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Considering Android’s massive mobile market share, this was pretty much an inevitability. But today it finally happened for real: The EU slapped Google’s parent company Alphabet with a record fine of nearly $5.1 billion for violating European antitrust regulations. According to EU officials, Google’s terms for licensing its full-featured version of the Android OS—which requires…
Hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals, many of them researchers and engineers prominent in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, vowed on Wednesday never to apply their skills toward the creation of autonomous killing machines. Led by the Future of Life Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit, as many as 160 AI-related companies in 36…
Going to the effort of setting up a smart home just so you can turn your lights on and off from your phone may not seem like the best use of your time and resources, but with the right gear and apps you can put together some routines that really will impress family, friends, and…
Elon Musk has been pretty quiet on Twitter ever since he called one of the cave divers in Thailand a pedophile. He deleted the tweets, but the diver, Vernon Unsworth, said he was considering legal action for the unfounded claims. But now Musk has apologized. Sort of. Musk’s half-hearted apology came in the form of…
The second day of a three-day strike by Amazon warehouse workers near Madrid coinciding with the e-commerce giant’s Prime Day promotion escalated significantly on Tuesday, with trade unions telling Spanish newspaper Público that police in riot gear had charged the strikers multiple times on supposed grounds they were blocking traffic. Police arrested at least two…
Donald Trump may be Twitter’s most infamous shitposter, but he’s also leading the charge flooding Facebook with political ads. According to a new analysis, he’s the number one spender on the site, flanked by Planned Parenthood and Texas Democrat Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Per the New York Times, the $274,000 Trump’s campaign and his political action…
On Tuesday, Google announced yet another massive subsea cable project, this time a private line stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to connect a data center in the US directly to another in Europe. Per TechCrunch, the planned “Dunant” cable (named after Red Cross founder Henry Dunant) will make landfall in France after crossing nearly 4,000…
Voting machine manufacturer ES&S has denied that its systems were ever equipped with remote-access software when confronted by reporters. But after receiving questions from a U.S. senator on the matter, the company has admitted it did do that dumb thing, but it did it a long time ago, and it doesn’t do it anymore. In…
If life is but a tapestry, then memory is the thread. But some of those threads may simply be imagined: A new study out today in Psychological Science suggests that our earliest memories often couldn’t have happened the way we remember them. In 2007, the UK’s BBC Radio broadcast a series of programs centered around memory.…
Twitter has pursued various efforts to make its platform a less nightmarish place and, in recent months, those measures have reportedly taken the form of a sustained mass purge. According to data obtained by the Associated Press, the social network suspended 58 million accounts in the last quarter of 2017. Asked for comment, Twitter would…
Scott Gottlieb is the current head of the FDA, and as of today, his most notable contribution to the agency is the following phrase, spoken at the Politico Pro Summit on Tuesday: “An almond doesn’t lactate, I will confess.” Not much of a confession, unless he has attempted to find the teat of a tree…
The Girl Scouts announced on Tuesday a number of new badges that the organization says will help equip girls with the leadership skills needed to deal with “key 21st century issues.” The badges tackle “some of society’s most pressing needs,” the Girl Scouts says, including environmental advocacy, robotics, online safety, and space science. The 30…
Parts of the Earth’s mantle might be loaded with diamonds, if a new model turns out to be correct. But no, you can’t mine them—they’d be almost a hundred miles below the surface. Scientists’ models show that sound waves seem to travel too quickly through the old, stable cores of continents, called “cratons,” which extend deep…
The effort to overturn the FCC’s disastrous repeal of net neutrality hit a significant milestone on Tuesday as the first Republican lawmaker came aboard. Representative Mike Coffman, Republican of Colorado, crossed party lines and joined with Democrats to support using the Congressional Review Act to reverse the FCC decision. Coffman also introduced his own bill…
For longtime Android users, it was a sad day when Google killed off its adorable blobs and replaced them with a more standard set of emoji alongside the release of Android Oreo. And while blobmoji sort of lived on in Google messaging app Allo, with development for that app now on an indefinite hiatus, it…
While the country is in the midst of Amazon’s mid-year discount fiesta and Jeff Bezos enjoys being crowned the richest man in modern history, rivals Walmart and Microsoft announced a new five-year partnership in hopes of knocking the online shipping giant down a peg or two. According to The Wall Street Journal, the focus of the…
What gadgets have you got at home? A smartphone? Maybe an Amazon Echo? We’re here to tell you about some of the lesser-known bits of kit that are worth tricking out your home with—covering everything from home security to data storage, put these on your shopping list the next time you’re working through your electronics…
For five years, 8Bitdo has been creating near-perfect wireless clones of your favorite classic gamepads, improving the experience of emulating retro games on modern devices. But if near-perfect isn’t perfect enough for your discerning gaming tastes, the company is now selling kits that should make it dead easy to upgrade your original Nintendo and Sega…
Last week, Apple announced an updated MacBook Pro, packing in fresh processors that were announced just three months ago, and tweaking the keyboard. A new keyboard! Let’s talk about that. I’ve spent the last day with that new keyboard—after nearly two years with the old one—and I noticed the difference immediately. But I’m not sure…
A new update for Skype has arrived, and with it comes the promise that we’ll finally be getting the option to record calls. Skype has gone more than a decade without this obvious feature, and you might as well update now because all other versions of the service will stop working on September 1, according…
