Category: Tech news

 Ecuador has claimed responsibility for cutting off Julian Assange’s internet access, calling it a “temporary restriction” aimed at preventing him from interfering with the U.S. election. Wikileaks tweeted about the outage over the weekend and claimed confirmation it was Ecuador yesterday. Turns out they were right. Read More

 OpenTable wants you to book a table for dinner right after you book your city break away. The restaurant booking platform is consolidating multiple apps for different countries into a single multi-language global app that supports bookings at restaurants in other countries, it said today. Read More

 Tinder Boost, the feature that lets users pay to have their profile shown first in the feed, has gone live worldwide as of today. The company started testing the feature in late September in Australia, and has finally decided to let it loose across Tinder’s global community. Tinder Boost lets users pay to have their profile bumped to the front of the feed for 30 minutes. While Tinder… Read More

 Put in your phone number, talk to someone with the opposite political views. That’s the idea behind two new sister sites, CallADeplorable.com for use by Hillary supporters and CallAnElitist.com for use by Trump supporters. “We hope that every voter can take the time to share their story and listen to what others have to say before election day,” write the… Read More

 This week is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Multimedia conference in Amsterdam, and the theme this year beyond a doubt is machine learning. Many of the papers and presentations in some way or another leverage neural networks and deep learning, and the purposes to which they put these increasingly useful tools are by turns fascinating, practical, and whimsical. Read More

 We humans are hunter-gatherers domesticated into becoming farmers. Around 10,000 years ago, we discovered the wonders of agriculture. To make farmers out of hunters, we used social norms and sanctions. This tension of our origins is described in the fable of Cain and Abel, which ends with Cain the farmer slaying his brother, and God’s favorite, the hunter-gatherer Abel. Read More

 Tagboard announced today that it has acquired Capture, another startup in the social media and user-generated-content business. Tagboard helps marketers find and create displays for social media conversation around a brand or topic. (When I covered the company a couple of years ago, I described it as a “cross-platform hashtag aggregator,” which is both accurate and… Read More

 If you’re kind of an ass when you drive, autonomous cars are going to be great for you, a new study from the London School of Economics and Goodyear has found (via GeekWire). Basically, self-driving cars will opt on the side of safety and caution, which means aggressive jerks who drive like morons will be able to bully them all over the road. The study found that, surprisingly, drivers… Read More

 Facebook rolled out a new feature today that lets users endorse presidential candidates, a move that will probably bring even more acrimonious comments about this election cycle into your News Feed. Yay. Here’s how it works: You can go onto any candidate’s Facebook page — yes, this includes third-party candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson; no one is getting left… Read More

 Maybe you’ve heard of LeEco (nee LeTV). Maybe you’ve seen some news about the company’s phones or its plans to launch a car. If you live in US, however, odds are pretty good that your knowledge of the company doesn’t extend beyond the occasional passing mention. But the company’s big and only getting bigger. Early today, research firm Strategy Analytics posted… Read More

 Yves Behar, designer of many round-edged objects, has at last turned his attention to the piece of furniture rated “most restful” by babies: the crib. His robotic, Wi-Fi-enabled creation, called Snoo, also puts to rest the classic “what’s snoo with you” joke, since now everyone will know what snoo is and won’t ask. It had a good run, but it was probably time. Read More

 So I’ve been hearing for weeks now that Apple has been waffling a bit on a date for its late-October Mac event. But, according to my sources, a date has been picked: Thursday, October 27th. So those looking for a new MacBook, hold your horses. And if you’re a journo, flights are getting iffy but hotels are pretty cheap still.
I reached out to Apple for a comment on their secret… Read More

 There’s a new remote-controlled Star Wars droid on the way, but it might not be the one at the top of most people’s gift lists. The R/C Mouse Droid (via Gizmodo) is about as basic as a bot can get, but the tiny scene stealing droid will be very familiar (and possibly even cherished) by fans of the original series, where it had a pivotal role expressing very animal-like terror… Read More

 Two taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) have docked to the Chinese space station, Tiangong-2, kicking off the nation’s longest human spaceflight mission to date. Watch LIVE: #Shenzhou11 and #Tiangong2 set for orbital docking #Today at 19:30UTC https://t.co/6LJ8qJnY0O cc: @Astroguyz pic.twitter.com/hOsiWR3BWX — Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 18, 2016 Over the course of 30 days,… Read More

 Who’s copying Amazon? Everyone! But especially Walmart. Speaking of which, the retailer giant announced today the launch of its own video streaming service, called Vudu Movies on Us. The service at launch will include thousands of titles, which will be available in HD and can be streamed for free. To generate revenue, Vudu Movies on Us will be ad-supported. While Amazon’s Prime… Read More