Category: Tech news

 Overwatch wasn’t what you’d call a “surprise” hit — everyone knew it was going to wipe the floor with its immediate competition. But unlike a lot of games, it still costs money. If you’ve been meaning to give it a shot but don’t feel like shelling out the $40, this weekend the game is free to play on all platforms with no restrictions. Read More

While NASA and space enthusiasts have been talking about privatizing the ISS for years, Monday’s announcement is the first time the idea has been officially endorsed by the White House.

 Homebrew is announcing the close of its third fund. This time they’ve raised $90 million, an increase from $50 million in 2015 and $35 million for its debut fund in 2013. Led by Hunter Walk and Satya Patel, the seed-stage venture firm has spent the past five years investing in U.S.-based startups at the onset. Read More

 “He wouldn’t have to worry about sending a hookup a picture of his junk! And girls would be way more likely to send him racy photos if they disappeared.” That’s just a taste of juicy details found in “How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story,” a new book coming out tomorrow from former TechCrunch reporter Billy Gallagher. Read More

 We knew this day would come sooner or later. Like the cloned velociraptors before it, Boston Dynamics’ newly redesigned Spot Mini has figured out how to open doors — with either its arm or face, depending on how you look at it. Read More

 Chalk one up to the power of media exposure. The team responsible for building Target’s online registry saw Honeyfund appear on “Shark Tank,” and thought it would be cool to integrate the honeymoon registry service into Target’s own. Today, that integration has gone live across Target’s website, mobile web and in the dedicated Target registry app. The retailer… Read More

 According to serial entrepreneur Jeff Cavins, more than 35 million people each year look to rent an RV — 38 percent of them so-called millennials. Yet they often walk away from the experience empty-handed. The reason, he says: There are fewer than 100,000 commercially owned vehicles available from traditional rental services. Read More

 Essential knew it had a hard road ahead of it. Andy Rubin and company acknowledged as much when they launched a handset aimed at taking on the likes of Apple and Samsung. Given that the company hasn’t issued anything in the way of official numbers thus far, a new batch of numbers from IDC are the best we have to go on at the moment — and things don’t look great. Read More

 You know that feeling of awe and wonder you had when you were a kid and you saw something huge and amazing? My blackened heart hasn’t felt it in years. Turns out all it needed was going to see an historic rocket launch. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch last week was an exhilarating combination of suspense, bureaucracy and childlike delight at seeing a giant fiery rocket make a big noise. Read More

 Science fiction no more — in an article out today in Nature Biotechnology, scientists were able to show tiny autonomous bots have the potential to function as intelligent delivery vehicles to cure cancer in mice. These DNA nanorobots do so by seeking out and injecting cancerous tumors with drugs that can cut off their blood supply, shriveling them up and killing them. Read More

 Over the weekend, a little piece of malware was hard at work mining cryptocurrency on government computers. Security researcher Scott Helme first noticed the malware, which he believes was running on more than 4,000 sites, including the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk) and the website for the American court system (uscourts.gov). Read More

 According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is switching things up for this year’s major updates. Instead of meeting a tight deadline and ticking all the boxes on the checklist, development teams will be able to push back some features if they’re not polished enough. Axios and Bloomberg previously reported that Apple was focusing on stability with iOS 12. You can still expect… Read More

 The Super Bowl is over, but Tom Brady is still at work. The quarterback who will undeniably go down in NFL history as one of the greatest of all time is already thinking about his next act. Alongside Michael Strahan (another football great turned pop cultural icon) and Gotham Chopra (producer, director and former war correspondent), Brady is launching a new sports media startup. Read More

 The Information has a report this morning that Amazon is working on building AI chips for the Echo, which would allow Alexa to more quickly parse information and get those answers. Read More

Once confined to browsers, hijacking computers to mine cryptocurrency has branched out to dangerous places.