In the tech world, a lot happens in a week. So much news goes on that it’s almost impossible for mere mortals with real lives to keep track of everything. That’s why we’ve compiled a quick and dirty list of the top 10 tech stories from this week. Everything from what happened at Facebook’s F8 Conference to last minute tax filing tips, it’s all here.
From chatbots in Messenger to a new open-source 360-degree camera, this year’s F8 was perhaps the most exciting F8 conference to date — and that was only the keynote. We may see a few more cool announcements on the morrow. Here’s a rundown of everything from the show, in case you missed it.
Most phones look very similar these days, but Sharp doesn’t want to follow the crowd with a phone it has announced is now available. It’s called the RoBoHon, and it takes the concept of a modern smartphone and the almost ubiquitous virtual assistant, and stuffs it all inside the body of a robot.
DT staffer Brad Bourque getting his PlayStation account hacked was terrible, but Sony made it a whole lot worse. Instead of helping him, Sony decided that he had to pay for the games that his hacker purchased, or face a permanent ban on his account. It all started Saturday afternoon. He was scrolling through his inbox and noticed some odd emails from PlayStation, all of them at 3:01 AM.
The distance is 25 trillion miles. The destination is a star system called Alpha Centauri. The mission? To launch a swarm of probes the size of postage stamps into outer space at 20 percent the speed of light to measure and photograph one of our nearest galactic neighbors. Celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner are some of the masterminds behind this plan –dubbed Breakthrough Starshot.
Looking for a way to attract more millennials into the movie theater, AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron is considering the possibility of allowing moviegoers to keep their smartphones active during a movie in order to send text messages. Detailed in an interview with Variety, Aron is looking into a couple options. One option would be to set aside an area of the theater for people that constantly want to send text messages.
We’re only days away from the 2016 tax filing deadline — aka Monday, April 18. And while it’s typical to put off filing our taxes for as long as humanly possible — hell, the IRS claims the week of April 15 is the single busiest week of the year for filings — filing them on time is still something you should do if you don’t want to risk paying late penalties or exuberant interest costs on top of what you might owe.
Facebook and Microsoft have come out and said they offer equal pay for their employees regardless of gender — but what about the rest of Silicon Valley? New data from a job recruiting startup doesn’t paint a promising picture for women in tech. Equal Pay Day began 20 years ago by the National Committee on Pay Equity, and while there has been acknowledgment and improvement of the gender disparity in Silicon Valley, the tech industry still has a long way to go.
Most people don’t recognize a lot of parallels between Rihanna and Bob Dylan, but apparently filmmaker Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock) does. The director, who previously worked with the pop superstar on her blockbuster debut, 2012’s Battleship, has announced plans to create a contemporary version of Dylan’s famed 1967 rock doc Don’t Look Back, substituting Dylan’s world for that of the Caribbean crooner.
BMW announced the launch of its ReachNow mobility service in a bustling Pike Motorworks showroom this past Friday. Highlighting a strong tie to Seattle and praising the city’s commitment to innovative transportation solutions, BMW Group Board Member, Peter Schwarzenbauer, and ReachNow Chief Customer Officer, Sandra Phillips described the platform as an answer to everyone’s mobility needs.
Your brain on acid looks about as trippy as your hallucinations on acid. For the first time ever, scientists have managed to look inside the mind of an LSD user, all thanks to modern scanning technology and a few volunteers who got high for the sake of science. Researchers from Imperial College London have now visualized the effects of the psychedelic Lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD or acid.
A virtual private network (VPN) encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a server run by the VPN provider. Websites see the VPN server’s IP address instead of yours, and you can get around geo-blocks, censorship, and ISP throttling. The best VPN services are paid, but there are still a handful of free options that do the job well.
Most free VPNs come with a hidden cost, because running servers isn’t cheap and a company that doesn’t charge you has to make its money somewhere else. Many do so by logging your browsing activity and selling it to advertisers, while others flood you with ads and track you across apps.
There's nothing quite like curling up with a good book on a cold evening. As much as I love the feel of a physical book, books take up a lot of space, and carrying more than one on a trip quickly becomes a chore. That's where e-readers come in, and the Amazon Kindle remains one of the best options.
Amazon just refreshed its Kindle lineup with thinner, lighter designs, a new flush-front display, and colors that wrap from front to back. Add the Kindle Scribe and the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft to the mix, and you have more choices than ever before.
A good Android app should earn its place on your phone. It might make an everyday task easier, handle something the built-in software can't, or let you change an experience that never quite worked for you.
These 20 apps cover everything from quick notes and password management to automation and local file sharing. Some are free, others charge for advanced features, and a few take some effort to figure out. The point isn't to install them all. It's to find the ones that make your phone work better for you.