Technology news

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Earlier this week, a number of reports pointed to an exchange program for Nintendo Switch owners looking to upgrade from the original model. According to these reports, Nintendo would offer a free upgrade for those who purchased their Switch after July 17th, when the new model with improved battery life was announced. However, today the company says that these reports are untrue. In a statement to The Verge, a Nintendo spokesperson explained:
We do not have a

Tech industry employment is a seller’s market firmly on the side of top talent, but competition for the best jobs remains fierce. Candidates cannot skate by on common skillsets and expect to secure the lucrative salaries, prestige, and perks for which the tech sector has become known. Companies today use advanced tools and tests to weed out the pretenders and identify the people who bring truly valuable skills to the table. Unfortunately, many tech workers — even some of the best &m

Not only does Microsoft have human contractors listen to some of your Skype and Cortana voice recordings, those contractors are paid poorly and given repetitive tasks, according to a report by Motherboard. And thanks to this new report, we now have an idea of what those contractors actually do with the Cortana recordings they listen to.
Motherboard says contractors earning merely $12–$14 an hour are expected to transcribe and classify Cortana voice commands into more than two dozen topic a

NASA and SpaceX continue their joint preparations for the eventually astronaut crew missions that SpaceX will fly for the agency, with a test of the emergency evacuation procedure for SpaceX’s GO Searcher seaborne ship. The ship is intended to be used to recover spacecraft and astronauts in an actual mission scenario, and the rehearsals this week are a key part of ensuring mission readiness before an actual crewed SpaceX mission.
Photos from the dress rehearsal, which is the first coordina

An Israeli spacecraft called Beresheet almost made it to the moon in April. It took a selfie with the lunar surface in the background, but then lost contact with Earth and presumably crashed onto the lunar surface. Now it’s been revealed that the mission was carrying a cargo of dehydrated microscopic lifeforms known as tardigrades. Beresheet was the first stage of a privately-funded initiative to transfer living DNA to the moon. The project is designed to act as Noah’s Ark Mark II,

Inside Voyage’s plan to deliver a driverless future
In the autonomous vehicle space, startups have taken radically different strategies to building our AV future. Some companies like Waymo have driven all across different types of environments in order to rack up the datasets that they believe will be needed to effectively maneuver without a human driver.
That’s the opposite strategy of Voyage,where CEO and founder Oliver Cameron and his team have focused on driving safety in the inc

Ikea’s smart home investments to date have been smart but scattered – now the Swedish home goods brand says it’s going to amp up its smart home bets with a brand new dedicated business unit.
The company’s smart home endeavors began in 2012, and focused on wireless charging and smart lighting. It’s iterated in both areas since, developing self-installed integrated wireless chargers for its furniture, as well as light/charger combos, and finally with a new partnership

You may have heard of the latest approach to authentication in businesses: inserting microchips into their employees.  While this approach has worked wonders in the pet community, helping returning lost furry friends to their owners, the use of microchips in a business environment is not only dehumanizing, it’s also pointless.  It’s true, passwords are not sufficient to defend your network, that has been well established over the years. You need additional factors to provi

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge This weekend, you can save on a variety of tech products, including the sixth-generation iPad, the PlayStation Classic retro console, Sony’s WH1000X-M3 wireless noise-canceling headphones, and more.
The sixth-generation iPad is $299.99 at Best Buy. What makes this deal worth your while is that it’s for the 128GB model, which is rarely available at a discount. This configuration has stayed at $329.99 for a while, so this is a pretty sharp price drop.

SoftBank has a plant to loan up to $20 billion to its employees, including CEO Masayoshi Son,for the purposes of having that capital re-invested in SoftBank’s own Vision venture fund, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. That’s a highly unusual move that could be risky in terms of how much exposure SoftBank Group has on the whole in terms of its startup bets, but the upside is that it can potentially fill out as much as a fifth of its newly announced second Vision

Ikea Ikea is formalizing what has recently become all too obvious: the company is making a major bet on smart home tech as a source of new revenue. To do this, Ikea announced that it will invest heavily in a new “Ikea Home smart” business unit with end-to-end responsibility for its burgeoning portfolio of smart devices. With access to 780 million shoppers who visit Ikea stores each year, the announcement also serves as a wake-up call to smart home incumbents like Google and Amazon.

Apple’snext Apple Watch revision could include new materials for the case, including titanium and ceramic. That’s according to new assets pulled form the latest watchOS beta release, as uncovered by Brazilian site iHelp.br (via 9to5Mac). The new screens discovered in the beta show graphics used to pair the Apple Watch during setup, and list “Titanium Case” and “Ceramic Case” alongside model size identification info.
Apple has previously offered a ceramic

Apple’s latest watchOS beta appears to have revealed the company’s plans for new Apple Watch models. Just days after spotting a potential iPhone 11 announcement date, iHelp BR has discovered references to new ceramic and titanium watch models in the latest watchOS 6 beta. Both new watch models will reportedly come in both the 40mm and 44mm versions, and iHelp BR has found animations for the initial Apple Watch setup process.
Apple has never released an Apple Watch in a titanium finis

Privacy researchers in Europe believe they have the first proof that a long-theorised vulnerability in systems designed to protect privacy by aggregating and adding noise to data to mask individual identities is no longer just a theory.The research has implications for the immediate field of differential privacy and beyond — raising wide-ranging questions about how privacy is regulated if anonymization only works until a determined attacker figures out how to reverse the method that’

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! Running is great fun, but if you want to keep your running tempo going, you’ll need some catchy music. Unfortunately, regular earphones might not do the trick. That’s why you should opt for a wireless sports earphones that won’t fall out of your ear. And what’s better than the JBL Under Armour Sports wireless earphones that are selling for just $29.99, down from $119.96? Yea

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about the differences between raising cash from angels and traditional venture capitalists. Before that, I summarized DoorDash’s acquisition of Caviar.
Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to [email protected] or on Twitter @KateClarkTw

Our robot colleague Satoshi Nakaboto writes about Bitcoin every fucking day. Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Marie Curie used to say: Talk to a stranger on a bus! Bitcoin Price We closed the day, August 16 2019, at a price of $10,374. That’s a minor 0.53 percent increase in 24 hours, or $54. It was the highest closing price in two days. We’re still 48 percent below Bitco

Elon Musk – aka Lex Luthor in spirit — is on social media yapping about nuking Mars again. He’s not trolling; he’s not acting as a provocateur; he really wants to bombard the surface of our planetary neighbor with actual nuclear weapons. Nuke Mars! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 16, 2019 Here’s why: he thinks it’ll kick-start the planet and make it habitable by releasing trapped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He’s been pushing this theor

It’s true, you’ve got the Galaxy Note to thank for your big phone. When the device hit the scene at IFA 2011, large screens were still a punchline. That same year, Steve Jobs famously joked about phones with screens larger than four inches, telling a crowd of reporters, “nobody’s going to buy that.”
In 2019, the average screen size hovers around 5.5 inches. That’s a touch larger than the original Note’s 5.3 inches — a size that was pretty widely mo

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Nintendo claims that the only difference between its new, revised Switch and the older model is improved battery life. Not content to take Nintendo’s word for it, some popular YouTubers put their brand new, currently hard-to-find units to the test, cracking them open to search for any new undisclosed features or hardware tweaks along the way.The consensus? Nintendo isn’t fibbing about that battery life. But unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to b

As people strive ever harder to minutely quantify every action they do, the sensors that monitor those actions are growing lighter and less invasive. Two prototype sensors from crosstown rivals Stanford and Berkeley stick right to the skin and provide a wealth of physiological data.
Stanford’s stretchy wireless “BodyNet” isn’t just flexible in order to survive being worn on the shifting surface of the body; that flexing is where its data comes from.
The sensor is made of

A team of researchers recently developed a robotic exosuit that makes it easier to walk or run long distances. It could imbue average people with superhuman walking abilities, aid the disabled, and help soldiers on long marches. And this is just the beginning. The research was conducted by scientists from Harvard, Chung-Ang University in South Korea, and the University of Nebraska Omaha. It involved the creation and development of an AI-powered soft robotics system designed to be worn as an exo