Technology news

Amazon's plans to launch a drone delivery service in the United States are slowly inching forward.
The Federal Aviation Administration just announced an important milestone in drone flight that has significant implications for Amazon and other companies hoping to launch commercial drone operations. 
The University of Alaska completed the first FAA-approved "beyond line of sight" drone flight this week, Reuters reported.
Up until now, the agency has had a strictly-enforced "line of sight" ru

There is no reasonable argument in 2019 for 8chan's continued existence on the internet.
Just look at the recent history. QAnon, an alarming and deeply absurd conspiracy theory, blew up there. When reports surfaced in 2018 that Louisiana police possessed a "full list of antifa" doc — actually just the names of anti-Trumpers scraped from petitions and Facebook events — 8chan was found to be hosting the same list.
Then there are the mass shootings. The angry, hateful men allegedly behi

Forget snakes on a plane. We have bats to worry about, now. 
On Wednesday morning, passengers on a 6:00 a.m. flight from Charlotte, North Carolina to Newark, New Jersey received quite the scare after a loose bat that somehow made it aboard a Spirt Airlines flight decided to dart through the cabin.
An absolute nightmare.SEE ALSO: Woman fell asleep on an Air Canada flight and awoke to find herself alone on the plane
Two passengers shared footage of the terrifying scene on Twitter. In the firs

Image: The CW The CW’s Arrowverse franchise is getting some new members: characters from its superhero series Black Lightning will be part of a major crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths, which will see its other DC superhero shows Arrow, Batwoman, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl team up this fall.The CW says that show itself won’t take part in the crossover event (the existing Arrowverse shows will each contribute an episode), but some of Black Lightni

If you've been thinking about buying a new Tesla, now might be a good time to make a move.
Tesla is offering prospective buyers some extra incentive: free supercharging when you buy a new Model X or Model S. New purchases of the two cars will come with"free unlimited" supercharging, Tesla announced in a tweet. BREAKING: All new Model S and Model X orders now come with ⚡ free ⚡ unlimited ⚡ Supercharging ⚡
— Tesla (@Tesla) August 3, 2019The company didn't post fu

Image: The CW The CW’s long-running science fiction series The 100 will come to an end with its seventh season, the network announced today during its presentation before the Television Critics Association.The series is the latest of its long-running shows to be canceled, after Arrow, which will come to an end after eight seasons, and Supernatural, which will end with its 15th season next year. The show isn’t quite over yet: it’s about to close out its sixth season, and will a

It might be time to break your Google Chrome habit. 
Though Google's browser is the most popular browser by an overwhelming margin, there are some good reasons to switch, especially if you care about privacy.
The Washington Post recently described Chrome as "a lot like surveillance software," citing the browser's habit of automatically signing you in if you use Gmail in order to serve better targeted advertising. Privacy advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have criticized Google

America has had 251 mass shootings in the 216 days of 2019, and with each devastating news cycle it gets harder and harder to accept the fact that President Donald Trump tweets "thoughts and prayers" instead of taking any real action on gun control.
In the wake of a recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, and another in Dayton, Ohio — which took place in the same 24-hour period — 2020 presidential candidates Beto O'Rourke, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttig

A $28 million financing has made SmartNews, an AI-powered news aggregation app, a unicorn.
Japan Post Capital has led the Series E round, which brings the company’s total investment to $116 million and pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion. Existing investors in SmartNews include Development Bank of Japan, SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest L.P.
The company, founded in Tokyo in 2012, boasts 20 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Japan. Growing at a rate of 500% per year, its

The research and development of neural networks is flourishing thanks to recent advancements in computational power, the discovery of new algorithms, and an increase in labelled data. Before the current explosion of activity in the space, the practical applications of neural networks were limited.  Much of the recent research has allowed for broad application, the heavy computational requirements for machine learning models still restrain it from truly entering the mainstream. No

There are about 22,000 large objects orbiting the Earth, including working and broken satellites and bits of old rocket from past space expeditions. If you include all the equipment dropped by astronauts while floating in space and the debris from colliding satellites down to around 1cm in size, there are about one million bits of space junk in Earth’s orbit. These numbers are likely to be underestimates. With more satellites and rockets launching each year, collisions with space junk are

Users reported issues with Instagramand Facebook Sunday morning.
The mobile apps wouldn’t load for many users beginning in the early hours of the morning, prompting thousands to take to Twitterto complain about the outage. #facebookdown and #instagramdown are both trending on Twitter at time of publish.
We’ve reached out to Facebookfor more information and when they are expecting services to come back online. We’ll update this story when we hear back.
 

Photo by Andrew Liptak / The Verge If you’re a fan of film history, the benchmark for behind-the-scene film books has been the work of J.W. Rinzler and his series of massive “The Making Of” tomes. Over the last decade, he’s written definitive histories behind the productions for the original Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones series and Planet of the Apes. His latest, The Making of Alien, is now out in stores, and is a comprehensive look at how Ridley Scott created the

We spend a lot of time around here covering the latest startup fundraises, and for good reason. While capital is certainly an input and not an output, there is nothing quite like the closing of a round of several million in venture capital to prove that yes, the startup I’m working on is at least interesting to someone other than me. External validation shouldn’t be your motivating principle, but it is motivating. Plus, it’s a great milestone to reach out to the press and start

Infinity Games 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.
In a city builder like SimCity or Cities: Skylines, traffic inevitably becomes a point of frustration. Your budding metropolis simply gets too big to handle the congestion. There is usually one intersection where, for some reason, the cars just don’t behave how

Following a failed attempt in July, French inventor Franky Zapata successfully crossed the Channel on top of a hoverboard this weekend. Starting his trek in Sangatte in northern France, the journey took 20 minutes, before landing in St. Margarets Bay, England.
“For the last five to six kilometers I just really enjoyed it,” Zapata told Reuters and other reports on landing near Dover. “Whether this is a historic event or not, I’m not the one to decide that, time will tell.&

French inventor Franky Zapata has officially crossed the English Channel by hoverboard. 
On Aug. 4, weeks after a failed Bastille Day flight, Zapata hopped on the jet-powered hoverboard that he invented, called the "Flyboard Air," and set out to fly across the 35-kilometer channel. This time, he was successful.
SEE ALSO: Check out this ridiculous flying jet board from France's Bastille Day parade
Zapata's board is propelled by five small jet engines, and after he stopped halfway to refuel h

One of my favorite memes is spun off a line from an essay: “to receive the rewards of being loved, we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”The format is simpler than it sounds: on one side, being loved; on the other, being known. Sometimes the mortifying ordeal is a pane of glass or a cartoon boulder, but it’s always standing between you and being loved.The wordiness becomes part of the joke. You can start with a simple tagline (“why don’t you have a

Roblox is big. Bigger than Minecraft big. The massively multiple online title has been around since 2006, but the game has been achieving a crazy amount of momentum of late. On Friday, it announced via blog post that it’s grown past 100 million monthly active users, pushing past Minecraft, which is currently in the (still impressive) low-90s.Digging into the Roblox growth strategyHere’s a recent piece detailing the service’s dizzying growth since February 2016, who it was hover

Photo by Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images After a failed attempt at the end of July, French inventor Franky Zapata successfully crossed the English Channel early this morning on his Flyboard Air, a jet-powered hoverboard.Zapata departed from Sangatte, France and arrived in Dover, England 22 minutes later, reaching speeds of up to 106 miles per hour during the 22-mile trip. “We made a machine three years ago,” he said after landing, “and now, we’ve crossed the Channel, it&rs

Photo by Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images After a failed attempt at the end of July, French inventor Franky Zapata successfully crossed the English Channel early this morning on his Flyboard Air, a jet-powered hoverboard.Zapata departed from Sangatte, France and arrived in Dover, England 22 minutes later, reaching speeds of up to 106 miles per hour during the 22-mile trip. “We made a machine three years ago,” he said after landing, “and now, we’ve crossed the Channel, it&rs

Last year, “Amazon employees met with ICE officials … to market the company’s facial recognition technology,” the ACLU informs us. Amazon VP Brad Huseman later said “We believe the government should have the best available technology.” Then, last month, Motherboard revealed Amazon has partnered with police departments around the country to create “a self-perpetuating surveillance network” of Ring products.
Allow me to be the umpteenth to say: what

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. In this day and age, we’ve been blessed with several tools that allow us to create simple to-do lists to help us keep our lives on track. I appreciate that keeping track of tasks and duties is an intensely personal thing, and most people (myself included) will immediately reject any app or service that doesn’t quite feel right – basical

Cybersecurity stock images are predictable at this point: a hooded man with a shadowy face in front of a keyboard or a mysterious person in front of binary code. A design firm called OpenIDEO thinks these images can be better, so it’s hosting a contest to entice visual creators to make images that are eye-catching, informative, and clear. “Cybersecurity,” which could mean data breaches, hacks, or policy changes, is a difficult concept to visually represent, so OpenIDEO is going

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! It could just be me, but I love having a cheap second computer. Of course, I couldn’t live without a high-end machine to do complex, resource-intensive work on. But sometimes I just want a little device I can take with me everywhere, and not worry too much about it breaking or being stolen. If you’re looking for this sort of computer, Chromebooks are a great option. And, would you believe it, the

Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries is acquiring 87.6% stake in Fynd, a seven-year-old Mumbai-based startup that connects brick and mortar retailers with online stores and consumers, for 2.95 billion Indian rupees ($42.33 million), the two said in a brief statement late Saturday.
Fynd, which was founded in 2012, helps offline retailers sell their products to consumers directly through its online store, and also enables them to connect with other “demand channels” such as third-pa

Keeping your home clean while juggling with different projects from school can be stressful. But if you let dust build-up, a gram of dust contains around 250,000 allergenic dust mite fecal pellets. Sounds nasty right? So why not get yourself a Eufy RoboVac robot vacuum, it allows you to focus on other stuff while it cleans for you.
With many great features, the customizable cleaning zone impressed us the most, as you can set where you want the robot vacuum to clean directly from your smartphone.

Hello, weekenders. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.
Last week, I talked about the Facebook FTC fine, the Sprint/T-Mobile deal getting approved, and the creeping feeling that decisive antitrust action was going to be fairly limited in scope.Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The big story

Technology is always transforming language and communication. After all, it's thanks to predictive text and autocorrect that a word as innocent as "duck" became synonymous with "fuck."
Online text for many of us is now our primary form of communication. So necessarily, web culture started breaking all the traditional rules of grammar to make it better fit the medium, with trends like the extra space before punctuation ... or idiosyncratic capitalization to Make A Point. 
But one of the olde

TL;DR: Snag the hands-on Google Nest Hello video doorbell for $189.99. It's typically $229.99, so you save $40 with this deal.You know the feeling where you think you left the door unlocked? It's that same realization Kevin’s mother had in Home Alone once she already boarded the plane. 
The Google Nest Hello Smart video doorbell will put your mind at ease with 24/7 streaming to your front door. The Google Nest not only provides live footage of your home but even lets you communicate w

TL;DR: Snag this immersive online course on project management for $29 in the Mashable Shop. It's typically $2,189 so you save 98%.Project managers earn an average of $75k per year. And that's just in base pay. You know why? Because they're an invaluable part of companies across virtually every professional industry. 
The best part is you can start learning about the techniques and skills required of project managers from your living room. You just need this Complete Project Management Bund

You brush your teeth twice a day without fail. And when it comes time for your six-month check-up you claim to floss your teeth every day. But just because you may brush and floss regularly doesn’t mean that you’re doing it in the most effective way. 
SEE ALSO: Best electric toothbrushes
Electric toothbrushes and water flossers are considered by many to be the cream of the crop when it comes to dental hygiene. The former has long been lauded by dentists and health professionals

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who enjoy the outdoors and those who'd much rather sit inside an air-conditioned house. 
If you're the A/C type, there are some critically-acclaimed video games on sale today that will keep you busy through the dog days and beyond.
For under $10, you can pick up the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic bundle, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, or Borderlands: The Handsome Collection. Read on to learn about each of the titles below.The Star Wa

TL;DR: Pre-order the action-packed FIFA 20 for just £34.99 on GAME, after saving £15 from Quidco via cashback. Circle Sept. 27 in your calendars, because that is the release date for FIFA 20. It's an important day, so maybe get the red Sharpie out for this one. You could even circle it a few times, just for good measure.
You can now pre-order FIFA 20, to make sure that you are one of the first to play the new game. The worry that a lot of people have with pre-ordering is that yo

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are happy to watch videos at 480P and those who will fight for every last pixel. If you’re in the latter camp, I have some good news for you: YouTube will now allow you to download videos for offline viewing in 1080p. Android Police first spotted the update, and the company confirmed to multiple sources that the feature is rolling out to “most Premium markets,” with more to come. Until now, YouTube has limited download

After a devastating mass shooting, El Paso's community pulled together to donate blood. 
A gunman opened fire in a Walmart on Saturday morning, injuring at least 23 people, CNN reports. Police confirmed "multiple" fatalities. This is the 249th mass shooting in the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which means there have been more mass shootings than days in 2019. 
The City of El Paso put out an urgent call for blood donors as hospitals drained their supply