Technology news

AT&T has a new climate change risk-assessment tool, developed with the help of Argonne National Laboratory’s scientists and supercomputing power, CNBC reports. The telecommunications company hopes to protect its infrastructure from the flooding and extreme weather events that are projected to increase as climate change continues.A few years ago, AT&T started thinking about the long-term risks that climate change posed to its equipment. For example, the company has cell towers and

After weeks of teasing, Silicon Valley electric motorcycle manufacturer Lightning pulled the wraps off the Strike on Thursday, which will be the company’s first two-wheeled EV for the broader market. Starting at $13,000, the sporty Strike can last for 70 miles on the highway or 100 miles in the city on a single charge, but can be optioned up to a battery pack with double the range. The company is already taking preorders, and deliveries of the more expensive versions will start shipping i

After weeks of teasing, Silicon Valley electric motorcycle manufacturer Lightning pulled the wraps off the Strike on Thursday, which will be the company’s first two-wheeled EV for the broader market. Starting at $13,000, the sporty Strike can last for 70 miles on the highway or 100 miles in the city on a single charge, but can be optioned up to a battery pack with double the range. The company is already taking preorders, and deliveries of the more expensive versions will start shipping i

A 24-year-old security researcher narrowly avoided prison today, after admitting to hacking into Microsoft and Nintendo servers and stealing confidential information. Zammis Clark, known online as Slipstream or Raylee, was charged on multiple counts of computer misuse offenses in a London Crown Court on Thursday, and pleaded guilty to hacking into Microsoft and Nintendo networks.
Prosecutors revealed that Clark had gained access to a Microsoft server on January 24th, 2017 using an internal user

Its latest flagship the Galaxy S10 might be getting the most attention these days, but Samsung is still trying to generate some sales of last year’s Galaxy Note 9 ahead of its own refresh this coming summer. This evening, the company is holding a brief 6-hour sale during which you can save $300 on the unlocked Note 9 — in either the 128GB storage / 6GB RAM or 512GB / 8GB configurations.This might be the Note 9’s lowest price ever; it ticked down to just over $700 a few weeks a

Lyftraised more than $2 billion Thursday afternoon after pricing its shares at $72 apiece, the top of the expected range of $70 to $72 per share. This gives Lyft a fully diluted market value of $24 billion.
The company will debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday morning, trading under the ticker symbol “LYFT.”
The initial public offering is the first-ever for a ride-hailing business and represents a landmark liquidity event for private market investors, which had invested billions

Canon announced a new pair of instant-print cameras that are set to challenge Fujifilm’s Instax mini-film cameras, part of a trend embraced by social media users and influencers alike.Enter the two Canon IVY CLIQ instant-print camerasEach of Canon’s new shooters can hold up to ten sheets of Zink film, can export its photos to the CLIQ+ Instant Camera Printer + App, and includes an optical viewfinder plus a USB cord for charging the battery.
The IVY CLIQ+ (the higher end of the two c

Twitch has announced its latest benefit for its Twitch Prime subscribers: a free year of Nintendo Switch Online service, which usually costs $19.99.The streaming site is giving out the free service in a two-stage process: first, subscribers will be able to claim a free three-month membership, and after 60 days, they’ll be able to come back to get the other nine months (presumably to stop people from signing up for a single month, claiming the free year, and bailing.) The deal is open to b

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which just filed housing discrimination charges against Facebook for its advertising policies, is reportedly scrutinizing Google and Twitter’s policies as well. The Washington Post writes that HUD officials told Twitter and Google about a probe into their advertising policies last year; a review is supposedly still ongoing. “They want to make sure that other companies aren’t getting away with something that one company is inv

Boston Dynamics — producers of everyone’s favorite robots that can run, backflip, and generally unnerve the human population — is back with its latest bot: a “reimagined” version of its Handle robot from 2017. And this time, it’s really, really good at stacking boxes.
The original Handle was designed largely as an experiment that applied Boston Dynamics’ robot know-how (typically used for bipedal or quadrupedal bots) to one with wheels. The new version

Nearly a decade after the original Borderlands, Gearbox Software has announced a third main installment in the series — alongside a trailer that features a few familiar characters. There’s very little hard detail about its plot, features, or release date, but this marks the first new, numbered game since 2012, and we’ll supposedly learn more about it on April 3rd.
The Borderlands 3 trailer seems to promise the same thing as Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands: The Pre-

Spoilers ahead for season 1 of Amazon’s The Tick.
Amazon’s decision to greenlight a 2016 pilot for a new live-action adaptation of Ben Edlund’s superhero spoof comic The Tick is only getting smarter with time. 2019 is expected to see the release of six major superhero films, and caped crusaders can now be found on nearly every major network and streaming service. The original animated version of The Tick was a cult hit in the 1990s on Fox and then Comedy Central, and a subsequ

Minecraft has been updated to remove most of its references to original creator Markus “Notch” Persson from the main menu of the game, via Eurogamer.
The main menu of Minecraft has long been home to a series of rotating phrases of splash text on the top right-hand corner of the logo, which include hundreds of different jokes, catchphrases, and references. But the most recent update to the game has tellingly removed three splash text phrases from the game: “Made by Notch!,&rdqu

Office Depot and its software supplier, Support.com, have paid $35 million to the FTC over allegations of faked malware reports that tricked customers into paying millions of dollars in computer repairs.
According to the FTC, Office Depot (and Office Max, which merged with Office Depot in 2013) used a program called “PC Health Check,” which claimed to be a free tool offering a check-up to help diagnose if there were any problems or malware plaguing a device.But instead of running ac

YouTube in 2006 was a radically different place than the site we know today, which aggressively serves up videos based on a recommendation algorithm that knows every inch of our viewing habits. Default Filename TV, created by artist Everest Pipkin, aims to get us closer to the early days of YouTube by “serving up videos that have been uploaded from the camera without edits to the filename.”With titles like “DSC 1197” and “IMG 3356,” the videos are pure, authe

In the quest to purge the dreaded camera notch from smartphones, we’ve seen lots of strange ideas, but Oppo’s latest attempt in its leaked Reno smartphone might be one of the strangest yet: a wedge-shaped pop-up front-facing camera that gives the odd impression that the phone is raising a vaguely disapproving eyebrow at you, via Slashleaks.The Reno does look a little bizarre, but I kind of like the idea: sort of a compromise between Oppo’s early sliding efforts on the bulky Op

Verizon is taking new steps to combat the unrelenting nuisance of spam calls. Well, maybe not new, but you won’t have to pay extra money to tell when the robots are calling anymore. The leading US carrier has rolled out its free call filter service to both Android and iOS customers. When activated, Verizon says the filter will let customers “get alerts when a call is likely spam, report unsolicited numbers, and automatically block robocalls based on their preferred level of risk.&rd

Twitter, showing that it does occasionally listen to user requests, has delivered on CEO Jack Dorsey’s promise of a true, battery-saving dark mode. The company has just tweeted the announcement that its dark mode with a proper black background, which it’s dubbing “lights out,” is rolling out today, but only for its iOS app. No luck for Android users, at least for now.
With every modern flagship phone, iPhones included, now having an OLED screen, the use of a black backgr

In February, MGM launched a streaming service for its premium channel Epix called Epix Now for iOS and Android users. The service is now available on Roku and Amazon Fire TV.Epix Now provides users with a wide range of programming to subscribers for $5.99 a month. Programs that include films like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival; original content such as Berlin Station and Deep State; and more to come, including a Batman prequ

LG’s latest flagship, the G8 ThinQ, will be released in the US beginning on April 11th. We originally previewed the G8 back at Mobile World Congress, but release info and pricing was unavailable at the time.The phone will be available at all major US carriers, as well as authorized retailers and a few regional carriers. The list includes: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Best Buy, B&H, US Cellular, and Xfinity Mobile.
Preorders start on March 29th at some of those retailers, but t

“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say it plays into the exploitative economics of prisoners being required to work for very low wages.Vainu is building a comprehensive database of companie

Forge, the marketplace for trading private company shares formerly known as Equidate, announced that it will be acquiring custodial trust company IRA Services for a purchase price of $55 million.
IRA Services is a trust company that provides custodial services for retirement accounts managed by individuals and mid-to-large sized Institutions. Stripped of financial jargon, the primary function of a custodian is to hold on to (or maintain “custody” of) its clients’ securities and