Technology news

Activision Blizzard has announced that it’s laying off 8 percent of its employees — roughly 770 people — as part of the company “de-prioritizing initiatives that are not meeting expectations.”
The news came on the heels of announcement of Activision Blizzard’s Q4 and 2018 earnings, where CEO Bobby Kotick gave the company’s “record results in 2018.” Kotick went on to comment that, “While our financial results for 2018 were the best in o

After months of dragging its feet, Sony finally started enabling cross-play between the PlayStation 4 and other consoles like the Nintendo Switch and Xbox One late last year with Fortnite, followed by Rocket League in January. But those two games remain the only titles with cross-console play, and some developers are calling out Sony for “playing favorites” with which games it is and isn’t allowing to have the feature, via Kotaku.
For its part, Sony’s Shawn Layden claime

Google may not be throwing in the towel on Android Things, but it’s at least neatly folding the towel and setting it on the ground. In a blog post today, Google said that it’s refocusing Android Things — its Android-based platform for smart devices — exclusively on smart speakers and smart displays. That’s a much narrower scope than the all-encompassing Internet of Things platform that Google had initially dreamed up.
When Android Things was first announced in Dece

Epic Games urged a judge to dismiss a lawsuit by rapper Terrence “2 Milly” Ferguson, who accused Epic of copying his “Milly Rock” dance moves in a Fortnite player emote. Epic responded to Ferguson’s complaint with a long list of legal defenses — including the claim that its dance emote, known as “Swipe It,” isn’t even using the same moves.
In its defense, Epic’s lawyers wrote that Ferguson’s dance — as seen in the music vid

Apple is reportedly planning an event on March 25th to launch its upcoming paid Apple News subscription service, according to a report from BuzzFeed.The event will reportedly focus on Apple’s service business, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see any new hardware, like the rumored iPad mini, AirPods, or long-anticipated AirPower charger. But the timing and theme of the event could give us an early look at its upcoming TV service, which is rumored to launch this spring.Apple is goin

Apple’s “Netflix for news” subscription service hasn’t launched yet, but a new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests the tech company is looking to take a 50 percent cut of revenue from the new service. The paid Apple News service is said to work a lot like Netflix or Hulu does for TV shows — users would pay a single monthly price to Apple and get access to a wide range of paid news sources and magazines all bundled together.But Apple is apparently running i

Verizon is facing a lawsuit from the Pennsylvania attorney general, after customers accused the company of failing to let them redeem a promotional offer for a free Amazon Echo.According to the suit, which was brought against the company this week by Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the company offered prospective customers a free Echo, and in some cases an Amazon Prime membership, if they signed up for a two-year contract.
Offered Echo as part of a two-year contract deal
Verizon sent an email to

Instagram is testing its direct message feature for the web on mobile and on the desktop, according to app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who tweeted a screenshot of the feature.Currently, the desktop experience on Instagram is a minimal, pared-down version of the mobile app that shows little more than the feed. There’s still no direct way to upload photos, and the service is slow to add new features. Browser notification support was added only last September. Some features, such as the ab

AT&T has caught a lot of (well-deserved) flak for its fake 5G Evolution network to the point that the company’s actual, real 5G network rollout hasn’t gotten as much notice. But that rollout is still happening, andtoday the carrier announced the next two cities: Chicago and Minneapolis, both of which should get AT&T’s real 5G network sometime later in 2019, via Engadget.The news is about par for the course for AT&T’s 5G ambitions so far: the company technical

Get ready to stick some ID on the outside of your drone — starting February 23rd, a new FAA rule will require all small unmanned aircraft to have their registration markings visible on the outside of their body, so law enforcement can easily find their owners.In a preview document published at the Federal Register (spotted by Bloomberg), the FAA says the move is in response to terrorism fears, specifically “the risk a concealed explosive device poses to first responders who must ope

Shane Dawson’s new two-part series investigates different popular conspiracy theories, including whether Chuck E. Cheese’s serves reused leftover pizza to customers. Now, following the success of Dawson’s documentary, a Chuck E. Cheese’s spokesperson told The Verge that claims made by Dawson are untrue.“The claims made in this video about Chuck E. Cheese’s and our pizza are unequivocally false,” the spokesperson said. “No conspiracies here —

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is no stranger to the occasional good deal on Amazon. We’ve seen the phone bundled with the likes of the Gear S3 smartwatch, the Amazon Echo Show, and the IconX earbuds, but today’s offer seems like the best yet. The 512GB model is discounted to $1,049 (its lowest price yet), and it comes with a Galaxy Tab A midrange tablet for free with purchase. The 128GB configuration qualifies for the bundle, too, but at $999, it’s hard to recommend since $50 more

Yesterday, over 100 executives, including many from the US’s most influential tech companies, signed onto a letter urging congressional leaders to protect Dreamers. The coalition argued that losing Dreamer protections would cost the US economy $350 billion in GDP and $90 billion in tax revenue.“These are our friends, neighbors, and coworkers,” the letter reads, “and they should not have to wait for court cases to be decided to determine their fate when Congress can act n

A combination of dwindling sea ice and an all-you-can-eat-buffet of garbage may be drawing a massive influx of polar bears to towns on a Russian archipelago. It’s a worst-case scenario for both the polar bears and people because proximity increases the potential for conflict.At least 52 polar bears have visited the village of Belushya Guba on the Novaya Zemlya islands in northern Russia over the past few months, The Washington Post reports. The bears are getting into homes and office buil

The world of Red Dead Online is getting a bit safer. Today Rockstar announced the next update for the game, which is focused primarily on reducing griefing, a problem that has plagued the online game since its debut late last year.
The update will include a handful of changes, the combination of which should make for an overall more pleasant experience. One of the biggest changes comes down to player visibility. Now, you’ll only be able to see other players if they’re within 150 met

Today, a group of Democratic senators wrote to officials at the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice, asking that they strike down a proposed merger deal between T-Mobile and Sprint. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) led eight of his colleagues in the letters, which are addressed to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim.
“Our enforcement officials are the last line of defense preventing reconsolidation of our telecommunications markets at the

The inspector general for the Pentagon announced yesterday that it will be reviewing how exactly SpaceX’s rockets became certified to launch payloads for the US Air Force back in 2015, Bloomberg first reported. In a letter to Heather Wilson, the secretary of the Air Force, the inspector general, Michael Roark, wants to know if the certification process complied with the Air Force’s guidelines for certifying new launch vehicles.
The news comes nearly four years after SpaceX fought an

Mediumis seeking to juice up its premium subscription content in its home market with the acquisition of The Bold Italic. The 10-year-old online culture magazine will go behind the $5 per month Medium membership paywall. The deal will keep The Bold Italic afloat when other San Francisco-local publications have struggled, following the shutdown of the The Oakland Tribune an SFist, plus the layoff of most of the Easy Bay Express.
The Bold Italiccould make Medium membership more appealing to Bay Ar

Porn and gambling companies are sneaking private apps on the iPhone, using the same tool that Apple busted Facebook and Google for inappropriately using last month. TechCrunch uncovered two dozen of these apps using Apple’s “developer enterprise program” to get loaded onto iOS devices outside of the App Store. Apple bans porn within apps, while gambling apps are permitted but strictly overseen.
There’s no indication that these apps inappropriately collected data on users

In the new comedy What Men Want, Taraji P. Henson plays a high-stakes sports agent who, after a slapstick-y mishap, gains the power to hear the inner thoughts of the men (and only the men) in her immediate vicinity. She immediately decides to use her power to get ahead at work. The premise and title may sound familiar: What Men Want is a remake of What Women Want, Nancy Meyers’ 2000 comedy starring Mel Gibson. This isn’t the first recent story to riff on a previous project by swappi

Tidal is staying on top of the social climate and its competition by allowing you to block music you don’t want to hear. It’s a page taken out of Spotify’s book, which recently enabled the feature after receiving pressure from their users.
Blocking artists or specific songs on Tidal affects the My Mix personalized playlists and track radio. Unless you unblock your selection(s) within the Tidal app’s settings, the previously blocked song or artist will never play again on

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 with 512GB of internal storage is $1,049, and it comes with a free Galaxy Tab A tablet with purchase for a limited time. This phone, sans bundle, retails for $1,249, though it can usually be found for around $1,100. The 128GB model currently costs $999 bundled with the tablet, though if you need more space for music, movies, and games, paying an extra $50 is a tiny premium that quadruples the amount of storage that you’ll get.
“It has the biggest screen, th

Learning a new language through immersion doesn’t mean you have to pack your bags and move to Europe for three months. Now, you just need to turn on Netflix. Language Learning with Netflix is a Chrome extension that lets you watch shows with two subtitles on at the same time so you can visually pair translations with dialogue and learn some new vocabulary in the process. It’s a clever service that makes use of Netflix’s massive catalog and all of the major languages in which i

Adobe has announced a new feature for its suite of photo-editing apps called Enhance Details that uses machine learning to artificially improve the resolution and picture quality of zoomed-in images. The results aren’t as dramatic as the “zoom and enhance” tropes of TV and film, but they do show how AI can help fill in details in digital pictures.The new tool will be available in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic CC, and Lightroom CC for Mac and Windows, and Adobe claims it

You probably use a cellphone for most (or all) of your calls, assuming you make voice calls at all. However, if you still have a landline, it can be hard to battle the barrage of spam calls that you will inevitably receive. According to a recent report cited in The Washington Post, Americans received 26.3 billion robocalls in 2018, up 46 percent from the previous year.Unfortunately, landline phones are as vulnerable to spam calls as mobile phones are, especially from (mostly) out-of-country sca

Former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly is running for the Senate in Arizona as a member of the Democratic Party, after toying with the idea for the last couple of weeks. Kelly commanded NASA’s Space Shuttle twice, and he’s also a former Naval aviator who flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. Now, he’s hoping to add “senator” to his résumé.
“I always knew I was going to serve this country in some way,” Kelly says in a video announcin

As tech companies continue their race to control the smart home, a promising energy startup has raised a round of funding from traditionally tech and strategic investors for a geothermal solution to heat and cool houses. Dandelion Energy, a spin out from Alphabet X, has raised $16 million in a Series A round of funding, with strategic investors Comcast Ventures leading the round, along with GV, the investment arm of Alphabet formerly known as Google Ventures.
Lennar Corporation, the home-buildin