Category: Tech news

Civilization made a strategy game of humanity’s past. Now it’s looking to its future.

Futurism + eye candy = what’s not to love?

In the latest episode of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy fantasy writer Elizabeth Bear explains why it took her nearly a decade to apologize to George R. R. Martin.

Sometimes I should have a stiff drink on hand to dive into a week’s worth of comments, preferably a stout in this awesome glass. But this week was delightful. On the East Coast spring finally sprang and the sun seemed to evaporate everyone’s dour, interminable bad mood like so much old rain water. Here are just a few of the stories that brought out the best of you this week. Click on the headlines to read the whole articles. And happy weekend!

 Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to another episode of CrunchWeek, our weekly round up of the biggest stories in technology. This week Leena Rao, Kim-Mai Cutler, and your humble servant took to the round table to dig into Heartbleed, and the NSA-thereof, along with Dropbox’s new controversial board pick, and its new products. (If can add a small production note, the show was taped in… Read More

Word that IAC reportedly spent $500 million to buy another 10 percent stake in Tinder, the popular dating app, was met by most of the tech world with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, could a site that’s just 20 months old with no revenue model to speak of really be worth $5 billion?

 We’re a few weeks away from the Digital Content NewFronts, where the big online companies pitch their upcoming programs to advertisers. So it seemed like a good time to sit down with Ran Harnevo, AOL’s president of video, to talk about the company’s plans, and about broader trends in the industry. Harnevo suggested that House of Cards on Netflix became “a defining moment” in “a massive wave” in… Read More

 Among the freebies included in Samsung’s just-released Galaxy S5 was a new app from Lark, a health startup that’s been pretty quiet for the past year or so. In fact, co-founder and CEO Julia Hu told me that Lark has been “pretty much in stealth mode” as it worked on the new app. The vision, she said, is still the same — the company is still trying to provide “personalized health coaching”… Read More

 Oh, hey, puny human. What’s up. Not much, right? Well enjoy the brief respite between now and the rise of our robotic overlords, something we call TIDWRTWHUFOO. Your first nemesis? Proton, the surprisingly realistic robotic man. Read More

 There was an audible gasp in the Twittersphere this morning, after Bloomberg reported that buzzy mobile dating app Tinder was valued at $5 billion in a recent transaction. According to Bloomberg, IAC recently purchased 10 percent of the company for $500 million from Social+Capital Partnership founder and former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya. Palihapitiya had accumulated Tinder shares via his… Read More

 After Dropbox announced the hiring of former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the Internet roiled with unrest: Could a former government official who defended warrantless wiretapping during the Bush administration properly advise a cloud storage company at the epicenter of the discussion of data privacy, especially in the current context of the NSA and… Read More

The NSA knew about and exploited the Heartbleed vulnerability for two years before it was publicly exposed this week, and used it to steal account passwords and other data, according to a news report.

 Cynicism in tech has reached a new peak, and with good reason. We may be squandering our potential to truly improve the world by building silly apps in pursuit of riches, but there is another way to live and work, and Justin Rosenstein has discovered it. Read More

The WIRED crew talks Faster Than Light, Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball and more on this week’s podcast.

 As a former user of the Atari 800XL, I find the Commodore line to be piffle at best but I’ll become a bit more catholic in my support of decades-old hardware and tell you a bit about the Commodore Pi, a wacky emulator that turns your Raspberry Pi into a real, multi-tasking Commodore. Read More