Technology news

With Apple's iOS 12 arrival in September, iPhone users saw "Screen Time" features make their way to  phone screens to counter-intuitively help them spend less time on their phones. But Apple's built-in phone addiction fighting tool isn't necessarily the best way to decrease screen time.
Although users could finally track phone and specific app usage while also limiting the amount of time spent on the phone and in apps, it didn't instantly eliminate the problem. For parents, it offered a way

Yes, it is snowing in Chicago and other parts of the Midwest.
Yes, it is April 27 — a mere four days until May.
Yes, people are heading to Twitter and social media to freak out. 
And finally, yes, we'll forget our shock as soon as the next extreme weather event happens. 
That's what a study from earlier in 2019 conducted by the UC Davis environmental science and policy researcher Frances Moore found after examining 2 billion tweets over a two-and-half year period. It found that w

Overcast is one of the best podcasting apps out there, and it’s introducing a new feature that should make it even more useful to listeners: the ability to share clips of episodes to share online.The app’s latest update allows users to converts an excerpt of a podcast into a short video, which can then be shared on social media, (or by email or text message). Developer and Overcast founder Marco Arment notes in a blog post that people have long been able to share podcast episodes, b

New York's legendary Webster Hall music venue returned with a bang Friday night.
After being closed since August 2017 for renovations, rapper and business mogul Jay-Z reopened the 1,400-person venue to a sold-out crowd.
He also didn't do it alone. Jay-Z surprised fans with a couple of special guests that no doubt turned things up to 11.
SEE ALSO: Watch Beyoncé and Jay-Z's powerful speech at the GLAAD Media Awards
Jay-Z's "B-Sides 2" show reportedly included alternative versions his classi

Following the introduction of Apple’s iOS Screen Time feature, a number of app developers who created screen-tracking and parental control apps have been asked to change their products, or have been booted from the App Store completely, according to a new report in The New York Times.The Times says that “Apple has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps,” as well as a number of others. The report cites users who point o

Over the past month, an AI called Dadabots has been endlessly generating and streaming death metal on YouTube, as spotted by Motherboard. Made by musical technologists CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, this algorithm is only one of many death metal algorithms the duo has developed over the years, with each one trained on a single artist’s discography.
The training method for Dadabots involves feeding a sample recurrent neural network whole albums from a single artist. The albums are split up int

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's long saga might finally be over — but don't count on it.
On Friday afternoon, Musk — a voracious tweeter and the head of Tesla, a publicly traded electric car company monitored by the SEC — reached an agreement with the regulatory agency after a February tweet about car production numbers. 
Earlier in April, a federal court judge in Manhattan gave Musk and the SEC a few weeks to sort out what the agency

Neuromancer author William Gibson famously wrote the script for a sequel to James Cameron’s Aliens years ago, but was ultimately never filmed — we got Alien³ instead. Last year, Dark Horse Comics resurrected the script for a new comic book, and now, the script is getting another adaptation, this time as an audio drama from Audible.Gibson’s Alien III is set after the events of Aliens, and picks up the story of Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and what’s left of the android Bisho

This is like the Infinity Gauntlet of dick moves.
There are no spoilers for Avengers: Endgame in anything you'll read below. That's more than can be said for the Twitter feed belonging to the NFL's LeSean McCoy, former star running back for the Philadelphia Eagles and current Buffalo Bills player.
McCoy, in three separate tweets that are still up even now, completely gave up the goods on a major Endgame plot point. It's a big movie and there are lots of things to spoil, but it's safe to say that

If an asteroid were ever to be come hurtling towards Earth, what would be the plan to stop it from impacting the planet?
That's the question NASA and its partners, including the European Space Agency and the U.S.'s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), are gathering at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in early May to investigate.
SEE ALSO: Behold, the very bizarre Facebook auto-captions from NASA launch
During the five day conference, NASA and its partners plan to engage in a "tableto

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission settled a case with Onixiz, the owners of i-Dressup, an online flash game website dedicated to dressing up virtual dolls and designing clothes. According to the complaint, the website violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and risked its young users’ data security.
i-Dressup operated pretty much like any flash game website you remember from the early 2000s. It featured timeless classics like “Sexed-Up Style,&rdq

The Federal Communications Commission has approved SpaceX’s request to fly a large swath of its future internet-beaming satellites at a lower orbit than originally planned. The approval was a major regulatory hurdle the company needed to clear in order to start launching its first operational satellites from Florida next month.
In November, SpaceX sent a request to the FCC to partially revise plans for the company’s satellite internet constellation, known as Starlink. Under SpaceX&r

What a great boost this is for drama programs across the country: stage something really cool and inventive and you might get to meet a literal Hollywood legend.
Every year, fans of the series that started with Ridley Scott's sci-fi/horror classic Alien celebrate "Alien Day" on April 26 — in honor of the planet LV-426 from the movies — and for the 2019 event star Sigourney Weaver did a really cool thing to celebrate. She paid a visit to North Bergen High School in New Jersey, the sit

Best Buy’s four-day sale is concluding later today, but you still have a chance to save on 4K TVs with built-in Amazon Fire TV hardware, Sonos-ready outdoor speakers, and more.
In case you needed a reminder of how affordable TVs have become, Insignia’s 43-inch 4K HDR TV can play content from Prime Video out of the box, and it’s $199.99 at Best Buy. If you want to go a bit bigger, Toshiba’s 55-inch model is $249.99. Both of these TVs are over $100 off of the original pric

Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet is dead.
After three seasons, Netflix canceled the series on Friday. Starring Drew Barrymore as a zombie mom and Timothy Olyphant as her husband trying to cover her flesh-eating behavior from friends and family, Santa Clarita Diet mixed just enough weird and comedy to build a cult following.
So naturally, as soon as word got out Netflix killed the show, fans broke out their pitchforks and took to Twitter to vent.
SEE ALSO: Netflix is testing a shuffle option
Wi

Fort Bragg, the US Army’s largest base issued an apology earlier this week following an unannounced exercise to see what would happen in the event of a cyberattack. The base lost power for 12 hours on Wednesday and Thursday, and caused some confusion and concern on the base.Army officials told the Charlotte Observer that the exercise was designed to “identify shortcomings in our infrastructure, operations and security,” and wasn’t announced to the public in order to &ldq

A few years ago, I went to St. Louis for the first time to meet my friend Andrew who, until then, I’d only known through a group chat. I was there for his wedding, along with the other people in the chat, of whom I’d met about half. We spent our time in Missouri visiting local attractions, drinking beer, eating ice cream, and, of course, celebrating Andrew and Laura’s happiness. Aside from the ceremony, what I remember most is feeling instantly comfortable with these people I&

A number of academics and tech entrepreneurs agree: computer intelligence will one day meet and exceed human intelligence. But almost none of them agree on what happens after that. Depending on who you ask, it could be the end of the world or the greatest period of human prosperity we’ve ever known. I am squarely in the prosperity camp, but Hollywood lends a lot of momentum to those in the doomsday camp. Movies like Terminator, Transcendence, and The Matrix share the archetypal plot point

Google Photos makes it possible to store a lifetime of memories, often without paying a single dime. But when you have thousands upon thousands of images, actually appreciating all of them isn’t always easy.
Luckily, Photos is filled with tools to help you organize your collection and make it more manageable, and most of them require little to no effort to embrace. Take a mental snapshot of the following possibilities, and get ready to experience your memories in a whole new way.
Assemble

Did you have a busy weekday and didn't have any time to browse for hot deals? Lucky for you, it's Saturday today, meaning it's time to stop working and start relaxing. With loads of great offers around, Best Buy Apple sale event caught our eye the most. Saving you up to $500 off MacBook Pro or up to $200 off the latest iPhone.
Check out more of today's best deals from Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and Rakuten for Saturday, April 27:
Best of the best
Has your current luggage seen better days? If so,

This is One Good Thing, a weekly column where we tell you about one of the few nice things that happened this week.The first weekend of Avengers: Endgame is finally upon us, and people are desperate to avoid any spoilers for the highly-anticipated film. 
In a desperate attempt to keep the details of the plot at bay, fans have been blocking certain keywords on social media, avoiding some news sites, and taking other desperate measures. There's even a notable #Don'tSpoilTheEndgame hashtag on

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! At some point, age catches up with us all. You can’t drink a bottle of wine, eat half a cake, and see your body take it all in its stride forever. You’re going to have to exercise. And when that happens, you best make sure you’ve got a decent pair of headphones to work up a sweat in. I mean, how else are you meant to get through it? So, friends, here’s an offer just for you: 50 percen

Warning: MAJOR spoilers for Avengers: Endgame below.Time travel can save the fate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and make your brain throb worse than a hammer to the head all at the same time!
Leading up to the epic release of Avengers: Endgame, plenty of folks (yours truly included) were worried that the inevitable addition of time travel to the MCU would undermine the series' fundamental structure and leave our favorite heroes in a pile of mind-numbing paradoxes, fallacies, and plot holes.

Minor spoilers for Avengers: Endgame ahead.
With its 22nd film, the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally reached a certain historic first: Avengers: Endgame is the first MCU film to feature a canonically gay character.
You'll find him early in the movie, attending a support group with Captain America and casually discussing a recent date with another man. 
Endgame director Joe Russo, who also portrayed the character onscreen, told Deadline the moment was "important" to him: SEE ALSO: 'Ave

In a move no one saw coming, Apple has officially pulled the plug on its AirPower wireless charging mat.
And while the company is still staying true to its commitment to "push the wireless experience forward," we have no choice but to settle for the flimsy, standard-issue chargers that come with Apple devices — at least for the time being.
You don't have to drop money on a bunch of those substandard cords, though. We know you're better than that. Instead of just accepting proprietary cable

If you're in the market for a premium pair of noise-canceling headphones, your latest hobby has likely been hardcore comparing features of the Beats Studio3, Bose QuietComfort 35 II, and Sony WH1000XM3. All have above-average noise cancellation, customizable audio, and will arguably make you the fanciest person on public transportation. To make it even harder, the MSRP for all three is $349 (give or take a dollar).
Here's your deciding factor: You can now get the Sony WH1000XM3 for under $300. T

In an industry where the spotlight is always focused on shiny new things, it's basically unprecedented that a two-decade-old programming language like JavaScript is still thriving. If JavaScript were a person, it could now buy alcohol, rent a car, and blow money on slot machines in Vegas.
The backbone of over 95% of ALL websites, it's considered to be the world's most popular programming language. But even with its ubiquity, JavaScript also remains the most misunderstood language, too. Novice co

Within the next several decades, most of the industrialized world’s cars and trucks could be replaced by autonomous vehicles. That transformation may provide an opportunity to fix some of what’s now broken with modern transportation—including, perhaps, light pollution. That might seem an odd intersection of environmental concerns and driverless technologies. Ethical concerns about the vehicles have focused on avoiding harm to humans, with a bit of attention paid to reducing th

Serious gamers invest in the best accessories. They have no problem throwing money at premium headsets, keyboards, mice, joysticks, and more to elevate the gaming experience.
But a truly self-respecting gamer makes sure to invest in a top-of-the-line gaming chair, too. After all, you park yourself in front of the computer or console all day, so you might as well get a chair that delivers utmost comfort. Sitting on the floor cross-legged or settling for a wonky dining chair will only be detriment

Game of Thrones has never been about giving readers or viewers what they most want. Its author and screenwriters prefer to build fan expectations, then overturn them for narrative impact and, sometimes, pure shock value. Yet, fans maintain hope that at least a few of the characters will reach a satisfying, well-deserved ending. So it’s time for the return of Game of Thrones Hope Chest, the weekly poll where we put all of our hopes together in one place. We aren’t asking what you thi

See the picture at the top of this post? I don’t need to tell you that’s a DJI Phantom, because you already know. It’s an instantly recognizable, practically prototypical drone design that’s attracted imitators around the world — and now, rumor has it that owner DJI is killing it off for good.
Well, it’s a little more than a rumor, because DJI’s own Director of Public Safety Integration Romeo Durscher said as much on a podcast last month: “Yes, th

Tesla,  Elon Musk and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reached an agreement Friday that will give the CEO freedom to use Twitter —within certain limitations — without fear of being held in contempt for violating an earlier court order.
Musk can tweet as he wishes except when it’s about certain events or financial milestones. In those cases, Musk must seek pre-approval from a securities lawyer, according to the agreement filed with Manhattan federal court.
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Avengers: Endgame is smashing box office records, pulling in more than $60 million yesterday alone. And while the internet loses its collective shit over Endgame, we’re just over here trying to finish out the work week so we can slide into a theater for a peek at the film. Needless to say, we’re a bit wary of spoilers. This led us to pass up a pretty cool Easter egg by the folks at Google. But don’t worry, it’s spoiler-free. For those that haven’t been following al

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Kate and Alex are back (again), bringing you the latest on the IPO front. As Friday is coming to a close, we’ll keep this post short to leave plenty of room for you to dig into the audio. Welcome to the weekend.
Up first we dug into Uber’slatest S-1 filing. This time, the company set a price range for itself (TechCrunch’s coverage here),