Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
In the latest in a string of security-related headaches for Microsoft, the company warned customers Tuesday that state sponsored hackers from China have been exploiting flaws in one of its widely used email products, Exchange, in order to target American companies for data theft. In several recently published blog posts, the company listed four newly…
After acquiring the delivery startup Postmates for $2.65 billion last year, Uber Technologies announced on Tuesday that plans to spin the company’s robotics division out into a separate company: Serve Robotics. The new company’s name is a nod to the black and yellow Serve delivery robot developed by Postmates X, the startup’s original robotics division. The…
Facebook’s so-called “Supreme Court” is reportedly interested in seeking company’s permission to review the machine-learning models used to determine which Facebooks posts are given the most prominence in users’ feeds. Alan Rusbridger, former editor of Britain’s Guardian newspaper and one of 20 people Facebook handpicked to sit on its Oversight Board, said on Tuesday that,…
Amazon has quietly edited its app icon, possibly because users noticed that it resembled a smiling, err, uh… we’ll go with Charlie Chaplin, but we don’t really mean Charlie Chaplin. Amazon updated the logo of its iOS mobile app in January to look like a smiling Prime delivery box as seen above, complete with the…
When we think of drones, we imagine massive, quadrotor machines that buzz around like manic seagulls. But what if your drown was small enough to accidentally swallow? That’s what MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built: a set of tiny drones with elastic actuators that power insect-like wings. The entire package weighs 665 mg…
Glitch, the software company behind Trello and Stack Overflow, now has a collective bargaining agreement with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The news is extraordinary, not just because they claim to be the first software workers to have secured a collective bargaining agreement, but because the lead-up to ratification has been so quiet: no…
Today at Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference, the tech giant revealed a bold glimpse at the future of digital collaboration with Mesh, a new mixed reality experience set to shape how people work and socialize online. Powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and designed to run on a range of devices, including Microsoft’s Hololens headsets, traditional…
On Monday, Roku announced a new “strategic alliance” with the market research giant Nielsen, that sees the connected TV giant swallow Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising business—and take on two major pieces of ad-targeting tech in the process. The first is Nielsen’s so-called automatic content recognition (ACR) tech, which is engineered to track the movies, shows,…
What’s the hardest video game you’ve ever played? If it wasn’t QWOP then let me tell you right know that you don’t know how truly difficult a game can be. The deceptively simple running game is so challenging to master that even an AI trained using machine learning still only mustered a top 10 score…
When my brother and I were kids, our family took a lot of road trips. We loved the end destinations, but getting there was a major drag. We had Game Boy Colors and other handhelds, but we had already played the games we owned way too many times. Consoles and desktop PCs aren’t exactly portable,…
The streaming video business is booming, and while that makes it easier to access tons of content, for some companies like Sony, it makes it less attractive to manage digital storefronts, so at the end of August, Sony is disabling the ability to buy on-demand videos in the PlayStation Store. In a new blog posted…
Apple introduced the ability to track your noise level exposure on the Apple Watch back in 2019. The company also launched three clinical research studies alongside that feature, including one to examine hearing health. Now, a little over a year later, Apple’s sharing some preliminary results in time for World Hearing Day. For the Apple…
As praises from celebrity investors and movie deals rained on the subreddit/memestock trading floor WallStreetBets, its two contingents of its moderators went to war, each accusing the other of profiteering off the community’s newfound fame. Now, those beaten in the squabble intend to start a competing community which will act like a “decentralized hedge fund.”…
Samsung’s consumer-friendly version of its larger-than-life The Wall display will eventually be available in a more reasonable 76-inch version—you know, for those of us whose homes can’t actually accommodate 110-inch televisions. Samsung announced the smaller version of the MicroLED TVs today during its big Unbox and Discover event. While the 76-inch MicroLED will be made…
The e-commerce industry spends a lot of time and energy trying to keep the public interested in its wares and traditionally this has involved spending cash on photography: taking nice pictures of your products has typically been the best way to keep users scrolling to your page on the likes of Amazon or Shopify. But…
Exhausted and disoriented, I arrive tempest-tossed on the shores of our dystopia to tell you the good news: Apps are birth control now. On Monday, the period-tracking app Clue announced that it had received clearance from the FDA to launch a digital birth control function that will use statistical modeling to closely track users’ menstrual…
Industrial 3D printing pioneer Markforged is gearing up to go public after a newly-announced merger deal with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) one. Per details of the deal, which is expected to be finalized sometime this summer, the combined valuation of the merged companies is expected to be $2.1 billion, with approximately $400 million…
Joe Biden has effectively endorsed ongoing unionization efforts at an Amazon facility in the state of Alabama and warned the e-commerce giant that its efforts to shut down the drive must involve “no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda.” Workers for Amazon have long complained of everything from grueling hours and quotas in…
It appears the smallest design from Apple’s 2020’s phones may stick around for the iPhone 13, after all. That’s just one of several predictions about the next generation of iPhones from noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. According to an investor note obtained and reported by 9to5Mac on Monday, Kuo stated that we may see “four…
As we watched NASA put a rover on Mars last month, it definitely seemed like the agency had to be using some sort of high-tech processor in its machine. Surely the rover is built on something much more powerful than the components in devices us civilians use, right? But while NASA is technically using a…
