Category: Tech news

 It’s been over a year and a half since Microsoft first announced the open source .NET Core project, which aims to bring the core parts of Microsoft’s .NET framework (and its cousin, the web-focused ASP.NET Core) to Linux, OS X and other operating systems that the company didn’t previously support. As Microsoft announced today, .NET Core and ASP.NET Core have now hit 1.0.… Read More

 Services like YouTube Gaming and Twitch are great for watching videos and live streams from your favorite gamers, but a new app called Leet, launching now, has a slightly different take. Instead of focusing on live-streamed gameplay and real-time chat, Leet lets gamers share short highlights from their favorite console or PC games to its online community and the social web. Others can then… Read More

 Austin, U.S.-based AllClear ID, a provider of identity theft repair and credit monitoring services, has quietly acquired Norway’s Encap Security. The Oslo-based company offers device-based multi-factor authentication and e-signature solutions, predominantly to the financial services industry. Read More

 A food delivery startup called Farm Hill is expanding its business from the suburbs of Silicon Valley to San Francisco this week, bucking the trend of so many “on-demand” businesses that focus on dense, urban markets first. Interestingly, Farm Hill benefitted from the demise of one of its city-focused peers in the industry, Spoonrocket. Farm Hill has taken over leases and… Read More

 Here’s one for your Friday. An older video, unearthed by Twitter user @iamjamajesty a few days ago has been blowing up on the network. This group poem, performed by Morgan “MoMo” Butler and Malachi Byrd, is one of the best expressions I’ve seen of love and trust in the digital age. “Settings>Privacy Settings>System Services>Location… Read More

 Chinese-backed electric car maker Faraday Future says it is working on a self-driving vehicle. The company not so secretly owned by LeTV joins a growing list of tech companies making autonomous cars, including Google, Tesla, Apple (big rumor), and even IBM now powers a self-driving bus. Faraday revealed its first concept car, the FFZERO1, at CES earlier this year — an electric car with… Read More

 Ladar Levison’s three-year fight for freedom to speak about the government order that shuttered Lavabit, his secure email service, is finally over. Levison was finally able to confirm today that Lavabit was targeted by the government during its investigation into the Edward Snowden leaks. Although Apple’s legal battle to keep its users’ data encrypted is more widely… Read More

 Earlier this week, BuzzFeed got its hands on a stock purchase offer arranged by Palantir for its employees, one that asked current and former employees to agree to a host of stipulations. Among them, the 12-year-old, data analytics outfit asked former employees to renew their non-disclosure agreements, agree not to solicit Palantir employees for 12 months, and promise not to sue the company or… Read More

 I do the same thing every time I get a waterproof device – I take it home, fill up the sink and dunk it. It’s a strangely cathartic, a sort of gadget baptism, and nicely refreshing for someone who spends so much of his time cautiously handling expensive hardware devices. The only thing that beats it are those companies with rugged gadgets that demand you bang them with a hammer.… Read More

 Shock, disbelief and disappointment were common sentiments echoed by the startups TechCrunch spoke to, many of which had scrambled emergency meetings this morning to consider their immediate steps in the face of a seismic shift in the political and economic landscape of both the U.K. and the European region as a whole. Read More

 The smartphone has become the digital Swiss Army Knife of modern life. Beyond making phone calls, it takes pictures and videos, facilitates purchases, connects us to our social networks, helps us navigate around town and runs applications for almost any imaginable purpose — including one you couldn’t imagine. Read More

 President Barack Obama praised tech companies’ efforts to improve diversity in their workforces and called for governments around the world to embrace openness and transparency today at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit.
Obama encouraged companies to continue hiring workers from diverse backgrounds, citing tech companies’ diversity reports as a step in the right direction. The… Read More

 As you can already tell, this is an electric skateboard. It’s not my first rodeo on one either, and it won’t be my last. But here’s something I learned the past few days: Acton’s budget-friendly electric skateboard has been the least fulfilling of the electric rolling planks I’ve ridden. Summed up, it’s an electric skateboard with a few quirks.
Price as… Read More

 Whoda thunk it? Tourist/cybersecurity expert Benjamin Tedesco was hanging out in Vienna when he walked up to an ATM. Because he trusts no one he decided to give the reader a little tug and came away with a working skimmer designed to look exactly like the card slot on the original machine. “It pays to be paranoid,” he said — and he’s right. Tedesco pulled off the… Read More

 In February, Facebook-owned WhatsApp announced it had reached one billion users worldwide, and this week, the company added another metric to demonstrate its ongoing traction and growth. According to a brief post on the company blog, WhatsApp claims that it’s now handling more than 100 million voice calls per day on its service. This is equivalent to over 1,100 calls per second, the… Read More