Tech News Feed

When NBC Sports announced its new $50 Premier League Pass yesterday, it was easy for soccer fans in the US to get excited about the ability to watch without a cable subscription. However, upon close inspection, the new broadcast structure for England...

Uber launched a couple of new programs back in 2014 to serve people who use wheelchairs. UberAssist is a way to hail an UberX driver trained in accessibility and whose car can accommodate a folding wheelchair. UberWAV will send you an actual accessib...

You won't want to book your honeymoon there, but there's a place on Mars where the landscape reminds scientists of the epic formations of Niagara Falls.

Further research and investigation into Petya ransomware -- which has affected computers over 60 countries -- suggest three interesting things: 1. Ukraine was the epicentre of the attack. According to Kaspersky, 60 percent of all machines infected were located within Ukraine. 2. The attackers behind the attack have made little money -- around $10,000. Which leads to speculation that perhaps money wasn't a motive at all. 3. Petya was either "incredibly buggy, or irreversibly destructive on purpose." An anonymous reader shares a report: Because the virus has proven unusually destructive in Ukraine, a number of researchers have come to suspect more sinister motives at work. Peeling apart the program's decryption failure in a post today, Comae's Matthieu Suiche concluded a nation state attack was the only plausible explanation. "Pretending to be a ransomware while being in fact a nation state attack," Suiche wrote, "is in our opinion a very subtle way from the attacker to control the narrative of the attack." Another prominent infosec figure put it more bluntly: "There's no fucking way this was criminals." There's already mounting evidence that Petya's focus on Ukraine was deliberate. The Petya virus is very good at moving within networks, but initial attacks were limited to just a few specific infections, all of which seem to have been targeted at Ukraine. The highest-profile one was a Ukrainian accounting program called MeDoc, which sent out a suspicious software update Tuesday morning that many researchers blame for the initial Petya infections. Attackers also planted malware on the homepage of a prominent Ukraine-based news outlet, according to one researcher at Kaspersky.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The results are kind of like if Commander Data from Star Trek tried to be your motivational therapist.

The dating app on Wednesday introduced a new members-only service called Tinder Gold, which lets you see who likes you before you swipe, among other perks.

Hosting a party? Google Photos can now automatically detect the best shots you take and suggest who to share them with.

A few days ago, we reported that Russia's communications regulator demanded that messaging app Telegram hand over information, including decrypted user messages, or risk being banned from the country. Now, Reuters reports that Telegram has agreed to...

Fox Sports is no stranger to VR. The network broadcasted Super Bowl 51 via a virtual suite of sorts, for instance. Now Fox is taking that further with the CONCACAF Gold Cup soccer championship. The footie action starts July 8th with the USA vs. Panam...

Google is making good on its promise of AI-assisted photo sharing. A Google Photos upgrade arriving this week uses machine learning to suggest pictures based on both your own sharing habits, the people in the photos, and whether or not they're part o...

As companies look for ways to cut costs, Seattle's $15 minimum wage law may be hurting hourly workers instead of helping them, according to a new report. From a USA Today article: A report (PDF) from the University of Washington (UW), found that when wages increased to $13 in 2016, some companies may have responded by cutting low-wage workers' hours. The study, which was funded in part by the city of Seattle, found that workers clocked 9 percent fewer hours on average, and earned $125 less each month after the most recent increase. "If you're a low-skilled worker with one of those jobs, $125 a month is a sizable amount of money," Mark Long, a UW public-policy professor and an author of the report told the Seattle Times. "It can be the difference between being able to pay your rent and not being able to pay your rent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter users react to the president's fake Time magazine cover by making a pile of parody versions.

In 2012, Canadian manufacturer Equustek asked Google to remove search results relating to a court case against Datalink, a distributor of the former company's network devices. While Google complied with the request, it only did so in Canada itself. T...

The first recall makes up for the other two, though, since it covers 400,000 vehicles.

Qualcomm unveiled new fingerprint sensors that can be placed beneath a phone's display and will even recognize a print underwater.

The Democratic National Committee has selected ex-Twitter VP Raffi Krikorian as its chief technology officer. Krikorian was until recently the senior director of engineering at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, but left the company in February.

Mike Tyka paints the portraits of people who don't exist. The subjects of his ephemeral artwork are not born from any brush. Rather, they are sculpted -- roughly -- from the digital imagination of his computer's neural network.

In a case involving pirated goods, the country's top court says removing results only on Google's Canada site isn't enough. But critics worry about free speech.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One excuse FCC Chairman Ajit Pai regularly offers to explain his effort to gut net neutrality protections is the claim that open Internet rules have harmed ISPs, especially small ones. During a speech earlier this year, he stressed that 22 small ISPs told him that the 2015 Open Internet Order hurt their ability to invest and deploy. In reality, though, many more ISPs feel very differently. Today, more than 40 ISPs told the FCC that they have had no problem with the Open Internet Order (PDF) and that it hasn't hurt their ability to develop and expand their networks. What is more, that they want the FCC to do its job and address the problem Congress created when it repealed the broadband privacy rules in March.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday, a number of Ukrainian and Russian companies and state agencies reported being hit by a cyberattack, the results of which ranged from flight delays at Boryspil airport to a shutdown of Chernobyl nuclear power plant's automatic radiation mon...