Technology news

League of Legends will be one of the focal points in Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons. The crossover will give fans of the show a look at the world of e-sports and PC gaming, while giving League fans who are lapsed Simpsons viewers a reason to tune in.
Whalen Rozelle, Riot Games’ co-head of e-sports, tells The Verge that The Simpsons reached out last year to learn more about League e-sports, as an executive producer for the show regularly drives by League’s e-sports arena on t

Valve says it’s taking a new approach to user reviews on its gaming marketplace Steam, after attempting and largely failing to solve the problem of so-called review bombing that taints its consumer recommendation system. In a blog post published today, Valve says that it’s “continued to listen to feedback from both players and developers,” and it’s implementing a new approach: hiding the off-topic review scores.
The company says that it defines a review bomb as &ld

Tinder wants to set the record straight about how its platform ranks and shows people potential matches, so today it published a blog post on the subject — but still kept things fairly vague. The company’s Elo score was a “hot topic” a few years ago, according to the blog post, but the ranking feature has now been depreciated.The idea behind the Elo score was that Tinder would rank people by attractiveness. Elo scores are used to rank chess players, too, but in the conte

More than a year after Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm to make us feel better, new data suggests we're still sharing the same old garbage as before. 
NewsWhip, an analytics company that tracks how content spreads across Facebook, put out a new report looking at how last year's News Feed changes have affected what's being shared on Facebook. Unsurprisingly, its findings aren't very encouraging.
SEE ALSO: Facebook announces a big News Feed change — and just wants you to be happ

LG has unveiled the pricing and release plans for some of its 2019 OLED TV lineup, basically mirroring the company’s playbook from last year. These are some of the very best TVs you can buy, so LG is continuing to price them as such.The 2019 C9 (65-inch, 55-inch) and E9 (65-inch) series TVs will start shipping in April. The 77-inch model of the C9 and 55-inch E9 will hit stores a bit later in May and June, respectively. And this year’s update to LG’s “wallpaper” TV

Snap may be launching a new gaming platform for Snapchat as early as next month at the company’s Snap Partner Summit in Los Angeles on April 4th, according to a report from Cheddar.Snapchat has dabbled in games before — the company launched “Snappables,” a set of AR lens games last year — but the new platform (said to be codenamed “Project Cognac”) would be a larger foray into the gaming world, and it would allow outside developers to create games that

You’ve probably been caught off guard by videos that play automatically on Facebook, Twitter, and other services; in fact, just across the internet in general. They begin playing as soon as you load a page or (if they’re more deviously implemented) when you start scrolling through a page to catch your attention.Automatic video play is a feature that, while nice to have when it’s surfacing content that’s related to your interests, can be pretty annoying. Autoplay videos c

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke has revealed he was a member of a notorious decades-old hacking group.
The former congressman was a member of the Texas-based hacker group, the Cult of the Dead Cow, known for inspiring early hacktivism in the internet age and building exploits and hacks for Microsoft Windows. The group used the internet as a platform in the 1990s to protest real-world events, often to promote human rights and denouncing censorship. Among its many releases, t

Cookie-cutter corporate housing turns people into worker drones. When an employee needs to move to a new city for a few months, they’re either stuck in bland, giant apartment complexes or Airbnbsmeant for shorter stays. But Zeus lets any homeowner get paid to host white-collar transient labor. Through its managed ownership model, Zeustakes on all the furnishing, upkeep, and risk of filling the home while its landlords sit back earning cash.
Zeus has quietly risen to a $40 million revenue r

Chris McCoy Contributor Chris McCoy is the chief executive of Footprint and the creator of Storecoin. More posts by this contributorYesterday’s “plastics” are today’s crypto tokens
We’re reaching the endgame of an inevitable showdown between big tech and regulators with a ley battleground around consumer data. In many ways, the fact that things have gotten here reflects that the market has not yet developed an alternative to the data paradigm of Google and Facebook

Nearly three months afters its streaming debut, Bird Box is getting an edit.
Following public backlash, Netflix has confirmed to Mashable that it will re-release Bird Box in the "next few weeks" — this time without the use of a controversial clip. 
The new version of Bird Box will remove stock footage used in one of the film's establishing apocalypse sequences, the contents of which depict the very real aftermath of the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster. The tragedy killed 47 people a

Reddit has banned r/watchpeopledie, an infamous subreddit that hosted videos of people dying gruesomely. The ban comes after the subreddit re-hosted videos of the recent mosque massacres in New Zealand. According to the new landing page, the subreddit was banned for violating Reddit’s content policy about glorifying or encouraging violence.A Reddit spokesperson provided this statement: “We are very clear in our site terms of service that posting content that incites or glorifies vio

Yet another San Francisco-based company looks to be going public imminently. PagerDuty, an 8.5-year-old startup that sends companies information about their technology, just filed its S-1, a public disclosure about its IPOs plans.
PagerDuty, which helps companies quickly respond to IT incidents, as well as increasingly tries to anticipate them, had reportedly filed confidentially several months ago but the 35-day government shutdown meant that no one could review its prospectus (or that of other

In a huge reversal, Disney is welcoming James Gunn back to the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. He has been rehired to direct the third movie after he was fired in July last year. 
The move was apparently decided on months ago. Disney Studios president Alan Horn was persuaded by Gunn’s public apology and his handling of the situation and decided to reverse course to reinstate him, according to Deadline. Mashable has confirmed the report.
SEE ALSO: James Gunn's sci-fi horror film 'Br

In a rare turn, director James Gunn is once again heading up up the third installment of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy series. Gunn, who directed the previous two films, was fired over the summer when offensive tweets dating from between 2008 and 2011 resurfaced after being promoted by right-wing personalities like Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich.
The news comes courtesy of Deadline, who has since confirmed things with both Marvel and Gunn’s representatives. Gunn addressed the fi

After a man used Facebook to live stream his attack on two New Zealand mosques last night, the video quickly spread to YouTube. Moderators fought back, trying to take the horrific footage down, but new uploads of the video kept appearing. It led many observers to wonder: since YouTube has a tool for automatically identifying copyrighted content, why can’t it automatically identify this video and wipe it out?
Exact re-uploads of the video will be banned by YouTube, but videos that contain

In addition to testing out a new format for conversations within a prototype app called twttr and other features like a “Hide Tweet” button, Twitter today confirmed it’s also developing a feature that would allow users to subscribe to individual conversations taking place on its platform.
The new option was first spotted by Jane Wong, a reverse engineer who often peeks inside popular apps to discover their yet-to-be-launched features and changes.
Twitter is testing "Subscribe t

There are dozens of subreddits for the trans community on Reddit, each designed to meet a certain psychological need. 
There's r/asktransgender, dedicated to people's questions about the community, r/transgender, a subreddit for trans news, and r/transtimelines, where people can document their transitions. These are large and vibrant groups, with followers in the tens of thousands.
But for some folks who are just coming out as trans, memes and GIFs — not traditional, location-based su

Well that was one hell of a party. 
On Thursday night, Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Model Y to a pumped-up crowd of Tesla fan boys, employees, investors, and media at the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne, CA.
"We're literally bringing sexy back," Musk said, after walking onto the stage to the opening bars of the '90s hit "I'm Too Sexy." Musk was alluding to the fact that his line of cars, the Models S, 3, X, and now Y, now intentionally spell out the word — you guessed it — "sex

Open-source infrastructure and application delivery vendor Suse — the company behind one of the oldest Linux distributions — today announced that it is once again an independent company. The company today finalized its $2.5 billion acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus, which itself had acquired it back in 2014.
Few companies have changed hands as often as Suse and yet remained strong players in their business. Suse was first acquired by Novellin 2004. Novell was then a

Despite being fired last year over a series of offensive tweets dug up by far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich, James Gunn is reportedly back to direct Guardians of the Galaxy 3, according to Deadline.Deadline has reportedly “confirmed it with Marvel and Gunn’s camp.” The decision to re-hire Gunn was “mulled and actually made months ago, following conversations with Disney studio leadership and the team at Marvel Studio,” according to the report.Gunn’s depart

Disney has rehired James Gunn to direct Guardians of the Galaxy 3, according to Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter, despite Gunn’s firing last year over a series of offensive tweets dug up by far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich.The decision to re-hire Gunn was “mulled and actually made months ago, following conversations with Disney studio leadership and the team at Marvel Studio,” according to Deadline. Gunn, a once avid Twitter user who hasn’t tweeted since being fir

To round out the end of the work week, the United Launch Alliance plans to launch a military satellite out of Florida this evening, marking the second flight of the year for the company. ULA’s Delta IV rocket will be lofting a communications satellite called Wideband Global SATCOM, or WGS-10, for the US Air Force. And it’s one of the last times this particular rocket will lift off.
This is the 10th Air Force satellite of its kind. When in space, WGS-10 will join nine other spacecraf

A former judge and family law educator has teamed up with tech entrepreneurs to launch an app they hope will help divorced parents better manage their co-parenting disputes, communications, shared calendar and other decisions within a single platform. The app, called coParenter, aims to be more comprehensive than its competitors, while also leveraging a combination of AI technology and on-demand human interaction to help co-parents navigate high-conflict situations.
The idea for coParenter emerg

Netflix has finally decided that its original horror movie Bird Box doesn’t need to contain footage of the real-life train disaster that killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Canada in 2013.Originally, in the face of protests from the Canadian town and online supporters, Netflix tacitly refused to remove footage of the exploding train, which the film used in a fictional news report at the beginning of the movie. But now, nearly three months after Bird Box started streaming on Netflix a

Students across the country walked out of school and into the streets today to demand that the adults running the government start fighting back against climate change. The strikers joined a worldwide movement of young activists who are fighting for a future on a habitable Earth.The catalyst of the strikes is 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, a student in Sweden whose climate protests in lieu of classes just earned her a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.Tomorrow we school strike for the climate i

There aren't many openly non-binary celebrities in the public eye, though thankfully, that list is growing.
Singer Sam Smith opened up about his gender identity Jameela Jamil's new Instagram show "I Weigh Interviews." In the past, Smith has publicly explored his gender identity, revealing in a 2017 interview with The Sunday Times that he could "feel just as much woman as I am man." View this post on InstagramIn the premier episode of I Weigh Interviews, Jameela Jamil discusses fame, body image a

In the last book list, I mentioned that I was reading The Hobbit to my son. While I was reading that, I was personally reading another Tolkien-related book: Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth by film journalist Ian Nathan. The book is an extensive behind-the-scenes account of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and after reading it, I’m a little astounded that the resulting film trilogy was as good as it was.The book draws on Nathan’s exten

Walmart is planning to release an inexpensive tablet under its in-house ONN brand, a spokesperson for the company has confirmed to Bloomberg. The report claims the device will be manufactured by a Chinese supplier, run on Android, and it’s expected to be aimed at kids.The tablet is the latest attempt by the retailer to establish itself in the electronics space after it released a Walmart-branded lineup of gaming PCs and laptops last year under its new Overpowered brand. We reviewed the so

In a proposal approved for consideration today, the Federal Communications Commission said it will move to require wireless carriers to more accurately track 911 calls indoors.For years, the FCC has been considering how best to require companies to track calls during an emergency. The newest plan focuses on vertical location information: carriers would need to track the altitude of a caller’s device to within three meters. The plan, the FCC says, will allow first responders to better loca

Noble.AI, an SF/French AI company that claims to accelerate decision making in R&D, has raised a new round of funding from Solvay Ventures, the VC arm of a large chemical company, Solvay SA. Although the round was undisclosed, TechCrunch understands it to be a second seed round, and we know the company has closed a total of $8.6 million to date.
Solvay was previously an early customer of the platform, prior to this investment. The joint announcement was made at the Hello Tomorrow conference