Category: Tech news

Opinion: When ISIS uses Twitter to recruit or a landlord uses Airbnb to discriminate, that’s not exploiting the platforms’ glitches—that’s using their features.

Jonk’s photographs in *Naturalia: Reclaimed by Nature* were taken in over 30 countries across four continents.

Lego has introduced its first sustainable elements but has a long way to go before the other 98 percent of the line meets that goal.

The computer scientist Barbara Engelhardt develops machine-learning models and methods to scour human genomes for the elusive causes and mechanisms of disease.

To generate entire brackets is to tangle not just with the randomness of the game itself, but with the randomness of your betting pool.

It might seem like it would be fun to see Alex Garland’s trippy film under the influence. It’s not.

Juno has documented clusters of cyclones, including eight around the north pole.

 There are plenty of projects out there attempting to replicate the locomotion of insects, but one thing that computers and logic aren’t so good at is improvising and adapting the way even the smallest, simplest bugs do. This project from Tokyo Tech is a step in that direction, producing gaits on the fly that the researchers never programmed in. Read More

 The FCC has denied a space startup permission to launch a collection of communications satellites after discovering that it had already launched some — after being told not to. Swarm Technologies, still in stealth mode, appears to have gone ahead with the deployment of four satellites deemed too small to be tracked and therefore unsafe to put into orbit. Read More

 Elon Musk has shifted his pans for The Boring Company: While it will still focus on digging tunnels to provide a network of underground tubes suitable for use by high-speed Hyperloop pods, the plan now is to use that Hyperloop to transport pedestrians and cyclists first, and then only later to work on moving cars around underground to bypass traffic. Read More

 Snapchat has temporarily removed its Giphy GIF sticker feature after a user saw an extremely racist GIF as an option. Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch “As soon as we were made aware, we removed the GIF and have disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won’t happen again. Read More

 Facebook’s augmented reality camera is evolving beyond selfie masks and randomly placed 3D objects to using location markers in the real world that trigger AR experiences in a precise location. Spotted today, Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature in closed beta with promotions for the upcoming Ready Player One and Wrinkle In Time films. And in April, it plans… Read More

 Fornite is on fire. The popular game takes the familiar artistic direction and freemium structure of popular mobile games and combines it with the last-person-standing gameplay directive of other viral titles like PUBG to get users running and gunning through its maps. The game will be expanding beyond its home on consoles and PC/Mac with the launch of “Fortnite Mobile” in iOS… Read More

 Urban Airship recently announced new capabilities designed to allow app developers to deliver the right message to their users at exactly the right time.
Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering Mike Herrick explained that the company (which started out as a platform for push notifications) has supported in-app messaging for years.
However, those messages have been sent from Urban… Read More

 We’re hearing from a number of sources that Giphy, the big platform for hosting GIFs that also runs a GIF keyboard, held talks to raise a huge new financing round — though it’s not clear if it ever crossed the finish line. Read More