Facebook has vowed to prioritize “meaningful interaction” among users with a dramatic overhaul of its News Feed, which it says will now focus more on posts from users’ family and friends and less on viral videos. “We want to make sure that our products are not just fun, but are good for people,” Facebook Chief…
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, said the social-media platform functions by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” At an event in Philadelphia on Wednesday night, the erstwhile 38-year-old Napster inventor told Axios, “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” Parker said he…
After the disastrous recall of its Galaxy Note 7 phone last year, Samsung on Wednesday unveiled the next phone in its Note lineup, the Galaxy Note 8. The successor to the discontinued and sometimes flammable phone features a sizable infinity screen measuring 6.3 inches diagonally; two 12-megapixel color cameras; fingerprint, facial, and iris scanning capabilities;…
Elon Musk claimed on Thursday that he’s received verbal government approval for The Boring Company to create an underground Hyperloop train between Washington D.C. and New York. The Loop would include New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the U.S. capital. Musk did not announce any further details on whether the approval was local or federal, but…
Tesla’s new Model 3 sedan, the electric car maker’s first mass-market car, has passed all regulatory requirements for production, CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet on Sunday night. The Model 3 got past the regulatory hurdle two weeks ahead of schedule. Musk said production was on track to start in July as planned, with…
Julian Assange had suggested that WikiLeaks is about to publish all of the CIA’s cyber weapons online. The organization has posted what appears to be the biggest ever leak of CIA spying secrets ever, but had previously refrained from publishing the details of the US spying agency’s weapons. Mr Assange had argued that it would…
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will leave the company’s board after the proposed sale of the internet pioneer’s core web properties to Verizon, according to a filing Monday. Five other directors also will go. The move was not a surprise, as the new company will essentially be an investment company holding the remaining Yahoo assets, which…
Yahoo announced Wednesday that more than a billion user accounts could have been compromised in a 2013 hack — and among that number could be more than 150,000 U.S. government or military employees, Bloomberg reports. Criminals or foreign intelligence services could now have the names, passwords, phone numbers, birthdays, and security questions of government employees,…
Google will ban fake news sites from using its advertising software, The Wall Street Journal reports. The move will prohibit the placement of Google’s AdSense ads “on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose,” the company told the Journal. Websites that published deliberately false news…
Internet users on the east coast of the United States felt the burn Friday morning after a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, an internet performance service company. The attack made it difficult for users to access popular sites like Spotify, Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, and Reddit, starting around 7:10 a.m. ET. Dyn…
Samsung has now completely halted production of the Galaxy Note 7, after another spate of fires and explosions were reported involving replacement models the company issued to customers. On Monday, Samsung initially told buyers to stop using the smartphones and to turn them off while it looked into the safety concerns; early Tuesday, that notice…
Google has just confirmed its Pixel smartphone, available in 5- and 5.5in versions as the Pixel and Pixel XL. Headline features include the new Google Assistant, which allows for natural dialogue between Google and a user to get the information they need, a 12.3Mp camera that has won the highest ever rating from DXOMark Mobile…
The first spacecraft to orbit a comet ended its mission Friday by safely landing on the frozen body it had tracked or the past two years. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe made a confirmed landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at roughly 2 miles per hour before sending its final radio signal back to the mission-control…
On Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and other company luminaries and guests will host an event in San Francisco, and the featured product is widely expected to be a new smartphone, the iPhone 7. According to rumors, the new iPhone will have no headphone jack, may have two cameras on the back of the larger…
ITT Technical Institute will cease all of its academic operations, eliminating most of its 8,000 employees effective today, after the government last month banned the for-profit college chain from enrolling new students who receive federal aid. “The actions of and sanctions from the U.S. Department of Education have forced us to cease operations,” ITT’s parent…
Samsung on Friday recalled its new Galaxy Note 7 smartphones over a battery problem that can cause the devices to catch fire. The company has sold 2.5 million of the waterproof phones, which only made their debut on Aug. 19. Samsung said it had found 35 cases of faulty devices globally. The South Korean company’s…
A European Union ruling Tuesday determined that Apple owes Ireland $14.5 billion in taxes and must now pay up. The amount makes the ruling the largest the organization has ever issued on a single company. Apple executives said the company will appeal the decision and believe the ruling “upended the international tax system,” CNN reports.…
Gawker.com will shut down next week, the famed gossip blog announced Thursday afternoon. The decision comes several days after Univision purchased the website and its six sister sites for $135 million, months after it lost a high-profile lawsuit filed by pro wrestler Hulk Hogan (and financed by billionaire investor Peter Thiel) and the media network…
Google’s new app, Duo, is a simple video-calling service that’s available for Android and iOS today. Alongside the upcoming messaging app Allo, it’s one of two communication apps Google announced earlier this year at its I/O conference, and one of four altogether from the company.
Verizon confirmed Monday that it had reached a deal to buy Yahoo’s land holdings and core internet operations for $4.83 billion. Yahoo was once an internet behemoth valued at as much as $125 billion. The takeover will end months of uncertainty about Yahoo’s future, which began in February with an announcement the company would review…
Three men were shot inside a vehicle on Tuesday in Norfolk, Virginia, and the event was captured in a Facebook Live video stream. The men, who have not been identified, are said to be in their late twenties and were taken to a local hospital with “significant injuries,” according to police. All three of the…
Dallas police “took out” one of the suspects behind the deadly attack on its officers Thursday night using a robotic explosive device, the city’s mayor told CNN early Friday. “We were able to take out one of the suspects, who had been cornered in the garage, with an explosive device,” Mayor Mike Rawlings said. “We’ve…
NASA’s Juno spacecraft will reach Jupiter on Monday, the three-second beep marking its arrival is expected around 11:53 p.m. EST. The craft will have traveled nearly 2 billion miles in five years. “I can tell you when that completes, you’re going to see a lot of celebration,” said Juno’s project manager, Rick Nybakken, “because that…
China has put the final piece into position on what will be the world’s biggest radio telescope, which will be used to explore space and seek out extraterrestrial life. The Five Hundred Metre Aperture Spherical Telescope is cut out of the side of a mountain and is the size of 30 football fields. The massive…
The first American killed by a self-driving car died when the Tesla he was operating on “autopilot” mistook a tractor trailer for a bright sky, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported. The driver, identified as 40-year-old Josh Brown, was using his Tesla Model S’s built-in system in Florida in May when the truck made…
Looking at your smartphone while lying in bed at night could wreak havoc on your vision. Two women went temporarily blind from constantly checking their phones in the dark, say doctors who are now alerting others to the unusual phenomenon. The solution: Make sure to use both eyes when looking at your smartphone screen in…
Microsoft is acquiring LinkedIn, the company announced Monday. The move is a cash deal valued at $26.2 billion. Both companies’ boards of directors approved the acquisition unanimously. Under the new deal, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner will report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. After the announcement, the LinkedIn share price jumped 48 percent.
SpaceX launched a Thai communi-cations satellite Friday afternoon, and its first-stage rocket booster landed on a floating target in the Atlantic Ocean, marking the company’s third successful sea landing.The rocket launched at 2:39 p.m. PDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
A link between cellphones and cancer has been found in a major U.S. study, officials said late Thursday. The peer-reviewed $25 million study was conducted over multiple years and found two types of tumors in male rats exposed to the same kind of radio frequencies emitted by the devices. The tumors were found in brain…
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement thanking conservatives for meeting with him at the company’s headquarters on Wednesday. “Thank you to everyone who rearranged their schedules and made sacrifices to be here today. It’s important that Facebook remains a platform for all ideas and that we continue to give every person a voice,” Zuckerberg wrote.…
