Technology news

Nothing like finally doing the right thing after being sued and browbeaten into it. Sort of. 
Scandal-plagued Facebook announced March 19 that it would take steps to address one of its many structural flaws. Namely, the company will no longer allow advertisers to discriminate when it comes to housing, jobs, or credit advertisements that run on the social media platform. 
SEE ALSO: Facebook defends targeted ads that only show job openings to young people
"These changes are the result of

Kickstarter CEO and co-founder Perry Chen has resigned from his role as chief executive of the company. Chen wrote in a blog post today that he will remain chairman of Kickstarter’s board, and that he intends to focus on “high-level and long-term company needs” from that position.
Chen has been with Kickstarter since its beginning, serving as CEO for its first five years. He stepped down for the first time in 2014, leaving the role to co-founder Yancey Strickler, and returned

The UE Boom 3 is $30 off at Amazon, taking the cost down to $119.99. This is the cheapest price that we’ve seen yet for Ultimate Ears’ latest Bluetooth speaker. Spotted by Android Central, this is also the first big discount on the UE Boom 3.
Compared to its predecessor, the UE Boom 2, this new Bluetooth speaker has a slightly refined design that trims away some of the excess rubber in favor of a slick, two-tone fabric wrap that covers the speakers.Additionally, it features a few qu

Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), penned letters today to tech executives from companies like Facebook and YouTube requesting a briefing on March 27th regarding their response to the New Zealand shooter’s live stream and the subsequent reuploads across multiple platforms.Thompson’s letter was sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, urging them to prior

MoviePass isn't done yet!
The company continues to try and win over new customers, this time with a new plan that comes close to the monthly unlimited which first got it so much attention. MoviePass Uncapped will offer users more movies than any current plan for the limited-time price of $9.95/month.
SEE ALSO: Whelp, MoviePass is being investigated by the NY Attorney General
The promotional price is only available with a 12-month commitment – 2017's shocking Unlimited plan cost the same wi

Waymo One — the self-driving taxi service from Google's autonomous car company — officially launched in December, but it hasn't been available to many people. That could change.
In a blog post Tuesday, the company announced a new 85,000-square-foot technical service center in Mesa, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. The taxi service — available through an app that orders Waymo-ified Chrysler Pacifica minivans — has only been available for about 400 "early riders" in the Ph

Several members of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) have collectively filed a lawsuit against fitness startup Peloton today, seeking over $150 million in damages. The complaint, filed by Downtown Music Publishing, Ultra Music, and eight other publishing groups, says that Peloton has been using their musical works for years in its workout videos without proper licensing, resulting in income lost for songwriters.
The complaint says that Peloton does have some licenses in place wit

Uber Eats rolled out its new fees structure this week, and most people are confused about what the new fees mean. Instead of a booking fee for each order, Uber is now splitting up its fee into a delivery and service fee, and adding a small order fee of $2 when your order total is less than $10. Here’s what it actually means.
From the homepage of the app, you can see the delivery fees. Ranging from 49 cents to $3.99 in New York, at a glance it looks more appealing and affordable than the p

Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos joined The Verge’s Casey Newton onstage at SXSW to discuss the difficult issues that plague Facebook and democracy.
You can listen to their discussion in its entirety on The Vergecast right now. Below is a lightly edited excerpt from this interview between Stamos and Newton about how to better serve the mental health of content moderators.Casey Newton: Let me ask about content moderation. I recently wrote a story about content mod

Pandora is giving listeners more control over what songs their customized radio stations play with a new feature called Pandora Modes.
Pandora’s classic algorithm has long chosen what plays when you start up a new artist station, but these alternative modes let you switch to other types of curation for different experiences. Modes work better the more you interact with the service while listening. Every thumbs-up or down on a song further informs what tracks Pandora will send your way.
Th

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made an astonishing discovery about the asteroid it has been orbiting since December: the rock is actively spewing material out into space. The asteroid, named Bennu, has ejected materials up to 11 times since the spacecraft has been there. But no one is sure what exactly is causing these bursts.
The revelation is just one of many surprises that scientists have learned about Bennu, ever since OSISIR-REx reached the asteroid late last year. Launched in 2016, OS

Trying to choose between Spotify Premium, Apple Music, and Amazon Music Unlimited is an ongoing internal struggle. (Are we being dramatic? Nope.)
Let's make it easy: For a limited time, you can get six months of Amazon Music Unlimited for free when you buy a select Amazon Echo or Fire device. Just purchase one of devices below and a link to sign up will be sent to your inbox, even if you're not a Prime member.
If you were thinking about snagging a new Echo device anyway, there's literally no bet

As part of a legal settlement with civil rights groups, Facebook said today that it will end some targeting options for potentially discriminatory advertisements.
The company said anyone placing housing, job, or credit ads will not be able to target users by age, gender, or zip code. Previously, the company dropped targeting by “multicultural affinity,” an option that could be used to exclude Facebook users by race.
Ending targeting options for housing, job, and credits ads
Facebook

In 1948, Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington stationed the United States' long-range nuclear bombers at Offutt Air Force Base in eastern Nebraska, a location safe in the middle of the nation and well-insulated from the coast.
But 70 years later, the base — now home to the U.S. Strategic Command which deters "catastrophic actions from adversaries and poses an immediate threat to any actor who questions U.S. resolve by demonstrating our capabilities" — isn't safe from historic an

The beauty of a cloud gaming service is two-fold: 1) you can theoretically play any game, anywhere you’ve got a good enough internet connection to stream it over the net, and 2) even if you’re playing it on a wimpy smartphone, you can harness the power of a beefy server located in a data center.
But what kind of server matters a whole heck of a lot when it comes to graphical fidelity and keeping the service affordable, given how many players may be using those servers at a given tim

A lot of promises were made about what the future would look like, and there's definitely a severe lack of robot butlers. Are we supposed to clean, cook, and make our own tea? Fortunately, we have a little bit of help with the cleaning part thanks to products like the ECOVACS Deebot robot vacuum. 
Until we can trust robots with knives, cooking is best left to human hands. Tidy up your room while you sit back and sip on a fresh cup of tea thanks to this deal for $100 off an ECOVACS Deeb

Google isn’t just launching a new gaming platform with its just-announced streaming service Stadia: it’s also becoming a game developer. At its GDC 2019 keynote, Google announced Stadia Games and Entertainment, a new first-party games studio that will be creating exclusive games for the new platform. There are few details on the studio itself, such as its size, location, or what titles it’s working on. But it’s being led by Jade Raymond, a longtime producer and executive

Can Stadia succeed where others have failed?
Google's first entry into the world of mainstream gaming certainly has the lineup to meet Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony on even footing. But it's bigger than that: rather than relying on traditional console hardware, Stadia lives inside of Chrome.
SEE ALSO: Apple is reportedly building a Netflix-style gaming service. What would it even look like?
That means it's going to launch with immediate support for a variety of screens: desktop, laptop, TV, tabl

Earlier this month, a patent surfaced that revealed a possible design for a forthcoming Google game controller. Now that Google has officially unveiled its long-expected cloud gaming service, called Stadia, we can finally get a look at what the gamepad actually looks like and how it works.
And it looks, well, much like a DualShock controller, with a pair of twin sticks, a D-pad, and plenty of face and shoulder buttons. One distinguishing feature, aside from the crisp white color scheme, is the

Google is launching its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who says he plays FIFA 19 “quite a bit,” introduced the Stadia service during a special keynote at GDC this morning. Describing it as a platform for everyone, Pichai talked up Google’s ambitions to stream games to all types of devices.
Phil Harrison, a former Sony and Microsoft executive, joined Pichai on stage to fully unveil Stadia in his ro

Apple has already announced a few product refreshes this week, but it might not be done just yet. The iPod touch may be the next device to get a hardware update, and according to MacRumors, the seventh-generation model may be announced tomorrow via a press release, as Apple did with the low-profile announcements of the new iPad Air, iPad mini, and today’s iMac.A new iPod touch hitting soon seems plausible, as it has been name-dropped by Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst with a good record for pred

Devin Nunes, Republican congressman from California and Trump lapdog, is suing Twitter for a deeply hilarious reason.
The thrust of the Nunes' lawsuit is that two parody accounts — @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow — defamed Nunes with the assistance of the third defendant, strategist Liz Mair. Twitter is also named in the suit for just letting it happen. It also mentions "shadow banning," a false claim frequently made by conservatives on Twitter that the platform suppresses their tweets.

The hyper-realistic reflection of light on the ground in front of the car should've given it away, but I was so distracted by the realness of everything else that I didn't pick up on the clues that the BMW 8 series coupe I was looking at wasn't the real thing.
San Francisco-based Unity Technologies general manager Tim McDonough had given me this challenge via video chat. On the screen, he showed me three sets of side-by-side images of a BMW car on a stage. Some of the images I was looking at had

The extinct beast's remains were found in Northern Asia in 2010. It has since been named "Yuka" and is thought to be nearly 30,000 years old. The breakthrough occurred at Japan's Kindai University. Scientists say DNA from Yuka's muscle sprang back to life after being injected into mice cells. Cloning Yuka is still far out of reach because her cells are degraded and damaged. Read more...More about Mashable Video, Woolly Mammoth, Dna Research, Cloning, and Science