Technology news

Snapchat could soon get more musical.
Snap has been "in talks" with a number of record labels in an effort to broker deals that would let the company add more music to its app, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal. The talks are not yet final but have "intensified in recent weeks."
If these talks do progress to actual licensing deals, it would mean Snapchat would be able to add musical features akin to Instagram and TikTok, both of which allow users to add short clips from pop

Tesla owners will soon find that they can no longer charge up to 100 percent at some Supercharger stations. 
The car maker has opted to limit charging to 80 percent at some of its busiest stations, according to a report in Electrek. "Today, we released a new Supercharger feature that will limit owners’ State of Charge (SOC) to 80% at select high-traffic sites," Tesla told employees in a memo obtained by the site.
SEE ALSO: Elon Musk explains why you shouldn't charge your Tesla battery

Netflix teamed up with Latin American YouTubers to create three Little Black Mirror mini-stories, but they're only available in Latin America.
The Little Black Mirror series is a promotional campaign aimed at Spanish-speaking audiences, according to a report from Variety. Netflix confirmed to Mashable that the videos, which will be published on the Netflix América Latina YouTube channel, are only available in Latin American countries and will not be released in English.
That's a bit of a

Tidying master Marie Kondo is working on a children's book about friendship, tidying up, and, of course, embracing joy. View this post on InstagramIntroducing “Kiki & Jax,” my upcoming children’s picture book co-written and illustrated by @salinayoon. It’s a timeless story about friendship, and I hope that the characters of Kiki and Jax will inspire children and families to tidy and embrace joy! The book launches on November 5, but you can preorder it wherever books a

Since the beginning of the modern science fiction genre, authors have built careers on writing short stories, for magazines and anthologies — and more recently — on websites. While those works don’t quite get the same attention as a novel, collections of an author’s short fiction has long been a good way to catch up on their published repertoire. Recently, there’s been more attention on shorter fiction thanks to projects such as Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots

Congratulations to the referee in the Netherlands who scored a goal against the Harkemase Boys football club on Saturday.During a match between the Harkemase Boys and HSV Hoek in the Netherlands, the Harkemase Boys' defense were scrambling to stop the Hoek offense from scoring inside the penalty box. One of the defenders tried to clear the ball away from the goal but kicked it right at the referee and the ball bounced back into the goal.
After a second, the referee signaled that the goal counted

A laptop infected with some of the most destructive pieces of malware ever may sound like the kind of ticking time bomb you'd expect only in sci-fi movies. But one man has created just such a machine, and it can be yours — if you have about $1 million to spare. 
No, this isn't some shady dark web marketplace. It's an art auction, and the current bidding price is around $1.2 million. 
The piece, by artist Guo O Dong, is titled "The Persistence of Chaos," and the name is apt becaus

Gaming disorder, which basically boils down to video game addiction, was officially recognized by the World Health Organization Saturday.
After a year and a half of deliberation on the new revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11), which included gaming disorder in its 2017 draft, all 194 member states of the WHO agreed to adopt ICD-11. The new revision goes into effect Jan. 1, 2022.
So what exactly is gaming disorder? It sits in th

At this point, it feels like I’ve heard countless stories about workers who are restless about the effects that AI will have on their jobs and their careers in the relatively near future. While we must certainly take into account that the nature of certain workplaces and the human roles within them may change, I believe a proactive approach in adapting can make all the difference in withstanding AI’s advent in the workforce. There are multiple AI waves happening simultaneously, thou

One of the ways that Samsung moved away from having a notch on its Galaxy S10 family of smartphones was to put the front-facing camera and sensors in the display, leaving a small cutout in the corner of the screen. Users have created some clever wallpapers to hide the hole, and Samsung recently partnered with Disney to release a series of its own custom wallpapers that camouflage the camera
Hiding the hole is pretty easy with the right wallpaper: it just needs to be surrounded by something that

Fiat ChryslerAutomobiles and Renaultare reportedly in talks that could result in merging vast swaths of their businesses, a move that illustrates the growing desire among automakers to consolidate in an environment of increased regulatory pressure, sales declines and rising costs aimed at bringing next-generation technologies like self-driving cars to market.
Bloomberg, Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal have reported on talks of a tie up that could result in Fiat Chrysler eventually b

Robert Moog changed the landscape of music forever when he launched the first commercial synthesizer in the ‘60s. Since then, the Moog name has become synonymous with synthesis and iconic pieces of hardware like the Minimoog. Now, the Bob Moog Foundation has opened the Moogseum — a museum dedicated to Moog’s work and other important music devices — in Asheville, North Carolina.
The museum had its soft opening this week but will officially celebrate a grand opening on Aug

Songs of the summer — you know them, you love them, and according to some, they're an entire musical genre that is in danger of melting away like sweet sugar syrup on a popsicle. 
It is true that it used to be a lot easier to judge which mega hit dominated the airwaves during the heatwaves. How do we measure the success of a single that you can't escape during the summer months now? Billboard charts? Spotify streams? Music video hits? Inspired memes? 
We're taking a look back at

It's been a couple days since SpaceX sent its first 60 Starlink satellites into orbit and the skywatching has begun.
A video captured by Dr. Marco Langbroek, who runs the StatTrack Cam Leiden Blog, shows the satellites all lined up as they sail through the sky. It looks like some kind of high-tech conga line, or an unintelligible string of Morse code.
Whatever it is you see when you look at this, we should all be able to agree that it's an unusual sight to behold in the night sky.Langbroek point

Venture capitalists aren’t supposed to make their portfolio companies battle to the death. There’s a long-standing but unofficial rule that investors shouldn’t fund multiple competitors in the same space. Conflicts of interest could arise, information about one startup’s strategy could be improperly shared with the other, and the companies could become suspicious of advice provided by their investors. That leads to problems down the line for VCs, as founders may avoid the

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.
I’ve written about a number of weird games for Short Play, but BirdGut might have the strangest premise so far. It’s about a disabled bee who is kicked out of their hive after being born. The bee manages to make its way through the world, despite not being able to fly,

The end Game of Thrones left fans with so many open ended questions. Namely: What happens to all their favorite characters after the show?
We looked into where everyone went and what happened to them after the cameras stopped rolling and put together these post-Thrones biographies. Some of them had happy endings. Some of them didn't really do much after the final episode.
Here's where your favorite Game of Thrones ended up.
Arya StarkImage:Helen sloan / hboArya sailed west of Westeros with a cre

Apple’s abacus emoji is wrong. Or, technically not “wrong” per se, in that you can probably still use it do math if you actually know how to use an abacus (I do not). But still, that ever useful emoji — added in the Unicode 11.0 update to the emoji standards as part of iOS 12 — is apparently incorrect on Apple devices when compared to nearly any abacus used across the whole of human civilization.The error was first spotted by Twitter user @sophophobic, who noticed

We'll soon get our first look at the next version of iOS. Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) kicks off June 3, when we'll get the first official peek at all the new features coming to iOS 13. 
And while there have already been a lot of rumors and speculation as to what we'll see, there are some features we really, really hope will make the cut. Whether it's more dark mode or a smarter camera, these are the features we'd like most in iOS 13.
1. System-wide dark mode
Yes, t

What's worse than buffering delays when you're deep in a binge-watching sesh?
The answer is easy: not having the ability to stream your favorite content. Like at all.
It's usually the case while traveling that you suddenly lose access to your favorite shows and movies because of geo restrictions. Every country has unique content agreements and royalty laws, so what is available in your home country may not be available for streaming in your chosen destination.
You may think you can easily counte

Last week, Trump signed an executive order that enabled the federal government to prohibit U.S. companies from buying telecom equipment from foreign companies at their discretion.
This week, the full damage began to feel apparent to China’s fastest-growing smartphone powerhouse, Huawei. American companies, at the behest of Trump and company, began turning on the Chinese giant, and what they’re stripping away will undoubtedly impact Huawei in a material way. Huawei may soon have to de