Technology news

Tesla will have trouble innovating its way out of this one. 
The car manufacturer is facing potentially serious financial headwinds in its attempt to equip all newly produced vehicles with the technology required to enable full self-driving. So reports TechCrunch, which notes that the White House won't budge on a 25 percent tariff on the Chinese-assembled 'engine control unit' the cars require. Notably, this tariff wouldn't apply to the entire car — just the ECU. 
The so-called A

I can handle just about anything that happens in the most gruesome of movies, but pets or babies murdered for lazy emotional manipulation will leave me in a rotten mood for the rest of the day. I get that it’s “just a movie,” but sometimes I’m not in the mindset to put up with the gratuitous deaths of cute things – especially when it’s completely unexpected. If you ever find yourself feeling like me, I’ve got the resource for you: Doesthedogdie.com Desp

Electric racing series Formula E posted a €26.4 million (about $29 million) loss during its fiscal year ending July 31st, 2018, despite generating a record €133.4 million (about $149 million) of revenue, according to a new financial statement filed with the United Kingdom’s Companies House registry.The results for the fiscal year Formula E reported in this filing cover the racing series’ fourth season, which began in late 2017 and ended with a pair of races in New York Cit

Video game adaptations used to mean dressing up attractive actors in iconic costumes and trying to stuff 20 hours of gameplay into a 90-minute movie. It didn’t really work. Now, video game adaptations are more reliant on CGI versions of favorite childhood characters appearing both realistic and either terrifying or adorable. It’s the difference between Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider and recent films like Rampage.Detective Pikachu director Rob Letterman knows how importa

Ever since Lil Nas X dropped "Old Town Road" (featuring Billy Ray Cyrus) earlier this month, the internet has been overrun with remixes of the "hip haw" song. 
The latest — and definitely most enthusiastic —  remix comes from Jasmine A. Merlette's third grade class. A day in the life of Ms. Merlette..
🍎👩🏽‍🏫🔥 #MyClassHasBarsss #TurntUpTuesday #ThisIsOURJam #WeKILTOurStateTest #ThirdGradeShawty #YoFavoriteTeacher pic.twitter.co

  
After all of her years preparing your favorite chocolate-chip pancakes for breakfast and her specialty spaghetti Bolognese for after-school dinners, it’s time to do Mom a solid. This year, invite her over for a Mother’s Day feast prepared by you — and in a kitchen she’ll admire. 
We’ve got recommendations for all the grown-up coffeemakers, cookware sets, and cutlery you’ve been jonesing for since moving out of Mom’s house, as well as th

Through both sunny days and torrential storms, sailors cutting through the waters around New Zealand and Antarctica faithfully recorded the weather they encountered, building up a treasure trove of data. Over a century later, scientists are digging through these maritime records for insights about the past and future of the region’s climate — and they need the public’s help.
Knowing what the weather was up to in the past can help scientists calibrate climate models like the on

Warning: spoilers ahead for season 8 of Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame.
The morning of Game of Thrones’ long-awaited Battle of Winterfell episode, “The Long Night,” Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo tweeted a fan-made picture of the Night King and Thanos face-to-face, with the hashtag #WeWannaSeeThisFight. But the truth about the villains — two of the most significant in popular culture this decade and both coming to their biggest, death-filled cla

Your wireless carrier knows where you are as you read this on your phone—otherwise, it couldn’t connect your phone in the first place.
But your wireless carrier also has a memory. It knows where you took your phone in the last hour, the last week, the last month, the last year—and maybe even the last five years.
That gives it an enormous warehouse of data on your whereabouts that can help your wireless carrier fix coverage gaps while revealing much more. Depending on the densit

Smart cities are designed to make life easier for their residents: better traffic management by clearing routes, making sure the public transport is running on time and having cameras keeping a watchful eye from above.
But what happens when that data leaks? One such database was open for weeks for anyone to look inside.
Security researcher John Wethington found a smart city database accessible from a web browser without a password. He passed details of the database to TechCrunch in an effort to

May the 4th is almost upon us, and if you’re anything like me, you’re going to indulge in some Star Wars video games, which let you live out your space-faring action hero fantasies. Luckily for us, most gaming platforms are eager to cater to this love, as several of them are offering sales on the best Star Wars games ever made. Discord revealed earlier this week it’s adding Star Wars games to the selection of games for its Nitro premium users —&n

Have you ever had that devastating experience where someone asks you what you've been up to, then the light rapidly leaves your eyes because you realize you've only been working? 
If you can swing it, consider taking up a hobby.
Learning an entirely new skill can be daunting. Luckily, we have the internet, which is probably the place you're spending all your free time (assuming you have it) anyway — and which allows you to learn the basics of pretty much anything for free.
Here are a

The White House has refused to exempt the “brain” of Tesla’s Autopilot technology from punitive import tariffs, a decision that could delay or disrupt the company’s self-driving ambitions, TechCrunch has learned.At a special “autonomy day” event last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled advanced Autopilot 3.0 hardware, including a new custom chip intended to enable full self-driving (FSD) operation for all of its new vehicles. This hardware is now standard in al

Joseph Flaherty Contributor Joe Flaherty is director of Content & Community at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributorWhy the ‘end of the startup era’ could be great for entrepreneurs Invisible unicorns: 35 big companies that started with little or no money
There’s a seemingly insatiable demand for Theranoscontent. John Carreyrou’s best-selling book, “Bad Blood,” has already inspired an HBO documentary, The Inventor; an ABC podca

There is way too much good stuff on TV right now to still be watching something under 1080p. Even if the numbers mean nothing to you, we're sure you noitice it when you can see each individual pixel as the colors change — or when you can't see shit in Game of Thrones. (The cinematographer says it's on you to get a better TV.) 
Whether you're watching GoT, knocking out a summer watch list, or just waiting to see what comes to Netflix and Hulu this month, a new TV will make all the

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to watch
“Out of Africa,” a season 2 episode of Samantha Who?, an ABC sitcom tha

Spotify has launched its instant listening app Stations on iOS, but only in Australia for the time being. The release comes nearly a year and a half after the Stations app first arrived on the market, initially for Android users in Australia. Dubbed an “experiment,” the app allows users to jump right into streaming instead of having to curate their own playlists or stations, or save favorite music to their library.
Unlike Spotify’s flagship application, the Stations app present

The emerging business of offering bikes and scooters on demand has not always been very smooth, and today comes one of the latest bumps: TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Liam O’Connor, an executive hired to help transportation company Lyft build its bike and scooter operations, has left after seven months with the newly-public company.
The change comes some two weeks after Lyfthad to pull thousands of e-bikes off the roads in New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC due to fault

The major darknet marketplace known as the Wall Street Market has been seized and its alleged operators arrested in a joint operation between European and U.S. authorities. Millions in cash, cryptocurrency and other assets were collected, and the market shut down. How investigators tied these anonymity-obsessed individuals to the illegal activities is instructive.
The three men accused of running Wall Street Market (WSM), one of the larger hidden service markets operating via the Tornetwork, are

Despite Uberco-founder Travis Kalanickwanting to be part of the company going public, the company’s board is considering not letting Kalanick be there to ring the opening bell on May 10, Uber’s first day of trading, Axios reports. Kalanick also wants to bring his dad, The New York Times reports.
Additionally, Kalanick’s fellow co-founders Ryan Graves and Garrett Camp may not be allowed on the balcony to ring the bell.
Uber would not be where it is today without Kalanick, but hi

Today, OnePlus posted a teaser video of its next flagship phone falling into a bucket of water. “Water resistant ratings for phones cost you money,” reads the text that pops up on-screen. “We bought something less expensive instead.” The spot clearly implies that the OnePlus 7 Pro will have some level of water resistance — even if the company hasn’t gone through the formal IP certification process.
Waterproof ratings for phones cost you money. We just bought

Do you ever crave a show to watch between watching shows? When you're struck by analysis paralysis, torn between your latest binge and the next item on your never-ending watchlist, there are few shows that fill the time adequately.
Enter Netflix's Bonding. At seven episodes (all of which are around 15 minutes), Bonding is the ideal transitional show. It follows best friends Tiff (Zoe Levin) and Pete (Brandon Scannell), the former of whom works as a dominatrix at night and enlists the latter as m

Way back in 2013, Applespent a whopping $578 million on sapphire glass. The sum, spread out over four installments, was an advance to GT Advanced Technologies. Already in use on the company’s home buttons and camera, the plan was to implement the extremely hard material on a larger scale, replacing Gorilla Glass in the process.
The following year, however, GT exited the business. The company shut down its plants, sold off its furnaces and announced plans to settle its debt. Today, the U.S.

“The Key,” a surreal story with a real-world political message, has won the Storyscapes award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival
That’s the festival’s juried award for immersive art. It comes with a $10,000 cash prize, which the creators say will be donated to the Friends of Refugees organizations.
I had a chance to experience “The Key” for myself last week, and it’s a unique story, starting with an exploration of the nameless narrator’s dr

At this point, we’re halfway through the final season of Game of Thrones, and two things have become excessively clear. One, Jon Snow is the protagonist of this show now. Two, Jon Snow sucks.
Where has Jon Snow ever actually succeeded on Game of Thrones?
Spoilers below for all of Game of Thrones, including season 8.
Both as a leader and as a protagonist, as one of the series’s primary load-bearing characters, Jon is one of the most ineffectual people on the entire show. He fails alm

It's hard out there for administrators of illegal dark web markets trying to steal their users' cryptocurrency in peace. 
Barely a week after Wallstreet Market — one of the largest remaining illegal online marketplaces in the vein of the Silk Road — went into a suspicious maintenance mode, German authorities have seized the site and arrested its alleged operators. Oh, and law enforcement says the three individuals now in custody not only ran the site, but were in the processes o

Tasha: So let’s be frank about this: we started having a version of this conversation a week ago when Julia said she was super into the Night King on Game of Thrones. We talked about her writing a piece about villain-lust, coming in part out of a Tumblr and pop culture outlet trend toward drooling over characters like Venom and thirsting after thicc daddy Thanos. And then this Mashable piece about the Night King hit, full of references to Night Bae and “Ice me, Night Daddy” an

Foxconn’s founder and chairman Terry Gou went on a quick US tour this week, first stopping at the White House on Wednesday to meet with President Trump, and then dropping by the Milwaukee airport on Thursday to meet with Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers.The purpose of the visit appears to be reassuring everyone that the company’s Wisconsin project is moving forward — that despite the company’s changing plans and lack of progress, it will eventually hire the thousands of peo

Sinclair is buying 21 regional sports networks from Disney in a $10 billion deal that marks the final major detail of Disney’s massive Fox purchase, according to The Wall Street Journal.It’s the latest move for Sinclair in regional programming, which is an area that the company already has vast control over. (The Federal Communications Commission actually blocked a merger between Sinclair and the Tribune Media Company last year due to concerns about Sinclair’s reach.)The 21 sp

A spoiler warning for Avengers: Endgame, the newest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will run alongside the new Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer.
It’s rumored that the new trailer will be released on May 6th, and it will feature “a special message from Tom Holland, warning viewers that the trailer will contain spoilers for Avengers: Endgame,” according to Trailer Track’s report. The site is reporting that a clip from the Far From Home trailer “was sent out,

A Europol-led police operation has arrested three people who allegedly ran the Wall Street Market, supposedly the world’s second-largest “dark web” marketplace. Authorities also seized the site’s servers and more than €550,000 (around $615,000) in cash, plus Bitcoin and Monero “in six-digit amounts,” which could add up to a huge sum. (A single bitcoin currently trades for $5,700 and Monero trade for around $65.)
The arrests were part of Europol’s &

Giacomo Bagarella ContributorShare on Twitter Giacomo Bagarella works for the Massachusetts Digital Service, where he leads projects to improve the way the state serves constituents. In his spare time, he thinks and writes about the impact of emerging technologies on society and national security. Follow him on Twitter @g_bagarella.When Amazonentered markets like bookselling or groceries, its competition proved highly disruptive to incumbents. In November 2018, Amazon declared that it had selec

A new report from The Wall Street Journal highlights an evolving threat in the ongoing civil war in Yemen: cheap drones outfitted with explosives used to attack government forces.Since 2015, Yemen’s government has been locked in a civil war against the Houthis, a militia movement that originated in Northern Yemen. That conflict has become incredibly controversial. It’s largely seen as part of a larger regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, it’s caused considerable ca

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1. Facebook bans a fresh batch of mostly far-right figures
The banned figures include Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, Paul Nehlen and Louis Farrakhan — plus, Facebookdoubled down on banning Alex Jones.
The company said this is part of its policy to ban “individual