Technology news

The Tesla Model 3 was the best-selling electric car in the world in 2018, according to data firm JATO Dynamics. JATO says the Silicon Valley automaker sold about 138,000 Model 3s, beating out contenders like the flagship EV of state-owned Chinese automaker BAIC (92,000) and the Nissan Leaf (85,000). In total, Tesla sold more EVs than any other automaker in 2018, JATO reports.The news comes at the same time that Tesla is starting deliveries of the Model 3 in China, the largest market in the worl

Ev Williams,a co-founder of Twitterand the social media business’s former chief executive officer, is stepping down from its board of directors effective at the end of the month, according to documents submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, first reported by CNBC.
In a series of tweets, Williams addressed the news.“I’m very lucky to have served on the @Twitter board for 12 years (ever since there was a board),” he wrote. “It’s been

Verizon is asking the Federal Communications Commission to let it keep new smartphones locked to its network for 60 days, as part of an initiative to prevent identity theft and fraud. After the 60-day period, the phones would unlock automatically, the telecom says in a note published to its website and authored by Ronan Dunne, Verizon’s executive vice president. Verizon says it should have the authority to do this under the so-called “C-block rules” put in place following the

After The Wall Street Journal reported that popular period-tracking app Flo had been secretly sharing some of its users' most personal health data with Facebook, Flo is promising to make some changes.
Along with a number of other popular health apps, Flo used Facebook's developer software to track users' data in a way that could be used for advertising purposes, the report found. 
SEE ALSO: Are period apps gender-inclusive? Not quite, but they're trying
In Flo's case, the period tracking ap

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who’s currently CEO of publishing platform Medium, is stepping down from Twitter’s board, according to a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Williams will officially depart at the end of the month.“It’s been an incredible 13 years, and I’m proud of what Twitter has accomplished during my time with the company,” Williams said in a statement from the filing. “I will continue rooting for the team as I f

YouTube says it’s not asking creators to moderate their comments or face ad restrictions, clarifying a message that has worried some of the site’s members. Yesterday, amid controversy over child predators congregating on YouTube, the Team YouTube Twitter account stated that “inappropriate comments” could result in videos having limited or no advertising. A YouTube spokesperson, however, tells The Verge that the platform isn’t basing these limits on creators’

Drivetime commuter trivia app
$Free download on App Store or Google PlayView Product
The Good
Interactive without being distracting • Designed knowing you are at the wheel • You might actually learn something • Available to play anytime
The Bad
Limited content with a focus on current events • For heavy drivers •only 30 minutes of trivia per day • Meant for solo •adult drivers •so doesn't work well for carpooling •passengers •or young kids •

Massachusetts-based biotech firm Thermo Fisher says it will stop selling equipment to Xinjiang, the province where Chinese authorities have launched a statewide campaign to monitor and track Uighurs. It told The New York Times the new decision was “consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code, and policies.”
From 2016 to 2017, China ordered almost 36 million people to get medical checkups, according to numbers reported by state-run Xinhua News. Blood samples, fingerprin

In a letter addressed to top executives, a group of Microsoft workers is demanding the company drop a controversial contract with the United States Army.
The workers object to the company taking a $479 million contract last year to supply tech for the military’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS. Under the project, Microsoft, the maker of the HoloLens augmented reality headset, could eventually provide more than 100,000 headsets designed for combat and training in the militar

Videos of cats opening doors are always good, but here is a particularly good one.
It was taken by Twitter user @steeleio_, who couldn't figure out why her roommate's cat was always able to break out of their bathroom. So she set up a camera on a shower shelf, shut the cat in the bathroom, and shook his food bag outside the door so he'd want to get out. 
He escaped in less than five minutes. "Once he got out, we gave him a treat and watched the video," @steeleio_ explained via Twitter DM. "

Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G was the final announcement at the company’s big Unpacked event — a phone promising mobile internet speeds dramatically faster than today’s LTE networks. But there’s one big problem: there are no 5G networks in the United States for the S10 5G to actually work with, and we’re not sure when that will meaningfully change.
The fact that Samsung didn’t offer a release date or price for the S10 5G is easy to explain. When Samsung sells

Relationships between landlords and their tenants don’t need to be fraught ones. With Y Combinator -backed Latchel, landlords and property managers can access a 24/7 maintenance service that takes requests from tenants and deploys the right professional to fix the things that need fixing.
“At first we thought of doing a high-tech property management system,” Latchel founder Ethan Lieber told TechCrunch. “As we looked more into it and talked to other property man

The Canadian government is withholding the remainder of its $18.3 million (CAD$24 million) investment into North after The Verge reported that the company laid off 150 employees this week. North is also being asked to return the money it’s already received from the investment. The funding withdrawal was first reported by Canada-based publication The Logic.
Canada’s innovation minister, Navdeep Bains, said the government’s investment remains a “repayable contribution&rdqu

Teslaand SpaceXCEO Elon Musk has been teasing — and his fan base has been making pleas — to host a meme review. And after tweeted hints, meme review has arrived via YouTube star PewDiePie.
Musk tweeted last month a photo and a question “Host meme review?”
Host meme review? pic.twitter.com/k2SFtIUh1k
— Elon Musk(@elonmusk) January 27, 2019On Friday, Musk and Justin Roiland, one of the creators of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty, appeared on YouTuber PewDiePie&rsquo

Samsung officially announced several new wearables this week, but it’s the Galaxy Watch Active, the company’s newest smartwatch, that stands out from the pack. While the hardware may not be as premium as the Apple Watch 4, it’s still in direct competition to the watchOS wearable, and will be immediately attractive to users who want a smartwatch that works with their Android phone.
If you’re looking for your first smartwatch, or are interested in how these smartwatches co

Applehas confirmed its plans to close retail stores in the Eastern District of Texas — a move that will allow the company to better protect itself from patent infringement lawsuits, according to Apple news sites 9to5Mac and MacRumors, which broke the news of the stores’ closures. Apple says that the impacted retail employees will be offered new jobs with the company as a result of these changes.
The company will shut down its Apple Willow Bend store in Plano, Texas as well as its App

Elon Musk’s appearance on Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s “Meme Review,” a popular series on Kjellberg’s channel where he provides commentary on memes, gave Tesla’s CEO a chance to address one of his most important customer bases directly: YouTube.
Musk, with Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, co-hosted the last third of Kjellberg’s latest episode. Their time was mostly spent reviewing memes that included Musk, including poking fun at h

For a person that doesn’t actually work for Google, I spend an inordinate amount of time hyping up the Google Pixel’s camera. But when the leader is so far ahead of its competition, I struggle to get excited about any other mobile cameras. Until today. Nokia’s coming to MWC with a phone we’ve seen leaked in photos and videos for many months, and that device has a five-camera system, the first fruit of which I believe we’ve just seen.
In an Instagram post by Edoardo

The video conferencing company Zoom is aiming to file a public S-1 by the end of March, according to a new report in Business Insider that adds the company could go public as soon as April.
Business Insider reported last month that Zoomhad filed confidentially with the SEC to go public, just months after Reuters reported that the San Jose, Calif.-based company had chosen investment bank Morgan Stanley to lead its eventual IPO.
We’ve reached out to the company for comment.
Zoom was valued a

Epic Games, maker of the ultra popular Battle Royale game Fortnite, is putting up another $100 million in prize cash for competitive tournaments in 2019.
The company made waves in the esports world last year, announcing a $100 million prize pool for the 2018 competitive year, dwarfing every other competitive title in one fell swoop.
This year, a significant portion of the $100 million will be awarded to participants of the first-ever Fortnite World Cup. Each of the 200 players who qualify and co

Instagramis threatening to attack Pinterest just as it files to go public the same way the Facebook-owned app did to Snapchat. Code buried in Instagram for Android shows the company has prototyped an option to create public “Collections” to which multiple users can contribute. Instagram launched private Collections two years ago to let you Save and organize your favorite feed posts. But by allowing users to make Collections public, Instagram would become a direct competitor to Pinter

Do you remember the panic surrounding the Millenium Bug? Computer programs, built when storage space was at a premium, would often represent years as two digits. 1998 would appear as 98, and so on. When the millennium arrived, these two-digit years would roll over to 00, with some programs interpreting this as 1900. While the Millennium Bug was resolved without incurring any real damage or disruption to businesses or users, the causes of the issue are frequently seen in other systems from the s

A good few months ago, TNW was utterly mesmerized by the Vivo Nex phone. This all-body handset concealed its selfie camera with an unusual pop-out mechanical mechanism. Although it didn’t make its way to the west, it was an interesting glimpse of what a post-notch future looks like. Why do I bring it up? Because MWC is around the corner, and French smartphone brand Archos is unveiling a phone that looks pretty bloody similar. Meet the Archos Diamond, which will retail at €300 when re

“I’m a fighter. I believe in our people, I believe in our mission, and I believe that it should exist and must exist.”
Sebastian Thrunis talking animatedly about Udacity,the $1 billion online education startup that he co-founded nearly eight years ago. His tone is buoyant and hopeful. He’s encouraged, he says over an occasionally crackly phone call, about the progress the company has made in such a short time. There’s even a new interim COO, former HP and GE ex

Mobile World Congress hasn’t kicked off yet, but an early leak of a banner by Twitter user @gimme2pm may have blown one of the biggest announcements: the foldable Huawei Mate X that the company will presumably announce at this year’s show, via 9to5Google.
#Huawei #MWC2019 #MWC19 huawei Mate X pic.twitter.com/cUV7POgF6r— 红军第十九冠 (@gimme2pm) February 22, 2019Huawei has been talking about the idea of a folding 5G phone for months, and it r

Yesterday, responsible tech journalists across the web did an important job: they warned readers that it might be a little bit premature to spend $1,980 on a completely unproven, entirely new category of phone-computer.That’s justified. Nobody gets it right on the first try. And there are already keen hints, if you know where to look, that Samsung’s Galaxy Fold may not have gotten it right.
But can we step back for a moment and appreciate that next month, you’ll be able to buy

Facebook is getting ahold of sensitive personal information that smartphone owners submit to entirely separate mobile apps, thanks to a software tool that immediately shares that data with the social network to improve ad targeting, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. It’s long been known that apps outside of Facebook’s ecosystem can and do willingly share data with the company to make it easier to reach existing and new users on the platform through ads. Yet the WSJ

José Ancer is first of all a startup lawyer, with a client portfolio of startups of various stages based around Texas and other similar ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley. He’s also the CTO of Egan Nelson LLP, a boutique firm, where he actively is also building automation software to help the firm compete against larger firms. He also writes on his blog “Silicon Hills Lawyer” publicly and pointedly about his profession — and often takes shots at certain practices

Last fall, Operaintroduced Opera Touch for iOS — a solid alternative to Safari on iPhone, optimized for one-handed use. Today, the company is rolling out a notable new feature to this app: cookie blocking. Yes, it can now block those annoying dialogs that ask you to accept the website’s cookies. These are particularly problematic on mobile, where they often entirely interrupt your ability to view the content, as opposed to on many desktop websites where you can (kind of) ignore the p

Apple is planning to shut down its two stores in the Eastern District of Texas in order to avoid patent troll lawsuits, according to a new report from MacRumors.As MacRumors notes, the Eastern District of Texas is known for its patent cases (an SMU Dedman School of Law paper backs up that claim), and per US law, patent lawsuits can be filed in places where the defendant “has a regular and established place of business.” By closing its two stores in the district, Apple reportedly hop

The field of medicine is, like other industries and disciplines, in the process of incorporating AI as a standard tool, and it stands to be immensely useful — if it’s properly regulated, argue researchers. Without meaningful and standardized rules, it will be difficult to quantify benefits or prevent disasters issuing from systematic bias or poor implementation.
AI tools, or to be precise, machine learning agents trained to sift through medical data, are popping up in every room in t

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1. Pinterest files confidentially to go public
The business has confidentially submitted paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering slated for later this year, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier reports indicated the company was pla