Technology news

After years of facing suspicion from US authorities, Huawei is now standing trial for fraud. Today, a bail hearing was held for Huawei’s chief financial officer, who was arrested in Canada on Saturday at the request of US law enforcement. The CFO, Meng Wanzhou, is facing extradition to the US for conspiring to defraud banking institutions, according to The Star Vancouver.
Many lined up to see Meng’s bail hearing today, after the extremely high-profile arrest that signified the first

Oooohhhhhh, the Epic Rap Battles of History video guys are back after a two-year hiatus, and they're coming for two of the most shade-able figures in the tech world: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
Epic Rap Battles is a video series that pits public figures against each other with fictional and non-fictional beefs. In 2016, their two rhyme spitters where none other than, you guessed it, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
This time around, the robotic Zuckerberg faces off against the pompous Musk.

Apple has released the first Beddit sleep tracker since acquiring the Finnish company in 2017, via CNET. The Beddit 3.5 Sleep Monitor is a thin sensor strip that can be placed under the bedsheet to track body movements through the night. It’s available to purchase now for $150 on Apple’s website and in stores.
The 2mm-thin sleep tracker can measure sleep time, heart rate, breathing, snoring, and bedroom temperature and humidity. The advantage over other sleep monitoring fitness trac

The InSight Mars lander accomplished a perfect landing last week on the Elysium Planitia region of the planet, where it is hard at work preparing to drill into the surface (and taking selfies, of course). But one “unplanned treat” is a recording of the wind rolling across the Martian plains — which you can listen to right here.
Technically the lander isn’t rigged to detect sound, at least in the way you’d do it if you were deliberately trying to record it. But the r

At a bail hearing today, new details emerged surrounding Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Vancouver, Canada over the weekend.
The daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfeiis accused of fraud with a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison, according to journalists present at the hearing. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges Meng allowed SkyCom, an unofficial Huawei subsidiary, to do business in Iran, violating U.S. sanctions against the country and misleading&

Artificial intelligence systems and creators are in dire need of direct intervention by governments and human rights watchdogs, according to a new report from researchers at Google, Microsoft and others at AI Now. Surprisingly, it looks like the tech industry just isn’t that good at regulating itself.
In the 40-page report (PDF) published this week, the New York University-based organization (with Microsoft Research and Google-associated members) shows that AI-based tools have been deploye

Epic Rap Battles of History just came back triumphant after almost two years of silence, and the opponents in the latest battle are none other than the most infamous CEOs of the year: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg versus Tesla’s Elon Musk. The choice of rivals is not a huge surprise — I’ve been seeing this match-up requested in comments for at least the last year. Series creators “NicePeter” Shukoff (who plays Zuckerberg) and “EpicLloyd” Ahlquist (wh

Remember Rex Tillerson, Trump's largely accomplishment-free Secretary of State?
Well he's back, this time with some long overdue criticism of our Commander in Chief.
On Thursday, Tillerson spoke at a fundraiser for for the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The former Secretary of State "let loose," as much as that limestone rock of a man can be loose about anything.
"When the President would say, 'Here's what I want to do and here's how I want to do it.' And I'd have to say to him, 'Well Mr.

Xiaomi showed off a 5G version of its latest flagship phone, the Mi Mix 3, at a conference in China this week. In the demo, Xiaomi demonstrated how you can surf the web and stream live videos more quickly through the 5G network.The 5G version of the Mi Mix 3 runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 and an X50 5G modem with a maximum download speed of 2Gbps. The regular version runs on the Snapdragon 845, the processor that was found in many Android phones in 2018.
Xiaomi has been working on 5G technol

Apple has acquired artist development startup Platoon, reports TechCrunch. Platoon works with creators to produce and distribute their work, and it uses analytics to target audiences and build marketing strategies. Notable acts Platoon has worked with in the past include Billie Eilish and Jorja Smith.
The acquisition of Platoon could serve to bolster Apple’s Up Next platform, which allocates resources to up-and-coming artists. Rapper 6lack was the first participant in Up Next when it debu

A professor out of Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health says that people should only be consuming 6 fries per serving...yes, 6Of course, the internet had something to say about it. Still, studies have shown a connection to eating fries and obesity...so it is something to be considered, to an extent.   Read more...More about Mashable Video, Healthy Eating, Healthy Lifestyle, Food Porn, and Internet Culture

Essential has acquired CloudMagic, pairing the struggling smartphone maker with the company behind the shut-down email app Newton, it confirmed to TechCrunch today. It’s a weird convergence of two underdogs, but makes some amount of sense when you look at what’s supposed to be next for Essential.
Newton Mail was shut down in September, in another sign that premium email apps are experiencing much difficulty competing against the free options offered by Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

Things are not looking up for Huawei's CFO. 
Wanzhou Meng, arrested Dec. 1 in Vancouver and facing possible extradition to the U.S., had a bail hearing today in which it was made clear that she is looking at some serious jail time for allegedly misrepresenting to authorities the relationship between Huawei and SkyCom, which did business in Iran. 
According to AP, the prosecutor said she portrayed the two companies as separate, while the U.S. claims Huawei and SkyCom are connected, and

Ugh, don't you hate it when the police rush you into turning yourself in?
A Facebook post led to an unexpectedly hilarious exchange between the Richland Police Department and a wanted criminal who was taking his sweet time.
SEE ALSO: Puppy detained by police has now been released after massive social media campaign
For its weekly "Wanted Wednesday," the Washington police department posted a mugshot of 38-year-old Anthony Akers, who allegedly violated his probation. He has a history of illegal po

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took a puff off a joint three months ago and people are still talking about it. 
In a preview Friday for an upcoming 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl, Musk defends his brush with marijuana. 
"I am somewhat impulsive and don't want to adhere to some CEO template," he says. When she grills him on the pot, he replies, "I do not smoke pot. As anyone who watched that podcast can tell I have no idea how to smoke pot, or anything."
SEE ALSO: OK, everybody: Stop pot-s

Though many people still scratch their head at the idea of watching people play video games, Twitch and its content creators have proven that the platform is attractive to (even beloved by) tens of millions of people.
Got a friend or loved one who believes they have the skill, personality and wide open schedule to be successful on Twitch? The right gift might get the ball rolling.
(Note: It should go without saying that there is one piece of gear that a Twitch streamer truly needs, and that&rsqu

When it comes to getting a quality education, a robot could do far worse than a program at Yale. Machine learning researchers at the Ivy-League university recently started teaching robots about the nuances of social interaction. And there’s no better place to start than with possessions. One of the earliest social constructs that humans learn is the idea of ownership. That’s my bottle. Gimme that teddy bear. I want that candy bar and I will make your life a living hell if you don&rs

Google is bringing its Smart Reply feature to Hangouts Chat for G Suite, its workplace messaging platform. The feature is similar to Smart Reply in Gmail, and uses machine learning to propose three different replies to conversations happening in Chat. The feature is rolling out now to workplaces that are either now running extremely efficiently or have halted to a standstill.
Google is determined to put its intelligent assistive writing tools to good use in its products. There’s Smart Com

Leica’spricey — but sexy — CL camera is the closest thing you can get to an original portable luxury shooter without spending more than a used Toyota Corolla. The CL, which launched last year, is essentially a pared-down M series camera that has gotten rave reviews over the past year. Now, in time for Noel, Leica is offering a Street Kit that includes the CL along with a Leica Summicron-TL 23 mm f/2 lens. This flat pancake lens gives you a “tried and true 35 mm equivalent

Rapper 2 Milly yesterday revealed he was suing Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, for copying his dance, the Milly Rock, in one of their emotes. The problem, he says, is not just that he’s not being fairly credited and compensated — it’s that he’s just one of several artists who’ve been treated this way by the game company. (Mis)Appropriation In the complaint filed by 2 Milly’s (real name: Terrence Ferguson) lawyers in a California cour

We were duped. 
Or, at least, we were given some false hope. In the three years between 2014 and 2016, global carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels had finally stopped increasing and leveled out. Emissions weren't yet going down — but there was the potential that they had peaked. 
Perhaps, mused scientists, this was the fruitful beginning of humanity's collective response to alter the course of history, and in doing so, avoid the mounting woes wrought by climate chang

The FCC said today that it will investigate whether “major carriers” provided inaccurate information on their coverage areas as the agency determined where to send funds for rural broadband.The Mobility Fund II project is meant to allocate more than $4.5 billion to encourage building out mobile broadband service in rural areas. As part of the project, the FCC requested coverage maps from carriers, which it could then use to determine which areas needed support.
FCC said it reviewed

It appears that most mobile carriers, including O2and SoftBank, have recovered from yesterday’s cell phone network outage that was triggered by a shutdown of Ericsson equipment running on their networks. That shutdown appears to have been triggered by expired software certificates on the equipment itself.
While Ericssonacknowledged in their press release yesterday that expired certificates were at the root of the problem, you may be wondering why this would cause a shutdown. It turns