Technology news

The state of 5G continues to be a mess, as big US telecoms race to one-up one another by being the first to deploy hobbled versions of the next-gen networking technology across the country. AT&T now boasts 19 cities with 5G service as of today, but there’s once again a big caveat: there aren’t any smartphones that can use it yet. Furthermore, AT&T’s only available true 5G device, a mobile hotspot it provides, can’t yet be purchased in stores.The only two 5G smart

YouTube is investing in new, interactive Choose Your Own Adventure-style series that will compete with programs like Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and You Vs. Wild.
The projects will exist under a new unit dedicated to interactive programming and live specials, according to a YouTube spokesperson. The series being developed will primarily be driven by interactivity. The company will also integrate some product features into both its scripted and unscripted YouTube Originals. The co

Earlier today, Google counsel Alexandria Walden testified before Congress in a hearing titled “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism.” The House Judiciary Committee streamed the video live on Google’s own YouTube platform, complete with a live chat feed. Anybody who’s even passingly familiar with YouTube might have flagged this as a bad decision. Hateful, racist comments are notoriously common on the site, and, unsurprisingly, some of YouTube’s worst users

Perhaps you’ve seen the rousing debate around FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice percolating across the internet these past couple of weeks. Maybe you’ve even engaged in a few “git guds” yourself. But no chapter in the ongoing controversy over whether the video game requires an easy mode (or whether your relationship with it really says anything meaningful about you as a human being) has been quite as satisfying as the “you cheated not only the game, bu

Walmart is hiring robots to replace human tasks that humans didn’t “enjoy doing.” In a bid to save on labor costs, it’s betting on robots to clean floors, sort inventory, and replenish out-of-stock items in its stores, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Walmart has several jobs in mind for the new robots. Robot floor cleaners are coming to 1,500 stores. (The company says that floor scrubbing was previously a task that could take a human worker two to three hours eac

As Google Cloud Next opened today in San Francisco, Accenture announced its intent to acquire Cirruseo, a French cloud consulting firm that specializes in Google Cloud intelligence services. The companies did not share the terms of the deal.
Accenturesays that Cirruseo’s strength and deep experience in Google’s cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions should help as Accenture expands its own AI practice. Google TensorFlow and other intelligence solutions are a popular approach t

The best deal that we’ve seen today is on the 17.3-inch Alienware 17 R5 gaming laptop. It’s currently $2,999 from Dell, but B&H Photo is selling it for $2,499. Additionally, buyers will get a 24.5-inch Alienware AW2518H G-Sync gaming monitor and an Alienware mechanical keyboard for free with purchase. Other retailers charge around $450 for this monitor by itself, so the savings are great here.The laptop features a 1440p G-Sync display with a 120Hz refresh rate, an 8th Gen Intel

Early Wednesday morning, a huge collaboration of scientists are expected to release the first images of the event horizon of a black hole, constructed from data gathered by observatories all over the globe. Combined, the telescopes created a virtual telescope as big as the Earth itself that’s powerful enough to capture enough data from the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Tomorrow, we may finally see all of that data pieced together.
Black holes, by their nature, are i

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 730, a new system-on-chip that will likely power mid-to-high-end phones later this year. Its predecessor, the 710, wound up in devices like Samsung’s Galaxy A8s and the Xiaomi Mi 8 SE, and while Qualcomm recently launched a slightly faster iteration called the 712, the 730 is a much bigger improvement.
The 8-core Snapdragon 730 uses Kryo 470 cores at up to 2.2GHz and is built on an 8nm process. It has an Adreno 618 GPU, a Hexagon 688 processor with a

Adobe first teased Project Gemini, its “next-generation drawing and painting app” last October, along with a preview of its Photoshop for the iPad app. A beta version of the app is now being released to a handful of artists on a prerelease program, and it was previewed at the MoCCA Arts Festival in New York, where I got to take a look.
While Adobe has said that Photoshop for the iPad will have features that focus on compositing workflows, Project Gemini is specifically focused on il

A 22-year-old man has been sentenced to two years in prison for selling unlicensed bitcoins. His crime was operating a bitcoin exchange without registering with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the US Department of Treasury.Jacob Burrell Campos, a US citizen and Mexico resident, has been held in custody without bail since August 2018. He pleaded guilty in October 2018, admitting that he employed no anti-money laundering measures and didn’t check up on details about his customer

In a statement on Monday, the White House promised to veto the Save the Internet Act — a bill designed to restore net neutrality protections and undo the FCC’s extremely unpopular 2017 decision to repeal them. To justify the veto, the statement painted a picture of surging broadband investment and robust new networks, free to flourish now that Title II was out of the way.
“Since the new rule was adopted in 2018, consumers have benefited from a greater than 35 percent increase

Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices.
Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even erase your Google Search and Amazon Alexa history, with clean-up features for Instagram and Tinder in the works.
The startup emerges from stealth today to launch its Jumbo privacy

Social apps have long provided privacy settings to help you manage who can see your posts. Yet, time and again, we find ourselves surprised to learn that we’ve given away more than we intended — whether it’s a years-old tweet that lands us in hot water, a Facebook post we never intended our ex to see, or something even more serious. Jumbo, a new privacy assistant app for iOS, attempts to take the guesswork out of privacy settings. While the app is hindered significantly by res

Dropbox Business now integrates directly with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides within G-Suite, letting you create and collaborate on files directly from within the file-sharing service’s interface. The functionality, which was first announced last year, lets you create a new Google file directly within Dropbox, after which it can be shared or searched like any other Dropbox file. Although the feature is currently exclusive to business users, Dropbox says it will eventually be available to

Car companies are hoping to capitalize on the growing popularity of voice recognition systems like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant by developing their own in-car voice assistants that drivers can use. But that effort may be a huge waste of money: car owners increasingly prefer familiar voice assistants, like the ones they use in their homes, over those designed specifically by automakers.
According to a new survey by JD Power, 76 percent of car owners are interested in having the same brand o

Tree-lined streets turn to rivers in the Charleston, South Carolina, of the future. Street lights hang suspended just feet from the water’s surface as a meteorologist perched on a rooftop explains that this is the view we might see in the year 2100 if climate change continues at its current pace.
The scene is from The Weather Channel’s latest mixed reality segment, which connects the flooding of tomorrow to the melting glaciers and sea level rise of today. It marks a slight deviatio

Just three months after raising $40 million in a Series B funding, German HR and recruiting platform Personio is announcing it has acquired Rollbox, the Spanish startup that offers an API-based payroll solution. The two companies had been working together, but now Personio is bringing Rollbox’stech and team in-house.
The full terms of the deal remain undisclosed. However, I understand the acquisition consists of a combination of cash and equity. This sees a number of Rollbox’s invest

Electric skateboard startup Inboard Technology no longer plans to sell its upcoming Glider electric scooter directly to consumers. Instead, the company will focus on selling fleets of the scooter to businesses and transportation companies to be used on campuses, at resorts, or on city streets in both docked and dockless configurations. All customers who plunked down a $349 deposit for the $1,299 electric scooter will be refunded, the company says.Those refunds will start going out today to the

Uber unveiled a new product Tuesday called “Uber Vouchers” that’s designed to help businesses sponsor free or discounted ride-hail trips for their customers. It’s the company’s latest service aimed at growing the B2B (business-to-business) market, and the announcement comes right before Uber is expected to officially announce its public offering.
Companies that already offer customers transportation such as shuttle services or rental cars, be it in the hospitality

While its sister dating apps have honed their marketing messages over the years, Hinge only recently landed on its own: a dating app “designed to be deleted.” Though the company made the branding message public in December last year, today, it’s rolling out a redesign that freshens up the app, and, according to Tim MacGougan, the app’s chief product officer, brings “design to be deleted” to the forefront of the app experience.“We felt like designed to b

Firefox is testing a new anti-tracking feature that will prevent sites from being able to “fingerprint” your browser and track you, even after you’ve cleared your cookies. In addition, the browser will now explicitly block cryptocurrency mining scripts that attempt to hijack your computer’s resources in order to mine digital currency. Both features will initially be available in the browser’s nightly and beta builds for testing.Fingerprinting describes the way site

Facebook has always been a company with global ambition, but few projects illustrate this better than its ongoing attempt to map the world’s population density using AI.The company first unveiled this work back in 2016 when it created maps for 22 nations. Today, it expanded that with new maps that cover the “majority” of Africa. “The project will eventually map nearly the whole world’s population,” Facebook said in a blog post.AI is perfect for large, repetit

Netgear is announcing one of the cheapest routers yet with support for Wi-Fi 6. Its new entry-level router, the Nighthawk AX4, offers Wi-Fi 6 support, four gigabit Ethernet ports, and up to 3Gbps of data transmission. At $199, it’s by no means a cheap router, but it’s cheaper by hundreds of dollars than most of the Wi-Fi 6 routers on the market so far.
The router’s support for Wi-Fi 6 is really what makes it stand out. Wi-Fi 6 is the latest generation of the Wi-Fi standard, an

Wing, the drone delivery company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is launching its first public drone delivery service in Canberra, Australia after the country’s aviation authority granted it regulatory approval. Around 100 homes in the suburbs of Crace, Palmerston, and Franklin will initially have access to the service, but in the coming months the company plans to expand it to homes in Harrison and Gungahlin.
The service works by partnering with local businesses includin