Technology news

Bethesda says it’ll get rid of the strange requirement that players must log into an online account before they play the newly re-released versions of Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3, which went live yesterday. Players quickly criticized Bethesda for the seemingly ridiculous limitation — the first of these games was released more than 25 years ago, at a time when there was obviously no internet requirement.
The online login will be made optional in a coming update, Bethesda said today. The

Cryptocurrency might be a challenge to the primacy of the U.S. dollar, but that's not stopping the Internal Revenue Service from wanting a piece of the action.
The IRS announced Friday that it was sending letters to 10,000 cryptocurrency holders informing them that they needed to report, and pay taxes on, their crypto transactions and capital gains.
"Taxpayers should take these letters very seriously by reviewing their tax filings and when appropriate, amend past returns and pay back taxes, inte

Apple's not done releasing new products in 2019.
New iPhones — bulbous square camera bump and all — are expected in September. The new Mac Pro will also be coming the same month. A 16-inch MacBook Pro with all-new keyboard are rumored for the fall. And now, there's word new iPads are coming.
Two regulatory entries Apple filed with the Eurasian Economic Commission (a now-frequent source of confirmation for unreleased products) suggest new iPads will likely be released in the fall, acc

Donald Trump started off his Saturday morning with a mean-spirited and racist attack on Congressman Elijah Cummings and the West Baltimore district he represents. CNN's Victor Blackwell wasn't having it.
The president singled out Cummings — who notably chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, one of several investigating Trump's conduct — in a string of morning tweets. He called the Congressman "a brutal bully" and labeled his district as a "rat and rodent infested mess" w

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Elon Musk has long touted the potential that the in-car displays found in Teslas have for drivers: they can not only provide information, but entertainment as well. To that end, he says that the cars will soon be able to stream video from Netflix and YouTube.Tesla has already unveiled games that drivers can play on the displays: in June, Bethesda studios announced at E3 that drivers would be able to play Fallout Shelter. Tesla has also released Cuphead and som

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is looking for pitches on how to enhance and augment traditional creative arts through immersive technologies.
Through a partnership with Microsoft the foundation is offering a share of a $750,00 pool of cash and the option of technical support from Microsoft,including mentoring in mixed-reality technologies and access to the company’s suite of mixed reality technologies.
“We’ve seen how immersive technologies can reach new audiences a

A hacker gained access to internal files and documents owned by security company and SSL certificate issuer Comodo by using an email address and password mistakenly exposed on the internet.
The credentials were found in a public GitHub repository owned by a Comodo software developer. With the email address and password in hand, the hacker was able to log into the company’s Microsoft-hosted cloud services. The account was not protected with two-factor authentication.
Jelle Ursem, a Netherla

Cat burglars? Out. Bear burglars? In.
One sneaky bear proved the lengths to which its kind would go to get some sweet sweet noms. A Colorado couple affixed a bird feeder to their backyard shed, in a kind move for birds. They knew that bears were prevalent in their area, so they also attached a bell to the feeder in the hopes that the noise would dissuade any non-bird creatures looking to feed. 
The bell was not enough. The couple (seemingly from safely within their home) captured one bear's

Is space truly within reach for startups and VC?
With the 50th anniversary of the moon landing taking place this past week, Darrell Etherington takes a temperature check of the current state of spacetech, chatting with startups like Wyvern and NSLComm. What he finds is actually a fairly positive picture — not only are there a huge number of original ideas and serious dollars flowing into the … space (couldn’t resist), but there are also clear trajectories to real products in t

This week professor David Carroll, whose dogged search for answers to how his personal data was misused plays a focal role in The Great Hack: Netflix’s documentary tackling the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, quipped that perhaps a follow up would be more punitive for the company than the $5BN FTC fine released the same day.
The documentary — which we previewed ahead of its general release Wednesday — does an impressive job of articulating for a mainstream

News alert: your Siri voice recordings may not be entirely private.
According to The Guardian, Apple hires contractors to listen to Siri recordings in order to improve the accuracy and quality of the voice assistant.
These contractors "regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or 'grading,'" the report claims.
Like Amazon and Google, both of which also employ humans to review some recordings

Tesla’s games library is getting bigger, and the latest announced title is probably a familiar one to gaming fans: Cuphead. This indie game was released in 2017 for Xbox One and Windows after making a big debut in 2013, attracting a lot of attention thanks to its hand-drawn, retro Disney-esque animation style.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that Cuphead would be getting a Tesla port sometime in August, replying to a post in which Tesla announced its latest addition to the in-car arcade libra

Image: Amazon Studios Today at the Television Critics Association, Amazon announced that it has renewed its science fiction series The Expanse for a fifth season.
Last year, Amazon picked up the series for a fourth season after the Syfy Channel canceled it, and it announced at San Diego Comic-Con that the new season would debut in December 2019. Along with the news, Amazon released a new teaser for the upcoming fourth season.Burn like hell, we’ve got incoming! Here’s a new Season 4

Gatik AI, the autonomous vehicle startup that’s aiming for the sweet middle spot in the world of logistics, is officially on the road through a partnership with Walmart .
The company received approval from the Arkansas Highway Commissioner’s office to launch a commercial service with Walmart . Gatik’s autonomous vehicles (with a human safety driver behind the wheel) is now delivering customer online grocery orders from Walmart’s main warehouse to its neighborhood stores i

It might be time to accept that the city of Las Vegas is now lost to us humans. It belongs to the grasshoppers now.
Swarms of the winged insect have overrun the Nevada city in the past week, making parts of Sin City look like they've been inflicted with a Biblical plague. But these aren't locusts; they're desert-native pallid-winged grasshoppers, and they're behaving normally.
That's what Nevada's state entomologist Jeff Knight told CNN. The insect's numbers grow following wet winters and spring

The chemist who helped create the magic sauce behind Juul, Xing Chenyue, unveiled the product of her new startup Myst Labs this week after two years of development: electronic cigarette alternatives designed for China’s 350 million smokers, the world’s biggest smoking population.
This new contender makes for a potentially heated battlefield given that Juul will reportedly enter China soon. TechCrunch has reached out to Juul about its expansion, but has not heard back at the time of w

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge It has been a few months since the iPad Pro (2018) had a big price drop, but you’ll find the best prices happening now at Best Buy and Amazon. The 11-inch model (64GB, Wi-FI) is available at Best Buy or Amazon for $649.99. This is $150 off of the original price, beating the previous best price by $25. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing!
If you want the bigger 12.9-inch iPad Pro (2019) with 64GB of storage, that one costs $824.99 at

french flag (flickr) France’s finance minister says that it will continue to carry out a plan to tax technology firms, despite a threat of tariffs on French goods from US President Donald Trump, according to Reuters.
The country’s senate passed the controversial bill earlier this month, and it was signed into law by President Emmanuel Macron this week. The bill places a 3 percent tax on technology firms that earn more than €750 million ($834 million) in global revenue and &euro

JAXA A camera has successfully recorded a Japanese spacecraft’s attempt to grab a second sample from a distant asteroid. While the actual sample collection happened earlier in July, a video made of images taken during the maneuver was just released on Friday, July 26th.The sample-collecting spacecraft, Hayabusa2, has been in orbit around the asteroid Ryugu since July 2018, and it has already delivered robots and rovers to the asteroid. In the new video, you can see the shadow of the space

Image: Sony First Flight Sony has announced the Reon Pocket, a small cooling device that you can wear like a portable air conditioner. It’s currently live on Sony’s crowdfunding website, where prices start at ¥12,760 (about $117). SlashGear notes that as well as cooling you during hot days, the device, which slots into the back pocket of a specially designed T-shirt, can also warm you up during the winter.Unfortunately, the March 2020 ship date means that the Reon Pocket will ar

TL;DR: Get an advanced Sage 50cloud Payroll subscription for just £19.50 a month, saving you 25% on list price.If you own a small business, you'll know that managing your accounts can be really tough. That's why it's good to have a payroll management system helping you out. 
If you're looking for an easy to use, advanced payroll system, then we have found a deal that may be of interest. You can now save 25% on the first six months of a Sage 50cloud Payroll subscription, and pay just &

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images If you’re anything like me, you took off like a shot the moment you heard Equifax would pay you $125 just for filling out a simple form. Perhaps you even considered it a reasonable stab at compensation for the fact that the 2017 data breach exposed the personal information of 147 million Americans.
But the likelihood that you’ll actually get a check for $125 is increasingly slim — because the more people who sign up, the less money each person

TNW recently reported the US Federal Trade Commision (FTC) had passed down a rather friendly little fine to Equifax – just $700 million dollars for exposing the private financial data of more than half of all US citizens. We also mentioned that Equifax was going to be shelling out checks to those affected and today’s the day you can file your claim. Equifax dropped the ball in the summer of 2017 when as many as 147 million people were put at risk for identity theft af

Chuwi’s Hipad LTE tablet took me by surprise. I’m not a big fan of ‘phablets’ to begin with. And when I saw it only cost $159 I was certain this slab would be a hot mess. I was wrong.  The 10.1-inch Hipad LTE is a ‘phablet’ — an unlocked smartphone with a big screen. It feels like Chuwi’s ambition was to sell this to travelers, but I’m not sure it’ll hold up to the needs of frequent flyers or other commuters who work on the g

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge We know the Note 10 launch at Samsung’s Unpacked event is imminent, but there is also growing evidence that the company will also launch a new smartwatch soon. And sure enough, that watch has just appeared on the FCC website where the agency posts approval requests, complete with images. Normally, companies request that images be hidden, but somebody didn’t cross a T or dot an i, apparently.
The Galaxy Watch Active 2 smartwatch is expected to