Technology news

Porsche’sfirst all-electric sports car might be the most hotly anticipated vehicle of 2019. Even Tesla owners are hooked.
In a recent interview with CNET, Porsche North America president and CEO Klaus Zellmer said if everyone who has placed a deposit to pre-order the car actually buys it, the Taycan will be sold out in its first year of production.
Who are these early reservation customers? According to Zellmer, more than half have not owned or do not own a Porsche. More specifically,

Hot pickles should be eaten cautiously, with plenty of preparation in the event of extreme sourness and heat.
Not every little kid knows that. Twitter user @iamlaurans recently fed a hot pickle to her nephew who was begging to have a taste, only to have him collapse in agony.
Be careful what kind of pickle you wish for, folks.
SEE ALSO: Dog completely overjoyed after getting 24 tennis balls as a gift
@IamLaurans believes that her nephew's reaction wasn't all that exaggerated:
"He’s very dr

After the year Mark Zuckerberg’shad, you’d think he’d struggle to appear so chipper.
“I’m proud of the progress we’ve made,” he said in an end-of-year note posted on his Facebook page for everyone to see. Acknowledging that the social network played its part in the spread of hate speech, election interference and misinformation, Zuckerberg’s note seemed more upbeat about his response to the hurricane of hurt caused by the company’s laiss

Netflix is notoriously cagey about audience statistics, but even the most secretive among us can't help bragging sometimes.
Following the release of the sci-fi thriller Bird Box, the company claimed in a tweet that a staggering 45 million accounts watched the film over its debut week.
SEE ALSO: Despite lukewarm reviews, people are enamored with 'Bird Box'Took off my blindfold this morning to discover that 45,037,125 Netflix accounts have already watched Bird Box — best first 7 days ever fo

Sandra Bullock’s star power can still sell a movie, apparently. Though reviews for the Netflix horror film “Bird Box” have been lukewarm — the movie has a respectable, but not outstanding, score of 65 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — it has still managed to break records for the streaming service, Netflix said this afternoon.
The company announced in a tweet that more than 45 million Netflix accounts have now streamed “Bird Box,” which set a new record

A huge blue light flashed brightly over over the New York City skyline late Thursday night. New Yorkers filled social media with photos and videos of the phenomenon, which appeared to be centered over the borough of Queens. In short, people freaked out.
Con Edison quickly put everyone’s alien-conspiracy theories to bed. The utility company tweeted that what New Yorkers were seeing was the effect of a brief electrical fire that broke out at a substation in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly moving full speed ahead when it comes to autonomous driving.  
Based on an email Electrek obtained this week, Musk is searching for Tesla employees to test out a new hardware update for the currently semi-autonomous driver assistance feature, Autopilot.
SEE ALSO: Here's all the ways you can make your Tesla fart
We reached out to Tesla to confirm the authenticity of the email, but haven't heard back.
The new self-driving program has "over 1000% more capabili

Bandersnatch is Netflix’s new interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style movie that ties into the Black Mirror universe. However, it won’t play on every Netflix-enabled device.Bandersnatch was written using Twine, an open-source platform that allows for interactive fiction and narrative-heavy games, but that requires devices with a level of technological sophistication in order to deliver a proper interactive experience. An email from Netflix confirms that Bandersnatch isn’t

Netflix is no longer allowing new customers on iOS to pay for the streaming service directly through an in-app subscription. It’s the latest example of a company with a high-profile, essential mobile app ditching Apple’s payment system to retain more profits for itself and stop handing the iPhone and iPad maker a cut of every subscription activated within the Netflix app. VentureBeat first reported the change, which Netflix confirmed with a short “we no longer support iTunes a

Dell returned to the public market on Friday, ending a long saga that began when CEO and founder Michael Dell took the declining company private in 2013 through a $25 billion buyout with Silver Lake. The next five years saw Dell make gains in cloud computing and the enterprise, and the company’s gaming PC division is also a strong performer. Dell opened at $46 on Friday under the NYSE symbol DELL and quickly started trading up.Earlier this year, Dell announced it would become a public com

It seems someone took Every Frame a Painting literally: The Very Slow Movie Player is a device that turns cinema into wallpaper, advancing the image by a single second every hour. The result is an interesting household object that makes something new of even the most familiar film.
The idea occurred to designer and engineer Bryan Boyer during one of those times we all have where we are sitting at home thinking of ways to celebrate slowness.
“Can a film be consumed at the speed of reading a

Twitter may be the most stagnant of the big social networks. The service, which has largely stopped adding users, is more of a static communication and information utility, and 2018 underscored that Twitter leadership wants to keep it that way, even when it proves a double-edged sword.Keeping Twitter at the forefront of news and culture means, as a platform, it hardly ever undergoes any drastic changes. As a result, the company has left its trickiest problems unsolved while giving people who ha

Sensor data platform Samsaraconfirmed this morning that it had closed a new round of funding from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst that values the startup at $3.6 billion.
The news was first reported by Cheddar, which spotted a filing with the state of Delaware on December 21 disclosing Samsara’s intent to raise a $100 million round at more than double the valuation it garnered upon its $50 million Series D this March.
“Our growth comes from bringing t

Right now, there’s a new Will Ferrell comedy playing on more than 2,000 screens, and yet it’s barely attracted any attention or commentary. Trailers for Holmes & Watson, a comic take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, starring Ferrell and John C. Reilly, were relatively scant. And pre-release buzz was nonexistent, due in part to Sony refusing to screen the movie for critics. The few critics who dutifully slogged out to theaters to cover the movie’s Christmas Da

It's the end of the year, and for many of us that means taking a moment to reflect on decisions past. For Mark Zuckerberg, however, it means taking a moment to bask in your manifold and unqualified successes. 
The Facebook CEO published a roughly 1,000-word post on Dec. 28 detailing his company's various wins over the course of 2018 that, while admittedly helpfully informing the most oblivious of readers that there is still work to be done, seems completely at odds with how the rest of the

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is Netflix’s new choose-your-own-adventure interactive special and, in traditional Black Mirror fashion, is full of fun Easter eggs — including giving people the chance to play one of the games featured in the film.Bandersnatch introduces viewers to a fictional game development studio, run by an ambitious leader who wants to turn the company, Tuckersoft, into the “Motown of games.” The goal is to produce a series of hit titles that will reward

Alexa is a powerful tool — and one that's easy for little kids to weaponize.
One mother, Yerelyn Cueva, recently caught her son Jariel using Alexa to do his math homework.
Can we blame him? What else is Alexa for except to perform the most basic operations we could otherwise complete ourselves?
SEE ALSO: Michelle Obama's letter to her younger self is so tender it has broken me
Give the kid credit — subtraction isn't easy, and at least he's not asking Alexa to add two plus two.
Amazon

A nationwide CenturyLink outage has knocked out 911 voice calls in parts of the US and affected everything from Verizon mobile data to ATM withdrawals, lottery drawings, and hospital patient records. The downtime, which also impacts CenturyLink’s residential internet customers, began Thursday and has now stretched on for more than 24 hours.FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced Friday that such a delay is “unacceptable” and said the commission is investigating the ongoing outage afte

For North Korean defectors, this is a nightmare come to life.
Hackers stole the personal information of 997 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, the South Korean government reported Friday. 
The identity of the hackers is still unknown. But experts are reportedly worried for the safety and security of defectors and their families, according to the BBC.
SEE ALSO: North Korea officially blocks Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
Hana centers are South Korea's resettlement agencies that wor

AT&T's Netgear Nighthawk 5G hotspot, the first consumer mobile 5G device, has been on the market for about a week now, but it's hard to find any evidence that anyone's using itOne post on Reddit shows a Speedtest result of 194.88Mbps down — impressive, until you see that the Redditor got 187.44Mbps on AT&T's 4G network in the same location.
Otherwise, AT&T's, Netgear's, and Reddit's forums are deathly quiet when it comes to any actual 5G users, and Ookla's Speedtest Intelligenc

Calendaring and note-taking apps have never really filled the void left behind when we moved away from our old, paper-based daily planners to digital devices. But a newly launched iOS app called Capsicum may help to change that. Like real-world daily planners from years ago, Capsicum lets you not only track your events and to-dos, it also offers a place to track other things not tied to a specific date and time — like your larger, longer-term goals, journal entries and even your daily

Chinese schools are now tracking the exact location of their students using chip-equipped “smart uniforms” in order to encourage better attendance rates, according to a report from state-run newspaper The Global Times (via The Telegraph).
The implementation is just about as unsettling as “using smart technology to track students’ whereabouts” sounds. Each uniform has two chips in the shoulders which are used to track when and where the students enter or exit the sc

Remember when Presidents used to read books, listen to music, and share innocuous lists?
President Obama, for example, recently shared his end-of-year list, featuring the books, movies, and music that touched him the most. His taste is impeccable and, most importantly, similar to mine.
The former president included queer favorites like Brandi Carlile and Janelle Monaé, books on the death of democracy (charming), and movies like Won't You Be My Neighbor, the Mr. Rogers documentary.
The who

Google Maps on Apple CarPlay
$0 (free on CarPlay-enabled cars)View Product
The Good
Really easy to connect • Similar to Google Maps on iOS • CarPlay integrates well with texts •calls •and music streaming
The Bad
Google Maps not native experience • Difficult to input destination info mid-ride • Not as full-featured as iOS version of Google Maps
The Bottom Line
If you're an iPhone owner but prefer Google Maps to Apple Maps, the CarPlay version is a smooth, albeit lim

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to watch
“Her Only Living Son,” the final segment of the 2017 horror anthology X

After a year of no new Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker's trippy, life-destroying sci-fi series returned with an interactive choose-your-own-adventure style game disguised as a TV movie. Its name? "Bandersnatch." Its purpose? To drive Twitter completely up the wall. 
SEE ALSO: 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch' marks the dawn of a new era in television
"Bandersnatch"uses Netflix's interactive story features to allow the audience to choose what happens to Stefan, a young video game developer living i

After a year of no new Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker's trippy, life-destroying sci-fi series returned with an interactive choose-your-own-adventure style game disguised as a TV movie. Its name? "Bandersnatch." Its purpose? To drive Twitter completely up the wall. 
SEE ALSO: 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch' marks the dawn of a new era in television
"Bandersnatch"uses Netflix's interactive story features to allow the audience to choose what happens to Stefan, a young video game developer living i

911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. went down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center.
The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and caused disruption across 911 call centers through Friday. Some states saw their services restored throughout the day. CenturyLink did not sy what caused the outage beyond an issue with a “network element,” but said around 11am ET on Friday that the company said that it