Technology news

Instagram has considered hiding the like count on photos, so audiences can’t see how many people have liked an individual post. An unreleased feature that would publicly hide like counts was spotted today by code hunter Jane Wong, who says the test states that Instagram wants “your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get.” Only the person who posted a photo will be able to see the number of likes it’s received.
Instagram says that it has n

Retro games keep resurfacing in all types of emulators, but Swedish artist and craftsman Love Hultén has created one that goes the extra mile if you really want a full, nostalgia-fueled experience. His newest design, called Yesterday Vision, is a handmade midcentury-inspired monitor enclosure that can play games from classic systems.
The Yesterday Vision contains a 19-inch 4:3 monitor that’s designed to have the curvature distortion of an old CRT monitor. It also has full-range lou

Amazon is shutting down its Chinese domestic e-commerce business, it told sellers on Thursday. By July 18th, Amazon.cn will no longer be open to third-party sellers, meaning it won’t compete with the massive e-commerce giants of China, including Alibaba and JD.com. Amazon still plans to let Chinese customers shop at international versions of the site, including the company’s American, British, German, and Japanese marketplaces. Amazon says it’s reevaluating its fulfillment str

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing a new bill that would block all tobacco and vape purchases for Americans under 21 years old, according to an announcement today that was reported by Bloomberg.In a statement today, McConnell presented the bill as a response to widespread public health risks posed by teen vaping. “For some time, I’ve been hearing from the parents who are seeing an unprecedented spike in vaping among their teenage children,” McConnell said. &ldqu

Wattpad, the online story-sharing community for up-and-coming and established writers, has signed a “first-look” deal with Sony Pictures Television to develop new projects based on its vast catalog of uploaded stories, Wattpad announced yesterday.With this new partnership, Wattpad will essentially give Sony a heads-up when it comes to projects that might make for a good TV series. According to Wattpad, the two companies will “work together to identify and develop popular narra

Facebook says it stored millions of Instagram users’ passwords in plain text, leaving them exposed to people with access to certain internal systems. The security lapse was first reported last month, but at the time, Facebook said it only happened to “tens of thousands of Instagram users,” whereas the number is now being revised up to “millions.” The issue also affected “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users” and “tens of millions of other F

Clutch your old BlackBerries dear, because the consumer version of BBM is officially dying at the end of May. In a blog post, Emtek (the company that has taken over running the BBM app since 2016) has announced that it will end support for the messaging app on May 31st, citing fleeting users over the past years despite efforts to revitalize the app with features like Uber hailing and video calling.
“We are proud of what we have built to date ... The technology industry however, is very fl

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate got a surprise update yesterday, which included a stage builder mode, a video editing feature, and the DLC character Joker from Persona 5. For the most part, users have taken to the stage builder mode to design elaborate, creative stages. But as anyone who has ever spent one nanosecond on the internet knows, given the creative power, humanity will always default to drawing dicks.
This isn’t the first time Nintendo’s introduced a stage builder function in i

HBO is asking President Donald Trump, again, to not use Game of Thrones memes on Twitter as a way of sending political messages.Trump tweeted a meme about the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The main font featured in the image below is lifted directly from HBO’s most popular series. This isn’t the first time Trump has used a Game of Thrones meme to address a controversy he&rsqu

Earlier this month, PC gaming fans learned that the long-awaited Borderlands 3 would initially launch exclusively on the Epic Store, not Valve Corporation’s older and more popular Steam platform, and a number of them exploded with rage. Steam users review-bombed the earlier Borderlands games, calling Epic Games a “scummy company” and its actions “a slap in the face.” Critics posted a litany of reasons to hate the Epic Store, ranging from minor feature complaints to

Earlier this month, PC gaming fans learned that the long-awaited Borderlands 3 would initially launch exclusively on the Epic Store, not Valve Corporation’s older and more popular Steam platform, and a number of them exploded with rage. Steam users review-bombed the earlier Borderlands games, calling Epic Games a “scummy company” and its actions “a slap in the face.” Critics posted a litany of reasons to hate the Epic Store, ranging from minor feature complaints to

As the latest season of Game of Thrones has shown, Westeros is at war. The divide between factions has stretched the Seven Kingdoms to the breaking point, and it seems that there’s only one hope for peace. Not Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons, or Jon Snow and his overdeveloped sense of righteousness. No, as HBO’s latest promotion shows, only Elmo, from House Sesame Street, can save the realm now.“Elmo thinks that you two need to respect each other,” says Elmo, bursting

Pinterest (NYSE: PINS) is a public company. Ben Silbermann’s virtual pinboard rose 25 percent in its NYSE debut, opening at $23.75 per share. Currently, shares of its stock are up another 2 percent, trading at more than $24 each.
The company priced its shares above range last night at $19 apiece. The IPO price gave the company a fully diluted market cap of $12.6 billion, a figure slightly larger than its Series H valuation of $12.3 billion.
After selling 75 million Class A shares, Pinteres

Microsoft has never been shy about being acquisitive, and today it announced it’s buying Express Logic, a San Diego company that has developed a real-time operating system (RTOS) aimed at controlling the growing number of IoT devices in the world.
The companies did not share the purchase price.
Express Logicis not some wide-eyed, pie-in-the-sky startup. It has been around for 23 years, building (in its own words) “industrial-grade RTOS and middleware software solutions for embedded a

Over the last couple of years, I’ve interviewed Adam Savage a few times about making things, his love of space suits, and what he carries around in his bag. He’s a frequent speaker on all of those things, and I was a little surprised that he’s never written a book — until now. In May, he’s publishing Every Tool’s A Hammer: Life is What You Make It, which bounces between a personal memoir and treatise on the maker movement and creativity.I recently picked up h

Facebook has admitted to accessing and storing the email contacts of as many as 1.5 million of its users without their consent. Business Insider reports that between May 2016 and last month, the social media platform asked some of its new users to verify their email address by providing the password to their email account. After doing so, the users’ contacts would be automatically imported, without any option for the user to opt out.Responding to the report, a Facebook spokesperson told B

YouTube is beta testing a new gifting feature for its Premium subscribers that allows those users to spend $2 on Super Chats for their favorite creators.Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s head of gaming, confirmed the new feature was something they were testing for its subscriber base. The beta testing is running through the end of May, according to a report from Android Police. A description for the initiative, which was discovered by one of Android Police’s reporters, suggests Premium subscrib

Ashwin Ramasamy ContributorShare on Twitter Ashwin Ramasamy is the cofounder of PipeCandy that provides algorithm-generated insights and predictions about eCommerce and D2C companies. His company helps investors, banks, tech firms and governments understand the global eCommerce landscape. @Ashwinizer More posts by this contributorWaiting for the right professional network It’s the end of “euphoric times” for custom app developers
Over the past half a decade, the tidal wave of

Google Home smart speakers can now play music from YouTube Music’s free ad-supported tier. Previously, in order to listen to YouTube music on your Google Assistant smart speaker you’d have to subscribe to Google’s paid YouTube Music Premium service for $9.99 a month. The new service is available now on the Google Home speaker and other Google Assistant smart speakers in 16 countries including the US, UK, and Australia.
Unfortunately, the free tier doesn’t let you request

If you’ve ever downloaded a scanned document, you know the frustration that comes with trying to search for specific words and phrases. If you want to quickly find text to read through — say, a certain explosive report that was just released as an unsearchable PDF — you can use Adobe Acrobat Pro’s optical character recognition to convert scanned documents into fully editable PDFs with searchable text.
Just open up your PDF in Adobe Acrobat, and click on the “Edit P

This week, Uber and Lyft rolled out new safety measures designed to give riders confidence as to the identity of their driver. The changes come several weeks after a University of South Carolina student was murdered allegedly by a man posing as her Uber driver.It’s a similar problem for both companies, but Uber and Lyft are taking slightly different approaches to rectify it. Uber’s app will push out an alert for riders to check the license plate, make, and model of the vehicle &mdas

On Wednesday, a group of Senate Democrats introduced a bill in their latest effort to help close the “digital divide” and fund state and local broadband deployment projects.The Digital Equity Act of 2019, introduced by Sens. Tina Smith (D-MN), Patty Murray (D-WA), and 2020 presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), would create two new grant programs aimed at building equal access to telecommunications technologies, primarily in underserved rural areas across America.The first gra

Samsung is turning the Galaxy S10’s Bright Night camera feature, which allows the S10 to automatically activate a night mode for low-light shots, into its own dedicated night mode. Users will be able to manually use it whenever they’d like, instead of relying on the algorithm to choose for them (as reported by SamMobile).
Once the update fully rolls out (currently, it only seems to be available in Switzerland), users will get a new night mode option for the camera. The mode can be a

Shares of Zoom(Nasdaq: ZM) began trading at $65 a pop Thursday morning after the video conferencing unicorn priced its shares at $36 apiece Wednesday, above its anticipated range.
The company initially planned to price its shares at between $28 and $32 per share, but following big demand for a piece of a profitable tech business, Zoom increased expectations, announcing plans to sell shares at between $33 and $35 apiece.
The initial public offering gives Zoom a fully diluted market cap of roughly

After nearly two years, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia is over, and a redacted version of the report has been released.Last month, after the conclusion of the investigation, Attorney General William Barr released a summary of the report, but lawmakers have pressed for the complete version to be released. While the nearly 400-page report is now available, it comes redacted — setting up another potential battle over whether the obscur

Streaming games from remote internet servers could be the future of the video game industry — or part of that future, anyhow. By removing the need to own a PC or console to play the latest, most demanding blockbuster games, the medium as a whole could become more accessible. That is, if you have a good internet connection. Google’s recent announcement of its Stadia game service has thrust this idea back into the spotlight, and when it launches later this year, it might be an interes

In yesterday’s daily TNW Conference newsletter, I shared a Day 1 sample itinerary of unmissable keynotes. With only 21 days left until TNW2019 kicks off, let’s explore what your second day could look like! Want to tailor your day to certain tracks or other preferences? Check out the official schedule to build your own. 10:00 – Ankiti Bose, Growth Quarters Ankiti Bose is the co-founder of Zilingo, an ecommerce fashion platform. She’s set to become the first Indian female