Category: Tech news

A fake *Cuphead*, a WhatsApp privacy blow-up, and more of the week’s top security news.

Streaming services, network TV, cable—really exceptional programming showed up all over the place this year. Here’s what kept us glued to the tube.

 Scaleworks, a private equity firm based in San Antonio, Texas, apparently couldn’t wait until after the holidays to share the news of its latest purchase. The firm announced it was acquiring Keen IO in a Medium blog post yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither company was available for comment beyond the blog post, but Keen has raised close to $30 million since it… Read More

Rian Johnson’s movie has more moral complexity than any of the previous films—and gives audiences a lot more to think about.

As the debate over Section 702 continues, those deciding its fate don’t know basic facts about how it works.

Edward Witten reflects on the meaning of dualities in physics and math, emergent space-time, and the pursuit of a complete description of nature.

How to build a transportation system that handles peak demand—and why you really really shouldn’t.

 SpaceX has completed its 18th launch in 2017, marking a record year for the private space company. It’s the most rockets SpaceX has launched in a single year, beating its previous best by ten missions. The launch today was for client Iridium, delivering 10 satellites to low Earth orbit for its Iridium NEXT communications constellation. This is the fourth such mission that SpaceX has… Read More

 SpaceX is launching its last mission of 2017 later today, with a planned launch window of 5:27 PM PST (8:27 PM EST). The mission is for client Iridium, and will send a fourth set of 10 satellites into low Earth orbit for Iridium’s NEXT constellation, which will eventually consist of 75 satellites launched by SpaceX in total.
SpaceX is launching the Falcon 9 for Iridium-4 from… Read More

Facebook released a tool that shows users if they’ve liked or followed accounts linked to a Russian troll farm.

 The room is a raw warehouse space that is partitioned off with curtains, hiding the bulk of it from view. I’m at the back of a group of girls who is nervously dropping its phones into a plastic box for safekeeping, to be returned on exit. The reason for the curtains, and the no phone policy, is that we are about to be some of the first people outside of the Disney Imagineering group to… Read More

There are still a lot of superb holiday tech deals left for 2017, from audio and phones to gaming and TV.

 Elon Musk shared images on his Instagram account today of the payload being loaded up on the first Falcon Heavy rocket that will ever launch – and it’s a red Tesla Roadster. The SpaceX CEO previously said that he’d be launching exactly that on the spaceship, but then suggested he was joking – before the whole thing was confirmed again by SpaceX, and now made really… Read More

 Molekule, a San Francisco-based startup with a sleekly designed molecular air purifier started as an immigrant dream twenty years ago and ended up being named one of Time’s top 25 inventions of 2017. The inventor Yogi Goswami came up with the idea when his baby son Dilip started having a hard time breathing the air around him. Dilip suffered from severe asthma but no air purifier at… Read More

 This fall saw ever-rising estimates of the number of people reached by Russian-backed troll accounts — just shy of 150 million at last count . Now the social network has at last released the tool it promised last month allowing users to see if they liked or followed one of the many pages or pieces of content put online during the sketchy attempt at mass manipulation. Read More