Technology news

NBCUniversal is joining the streaming wars, announcing that it will launch its own standalone streaming service in 2020.An ad-supported version of the streaming service will be free for NBC TV subscribers in the United States, and will also be made available to Comcast Cable and Sky subscribers internationally, too. Paid versions of the app, which include an ad-free version for those who don’t want to sit through commercials, will also be available for $12.99, according to a CNBC report.

The publisher of Red Dead Redemption 2 has thrown down a legal gauntlet against the security company Pinkerton — which demanded royalties for using its name in the game. According to a complaint filed late last week, Pinkerton sent Take-Two Interactive a cease-and-desist letter over the characters of Andrew Milton and Edgar Ross, a pair of Pinkerton agents and major antagonists in the game. Now, Take-Two is suing to have the characters declared fair use, arguing that they’re part of

The Pwn2Own contest is one of the biggest events in competitive security research, a place where up-and-coming hackers can show off their skills and earn money by finding new vulnerabilities in widely used programs. But this year, there will be a new target on the list — a brand-new Tesla Model 3.
Tesla is partnering with the event’s organizers to include the Model 3 as the sole target in the automotive category, challenging hackers to find new ways to compromise the car’s sec

CBS All Access announced today its plans to add another Star Trek series to its lineup, with Michelle Yeoh set to star in the leading role as Captain Philippa Georgiou. Today’s news confirms the rumors that had been circulating since November, and it means this Star Trek Discovery spinoff will be the fourth series to expand on the Star Trek franchise for CBS’s streaming service.What’s the show about? SPOILER ALERT:
The series will follow Captain Georgiou’s alternate coun

Apple says it wanted to use Qualcomm modems in the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR — but that Qualcomm refused to sell them after Apple sued over its licensing practices. “In the end they would not support us or sell us chips,” Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams revealed today during his testimony to the US Federal Trade Commission, as spotted by CNET. Apple had to use Intel’s LTE chips instead.
Qualcomm is currently on trial, accused of engaging in monopolist

TCL’s 6-Series 4K HDR televisions are the best that you can get for under $1,000, and you have the rare opportunity to pick up the 65-inch version for $849.99 — it usually hovers just north of $1,000 — at Amazon, Walmart, and Target. If that’s a bit too big for your home or your price range, the 55-inch version is discounted to $629.99 from its usual $799.99.
TCL’s 6-Series is a good choice if you’re looking to make some budget-friendly home entertainment rev

London residents who use Uber will have to pay an extra 15 pence (USD $0.19) per mile under the ride-hail company’s new Clean Air plan that was announced Monday. The surcharge will go toward helping Uber drivers switch from dirty, fossil fuel burning cars to cleaner, battery-electric versions — with the goal of having all cars on the app be fully electric in London by 2025.The average trip in London is around three miles (4.8 km), so riders can expect to pay an extra 45 pence (USD $

Sony is enabling cross-play support for Rocket League today. This now allows PS4 Rocket League players to play against gamers on Xbox One, Nintendo’s Switch, or Steam PC players. Sony had previously limited Rocket League cross-play to just between PS4 and PC, and Rocket League developers Psyonix revealed it was waiting on Sony to stop blockingcross-play. Sony eventually backed down on both Fortnite and Rocket League cross-play with a new policy change last year.
The policy changed followe

Electric scooter company Bird apologized today for demanding that the publication Boing Boing remove an article about a $30 way to hack Bird scooters, as first spotted by the BBC. Bird said, “This was our mistake and we apologize to Cory Doctorow.” Bird had originally issued Boing Boing a notice of copyright infringement saying that the article writer, journalist Cory Doctorow, had promoted sales of an illegal product designed to bypass the scooters’ proprietary copyright prot

One of the first profile pictures I ever posted featured me, front and center, with a Yoda backpack hanging from my shoulders, a Freddy Krueger-inspired sweater, a pair of baggy blue jeans, and a look on my face that said “undateable.”It’s adorable, and I only came across it, buried deep in my Facebook gallery, thanks to a movement that caught on over the weekend. The “glow-up challenge,” as many have dubbed it, asks people to post one of their earliest Facebook pr

Sony’s 1000X M3 noise-canceling headphones are a terrific product: they’re comfortable, they deliver pleasing sound, eliminate outside noise, and they charge by USB-C. I don’t feel any regrets for dropping $350 on them. But as we’ve moved into winter, I have come across one significant frustration: these headphones aren’t very good at handling cold weather. A usually superb listening experience can be interrupted — and in some cases, ruined — when the t

Today, Google is announcing that it’s rolling out RCS Chat on the Google Fi network. Google is also announcing that it’s improving data speeds for users who roam.
The RCS rollout follows limited support on Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Google is making RCS available on a broader array of phones than Verizon and T-Mobile; it should work on Pixel phones, the Moto G6, LG V35, LG G7, and Android One Moto X. It can also work on other Android phones, provided you download the Google Mess

In 1938, just before World War II broke out, the city of London (population 9 million) only had eight pints of blood in storage ready for transfusion. For context, consider that the human body contains nine pints.
“By then, Britain knew to expect mass casualties, and it was pretty well expected that war would break out soon and London would be bombed,” says journalist Rose George. The men in power were preparing for war. They just weren’t thinking about the importance of blood

For the past year, discussions involving data privacy have heated up in Congress, and new federal legislation now seems inevitable. Today, a leading technology policy think tank, supported by Google, Amazon, and Facebook, proposed a “grand bargain” with lawmakers, arguing that any new federal data privacy bill should preempt state privacy laws and repeal the sector-specific federal ones entirely.The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s (ITIF) proposal lays out a

Norwegian authorities have opened an investigation into reports that millions of Tidal’s streams never happened, reports Dagens Næringsliv, a Norwegian financial newspaper. Økokrim, Norway’s National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime, is conducting the investigation after reports emerged last May that 320 million streams of Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo were fraudulent.If true, infl

Days after GM announced that Cadillac would become its lead electric vehicle brand, the automaker teased a few images of its first planned EV.Cadillac isn’t sharing any other details beyond the images — no name, no specs, nothing. That information will be revealed “closer to launch,” the company says. But Cadillac is positioning itself to become an aggressive player in the nascent EV market as it seeks to pivot from mass-market EVs to the luxury end of the spectrum.pivot

Justina Ireland’s story, “A Theory of Flight,” imagines a future in which one woman recognizes the barriers of getting to space, so she takes the issue into her own hands with an open-sourced rocket, kickstarting a revolution to open up the skies to everyone.Ireland received acclaim for her best-selling novel, Dread Nation, which imagines an alternate Civil War. The appearance of zombies after the battles of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville alter the war forever, and a young wo

Facebook continues to undergo the most contentious period in its history, as it struggles with the fallout from numerous scandals related to data privacy, misinformation, and fake news, as well as larger issues around the social network’s corrosive role in democratic societies.But as young users abandon the platform for the hipper Instagram and the site’s reputation keeps taking a hit, one key feature has remained absolutely vital: events. Facebook is still the best place to organiz

Oppo is gearing up to announce the world’s first 10x optical zoom system for a smartphone, according to My Drivers (via GSMArena). The company is holding an event on January 16th with the tagline “十所为见,” which roughly translates to “ten times the view, see you soon.” A few weeks ago, Twitter leaker Ice Universe cited an unnamed “Oppo official” who said that we’d see the 10x technology launched at either the Consumer Ele

Samsung’s new mid-range Galaxy M series will be launching in India on January 28th, the company has announced on Amazon India, via India Today. The lineup is expected to consist of three phones in total (the M10, M20, and M30), all of them featuring Samsung’s new “Infinity-V” teardrop display.
The announcement of the new India-focused phones comes as Samsung is under intense pressure from Chinese rivals in the country. According to data from Counterpoint, Xiaomi overtook

Lest there was any doubt about how seriously Samsung is taking the 10th anniversary of its Galaxy Android smartphone line, the company has today issued a press release celebrating its takeover of central Paris with large billboards promising the next stage of its evolution will be shown off on February 20th. The Korean company is celebrating its national heritage by printing out two designs in its native alphabet, Hangul, with one of them reading “the future unfolds” and the other s

A picture of a plain little egg has poached the title of most-liked Instagram post from Kylie Jenner. The photograph, uploaded on January 4th, had the explicit aim of overtaking Jenner’s record breaking birth announcement to become the most-liked post on the service. The egg post officially passed Jenner’s 18 million likes on Sunday evening, and currently has just over 24.5 million likes.In an Instagram story responding to the win, the account’s owner “Egg Gang” sa