Latest Technology News & Updates

UK startup SimplyCook is another recipe kit service. However, unlike competitors HelloFresh, Gousto, Marley Spoon, and Shuttlecook, the company doesn’t send you all of the fresh ingredients required to turn its recipes into food on your table. Instead, the subscription service consists of recipe cards and what SimplyCook calls “ingredients kits,” which are herbs, spices, sauces and other extras needed to cook each meal. The idea is that the rest of the ingredients are easily obtainable as part of your regular weekly shop, and in turn means that the London-based startup, perhaps smartly and for the most part, avoids being in the fresh food delivery business. “SimplyCook provides specially curated cooks’ ingredients that provide the flavour, alongside 20 minute recipes giving customers the confidence to discover new meals without the constraints,” explains founder Oli Ashness, who was previously a VC at DFJ Esprit. “With each monthly delivery customers can cook 4 new meals at ...

Four years ago, Facebook announced that they were decamping to Menlo Park from their longstanding home of Palo Alto. Just last month, the company finally cut the ribbons on a beautiful 430,000-square foot building designed by Frank Gehry that is basically one giant, open-air room with an enormous park on top. The effect on the prices of surrounding real estate has been profound. If you look at the chart below, published last week in the Almanac and Palo Alto Weekly, the price increases are mainly concentrated in Menlo Park and the neighboring city of East Palo Alto.

A 14-year-old Florida boy has been charged with felony computer intrusion after shoulder-surfing his school's computer network password and using it to play a prank on a teacher. Domanik Green, an eighth-grader at Paul R. Smith Middle School in Holiday, Florida, was charged with an offense against a computer system and felony unauthorized access, according to a report published Thursday by The Tampa Bay Times. In late March, the youth allegedly used the administrative-level password without permission to log in to the school's network and change the images displayed on a teacher's computer to one of two men kissing. One of the computers accessed allegedly contained encrypted questions to the FCAT, short for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. While the factual allegations laid out in the article seem to indicate the youth perpetrated some form of trespass, they also alleged a litany of poor practices on the part of school administrators. These practices include ...

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are a rare type of cancer cell that are found in the blood stream of patients with localized tumors. Successful separation of CTCs from blood could serve as a liquid biopsy to help diagnose cancer and monitor treatment progress. A deeper understanding of CTCs could also lead to a better understanding of the most deadly cancer process: metastasis, where cancer cells leave established tumors and migrate to other locations in the body. Currently, CTC separation methods rely on features that distinguish CTCs from other cells—antibodies that stick to them, cell size, deformability, or even electrical properties. Scientists have also explored using sound waves to separate CTCs. Acoustic-based separation provides excellent biocompatibility and safety; it preserves the viability, function, phenotype, and genotype of cells. It also allow cells to be separated without modification. As a result, sound-based separation methods enable CTCs to be maintained in the...

Republicans in Congress yesterday unveiled a new plan to fast track repeal of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. Introduced by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) and 14 Republican co-sponsors, the "Resolution of Disapproval" would use Congress' fast track powers under the Congressional Review Act to cancel the FCC's new rules. Saying the resolution "would require only a simple Senate majority to pass under special procedural rules of the Congressional Review Act," Collins' announcement called it "the quickest way to stop heavy-handed agency regulations that would slow Internet speeds, increase consumer prices and hamper infrastructure development, especially in his Northeast Georgia district." Republicans can use this method to bypass Democratic opposition in the Senate by requiring just a simple majority rather than 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, but "it would still face an almost certain veto from Preside...

An Arkansas lawyer representing current and former police officers in a contentious whistle-blower lawsuit is crying foul after finding three distinct pieces of malware on an external hard drive supplied by police department officials. The hard drive was provided last year by the Fort Smith Police Department to North Little Rock attorney Matt Campbell in response to a discovery demand filed in the case. Campbell is representing three current or former police officers in a court action, which was filed under Arkansas' Whistle-Blower Act. The lawsuit alleges former Fort Smith police officer Don Paul Bales and two other plaintiffs were illegally investigated after reporting wrongful termination and overtime pay practices in the department. According to court documents filed last week in the case, Campbell provided police officials with an external hard drive for them to load with e-mail and other data responding to his discovery request. When he got it back, he found something ...

For decades now, being able to pull off a complex set of quick button presses to activate a gruesome fatality has been a point of pride for Mortal Kombat players. Now, the latest game in the series, Mortal Kombat X, will let you set off a bloody kill animation with only a couple of button presses... for a price. As Ars' Sam Machkovech noticed last night, the Xbox Live and PSN stores both offer packs of "easy fatalities" as downloadable content for the game, which launched today. The consumable items let players pull off the bloody finishing move by simply holding down a shoulder button and pushing a face button, rather than entering an entire series of buttons and directions in a specific order. Players can buy a pack of five easy fatalities for $0.99, or 30 for $4.99 (the DLC packs don't appear to be available for the PC version through Steam, as of this writing). Mortal Kombat X players start with three free "easy fatality" tokens, though their func...

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) told Apple that it would not accept any further deliveries of Pearson curriculum, which Apple has been providing as part of a $1.6 billion plan to give every student in the nation's second-largest school district an iPad. LAUSD also asked for a “multi-millon dollar refund” for software that had already been delivered, according to local public radio station KPCC. In 2013 the school district signed an initial $30 million deal with Apple in a program that was supposed to cost up to $1.3 billion. As part of the program, LAUSD said it would buy iPads from Apple at $768 each, and then Pearson, a subcontractor with Apple, would provide math and science curriculum for the tablets at an additional $200 per unit. Not a month after the pilot program launched, students were found disabling app and browser limitations on their tablets. A month after that, LAUSD reported that a third of the 2,100 iPads distributed during the pi...

Netflix will soon use the HTTPS protocol to authenticate and encrypt customer streams, a move that helps ensure what users watch stays secret. The move now leaves Amazon as one of the most noticeable no-shows to the Web encryption party. Flipping on the HTTPS switch on Netflix's vast network of OpenConnect Appliances (OCAs) has been anything but effortless. That's because the demands of mass movie streaming can impose severe penalties when transport layer security (TLS) is enabled. Each Netflix OCA is a server-class computer with a 64-bit Xeon CPU running the FreeBSD operating system. Each box stores up to 120 terabytes of data and serves up to 40,000 simultaneous, long-lived connections, a load that requires as much as 40 gigabits per second of continuous bandwidth. Like Amazon, Netflix has long encrypted log-in pages and other sensitive parts of its website but has served movie streams over unsecured HTTP connections. Netflix took the unusual step of announcing the switc...

On Thursday, J.J. Abrams kicked off a weekend-long Star Wars convention by revealing the second teaser trailer for the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens film, and it included the first reveal of Harrison Ford reprising his role as Han Solo. "Chewie, we're home!" Ford says with Chewbacca standing behind him to close the teaser, which also included footage of a Millennium Falcon chase, a melted Darth Vader mask, a lightsaber hand-off, and Mark Hamill's speech to Leia from Return of the Jedi, though this time chopped up to sound like he's now saying it to an heir apparent. Stormtroopers, X-Wings, TIE Fighters, new droids, and the sequel's three new leads also feature prominently. As a lead-up to that teaser reveal, Entertainment Weekly columnist Anthony Breznican hosted a panel with Abrams and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy, where he asked questions about filming scenes in Abu Dhabi, designing new droids (including new droid "BB8," whos...

What would you say if we told you that your version of Windows is affected by a vulnerability that dates back to 1997? You’d laugh, right? Surely, after all, Microsoft would have patched the fault prior to releasing Windows 98, or at the latest, Windows 2000? Well, not quite. This Redirect to SMB vulnerability has its roots in the identically-named attack discovered by Aaron Spangler 18 years ago. And it’s a problem that you need to do something about, because it doesn’t only affect Windows, but also programs from Adobe, Apple, Symantec and even the Windows 10 preview. Redirect to SMB: What Does it Do? Affecting Windows PCs, tablets and servers, Redirect to SMB – discovered by Cylance’s Brian Wallace – is a development of the original vulnerability. In 1997, Spangler found that introducing URLS beginning “file” would cause Windows to attempt authentication with an SMB server at the given IP address (for example, file://1.1.1.1), which could then be used to record login crede...

A federal judge has rejected AT&T's claim that it can't be sued by the Federal Trade Commission, which is trying to put a stop to the carrier's throttling of unlimited data plans. The FTC sued AT&T in October 2014, saying the company deceived customers by offering unlimited data plans and then throttling data speeds once customers hit certain usage thresholds, such as 3GB or 5GB in a month. AT&T claimed in January that because it is a common carrier, it isn't subject to FTC jurisdiction. In a decision out of US District Court in Northern California yesterday, Judge Edward Chen refused to dismiss the lawsuit. It's true that the FTC Act exempts common carriers from the commission's oversight. But while AT&T is a common carrier for landline telephone and mobile voice service, the mobile data services at issue were not classified as common carriage at the time the lawsuit was filed. AT&T argued that it is exempt from FTC oversight "...

CESSY, France—As we drive through small villages in Eastern France, some for the second time, it's becoming increasingly clear that my tour guide is lost. She's got a stack of printed Google Maps, but, without a clear indication of where we actually are, it's tough to tell where in the stack she should be looking. Eventually, on the other side of a corn field, she spots a building that looks out of place. Someone apparently ripped this structure out of an office park in New Jersey and dropped it into France. Before long, we step onto an elevator and step out into a scene that wouldn't look out of place in a science fiction movie. A building-sized heap of electronics dominates the underground cavern before us, and this contraption has an equally sci-fi-ish name: the Compact Muon Solenoid. Best known for helping physicist Peter Higgs earn his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Higgs boson, the CMS is one of two general purpose particle detectors built on the Large ...

The renaissance of self-reliance has brought about such things as a flood of creative ideas on Pinterest, Arduino projects, popular YouTube DIY Channels, and the Raspberry Pi movement. But why should grown-ups have all the fun? Kids are born into technology, so why not include them in the experience? Teach them to fix and create things and you teach them to take control of their world. Why Should I Introduce DIY to My Kids? Because you want them to be people who can solve problems, be creative, think analytically, and have healthy self-esteem. You want them to be able to adapt to or overcome life’s obstacles. Most importantly, you want them to never feel helpless and alone. Does that sound like a lot to expect from doing DIY with your young ones? Maybe, but at least one expert thinks it can. Clayton Christensen, an intellectual, as well as physical, giant, and the originator of the term “disruptive innovation”, thinks so. He believes that, “…really creative people have almo...

Professional network LinkedIn is getting into the professional skills education market in a big way: The social company purchased Lynda.com, the online learning company founded in 1995 by technical skill instructional book author Lynda Weinman and co-founder Bruce Heavin. Lynda.com has long been the go-to resource for online learning on subjects like Photoshop, basic HTML, CSS, management practices and many more, offering instructional videos and tutorials from industry experts and vets long before e-learning was at anywhere near the level of interest it enjoys today. The acquisition is valued at $1.5 billion total, combining 52 percent cash payout and 48 percent stock, with an expected close date sometime in the second quarter of this year. “Most” Lynda.com employees will join LinkedIn as part of the deal, according to a release from the companies. In a blog post addressing the deal, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner talks about how the acquisition helps his company move closer towards ...

The idea of learning a new language in just 10 days sounds absurd. Learning a new language completely will certainly take longer than that, but you if done correctly, you can actually manage to lay down a solid groundwork and actually begin speaking Spanish (you may be able to apply these techniques to other languages, too). So how can you pull this off? Just check out the infographic below and follow the steps. Before you know it, you’ll be ready to talk in a language other than your native one. Via  Click To Enlarge

The BBC has just made the groundbreaking decision to release Doctor Who on BitTorrent as a legal download. This is fantastic news for fans worldwide and will hopefully pave the way for more legal BBC content via BitTorrent in the future. In fact, this is surely a win for everybody involved. BitTorrent Wins While BitTorrent is commonly known for the illegal content available to download, it is trying to legitimize itself by offering legal bundles, both paid and unpaid. The addition of legal BBC content to the paid BitTorrent bundles is an incredible boon for them, as more people will become aware of the legal content available via torrents. Doctor Who Fans Win There are Doctor Who fans located all around the world, and many of them do not have access to timely TV broadcasts of their favorite show. By putting the content on BitTorrent, any fan with Internet access will be able to pay a small fee and download the whole bundle… legally. People downloading the Doctor Who bundl...

In September, Google launched ARC—the "App Runtime for Chrome,"—a project that allowed Android apps to run on Chrome OS. A few days later, a hack revealed the project's full potential: it enabled ARC on every "desktop" version of Chrome, meaning you could unofficially run Android apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. ARC made Android apps run on nearly every computing platform (save iOS). ARC is an early beta though so Google has kept the project's reach very limited—only a handful of apps have been ported to ARC, which have all been the result of close collaborations between Google and the app developer. Now though, Google is taking two big steps forward with the latest developer preview: it's allowing any developer to run their app on ARC via a new Chrome app packager, and it's allowing ARC to run on any desktop OS with a Chrome browser. ARC runs Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS thanks to Native Client (abbreviated "NaCL...

On Tuesday, Gen Con, the United States' largest annual gaming convention, issued a political challenge to the governor of Indiana, where the con is currently hosted, over a bill passed by that state's House of Representatives the same day. The open letter ended by threatening to seek a new home should the bill pass. The language of the bill, SB 101, resembles that of recent bills passed in other states in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Hobby Lobby corporation. The bill's critics have argued that it would allow Indiana corporations to openly discriminate against anybody they deemed out of favor with their religious beliefs, particularly members of the LGBTQ community. In the letter, posted to Gen Con's Twitter account, Gen Con CEO Adrian Swartout spoke of the event's "diverse attendee base" made up of visitors from around the world, and he made clear that such diversity included factors like cultures, religious beliefs, and sexual...

RadioShack is trying to auction off its customer data on some 117 million customers as part of its court-supervised bankruptcy. The data in question, according to a legal challenge (PDF) launched by Texas regulators on Friday and joined by the state of Tennessee on Monday, includes "consumer names, phone numbers, mailing addresses, e-mail addresses, and, where allowed, activity data." The states say the sale breaches the 94-year-old chain's promises to its in-store and online customers that it would not sell their personal identifying information (PII) data. "The Debtors have affirmatively stated in multiple privacy policies currently in effect that consumer PII will never be sold. Yet the Debtors come before this Court with a Motion which seeks to do precisely that," according to the challenge. The states claim that RadioShack told its online customers (PDF) that "We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to anyone at any...

In a key case before the European Union's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the European Commission admitted yesterday that the US-EU Safe Harbor framework for transatlantic data transfers does not adequately protect EU citizens' data from US spying. The European Commission's attorney Bernhard Schima told the CJEU's attorney general: "You might consider closing your Facebook account if you have one," euobserver reports. The case before the CJEU is the result of complaints lodged against five US companies—Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, and Yahoo—with the relevant data protection authorities in Germany, Ireland, and Luxembourg by the Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, supported by crowdfunding. Because of the important points of European law raised, the Irish High Court referred the Safe Harbor case to the CJEU. The referral was prompted by Edward Snowden's revelations about the Prism data-collection program, wh...

Microsoft dropped an interesting piece of information today amid its confirmation that Windows 10 will go on sale this summer. Near the end of its announcement, the Redmond-based company casually revealed that it is testing Windows 10 with “power users” of Xiaomi’s flagship Mi 4 Android smartphone. The initiative, which Xiaomi stressed is not a partnership but merely assistance with the trial, is an interesting one because it again shows Microsoft’s new ‘platform agnostic’ approach. Neither Microsoft nor Xiaomi provided specific details of the Windows 10 software being trialled, but TechCrunch understands from sources that it effectively overrides Android, turning the Xiaomi phone into a Windows 10 device complete with Microsoft services. (Which the company hopes will dazzle Android owners into making the switch.) That’s to say that the software doesn’t offer a dual boot option, which Microsoft has pushed in the past in India. This is a ROM, based on Windows, that operates muc...

Microsoft confirmed today that Windows 10 will launch this summer in 190 countries and 111 languages. Frustratingly, though, the company isn’t dishing an actual launch date for its hotly-anticipated new platform, but an interesting new nugget of information was let out today. The company previously voiced its intention to offer free upgrades to “millions” of customers on Windows 7 or earlier, and China — a market synonymous with piracy — is a key focus of that initiative. Speaking at an event in Shenzhen, China, Terry Myerson — Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Operating Systems — revealed that the Redmond firm will work with three of China’s most prominent software companies — Lenovo, Tencent and Qihoo 360 — to offer free upgrades to their collective customer base. That doubtless spans a huge number of potential users. But, there’s more, Microsoft is also working Xiaomi — yes, the fast-growing Android phone company — in a partnership that will give selected owners of its...

Your next Android Wear watch could be a TAG Heuer. Intel and Google are today announcing a partnership with the iconic watch brand that will result in a TAG-branded Swiss watch powered by Android Wear. The announcement came at the start of Baselworld, the world-famous watch show in Basel, Switzerland where companies like TAG and Swatch are looking to retain market share. The partnership is very much from the same vein as Intel’s partnership with Fossil and Luxottica Group. Details about the watch are unavailable at press time and there is no indication that there is any product to speak of right now. So what does all this mean? Intel clearly knows it needs help from top consumer brands to bring wearable products to market. TAG, part of the LVMH Group, is also looking at the Apple Watch as an oncoming threat. By creating a higher end smartwatch for luxury-loving Android users – an audience obviously underserved by the current Android Wear crop – Hauer, Intel, and Google can try t...

As the new wave of virtual reality headsets barrel ever closer to consumer reality, the effects of "simulator sickness" on a significant portion of the population remain a concern. A group of researchers at Purdue University say they've found an easy way to mitigate this effect by adding one bit of reality that most VR simulations leave out: a virtual nose sitting persistently at the corners of your vision. Offering a fixed object that doesn't shift as you move around a virtual world has been shown to help anchor many VR users, reducing the apparent difference between visual and sensorimotor stimuli that can lead to simulation sickness. That's useful for VR experiences that can insert a virtual cockpit or vehicular frame around the user. A virtual nose, though, has the potential to be much more generalizable to any VR experience that takes place from a first-person perspective. The Purdue study divided 43 undergraduate volunteers into two groups. The first g...

Dextromethorphan (DXM) is a cough suppressant found in Vick's NyQuil Cold & Flu Relief, Triaminic Multi-Symptom Fever, Dimetapp Children's Multi-Symptom Cold & Flu, Tylenol Cold Multi-Symptom Nighttime, and similar over-the-counter cold medicines that make life so much more bearable when you're coughing your lungs out. It's not good for everyone though; the American Academy of Pediatricians has recommended that it not be given to children under the age of four, because it is completely ineffective for them and may even cause them harm. But although it may be bad for kids, it may be good for type 2 diabetics; a recent report in Nature Medicine suggests that it increases glucose tolerance and does so in a way that is more effective than existing drugs. Antidiabetic drugs currently on the market increase what's called the basal levels of insulin secretion—it goes up all the time, whether it's needed or not. This basal insulin secretion is a major ca...

Y Combinator unveiled one of its most impressive startup batches to date yesterday, featuring big ideas in medicine, finance, and marketplaces. After carefully watching the demos, speaking with founders in the class, and querying prestigious investors about their favorites, TechCrunch has compiled this list of the top 10 startups of the 47 that launched at Winter 2015 YC Demo Day 2. Here they are, in no particular order: Campus Job – Helps college students find part-time jobs and internships. Students fill out a profile, see jobs they’re qualified for, and can quickly apply. 1300 companies are already paying Campus Job to connect them to its 100,000 students across 2200 colleges. Why we picked it: College kids don’t just want another public profile to maintain, they want results — in this case a job. Campus Jobs fills an obvious need, already has strong traction. LinkedIn’s sign-up-and-pray-for-a-job-offer isn’t Seed – An online bank for small businesses. Seed uses your data...

At Nvidia's GTC conference in California, Tesla's Elon Musk has given us yet another glimpse into his view of the future. Talking to Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Musk said that, in the future, driving cars might be outlawed. "[It's too] dangerous," he said. "You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine." Huang and Musk were on stage during the GTC 2015 keynote, ostensibly chatting about the computational challenges of computer vision and deep learning. Then, Huang decided to ask Musk, in fairly general terms, how the whole self-driving car thing will actually go down in practice. "I don't think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that's sort of like a narrow form of AI," Musk replied. "It's not something that I think is very difficult, actually, to do autonomous driving, to a degree that's much safer than a person, is much easier than people think." The difficulty arises, though, w...

Those of you with long memories will recall a barrage of complaints in the run up to Windows 8's launch that concerned the ability to install other operating systems—whether they be older versions of Windows, or alternatives such as Linux or FreeBSD—on hardware that sported a "Designed for Windows 8" logo. To get that logo, hardware manufacturers had to fulfil a range of requirements for the systems they built, and one of those requirements had people worried. Windows 8 required machines to support a feature called UEFI Secure Boot. Secure Boot protects against malware that interferes with the boot process in order to inject itself into the operating system at a low level. When Secure Boot is enabled, the core components used to boot the machine must have correct cryptographic signatures, and the UEFI firmware verifies this before it lets the machine start. If any files have been tampered with, breaking their signature, the system won't boot. This is a desirabl...

Ever spend more time looking for something to watch on Netflix than actually watching something on Netflix? That’s because of the site’s addiction to brevity. Titles are hidden by sliding bars that requires clicking to reveal more titles. This bookmarklet fixes the issue. It’s called God Mode and I love it. Just pop the bookmarklet into your bookmark bar and load Netflix. Once logged in, click the bookmark button to expand all the sliding bars into grids of movies. It’s not as pretty, but damn is easier to use. Suddenly you can see all the movies and TV shows at once. There’s no need to click around on the interface to reveal hidden titles. It’s beautiful in a purely functional way. Netflix has a wonderful problem. It simply has too much content, and the streaming service is constantly testing new interfaces to address it. I’ve found that the best Netflix user interface is found in the Windows 8 app where a ton of content is visible at once. Want to see more? Swipe left or rig...

Last summer, Apple surprised almost everyone at WWDC with the announcement of Swift, a new programming language for iOS and Mac development. The language feels like something Apple would invent. Like several of the languages currently popular in web development, it has a concise, readable syntax that’s easier to pick up than Apple’s older language, Objective-C. It was engineered by Apple’s compiler experts, so in addition to being compatible with existing code and Cocoa libraries, it’s also faster by some metrics. But even though Apple’s tagline for the language is that it “lets everyone build amazing apps,” no novice is going to pick up Swift and get to coding full-on iOS or Mac apps without some guidance. To that end, Apple and its developer community have done a heck of a job getting lessons out there. The same week Swift was announced, Apple released a version of Xcode with support for the language, released a free book detailing the syntax and launched a blog with posts d...

In May 2014, Life360 CEO Chris Hulls received an aggressive patent demand letter. The letter, from lawyers representing a company called Advanced Ground Information Systems (AGIS), told him he needed to pay for a "royalty-bearing license" to its four patents, or Life360 and its customers would have to "cease and desist" from infringement. In other words: pay up, or shut down your company. The letter demanded a response within three days. Hulls wrote back: Dear Piece of Shit, We are currently in the process of retaining counsel and investigating this matter. As a result, we will not be able to meet your Friday deadline. After reviewing this matter with our counsel, we will provide a prompt response. I will pray tonight that karma is real, and that you are its worthy recipient, Chris On that Friday, Life360 got sued. The lawyers attached Hulls' "Dear Piece of Shit" letter as an exhibit. What AGIS' lawyers could not have known is that...

If you were looking for love in Austin this weekend, you might have run into Ava — a chatbot on Tinder created to promote the South by Southwest premiere of a new science fiction film called Ex Machina. Regardless of what you think about the campaign (I didn’t have a problem with it, but then I’ve always found Tinder chats to be awkward and slightly surreal), it certainly fit with the film’s plot. In Ex Machina, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), an employee at a large, Google-esque company, wins a contest and gets to spend a week with the company’s reclusive founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Turns out, however, that Nathan has something specific in mind — he wants Caleb to interview Ava (Alicia Vikander), an artificial intelligence housed in a female, humanoid body, and determine whether or not she’s achieved true consciousness. Of course, there’s more going on than Nathan will admit, and tense, sexually fraught hijinks ensue. Ex Machina is also the directorial debut of Alex Garland, who ...

Nintendo is finally bringing its games and characters to mobile after the company surprised the tech world with an alliance with Japanese mobile gaming firm DeNA. The duo announced a collaboration that will see them jointly develop games for “smart devices.” Secondly, a service that lets users play games across a variety of devices, including mobile devices, PCs and Nintendo’s own consoles like the 3DS and Wii U is slated to launch “in the fall of 2015″. Nintendo said that it will create new titles from the ground up, rather than porting existing games from its consoles so as to “ensure the quality of game experience that consumers expect” from the coming together. In what may be music to Nintendo fans — like this one — the companies said that “all Nintendo IP will be eligible for development and exploration by the alliance.” That said, the duo will not flood the market with vast numbers of games, the approach appears to be qualitative rather than quantitative. At a joint-pr...

As the nation's policing agents scramble to provide street officers with body cameras, a new study released Wednesday shows that a majority of use-of-force incidents weren't captured by Denver police officers who are piloting use of the technology. There were a host of reasons for officers failing to turn on the body worn cameras (BWCs) in violation of Denver Police Department policy. According to an independent police monitor's report, which surveyed the six months ending in December, only 26 percent of the use-of-force incidents in the studied policing district were captured on video. Among the monitor's findings: (PDF) "We identified several causes of this issue. First, BWCs were not assigned to supervisors or officers working off-duty during the pilot project, leaving 35 of the 80 uses of force unrecorded. Second, 45 of the incidents involved patrol officers to whom BWCs were assigned, and who were on-duty at the time they were involved in uses of force. ...

The new MacBook has been… lets say, divisive. Even within TechCrunch, we’ve got one side suggesting it’s “a betrayal” while the other declares it “nothing short of the future”. But there’s one thing we can all agree on: oh man, this parody video is fantastic. Watch on, as an “Apple Engineer” explains the design process of the 2015 MacBook: It’s even better if your high school Spanish is juuuust rusty enough to pluck out some of the words, but not good enough that you’re distracted by the actual story. Every once in a while, the subtitles and the actual words being said match up a little and everything just falls into place.

Of all the complications that will worry the outer rim of Apple Watch buyers’ minds, the question of whether they need to purchase a case to protectively encase their expensive wrist-wear is perhaps the most frivolous. On the surface it sounds ludicrous. Who keeps a watch inside a case when it’s attached to their person? And yet the Apple Watch is really a very small wrist computer, with a price-tag that ranges right up to the luxury end of the market. To $10,000, or even $17,000. It’s also intended as a multipurpose device, with fitness tracking functionality rubbing up against notifications and comms, with some ostentatious bling thrown in (at least if you’re shelling out for 18-karat gold). So it’s supposed to track you when you sweat through a half marathon and then remain on your wrist during that fancy dinner. Same device, different aspects. Add to that, given that keeping your smartphone in a protective case is well-established behavior, the notion of similarly encasing...

Google’s plan to deliver Internet service from balloons in the stratosphere has come a long way since being unveiled in June 2013. A single “Project Loon” balloon can now remain in the air for more than six months and provide 4G LTE cellular service to an area the size of Rhode Island, according to Google. Company officials have taken to calling Loon balloons “cell towers in the sky.” While there’s no announced date for a widespread service launch, Google has provided Internet to a school in Brazil and is partnering with cellular operators Vodafone New Zealand, Telstra in Australia, and Telefónica in Latin America. The US probably won’t be the first place Loon powers a commercial service. Google is aiming to get more people in developing countries on the Internet (and that’s good for Google’s business, since a lot of those people will use Google services). “For some countries, having Internet once a day for an hour is a huge deal,” Google software engineer Johan Mathe, who p...