bring a compatible version of Firefox to Snapdragon-powered Windows computers on ARM. The new 64-bit version of Firefox will be optimized to run on these computers for better performance.Firefox is making each browser tab run on individual cores in the CPU and Qualcomm, which has announced the eight-core Snapdragon 8cx earlier today, will have plenty of cores to spare. There are few additional details available.“Mozilla is e

You’ll soon be able to listen to an audio news playlist curated by Google Assistant to inform you on the topics you’re interested in. Google’s latest Assistant feature uses artificial intelligence to help make these custom news bundles, and it’s available today for a limited number of users.
The audio news playlist will be assembled in the moments after you request one. It starts with a quick briefing of current top stories and any small updates on relevant topics. You&r

Early Saturday morning in China, a rocket will launch, carrying a lander and a rover bound for the Moon. It will mark the beginning of China’s ambitious lunar mission known as Chang’e-4, which will attempt to land spacecraft on the Moon’s far side — the region that always faces away from Earth. No other nation has ever attempted such a feat — which means the mission could catapult China into spaceflight history.
So far, China is among an elite group of three countr

The “X” stands for “extreme.” That’s what Qualcomm’s marketing department wants you to think about the new eight-core Snapdragon 8cx.It’s a brand-new processor for always-connected Windows laptops and 2-in-1 convertible PCs, and from Qualcomm’s perspective, it might seem a little extreme. Physically, it’s the largest processor the company has ever made, with the most powerful CPU and GPU Qualcomm has devised yet. Qualcomm says it’ll be

Microsoft has always used pop-ups, notifications, and warning signs to sway people away from installing Chrome on Windows 10. The software maker even performed battery tests to show how bad Chrome is for your laptop’s battery life. With the news that Microsoft is moving to the Chromium rendering engine for Edge, all of these comparisons and notifications are about to become irrelevant. Microsoft now has a reason to make Chrome run better on Windows.
“We will offer our Windows platfo

Microsoft is moving its Edge Windows browser to Google’s open source Chromium rendering engine. The move will mean Edge will be far more compatible with websites, but Microsoft will also be able to contribute to the underlying code of the Chrome browser and ensure it improves on Windows 10. Google has welcomed Microsoft’s move in a statement to The Verge.
“Chrome has been a champion of the open web since inception and we welcome Microsoft to the community of Chromium contribut

Verizon has announced a new discount for emergency first responders. The carrier already offers special plans for government agencies, but the new discount applies to personal consumer plans for first responders, not just their professional lines.State and local police, fire, and EMS workers are all eligible
State and local police, fire, and EMS workers are all eligible for the discount, be they current employees, retirees, or volunteers. Eligible customers can get $15 off their bill for a sing

In an effort to reduce gender bias in its translations, Google Translate will now show gender-specific translations for some languages. Previously, Google Translate would only show one translation for words that could either have a feminine or masculine form. Translations for words like “strong” or “doctor” would skew masculine, while “beautiful” and “nurse” would skew feminine. Now, Google Translate will show both feminine and masculine translati

Facebook is testing a new feature that allows merchants to more efficiently sell items on a live stream. When a seller demonstrates items on their stream, customers might see a screenshot button that lets them take photos of items they want to buy and message the merchant directly. The merchant can then send payment requests through Messenger to streamline the process.
The feature is currently being tested in Thailand, where a community of independent sellers have recently taken to Facebook Liv

Every season of Fortnite brings with it a bewildering amount of change — you can see footage that is months apart and feel like you’re looking at totally different games. With the introduction of planes this morning, Fortnite has once again reinvented itself in a way that might be familiar to fans of a certain large-scale first-person shooter.
Over the last year, the battle royale game has placed more emphasis on vehicles through inclusions such as the shopping cart, the all-terrain

Podcasts are now officially available on Pandora for all listeners as of today. The company announced the arrival in a blog post, saying it has hundreds of podcasts with over 100,000 episodes across genres like true crime, technology, music, and more.
Now in the Pandora app, there will be a new tab called “Recommended Podcasts For You,” and users can discover new podcasts throughout the app. For now, it looks like Pandora is launching with fan favorites like This American Life and R

Contentful, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million.
It’s been less than

The new Disney movie Ralph Breaks the Internet has been the top film at the box office for a few weeks in a row, not a particular surprise in a holiday season where people are looking for films that will entertain kids without boring adults. The original 2012 Wreck-It Ralph was a revelation for Disney films — a fleet, funny, but emotional movie that took its audience inside the world of video games, and focused on a game villain, Ralph, who wanted to be seen as a hero. He finds his best f

This week, Tumblr announced that it would ban all adult content from its platform and said any user who was hurt by the decision could simply migrate to another site. But creators and readers alike don’t believe there’s another website that fosters the same kind of sex-positive spaces that Tumblr has. It’s as though Tumblr CEO Jeff D’Onofrio has failed to understand his own platform, how unique these communities are to Tumblr, and how unlikely it is for them to survive b

Microsoft is announcing some significant changes to its Edge browser today. The software giant is beginning to rebuild Microsoft Edge to run on Chromium, the same open-source web rendering engine that powers Google’s Chrome browser. This means Edge will soon be powered by Blink and the V8 JavaScript engines. It’s a big move that means Microsoft is joining the open-source community in a much bigger way for the web.
“Ultimately, we want to make the web-experience better for many

T-Mobile CEO John Legere is essentially a character all his own, representing the carrier’s brand in an almost cartoonish manner, much in the same way that Mickey Mouse is a visual shorthand for Disney.
Now, he’s releasing an actual cookbook called #SlowCookerSunday – Leadership, Life and Slow Cooking with CEO and Chef, John Legere. (Obviously, Legere being Legere, it’s also a business advice book in addition to offering crock pot recipes.)If none of those words make sen

Amazon announced today that it’s beta testing Alexa Answers, an invitation-only program for users to add responses for questions that Alexa can’t answer. Amazon says that in the last month of its internal Alexa Answers beta program, 100,000 responses have been added and served to customers “millions of times.”Starting today, selected customers who have received email invitations can participate via the Alexa Answers website. Users can browse through various topic categor

As part of Best Buy’s “20 Days of Doorbuster” deals, Lenovo’s 10-inch Smart Display is nearly $100 off. Normally priced at $249.99, you can purchase it for $159.99 until the end of today.To put this deal into perspective, Google’s Home Hub, which has a smaller (albeit brilliant) display, was $99 during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. Lenovo’s model is a few inches bigger, and it has more panache, but the main difference is that it features a camera

AT&T is the first major US carrier to add support for eSIM on the iPhone XS and XR, allowing its network to be used in a dual-SIM setup.
One of the XS and XR’s headline features was support for dual SIM cards, allowing the phones to be connected to two networks at once. But at the phones’ launch, the feature didn’t really work: major US carriers had issues supporting dual-SIM users, and none of them supported the eSIM feature that actually allowed the carrier to be on the

Smash Bros. is, at its very core, a multiplayer experience. The game loses something when you’re playing by yourself. Over the years, Smash’s developers have tried different ways of offering a solo experience, like story modes, to varying degrees of success. But Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which launches tomorrow on the Nintendo Switch, has finally cracked the code. The game introduces a new “spirits” mode, which, while initially very confusing, actually manages to turn