Technology news

To be fair, you shouldn't eat the logo either. 
Microsoft's Edge browser is freshening things up with a new look, and it's a swirling blue-and-green design that to many calls to mind another thing that's gone out of style: Tide pods.
Discovered by The Verge, Tom Warren writes that the "Edge icon was revealed in an elaborate Easter Egg hunt where Microsoft employees posted cryptic clues to a series of puzzles and  images."The final clue led to the new Microsoft Edge logo. This was a rea

Some days, social media is a gift. This is one of those days.
Jason Momoa, star of Aquaman and also our hearts, got up close and personal with a real, live bear at some point in the not-too-distant past. I guess this is tied to his new Apple TV+ series, but all I see is an adorable bear gently extracting a cookie from the mouth of a gentle giant.
Please enjoy. View this post on InstagramThe things we do for our ART. SEE. Is out. Please watch on Apple TV+. The bear needs to know your scent. So he

Five dead, and four injured. 
A Halloween house party in Orinda, California, took an unexpected and dark turn late Thursday night when gunfire erupted and partygoers fled for their lives. The house had been rented on Airbnb, and on Saturday the company's CEO belatedly said enough is enough. 
"Starting today, we are banning 'party houses' and we are redoubling our efforts to combat unauthorized parties and get rid of abusive host and guest conduct, including conduct that leads to the te

AirbnbCEO Brian Chesky said Saturday the company will ban “party houses” and take other steps to safeguard hosts and guests after five people died at a Halloween party hosted at California home that was rented on the service.
Chesky made the announcement via a series of tweets Saturday. “What happened on Thursday night in Orinda, CA was horrible,” Chesky wrote. “I feel for the families and neighbors impacted by this tragedy — we are working to support them.&rd

Climate change activist Greta Thunberg graciously let Critters 3 star Leonardo DiCaprio post an Instagram pic with her on Friday.
DiCaprio, who also dabbles in climate activism, praised Thunberg in the post as a "leader of our time" and called upon world leaders to take her message seriously. He also called out the initiative Fridays for Future, which tracks and promotes climate strikes around the world. View this post on InstagramThere are few times in human history where voices are amplified a

Microsoft is refreshing the logo for its Chromium-based Edge browser. The software giant originally unveiled its Edge icon more than four years ago, and it’s fair to say it was a logo that clinged to the past of Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s new logo was discovered as part of a new surfing mini game hidden inside the latest Canary versions of Edge. It looks like a wave, and includes a similar Fluent Design style to the company’s new Office icons.
The logo also spells out the l

Alexa Answers is somehow turning out even worse than expected. 
The program, launched in September, gives any idiot off the streets of the U.S. the chance to answer real questions posed to Amazon's Alexa smart assistant by actual people. As any thinking internet user might have expected, just over a month into the service those answers range from unintentionally inaccurate, to deliberate trolling, to calculated misinformation. 
According to Amazon, here's how Alexa Answers is supposed

The trick-or-treating is done. The jack-o-lanterns have been tossed. The office party was fine. Now, there's only one post-Halloween task to take care of: your beautiful surplus of candy.
Candy is good, so having a lot of it is not necessarily a problem. But if you have "too much" candy, you have a few options for getting rid of it without causing unnecessary waste.
That being said, extra candy corn can go directly in the trash.
Donate it
Some nonprofit organizations seek out candy donations aft

Anybody can learn how to code and get really good at it nowadays. Implementing code isn’t the hardest part anymore. Trying to figure out how an application should flow for a user has crept up that list of priorities. Getting that information out of a product manager or project managers can be tricky since you’re all speaking different jargon. That means someone has to be able to translate business logic into code — and that someone is you. Not every developer will have to dire

All evidence indicates that music plays a significant role in every human society, both past and present. When we gather to celebrate, rejoice or mourn, music moves us in powerful ways. Caregivers around the world sing to infants to soothe, play with, and teach them. And yet we are just starting to uncover the profound impact music has on our brain, our emotions and our health. Laurel Trainor is the director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind and plays principle flute in the Burli

Maybe giving the U.S. president unfettered and relatively unregulated access to Twitter was a terrible idea?
A Saturday morning report from the New York Times comes with the chilling takeaway that savvy social media users outside the U.S. are gaming President Donald Trump's Twitter habits. It's an alarming prospect for anyone who treasures America's continued independence – including the famously controlling president himself.
Trump's habit of retweeting ideas he agrees with has strengthen

Nintendohas a long history when it comes to exercise-driven games. I’m dating myself, but I can say I remember playing Track & Field on NES with the Power Pad. How far we’ve come! Ring Fit Adventure is a full-body workout for grown-ups, but fun, gentle, and ridiculous enough to forget it’s exercise.
The game and accessories were announced in September, coming as a complete surprise even considering Nintendo’s constant but hit-and-miss attempts at keeping its players h

Sometimes it feels as if Internet platforms are turning everything upside down, from politics to publishing, culture to commerce, and of course swapping truth for lies.
This week’s bizarro reversal was the vista of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a tech CEO famed for being entirely behind the moral curve of understanding what his product is platforming (i.e. nazis), providing an impromptu ‘tweet storm’ in political speech ethics.
Actually he was schooling Facebook’sMark Zuc

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Tesla over alleged battery defects that have reportedly led to fires in the Model S and Model X.
On Oct. 24, the agency sent a letter informing Tesla that it planned to open a defect petition requesting that "certain battery management system software updates" be evaluated in Model S and Model X vehicles sold between 2012 to 2019 in the United States. It also requested information about those updates, as well as details on consu

Welcome back to This Week in Apps — the easiest way to keep up with everything that happened in the world of apps over the past week — from the breaking news to the trends and all the other information an industry watcher needs to know.The app industry is as hot as ever, with 194 billion downloads in 2018 and more than $100 billion in consumer spending. People spend 90% of their mobile time in apps and more time using their mobile devices than watching TV. In othe

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! I was always intrigued by smart speakers, but I just didn’t see the point in them for a long time. Yeah, asking to set timers and about the weather was useful, but they always seemed hamstrung by the lack of a screen. Using only your voice, things like changing tracks or browsing news sources was clumsy at best or impossible at worse. I just didn’t see the point. Then, I got a smart speaker with

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 how SoftBank is screwing up. Before that, I noted All Raise’s expansion, Uber the TV show and the unicorn from down under.
Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to [email protected] or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don&r

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. It’s quite possible that you live in a house with a lot of kids who often snatch your phone to play games and watch videos. That’s probably fine by you, but you might not want them to peek into your WhatsApp chats. Thankfully, WhatsApp allows you to lock your app with a fingerprint or a FaceID. WhatsApp enabled this setting for iOS back

Amazonhas set its eye on the next business it wants to disrupt in its key overseas market India: online movie tickets. The e-commerce giant said Saturday it has partnered with local online movie ticketing giant BookMyShowto introduce booking option on Amazon India shopping site and app.
The move comes months after the e-commerce giant began offering flight ticketing option in the country as it races to turn its payments service Amazon Pay into a “super app” — a strategy increas

Don't have an iPhone but still lusting after Apple's newest AirPods? You're probably not alone, though you might want to think twice before you sink $249 of your hard-earned cash into them. 
But, if you're reading this, chances are you're seriously considering it anyway. The good news: AirPods Pro definitely work with Android. The bad news? There might be a few hiccups. 
First, it should go without saying, but you'll never get the same functionality with AirPods on Android. AirPods are

Money matters aside, sometimes there's a gadget or gizmo you just have to have. For some, it's the latest and greatest tech. For others, it's a hyped-up product on Instagram. We're not here to judge; we think you should treat yourself.
We're in the final quarter of the year and you've worked your butt off. Get yourself something nice. Here are 15 sweet deals that will have you saying, "take my money."Ryze Tech Tello Quadcopter Iron Man Edition Powered by DJI
Learn to fly and feed your Marvel obs

Black Friday isn’t just about getting discounts on 4K TVs and sound systems (that you may not even be getting a good deal on, anyway) — you can also get stuff for yourself that’s like, much more useful and less fleeting than the rush of watching your favorite films in the highest resolution possible (okay, wait… no, that sounds pretty good, but still). 
To show you what we mean, here are some not-so-run-of-the-mill stuff that we bought during last year’s Black

A lot of dogs — if not most, or all of them — are just naturally drawn towards the water. Problem is, not all of them can, you know, swim. 
Most of them just kind of do this:Wow, that's cute.
But just because your pup can’t swim doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to. We fully support equal swimming opportunities for all dogs, big and small. But if you can’t afford to send your pet to the puppy YMCA each week for an in-depth water-treading lesson, here’

TL;DR: Get the helpful Townew: The World's First Self-Sealing & Changing Trash Can (Value Pack) for $105, a 12% savings. In a perfect world, the trash would take itself out and we'd never get our hands dirty. And while that doesn't exist (yet), we now have the next best thing: the world's first self-sealing and changing trash can.
Meet the Townew. It's a trash can designed to make your life easier. Not only does it seal in those festering odors from raw chicken trimmings and rotting fru

TL;DR: Get the time-saving StirMATE Smart Pot Stirrer for $49.99, a 16% savings. You know what’s a tricky dish to make? Risotto.
It’s not one of those things where you can just chuck all the ingredients in a pot, stick it on low heat, and come back three hours later to something your dinner guests will talk about for the next six months.
No, it requires attention, patience, and a deft wrist. You need to stir it: but not so much as to make it too thick, nor too little in case it

TL;DR: The comprehensive CyberGhost VPN is on sale for £2.45 a month, saving you 76% on list price.Halloween may have been and gone, but CyberGhost VPN is keeping things spooky until the end of the weekend with its Spooktakular Sale.
You can now sign up to one year of protection from online horrors for as little as £2.45 a month. This is down by 76% on list price, and works out at under £30 for the whole contract. That's a seriously low price to pay, especially when you conside

MIT researchers first showed off its self-assembling “M-Block” robot cubes in 2013 — and this week, they shared a video of what they’re calling M-Blocks 2.0 (via TechCrunch). Like the first version of the blocks, M-Blocks 2.0 move by generating momentum with an internal flywheel, and can climb on and around each other using magnets:But these new blocks also have a “barcode-like” system on each block face that they can “read” to do things like follo

Forget the Avengers — the most ambitious crossover in (beauty guru) history just broke the internet. 
Vlogger turned documentarian Shane Dawson and vlogger turned makeup maven Jeffree Star launched Conspiracy, a collaborative makeup collection, through Morphe on Friday. Dawson, known for his series of lengthy profiles on various YouTubers, began posting episodes of a new series called The Beautiful World of Jeffree Star. The five-part series turned out not to be another documentary, b

Software development companies tackling services for niche industries, like commercial real estate subcontracting, continue to find Los Angeles to be fertile ground for development.
The latest company to raise funding from a clutch of investors is BuildOps, which raised $5.8 million in seed financing from some big names in the Los Angeles tech ecosystem.
Led by Fika Ventures,with additional investments from MetaProp VC, Global Founders Capital, CrossCut Ventures, TenOneTen, IGSB, 1984 Ventures,

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google’s Pixel 3A is a pretty good mid-range phone with a great camera. It normally starts at $399, but there are a couple deals right now to get the unlocked phone for up to 25 percent off — though you’ll have to activate the phone to get the discount.
If you buy the Pixel 3A or Pixel 3A XL through Google Fi, the Pixel 3A is discounted to $299, while the Pixel 3A XL is discounted from $479 to $359. The discount will already be applied when yo

It's a match made in data heaven.
After days of rumors, Google announced Friday that it would be acquiring wearables pioneer FitBit for $2.1 billion. In an industry where warring tech giants are battling for user loyalty, it's a big deal. 
"It's not every day a deal like this happens," Forrester analyst Frank Gillett told Mashable over the phone.
The acquisition could have far-reaching ripples in business, showing that Google is seriously ready to compete with Apple in health and wearables,