In an era of instantaneous access to everything, one system that's managed to lag well behind is online court documents. Electronic filing systems have become the norm in lower courts, but are still in the midst of being overhauled to make accessing documents feel like like you're stuck in the 1990s. Then there's the Supreme Court, which still relies on paper filings, which need to be scanned and distributed by others like the Scotusblog for public consumption. That will change sometime in 2016, Chief Justice John Roberts said today. Writing in a year-end report on the Federal Judiciary, Roberts said the court was developing its own electronic filing system to help it escape the clutches of paper, and freely host major documents for the...
In a future fueled by hacks and leaks, will we be sedated by our own transparency?
Apple's caught plenty of flack for continuing to sell iPhones and iPads with just 16GB of storage in 2014, and just as much for the amount of storage needed to upgrade to iOS 8, two things that a pair of customers from Florida are suing the company over. In a legal complaint filed yesterday in California, Miami residents Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara say that the 16GB iPhones and iPads they purchased had less than that amount of usable space, something Orshan contends was further reduced after upgrading his iPhone 5S from iOS 7 to iOS 8.
Are the Moto X's storage limits keeping you from buying Motorola's flagship smartphone? If so, those concerns may have just dissolved. Today the company announced that it's now offering its unlocked GSM Pure Edition Moto X — which ships free of carrier cruft and bloatware — with 64GB of storage. That's a new option to go alongside the 16GB and 32GB variants that've been available since the second-gen Moto X launched earlier this year. Going with the Pure Edition is pretty much the only way of getting that much space for your apps, music, movies, documents, and whatever else you cram onto a phone; Motorola doesn't offer the "regular" model with 64GB through any US (or international) carrier. We really wish Motorola would take after...
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will hire a chief of laboratory safety, according to a Reuters report. Because apparently there wasn't one before; creating the position was a major recommendation of a lengthy internal investigation into mishandling of anthrax and bird flu in the agency's labs, according to a memo Reuters obtained.
The announcement comes a week after another lab mix-up — one involving Ebola. Last week, a wrong transfer of a sample containing the Ebola virus exposed at least one lab technician to the disease. The technician wore gloves and a gown, standard gear for inactivated viruses, but not all of the protective gear — like a face mask — recommended for working with the live virus. The worker was...
If you were fortunate enough to have owned or driven a Power Wheels car as a kid, it's hard to forget the feeling of breezing down the sidewalk at 5 mph. For many of us, it was our first driving experience that wasn't powered by furious pedaling. But they were still very much toys — quick to lose a full charge and often made of flimsy plastic that was easily damaged.
The selfie stick has been framed by my peers as a risible technology of which ownership is akin to the forfeiture of good taste. For the past year or so I kind of agreed. I've been at best disinterested and at worst disgusted by what seemed to be a over-priced, vanity-promoting retractable camera mount. But a holiday trip to Disneyland convinced me the selfie stick deserves respect.
If you've traveled in the past two years, you probably noticed the surging popularity of obtrusive photography: ginormous tablets and smartphones that hover in the air like glowing balloons, blocking the view of beautiful landscapes and dirtying the frame of family photos. They're not all bad, of course. Phones and tablets with improved cameras have made it...
Virtual reality is a difficult thing to review. It’s hard not to be impressed when you look into a screen and see a world, magnified to surround you and responding to the motion of your head. It’s even harder when the basic technology is so simple: almost every VR headset on the market is a mobile phone screen with some gyroscopic sensors and a pair of lenses. But when something like Samsung and Oculus’ Gear VR comes out, you can’t simply judge and recommend it like a phone or laptop. It’s a $200 toy, plus an extra $700-800 for the phone it fits around, that promises to contain the embryo of a revolutionary new medium. So the real question isn’t just whether you should buy it right now (because you shouldn’t). It’s whether there’s a...
A friend recently told me that his favorite thing about the show Black Mirror is that he finally has a term for a certain type of technological anxiety. It’s a type of anxiety that seemed everywhere this year. The Sony hack could have been an episode of Black Mirror, as could Gamergate. In the same way that we refer to Blade Runner as shorthand for gritty dystopian cityscapes, Gattaca for worries about corporate use of genetic information, and Terminator for ominously powerful AI, Black Mirror has become shorthand for a certain type of contemporary internet-age creepiness.
If you haven’t seen the show, go watch it and come back: it's streaming on Netflix, and what follows contains many, many spoilers. If you don't care about that and...
I've spent much of the past few days replaying my favorite games from 2014. I slowly crept through the dark hallways of Sevastopol Station in Alien: Isolation , holding my breath while a xenomorph stalked me through the vents. I whizzed through the whimsical world of Hohokum , nodding along to my favorite Tycho songs. And I engaged in all manner of criminal activity in the new and improved Grand Theft Auto V . It was a great reminder of just how many awesome games came out this year.
The crazy part? I played all of them on a smartphone.
Ever since the PS3, Sony has tantalized Playstation owners with the idea of Remote Play, which lets you stream console games to a mobile device so you can take games with you throughout the house. It was a...
You're going to see lots of curved things at CES 2015. TVs, all-in-one PCs, and plenty desktop monitors. LG's one of the main pushers of curved displays, and tonight it's announcing one of those products before we head for Las Vegas. The 34-inch UltraWide desktop monitor has been designed for gamers and integrates support for AMD’s FreeSync, which eliminates unsightly screen tearing that can happen when your monitor and graphics card get out of sync. And since it's got a 21:9 aspect ratio, you'll be able to see details on screen that are hidden from your multiplayer foes playing Battlefield 4 on 16:9 monitors. LG's not new to 21:9 displays, but it's describing the new UltraWide as one of its best yet, promising unrivaled color accuracy...
After more than a decade of traversing the red planet, NASA's Mars Opportunity rover is facing some problems in its old age — namely, ones with memory. According to Discovery News , the rover has been going through bouts of "amnesia" thanks to failures in its flash memory storage.
"The Opportunity rover uses two different types of memory: "volatile" and "non-volatile," NASA project manager John Callas told Discovery News. The volatile memory is akin to a computer's RAM, so any data stored there is wiped every time the rover shuts down. The non-volatile memory is where the important data like telemetry — the measurements the rover is collecting — is stored so that it can be accessed whenever Opportunity is powered on. The problem with the...
Samsung sure loves its curved display HDTVs, and now it's expanding the design trend to cover PCs as well. Today the company announced its brand new Ativ One 7 Curved, an all-in-one Windows machine that features a slight curve in its screen that isn't as readily apparent compared to what we've seen from its recent 4K TVs. It's a 27-inch, 1920x1080 panel with pretty fantastic viewing angles and vivid color reproduction. But it could stand to be a bit sharper. The resolution is no match for Apple's flagship iMac with Retina Display, and it even falls short of Cupertino's regular 27-inch model. When you're sitting so close to a PC, those extra pixels can make a world of difference. Oh well. If you're wondering just how curved this thing is,...
If there is such a thing as seasonal music for New Year's Eve, it is apocalypse pop. Apocalypse pop is a subgenre of radio dance pop that I made up, whose lyrics and musicality invoke the end of the world, usually to rationalize dancing for a very long time or engaging in sexual activity with someone you might otherwise not. For reference, the holy trinity of apocalypse pop is "Give Me Everything" (Pitbull feat. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, and Nayer), "Till The World Ends" (Britney Spears), and "We Found Love" (Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris). All three of those songs were released in 2011 — the brief reign of apocalypse pop coincided with the rise of the EDM-crossover pop hit, back when EDM could still be said to cross over into the mainstream,...
With just a day to spare, the White House has just released its photographic look back at 2014. Curated by the director and chief White House photographer Pete Souza, the collection of over 100 images was composed from his own work and the work of his staff: Amanda Lucidon, David Lienemann, Chuck Kennedy, and Lawrence Jackson.
We've known how fierce the acceleration of the Tesla Model S P85D is ever since we got to experience a lap of terror with one back in October. But this new video from DragTimes of it shaming the 2013 version in a drag race puts the power into some serious context. With advantages like dual motors and all-wheel drive, the P85D and its 691 horsepower gives the older model no chance to compete in a race off the line.
In a second video — during which the two cars race from a rolling start of 35 mph — the original P85 gets a jump and still gets beat handily by the P85D. According to DragTimes , the combination of 471 horsepower in the rear motor and 221 in the front of the P85D made it outperform its rated torque...
One of the greatest gifts of 2014 is Matthew McConaughey's collaboration with Lincoln to sell cars using existentialism. This week, Lincoln doubled its output — two new commercials, two new performances. It still ranks high for McConaughey in a year marked by True Detective, Interstellar, and a recursive series of "alright." So how do you rank greatness? Like this.
What yellow fever aboard a ship 169 years ago can tell us about Ebola today
After scouring their systems for evidence of a breach, workers at South Korea's nuclear regulator have discovered an embarrassing surprise: a malware-infected device connected to the air-gapped system that controls one of the nation's nuclear reactors. There's no evidence that the malware copied itself over onto the system, and there's also no indication that the program would have had harmful effects if it had made it onto the systems — but for anyone concerned about the digital security of nuclear plants, it's a harsh reminder that keeping a system off the web isn't enough to protect it from attack.
Keeping a system off the web isn't enough to protect it from attack
According to a statement by the country's energy minister, the...
The camera industry is the most interesting and exciting it’s been in the past 10 years. After capable smartphones decimated the point-and-shoot market, camera makers have focused their efforts on appealing to enthusiasts and professional photographers — those that need or want more than a smartphone can provide. We’ve gotten really great cameras from the likes of Fujifilm, Panasonic, Olympus, and Sony that prioritize manual controls and image quality, while still being more compact and approachable than the DSLRs that dominated the aughts.
In that vein, Sony recently released the A7 II, a compact mirrorless camera that could replace the big DSLR rigs many professionals still cling to. The A7 II is actually a successor to last year’s A7,...
Are we alone in the universe?
That's a big question, and there have been many attempts to answer it, whether it’s beaming radio waves at specific star systems or sending recordings of multilingual greetings out of our solar system. But for the last few years, NASA has been using the Kepler Space Telescope to hunt for life in a more direct way — by looking for planets.
A week ahead of CES 2015, Samsung has given us a glimpse of two new pill-shaped speakers it'll show off at the event. The speakers, which resemble a sleek cross between Eve from Wall-E and a Portal turret, can project sound in a 360-degree radius. Samsung says the effect, made possible with the company's proprietary "Ring Radiator" technology, "fills a room with sound."
360-degree speakers aren't totally new — a number of devices, including our favorite bluetooth speaker, the UE Boom, spit out sound in a circle — but Samsung's new devices certainly look pretty. The larger WA7500 is designated "stand type" and is designed to be left in place, while Samsung says the WA6500, which includes a built-in battery, is "movable type." Samsung...
Marvel Studios has made it a selling point that every frame it produces lives in the same continuous universe. So what if you wanted to watch it in order? Not based on release dates but the narrative itself — from a 2987 BC flashback in Thor: The Dark World through the Battle of New York in The Avengers?
With enough time, the most ordinary objects can become extraordinary. These polaroids, on display through January 4th, 2015 at the British Film Institute Southbank as part of an exhibition of materials from the set of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, were taken by crew member Ann Skinner. She's credited for continuity, also known as script supervisor. It was typical in that time for script supervisors to use instant photographs to supplement quickly written documentation of a scene's set-up. Was Darth Vader facing left or right? Was Princess Leia wearing a bracelet in this scene? And at which point did Luke Skywalker lift his lightsaber? Here's an example of Skinner's notated script:
The job is incredibly stressful, requiring a...
Every year hundreds of newscasters try to bring the public the most important events on the global, national, and local scale, and ever year things go terribly wrong and someone ends up making an awful double entendre or getting hit by a skateboard. The annual collection of best news bloopers is online. Watch it with your teeth cringed and your hands covering your face, knowing if your job were on camera this would be you.
The rise of smartphones has left us tapping away at touchscreens. In this week's Big Future, we look at what comes after the glass. Will we all be speaking to our devices? Are augmented reality glasses and contacts going to feed us information all day? Or does touch interaction work so well that we'll never really replace it?
We've accessed and manipulated information with our hands and fingers for decades. Whether we recognize it or not, our brains are constantly processing information afforded by what we hold and telling our hands how to respond. What we've lost over the years as we swapped mouse and keyboard for glass touchscreens, though, is feedback. Our phones and tablets demand our...
The Interview did far better online than it did in its limited theatrical release. Sony Pictures has revealed that the film pulled in over $15 million over the holiday weekend from online purchases and rentals alone. That handily beats the estimated $2.8 million the film earned over the same time period in theaters. However, only a relatively small sampling of independent theaters carried the film — had the major theater chains been willing to show The Interview, these numbers would likely be very different. The studio has also announced that the film was rented or purchased over 2 million times online over the holiday weekend.
The comedy's box office numbers — online and off — are being closely monitored, as the drama surrounding the...
Fans of The Wire have been eagerly waiting to see how the beloved show has made the transition from 4:3 standard definition to its new widescreen, HD versions. Leading up to its premiere this past Friday, HBO has kept its HD remasters of The Wire entirely under wraps — but now we can see just what the show looks like in HD. And, frankly, the results are quite good.
Unlike The Simpsons , this is no half-assed scan-and-pan job that merely stretches or crops the original 4:3 frame to fill your widescreen TV. Since the show was originally shot on 35mm film, the editors had extra footage to work with to bring the remastered version to life. That means we now have a "true" widescreen version of The Wire to enjoy. However, it's important to...
The Associated Press reports that an AirAsia flight on its way from Indonesia to Singapore is missing, having lost contact with ground control Sunday morning. Flight QZ8501, an Airbus A320-200, had 155 passengers and six crew, and, according to an official statement, disappeared about an hour before it was due to land. Search and rescue efforts are currently underway.
"Search and rescue operations have been activated by the Indonesian authorities," said the Singapore aviation authority in a statement. The Singapore navy and air force have been deployed in the search.
AirAsia Indonesia regrets to confirm that QZ8501 from Surabaya to Singapore has lost contact at 07:24hrs this morning http://t.co/WomRQuzcPO
— AirAsia (@AirAsia) D... 
North Korea believes it is being punished for a crime it did not commit. KCNA, the North's state-run media outlet, has published an official statement from an unidentified spokesperson that accuses the US of shutting down the country's internet access earlier this week.
"The United States, with its large physical size and oblivious to the shame of playing hide and seek as children with runny noses would, has begun disrupting the Internet operations of the main media outlets of our republic," reads the statement.
Among other insults, the government spokesperson blames President Obama personally for the release of The Interview, adding in an apparent racial slur: "Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical...
Good morning, and welcome back to The Weekender. Our weekend journey is just now starting, so thank you for choosing us for your travels. As you may recall, this was the 52nd and final full week of the year 2014 on the planet known colloquially as Earth, otherwise known as Terra in other inhabited star systems. It was not a quiet week, as you might imagine. Below you'll find your itinerary, carefully crafted for your pleasure; stories from the week passed and recommendations for the days ahead. Now. Please sit back and relax as we take you on a journey through time and space. You might hear a slight buzzing in your ears as we get started.
When I'm home for the holidays, one of my most beloved traditions involves sifting through my time capsule of a bedroom, where decades of PC Magazines, PC Worlds, Windows Magazines, and Visual Basic Programmer's Journals collect dust. These were my bibles as a youngster: magical cocktails of attainable and unattainable technology pulling me forward into an education and career in engineering. If it weren't for PC Magazine in particular, I'm not sure I ever would've touched a line of code. And now, today, I'm a founding editor of a publication that I consider something of a spiritual successor to those classic mags. I'd like nothing more than to be inspiring an eleven-year-old somewhere to pursue a career in technology, the way PC Mag did...
Bitcoin is sponsoring a college football bowl game this year, officially dubbed the "Bitcoin Bowl." And because sports fans love mascots, "Mr. Bitcoin" is now apparently a thing that exists. All around the game's festivities, people are posing for photos with the rotund representation of the cryptocurrency.
Met Mr. Bitcoin at the @BitPay Christmas dinner! #BitcoinBowl @BitcoinBowl http://ift.tt/1zEROZM
— Maria Gallippi (@BitPayMom) December 26, 2014 But wait — as others have noticed, Mr. Bitcoin has been around for a while.
Like the Terminator, Mr. Bitcoin appeared bare and seemingly out of nowhere at the University of Texas (the site of the Texas Bitcoin Conference) about 10 months ago:
As he...
Whenever I’m wearing some new gadget on my wrist, people ask about it. Co-workers are idly curious about which smartwatch or fitness band that is; my girlfriend asks why it’s so ugly and when I’ll take it off. A few, like the Moto 360, prompt strangers to stop me on the street or subway and ask if that’s what they think it is. (Yes, it is. Yeah it’s cool, I guess. No, sorry, I can’t let you wear it.)
No one asked about the Withings Activité. I don’t think anyone knows they should.
I’ve been wearing it for a week. It’s one part standard wristwatch, one part fitness tracker. It tracks your sleep, steps, and activity. It costs $450. It’s beautiful: made of carefully machined sapphire, calf leather, and stainless steel. It looks like a...
It may be a slow, restful, holiday week, but new trailers are still coming out — including one particularly big one. Head below to see seven of this week's best new trailers, including the first for the Entourage movie.
Reports have been flowing in on Twitter today that Xbox Live and PlayStation Network — the online services connecting Microsoft's and Sony's game consoles — are experiencing outages. Occasional downtime is par for the course for both, but Christmas Day is a particularly bad time, just as hundreds of thousands of PlayStation 4s and Xbox Ones are unwrapped and set up.
If you want to release something no one will pay attention to, what time's better than Christmas Eve? At least, that appeared to be the National Security Agency's thinking. Last night, the NSA released reports detailing all the times they've illegally spied on American citizens. Ho ho ho!
the redactions make it hard to judge how often privacy violations happen
The heavily-redacted documents were released in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act. Many of these privacy violations have been previously reported on, but these documents show new specifics. A series of annual and quarterly reports from 2001 through the second quarter of 2013 are now available for perusal, and...
Mazda's Christmas gift to the world of racing fanatics has been revealed as the LM55 Vision Gran Turismo concept supercar. It joins a growing cadre of outlandishly designed vehicles that car manufacturers have been contributing to Gran Turismo 6 since the game's release last year. Challenged by Polyphony Digital chief Kaz Yamauchi to produce their grandest vision for the ideal Gran Turismo racing car, marques like Mercedes-Benz and Toyota have responded with enthusiasm and even built real-world mockups to show off the undulating curves of their supremely aerodynamic concept autos. Mazda's approach is even more focused on the racing aspect, as the company has taken its 1991 Le Mans win as the basis for the LM55 concept that it's now added...
The future of driving, it appears, won't require much driving at all. LG and Mercedes-Benz have this morning announced plans to co-develop a stereo camera system to be used in future autonomous vehicles. Using multiple cameras to detect what's in front of the car, and how far out in front, is the first step to giving it the self-awareness necessary to take the burden of driving away from the driver. It's also the first step in what both companies hope will be a productive and long-lasting partnership. In an emailed statement to The Verge, LG explains that it will be responsible for providing the "core components" of the driverless Mercedes-Benz cars of the future.
Self-driving cars are a major focus of research and development at...
If you've ever wondered what would happen if you told a bunch of architects to design a building without worrying about the realities of budgets, bylaws, or building codes, here's your chance to find out. A competition run by Helsinki Design Week and a Finnish construction company called Ruukki asked architects from around the world to submit their plans for Santa's "logistics center" — a center from which Santa can run his toy operation. Despite the corniness of the task, close to 250 designers went ahead and did just that, and the buildings they imagined are actually pretty cool.
There was never any question this week that I would be spending part of my Christmas watching The Interview. When it was announced the morning that the film would get an online release at 10 a.m. PST, without missing a beat I yelled to my mom in the next room (who I am currently visiting for the holidays) that we would have to cancel a day trip we had planned. Welcome to the hot take workshop: when a story snowballs to the proportion that the Sony hack and near-non-release of The Interview has, a certain kind of professional easily becomes a slave to the feeds and the whims of the individuals at the center of the story.
But having now finally watched Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and screenwriter Dan Sterling's film, I can confirm with...
It's been an interesting day for Kernel, the site powering Sony's digital rentals of The Interview in the US. Not only did it briefly buckle under the pressure of people hammering its site to watch the movie, but apparently it didn't do a great job in securing copies of the film, either. Those who spent $5.99 to watch a 48-hour rental of The Interview on their browser could simply share the URL of the film with anyone else. Worse yet, anyone who had access to the link was able to save an unprotected copy locally through a super obvious loophole, something The Verge was able to confirm from different browsers and locations.
Walmart is making a play for your gift cards, testing a program that lets you exchange cards from more than 200 other stores for a Walmart card. The Walmart card, notably, will be worth a fraction of the value of the original: 95 percent for Amazon, 90 percent for Staples, and down to 70 percent for other stores.
The cards will be worth a fraction of the value of the original.
Every year Americans get huge numbers of gift cards and then proceed not to spend them, either forgetting about them or deciding they’re too much of a hassle. According to the consultancy CEB TowerGroup, about $1 billion worth of gift cards will go unused this year.
For the test program, Walmart is partnering with CardCash, the largest gift card exchange....
The time between Christmas and New Years has turned into a big online shopping week, with deals rivaling those found during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Retailers like Amazon are eager to capitalize on that, so a few have already started offering some pretty good discounts.
There are plenty of options for TVs, both 4K and 1080p, and even a few surprises like Newegg offering $350 off the full price of a 13" Retina MacBook Pro. Dell is discounting most of its tablets and laptops, and if you still don't own a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, the popular Destiny and Call of Duty bundles are back. Many of these sales will likely be replaced with a whole new round in a few days, so they won't last long, but here's some of the best we've...
In case you didn't already know, The Verge's video team is the best in the business. They work incredibly hard and do incredible work — honestly, their only problem is that they make too many great videos even for our staff to be able to catch everything, much though we try.
So, as we wrap up 2014, we asked our video team to collect their favorite things we did this year. What follows is a weird, wild, adventurous mix of stories, from simple hands-on tips to powerful trips into the past and future of magic. You won't want to miss a moment.
Days after the shooting of two New York Police Department officers, the FBI has announced the arrest of a man who allegedly posted YouTube comments about hunting down and killing police. Yesterday, the Colorado District Attorney's office said it had detained 33-year-old Jeremiah Perez, who is accused of transmitting an online threat in retaliation for the death of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. On December 17th, Google notified the FBI about a Google+ account called "Vets Hunting Cops," which had commented on a YouTube video. The comment said that since Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Brown in August, "our group" had killed six retired sheriffs and police officers and would "hunt two more in...
The presents are open. Dinner is done. Now you've got some free time to kill, and there's one obvious place to look: Netflix. Marco Polo may not have turned out so well, but Netflix has still added a pretty great selection of new and classic movies over the past month. Here are 10 favorites for you to consider when you're searching for something to watch.
The gulf between people and police is widening, and comedian W. Kamau Bell is podcasting about it.
On December 20th, gunman Ismaaiyl Brinsley allegedly shot and killed two New York City police officers in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He later killed himself. The murders came after weeks of nationwide protests against law enforcement in America, with people taking to the streets to denounce the shooting deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the non-indictment of the police officers involved, and reports indicate that Brinsley committed the killings as revenge against law enforcement at large. With these new killings, the tenor surrounding the situation had changed in one fell swoop.
The shootings gave Bell...
Much like it did with its Black Friday deals, Amazon is posting its after-Christmas sales early. Some of them end as early as tonight or tomorrow, but many others will run all the way up until January 1st. Over that span the online retailer promises daily discounts and clearance prices, so each day will bring new deals. The full Year End Sales site is available here and features discounts up to 70-percent off things like clothing and sports gear, and up to 85-percent off popular ebooks. We've broken out some choice electronics deals below. And remember, if you're an Amazon Prime member, some orders placed today could delivered as early as the day after Christmas.
TVs
South Korean prosecutors have indicted the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, for operating an illegal taxi service in the country. The formal accusation against Kalanick and another man, a local rental car service operator, was made without physical detention. Yonhap News says that violators of the Korean law in question, which stops rental car services from offering paid passenger transport, could face a fine of up to 20 million won ($18,121), or up to two years in jail.
A petition to grant hoteliers the right to block personal Wi-Fi on their premises is being met with staunch opposition from the biggest technology companies. Google and Microsoft are among those who have filed objections, noting the illegality of any devices capable of interfering with radio signals.
Vizio's got Samsung in its sights. A new ad released today by the US-based TV manufacturer is lighthearted in tone, but it's also a brutal takedown of the curved TV concept that Samsung, LG, and others have been pitching to consumers over the last couple years. The "revolutionary, remarkable, radical piece of technology" that's the centerpiece of Vizio's mock infomercial is a ridiculous set of Anti-Curve Glasses that will turn your curved TV into "a beautiful flatscreen." You know, the very kind of TV that Vizio specializes in and sells a ton of.
This is the company that's already kicked 3D to the curb, so it's no surprise to see Vizio tackling what many consider to be a gimmick meant to tempt TV shoppers into an early upgrade. The...
It doesn't take much to understand the updog joke — I probably learned it in about first grade or so — but its beauty and power is in its simplicity. Updog is a little mean-spirited, sure! A friend had an opportunity to interview Kim Kardashian, considered updogging her, and decided not to; it would have been too mean to her, he said. But as mean-spirited jokes go, I find updog to be pretty gentle, particularly since pretty much every native English speaker has heard (and forgotten) it at some point.
Your Instagram friend could secretly be a police officer, and that's totally legal, at least in New Jersey. In an opinion from earlier this month, district court judge William Martini responded to a request by Daniel Gatson, who is accused of running a lucrative jewelry theft ring that was busted by the FBI in 2013. Among many other requests to suppress evidence of cellphone location data, seized physical evidence, and phone conversations, Gatson asked for the court to throw out his social media history: namely, pictures from a private Instagram account, which law enforcement officers had accessed by creating a fake account and friending him.
"No search warrant is required" to go undercover on Instagram
Social media, especially places...
One day after the news that Fast & Furious director Justin Lin was taking over Star Trek 3, Paramount has announced the movie will premiere on July 8, 2016, according to Variety. Both announcements bring some stability to a franchise that has experienced plenty of rumors since J.J. Abrams left to direct Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Since then, speculation ran wild on who would take the helm, including one director who came and went. The release of third movie in Paramount's rebooting of the franchise will coincide with the 50-year anniversary of the original Star Trek.
Vince, Ari, E, Drama, and Turtle are officially back. After a long wait, we've now got the first trailer for the Entourage movie. It's got everything you want, which is to say, there's a superhero DJ and also Jeremy Piven is yelling.
The FDA is set to recommend putting an end to the ban on blood donations by gay and bisexual men today, reports the Associated Press.
BREAKING: FDA to recommend end of ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men; restrictions remain.
— The Associated Press (@AP) December 23, 2014 developing...
I'm at the airport in Dallas, after a four-hour flight without usable Wi-Fi. That means I have about four hours of email to catch up on. But it's not just any email: it's Monday morning, pre-trade show, I-never-told-anyone-I'd-be-traveling email. It's a lot of email.
Yet here I am, just deplaned, and it's handled. All of it, including plenty of well-considered and lengthy replies, and nothing put off until I could get to a computer. I handled it while I waited for rows 1 through 19 to get their luggage out of the overhead bins, and I did most of it one-handed while crammed betwixt holiday travelers.
This is what the BlackBerry Classic was made for: jamming on email with one hand, pounding out replies like a boss, confidently...
Flirtmoji, the company that brought you NSFW sex emoji, is getting into the holiday spirit. Their website now features a holiday and winter-themed pack, complete with a penis menorah, humping reindeers, and a couple getting it on under a Christmas tree.
This year was a pretty great one for new game releases. But being a site about the future, we can't help but look ahead — and it seems like 2015 might be even better. Next year will see new entries in some of the biggest franchises around, from The Legend of Zelda to Halo, while brand new names like No Man's Sky look to shake things up with fresh ideas. Of course, there's plenty that will come out next year that we don't even know about — mobile games like Threes often launch with little build-up, for example — but even still there's plenty to look forward to. Here are the 10 games that have us most excited to boot up our consoles.
After months of coyness, we've finally got a clear look at the upcoming Better Call Saul. Unlike previous glimpses of the Breaking Bad spin-off, AMC's new 30-second trailer shows a more coherent montage of images from the life of amoral rascal Jimmy McGill, who eventually reinvents himself as the Jewish lawyer Saul Goodman for the "homeboys" who want "a pipe-hitting member of the tribe." Here, we see Jimmy dramatically declaring that someone will atone for an undisclosed sin, Jimmy gagged and dropped onto the ground, and Jimmy being advised that his line of work can result in one being "so caught up in winning" that they "forget to listen to their heart." The premiere will air in February over the course of two nights: Sunday, February...
Firefox OS is coming to Japan and doing it in style.
Announced at a KDDI press event in Tokyo today, the Fx0 is a striking 4.7-inch smartphone with a transparent shell and a home button decorated with the golden Firefox logo embracing the Earth. It runs the latest version of Mozilla's web-centric mobile OS and was designed by noted Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka, whose previous collaboration with KDDI produced a phone worthy of making it into the Museum of Modern Art's collection. With the Fx0, Yoshioka has worked around the familiar outlines of LG's G3 design (LG is the silent partner producing the device) and adapted them to a smaller size while producing a delightful aesthetic in the process. Like a watch with a window showing...
Seasonal shots have been fired. T-Mobile's flamboyant CEO John Legere stars in this promotional video for the holidays, which features him solemnly reading a "magical story from the land of #Uncarrier." It opens innocuously enough with T-Mobile branded Christmas decorations, before cutting to Legere reclining in a plush chair, pipe in hand. Set to the tune of "The Night Before Christmas," the tale begins with an outline of T-Mobile's strengths, but soon progresses into a bombardment of insults aimed at the competition.
It's an odd video, this isn't startling behaviour from Legere, who is notoriously brash and ready with scathing descriptions about his peers. In the past, he has taken to calling AT&T and Verizon "greedy bastards," and...
This morning brought some alarming news. Just two days after President Obama promised a proportionate response to the North Korean attack on Sony, the country mysteriously disappeared from the internet. Given the timing, the question was inevitable: was this the retaliation Obama had promised? But while it's tempting to connect the two, early reports suggest it's very unlikely that the downtime was the work of a government actor.
On Friday, a post on the Tor Project's blog sent out an alarming message: "The Tor Project has learned that there may be an attempt to incapacitate our network in the next few days." More than two million users use the network to obscure their identities online, but law enforcement has been increasingly aggressive about pursuing criminals across Tor in recent years. Tor's tip suggested the latest attack would be directed against the network's directory authorities, which guide users to the available relays. If those authorities came down, users would be lost on the network, and the service would be effectively broken. Still, the post assured users that measures were being taken to ensure the authorities were backed up and the service as...
The controversial Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger hinges on regulatory approval from the FCC and the Department of Justice, both of which are based in Washington DC. It will come as no surprise that Comcast is trying to ingratiate itself to the Washington DC elite by passing out cards with "priority assistance" codes to select staffers, journalists, and other influential citizens of the nation's capital, which can help expedite service for the select few who posses the cards.
In an excellent report by Luke Mullins of the Washingtonian detailing how former Meet The Press moderator David Gregory lost his job, Mullins notes how Comcast is a much more hands-on corporate parent for NBC than GE ever was. Comcast executives show up to...
We've said that the mediocre screen on HP's Chromebook 14 "kills the whole appeal of an otherwise solid Chromebook," and it seems HP may have come to the same realization. Recently, HP introduced the option to purchase its Chromebook 14 with a 1080p touchscreen. So not only is it sharper than the default panel (and perfect for Netflix), but you get the benefit of using Chrome OS through touch — if that's something you'd prefer versus a trackpad. Just as you'd expect, the better screen comes at a higher price.
The Full HD Chromebook 14 runs $439.99, but you're also getting double the RAM: this model includes 4GB compared to the regular's 2GB. It's still got the same Tegra K1 chipset inside, which should prove ample for most tasks you'd...