Technology news

In the opinion of Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and blogs around the world, there are only two pieces of pop culture that matter this year so far: Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones. Newly announced nominations for MTV’s Movie and TV Awards confirm those beliefs.Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones racked up top nominations for this year’s awards ceremony. Endgame picked up several nominations for Best Movie, Best Hero (Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron-Man), Best Villain (Josh Brolin

In a first for a city in the United States, San Francisco has voted to ban its government agencies from using facial recognition technology.The city’s Board of Supervisors voted eight to one to approve the proposal, set to take effect in a month, that would bar city agencies, including law enforcement, from using the tool. The ordinance would also require city agencies to get board approval for their use of surveillance technology, and set up audits of surveillance tech already in use. Ot

Apple has added Apple Pay as a payment method for a variety of purchases, including the App Store, iTunes Store, Apple Music, Apple Books, or to buy iCloud storage. The changes are reflected in an updated support document first spotted by MacRumors.
The new payment option is launching right on time ahead of the Apple Card, which is slated to arrive this summer. Users can get 2 percent cash back on purchases made with Apple Pay, and 3 percent cash back for Apple products, which includes the digi

It truly feels like we’re starting to reach peak dongle: Anker has released an adapter that allows Lightning earbuds to work with the 2018 iPad Pro, Apple’s USB-C MacBooks, and some recent Windows 10 laptops. This $29.99 accessory is available from Amazon now and is certified under the iPhone maker’s MFi program.If your Lightning earbuds have an in-line microphone and track controls, Anker says that both should still work when running through the adapter. The USB-C to Lightnin

A newly discovered security flaw in Intel processors allows attackers to steal any data that’s been recently accessed by the processor. That even holds true on cloud servers, which could allow an attacker to steal information from other virtual machines running on the same PC.
It’s not known whether the attack, dubbed ZombieLoad, has been used by malicious hackers. The flaw was discovered by researchers from Graz University of Technology and was disclosed to Intel. Intel has issued

There’s bad takes, and then there’s bad takes. An example of the latter comes from Bloomberg Opinion columnist Leonid Bershidsky, who thinks that today’s WhatsApp security woes proves that end-to-end encryption is “a gimmick” and “largely pointless.” WhatsApp is one of the largest messaging apps around. To put Bershidsky’s comments in context, earlier today, it transpired that it was possible to use specially-weaponized phone calls in order to ins

Disney is set to take full control of Hulu, which means many beloved NBC shows currently streaming on the platform will disappear by 2024. Between that and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson confirming that some of WarnerMedia’s most popular series would leave Netflix to land exclusively on the company’s upcoming streaming service, the future of streaming is about to change.Or to put it simply, the streaming world that most cord-cutting consumers have grown to know over the last few ye

Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed Apple a major defeat in an antitrust case. A group of iOS users claimed Apple had unfairly driven up app prices with its locked-down App Store. Apple argued that the users had no right to sue since they were actually buying apps from developers instead of Apple. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, speaking for a majority of the court, disagreed.
The new ruling establishes that app buyers are Apple’s direct customers, giving them the right to proceed with their ant

Google is combining its travel-related products — the mobile Google Trips app, Google Flights, Google hotels search, and more — under a singular landing page aptly called Trips. Found under google.com/travel, Trips lets travelers search by destination to find options for flights, hotels, travel guides, or vacation packages. And once you’ve booked your trip, whether through the Google tool or not, you can use Trips to see all the booking receipts to outline your itinerary, conf

Google announced a bunch of new ad types today that’ll start showing up throughout its mobile products, including some that interrupt the core Google search and discovery experiences.
Google searches on mobile will soon include “gallery” ads that allow advertisers to display multiple images for users to swipe through. You’ll also begin to see ads in Google’s discover feed — the feed of news stories that you find built into many Android home screens, inside th

Updated at 3:53PM, May 14th: Amazon’s Lightning Deal is now over. If you missed out, it’s selling the H9i in a “renewed” state for as low as $259.99. These will be refurbished and, according to Amazon, look and operate as a new model would. It states that these may not come in the original box or with original accessories, though, a 90-day warranty isn’t horrible.Bang & Olufsen’s H9i over-ear headphones are $249 for only a few hours, or until supplies las

Rockstar today revealed Red Dead Online is finally exiting the beta stage, and it’s bringing a wagonload of new stuff with it. From new playing modes to punishing murders to full-on role-playing, what was originally a fairly blasé add-on to Red Dead Redemption 2 looks like it might finally be a game worth playing by itself. I remember a time when we were all kind of apprehensive about Red Dead Online. Back around the time RDR2 was teased, the online multipl

Last night, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman tweeted an image of broken glass shards that seemingly reveal some of the new colors Apple has planned for the follow-up to its iPhone XR. The familiar black, white, and yellow colors are back, but there are also green and purple pieces in the mix. These look like they could be discarded manufacturing parts or glass panels that failed quality assurance testing.As Gurman notes in his tweet, both of those new options, which are said to replace the current

Microsoft is warning users of older versions of Windows to urgently apply a Windows Update today to protect against a potential widespread attack. The software giant has patched a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Remote Desktop Services that exists in Windows XP, Windows 7, and server versions like Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft is taking the highly unusual approach of releasing patches for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 even t

Pioneer DJ has announced its newest controller, the DDJ-200. It’s built for beginners that are curious about DJing and puts ease of use at the forefront with an ultra-competitive price of $149. Not only does it come with built-in tutorials, it’s compatible with several music streaming services, and can pair with your smartphone, tablet, or laptop.
Easy and frictionless setup is at the heart of the DDJ-200. It can connect to any number of devices to stream music, is iOS- and Android-

Uber drivers are independent contractors, not employees of the ride-hailing company, the federal labor board’s general counsel said in an opinion released May 14th. It’s another sign that drivers and labor advocates face a steep — if impossible — hill to climb to force Uber to reclassify its drivers as employees.The opinion, authored April 16th by Jayme Sophir, associate general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, means that drivers will have a much harder tim

If you search for tweets related to vaccines as of Friday, the first thing you see on Twitter is a post from the United States Department of Health and Human Services pointing you to reliable health information instead of anti-vax misinformation.
Last week, Twitter announced that it would be launching a new tool in search that would prompt users to head to vaccines.org, which is run by officials at HHS. Over the past few months, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have faced intens

OnePlus has done it again. It’s created a monster smartphone with an incredible array of flagship specs and features — including a 90Hz AMOLED screen and a motorized pop-up selfie cam — at the recently unimaginable price of $699. And it’s actually good.
But the new OnePlus 7 Pro is just one of the two new phones the company announced today. Though OnePlus didn’t even mention it during its big New York City presser, there’s also a regular OnePlus 7 arriving as

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person in want of an Iron Throne must be in need of therapy.Game of Thrones’ final season has shown, more than ever, that most of the show’s characters are in desperate need of some one-on-one time with a therapist. It’s easy to snort over the idea of Mad Queen Daenerys sitting down with a patient, sympathetic professional ear once a week or Euron Greyjoy spending the occasional 60-minute session working through his feelings

Facebook is restoring the option for users to view their profile from the perspective of someone they aren’t friends with, as well as making it easier for users to manage what information does or doesn’t get displayed on the public-facing version of their profiles.The news was announced in a tweet today after Facebook had disabled the option back in September 2018 due to a major security flaw that allowed an attacker to steal access tokens for over 50 million accounts by exploiting

Researchers from Romanian security firm BitDefender have uncovered a troubling security vulnerability in Intel processors that could allow an attacker to access privileged kernel-mode information typically considered “off limits” for most applications. An exploit for the vulnerability, which is called microarchitectural data sampling (MDS), has been proven to work on Intel’s Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake processors. This is the most recent CPU-level vulnerab

Russian hackers accessed voter databases in two Florida counties prior to the 2016 presidential elections, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said, following a briefing with the FBI earlier today.According to DeSantis, the hackers were able to access the databases by sending spearfishing emails to county employees. These links contained malware that, once opened, gave the Russian military intelligence unit GRU access to voter registration information.The names of the affected counties were not formally

Microsoft’s disc-less Xbox One S All-Digital launched last week for $249. The idea behind its design is that removing the 4K Blu-ray drive will save customers some money, at the expense of not being able to insert physical games or movie discs. However, Walmart currently has the regular Xbox One S with 1TB of storage for $207.75.
In addition to being a pretty good gaming console, the original Xbox One S is an affordable way to play 4K Blu-ray discs (the more expensive Xbox One X can, as w

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson confirmed today that AT&T is planning to pull WarnerMedia-owned content like Friends and ER from rival streaming services and offer it exclusively on AT&T’s upcoming streaming service.“We are going to have to take a lot of the great content we own that’s been licensed elsewhere and bring that back into the fold,” Stephenson said at a conference in Dallas, as reported by The Dallas News.
Stephenson’s comments echo what Kevin R

Uber is notoriously stingy with its data, often refusing requests from cities for reasons around privacy and the desire to preserve its competitive advantage. That’s changed a little over the last few years with the launch of Uber Movement, an online tool expressly for cities to map travel times, powered by the company’s vast store of trip data. Today, Uber announced an update that would allow cities to track vehicle speeds on a granular, street-by-street level.This new tool “

The OnePlus 7 is here. It starts at $669 in the US, goes on sale May 17, and it might just be the phone that brings OnePlus to the mainstream. I’ve only been able to play around with the phone for a few days, so don’t consider this a full review, but the OnePlus 7 Pro feels like the company has finally stopped holding back. OnePlus’ mantra has always been ‘Never Settle,’ but despite how good its previous phones have been, it’s always seemed like the company h

Alexa Guard, Amazon’s new feature that lets your Echo smart speaker listen for potential signs of an emergency, is still in the process of rolling out to Echo owners in the US. Once it’s live for you, you’ll be able to find Alexa Guard within the Alexa app on your iOS or Android devices.
Alexa Guard uses the far-field microphones in Echo devices to listen for glass breaks and alarms from a smoke or CO detector. Once you arm your Echo with the voice command “Alexa, I&rsqu

The next Star Wars trilogy hitting theaters beginning in 2022 will come from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced today at Disney’s annual Upfronts event.“It makes sense to take a hiatus,” after the release of The Rise of Skywalker this year, Iger said. “Three years is the proper amount of time to take a breather and reset but really gear up for the next film’s release. We did a deal with Benioff and Weiss, and the