Tech news in brief

But what is their fault to deserve a suspension from the registry operator EURid, which manages over 3.5 million domain names ending in .eu and .ευ (in Greek alphabet)? The answer is quite simple: these domain names have been registered by persons…

In its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the American federal organization that regulates and controls financial markets, Tesla says it invested 1.5 billion dollars of its cash assets in the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The…

Security researcher Alex Birsan has found a frighteningly easy way to run code on servers owned by 35 large companies. The exploit takes advantage of a relatively simple trick: replacing private packages with others of the same name on public…

Epic Games provided a sneak peek at an impressive new software tool called MetaHuman Creator that lets you easily craft and animate highly realistic human faces. And this powerful tool, powered by Unreal Engine, works inside a web browser! “Up until…

If Inspector Gadget had had a laptop, it would have been the Aurora 7, a prototype developed by Expanscape, a small English company. It has no fewer than 7 screens: four 17.3-inch, 4K monitors (two working in landscape, two in portrait mode) and…

Due to the effects of the pandemic on production chains, there is a worldwide shortage of semiconductors and other electronic components. That’s why it’s so hard to get one’s hands on a Sony PS5 or on Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. Fabricators have…

Microsoft’s Project Bicep, described as “experimental”, is a strongly typed declarative language that lets users define a set of Azure resources directly in the code, without going through Azure’s portal dashboard. Defining resources as code means…

While you may have had extreme difficulty buying the new console since its launch in November, Sony’s manufacturing lines have not been idle since 4.5 million PlayStation 5 were shipped worldwide in 2020. The company’s latest earnings report also…

Car maker Ford said it will use Google’s Android to power the infotainment systems in millions of vehicles under the Ford and Lincoln brands starting in 2023. That means Google’s voice-activated Assistant, Google Maps, and other automotive-approved…

The automatic PowerShot PICK camera can stand on a table, turn on several axes and analyze a scene. Thanks to artificial intelligence, it can identify people, track their faces and then determine the ideal moment to capture a photo. Launched on the…

The new Viper 8K is replacing its predecessor, the Viper, at the same asking price, USD79. While it looks the same on the outside, several technological upgrades on the inside make it one of the best mice in the world, according to Razer. First off…

Pac-Man celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, and to commemorate the occasion, Cook and Becker is releasing an incredible-looking history book later this year. Lavishly illustrated, the 300-page book relates the origins of the game through the…

Apple announced its results for the last quarter of 2020, and they give a good idea of the public’s appreciation of the new iPhone 12: it’s excellent. Overall, Apple crossed the threshold for $100 billion in revenue in a single quarter for the first…

In late February, Canon is to release a mixed reality headset marketed mainly to corporations. Called MREAL S1, it’ll sell for 4 million yen (about CAD49,000). The price includes the unit, software, a portable PC that the unit connects to via…

SpaceX has begun launching Starlink satellites with laser links that will help provide broadband coverage in polar regions. These satellites have laser links between the satellites, so no ground stations are needed in remote or inaccessible areas.

The Raspberry Foundation has released its first microcontroller product. Priced at just 4 dollars, the Raspberry Pi Pico is built on the RP2040, a brand new chip developed by the Foundation itself. The advantages of the microcontroller are its low…

Plasmonics is a technology that takes advantage of the resonance between electromagnetic radiation (especially light) and free electrons that exists at the interface between a metal and a dielectric substance (air or glass, for example). And…

Corellium, the company that virtualizes iOS for security testing, has ported Linux to run Ubuntu natively on the Mac M1. It has a complete tutorial on its site and there’s a Github repo (corellium/linux-m1) that you can download the kernel from.

To celebrate the first birthday of its Chromium-based browser, Microsoft is introducing 24 colorful themes for the Edge interface. Most of them showcase Xbox games, like Halo, Gears, Forza, MS Flight Simulator, Sea of Thieves, and others. These new…

Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s new CEO as of February 15, told his future staff that it had to outperform Apple. “We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino makes”, said Robert Swan’s…

Galaxy Ultra, S21+, S21. © Samsung. Since Samsung can’t keep a secret like Apple can, we knew just about all there was to know about the new family of Galaxy phones long before this week’s official presentation. However, one thing that was a…

Intel is updating its Next Unit of Computing (NUC) lineup of miniature computers with its 11th Gen processors, and it’s again including a gaming-focused model, the NUC 11 Enthusiast. Intel has also added a NUC Pro line and a NUC 11 board meant to be…

Watchy. © Squarofumi. Watchy is a smartwatch with an e-paper screen whose design and software is open-source. Built around an ESP32 SoC, Watchy has a monochrome, 1.54-inch, 200x200 display, 4 buttons, and a 3-axis accelerometer with movement sensor.

Microsoft is upping file size limits on OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint, from 100 to 250GB. This is great news for everyone, but especially teleworkers who need to share large files on the cloud, like 4-or-8K video, CAD files or large scientific…

The well-known maker of gaming computers and accessories already sold cloth masks for USD30, but, ahead of CES, Razer announced a far more ambitious project: a N95 mask with a transparent front to show the mouth (useful for communicating with deaf…

The first Wi-Fi 6E-compatible devices should start hitting the market this year. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry-wide group that oversees Wi-Fi, is now starting to certify the first wave of products with support for Wi-Fi 6E, including phones…

Over the Holidays, one of the most-shared videos was one produced by Boston Dynamics, in which various robots get down to the tune of “Do You Love Me” by the Contours, a hit from 1962, the era of the Twist and the Mashed Potato. As of writing these…

A year after Microsoft officially ended support for Windows 7, a determined population of PC users are still hanging on to this operating system launched in 2009. According to ZDNet, at least 100 million PCs are still running on this obsolete…

The Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce texts that could have been written by humans. Not only can it create news articles, but it can also write poetry, and even code.

We thought that after 2020, nothing could surprise us. And yet… At first, we thought it was a hoax, but no, they’re serious. The KFConsole, a joint venture between Kentucky Fried Chicken and Cooler Master, is a PC based on Intel’s NUC 9 with an…

Google has just released its list of top search terms used in its search engine in 2020. Interestingly, you can break down the searches by country. The world’s top search word is, not surprisingly, “coronavirus”, followed by “election results”…

As announced back in 2017, Flash is soon to be a mere memory: Adobe will stop supporting Flash Player on December 31 and block Flash content from running on January 12, 2021. Its days were counted, with countless security holes, poor portability on…

Right on time for the Holidays, Apple has launched the AirPods Max, high-fidelity, wireless headphones that “bring the magic of AirPods® to an over-ear design”. Of course, Apple promises “a breakthrough listening experience” that provides rich, deep…

If you’ve ever used a GPS tracker like a smart watch or phone to track your outdoor exercise, you’ve noticed that your run or cycle through downtown areas is fancifully tracked, while it is far more accurate outside the downtown core or even in…

Unveiled at CES 2020 in January, Razer’s first desktop is finally available for preorder. Based on Intel’s NUC 9 Extreme, the Tomahawk looks like a smallish aluminium box with tempered glass sides. The front slides out like a drawer: just slide it…

This week’s biggest news on planet tech: Salesforce is purchasing Slack for close to 28 billion dollars. The announcement follows a week of rumors and a steep bump in Slack’s value on the stock market in anticipation of the deal being made official.

Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 888, its new 5nm system on a chip (SoC) with 5G technology, which will power just about every new high-end Android phone in 2021. The Kryo 680 CPU is promising performance improvements of 25 percent over last year’s…

Early tests showed just how powerful Apple’s SoC is, and further experiments have just confirmed it. While the ARM64 Windows 10 system isn’t officially supported on the new platform, many hackers have already tried their skills and succeeded. Among…

For the first time ever, Amazon has introduced macOS instances in its AWS cloud. The new “mac1.metal” is not virtualized; it’s actual Mac Minis accessed on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which will allow developers to build iPhone, iPad and…

Microsoft has started testing a new method of providing its clients with smaller Windows 10 updates outside of the major Spring and Fall updates. This process, branded Windows Feature Experience Pack, is first being tested within the Windows…

The European Union has made a huge stride towards the adoption of stricter rules on the “right to repair” to better protect consumers. The resolution was adopted with 395 in favour and just 94 against, with 207 abstentions. The European Commission…

Never put all your eggs in one basket, right? Yet that’s exactly what is happening on the Internet with a few increasingly huge and ubiquitous service providers. So when a giant like Amazon Web Services fails, entire regions of the Net are affected.

To cap off 2020 on-brand, Hey email service came up with an idea that set the Internet on fire. Send a heart-felt email to dumpsterfire@hey.com, expressing, for example, your feelings about 2020. Your email will be automatically printed out and the…

Samsung on Tuesday announced the Galaxy A12 and A02S, two new entry-level phones set to launch next year in Europe. The A12 is designed to be a successor to the A11, sporting a 6.5-inch HD+ display, an octa-core processor, a fingerprint sensor on…

Announced in 1983 by Bill Gates, the Windows graphical interface for MS-DOS was born on November 20, 1985. At the time, Microsoft sought to satisfy a growing hunger for mouse-driven, multi-window graphical interfaces, a revolutionary novelty that…

Google has begun rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Rich Communication Service (RCS), the text-messaging standard the industry giant is pushing as an alternative to SMS. E2EE guarantees the complete privacy of messages, even against the…

Intel has launched a laptop under its NUC program (Next Unit of Computing). This means that you won’t be able to buy it directly from Intel, nor will it be stamped with the Intel logo. Instead, the NUC laptops will be sold to boutique shops that…

GeForce Now, Nvidia’s cloud-based gaming service, is now available as a Web app in beta form, which means that it can work with iOS without going through the despotic App Store. The service’s more than 5 million registered users can fire up GeForce…

Lumi is a tiny electronic keyboard with just two octaves and keys that light up to help you learn to play the piano in a fun way. It connects through Bluetooth to a tablet or phone that displays, Guitar Hero-style, the keys you should be pressing…

Google has announced major performance enhancements to the company’s Chrome browser. The first has to do with tabs. Chrome now will prioritize your active tab over the others in the background, “reducing CPU usage by up to 5x and extending battery…

The day Apple delivered its final version of Big Sur, Andrew Cunningham released his traditional Ars Technica review (link below) which exhaustively details every aspect of the new system. At over 20,000 words long, the article should keep you…

The Mac Mini ARM that was shipped to developers after WWDC 2020 had a A12Z chip, the same as the iPad Pro. This seemed to indicate that the next generation of Mac ARMs would come with some variant of the chips that power its telephones and tablets.

The Taara project, initiated by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, provides Internet connectivity over light beams. Tested in Kenya, the technology can cover distances of up to 20km and transmit bandwidth of up to 20Gb/s, enough for thousands to…

Elon Musk, a fun-loving guy who doesn’t always turn down a drink, or even a smoke, has launched a new Tesla spin-off product: tequila. And not just any old tequila: the 750ml bottle of tequila añejo is retailing for USD250 on Tesla’s website. An…

Thanks to the cloud, platform-related gaming differences are becoming more nebulous. This is why Fortnite could come back to iOS through a more circuitous route: the on-line gaming platform GeForce Now. The Nvidia service hasn’t yet been announced…

Developer and privacy activist Resynth1943 announced that GitHub’s source code had been leaked on GitHub itself, in GitHub’s own DMCA repository. But in actual fact, the upload in question was actually of GitHub Enterprise Server, not the GitHub…

The boundary between gaming and work computers is getting blurry, to the point that brands like Razer, which have traditionally targeted gamers, are now making forays into the productivity market. And oftentimes, all you need to do is to give up the…

The latest version of the DJI Mini essentially vaults from 2.7K 25/30 fps video to 4K 60 fps. Also importantly, WiFi technology is traded in for OcuSync 2.0 proprietary transmission technology, increasing communication distance from 4km to 10km.

Old-timers will remember the days, back in the 70s and 80s, when most consumer PC were a unit with an integrated keyboard. Remember the TRS-80, the Atari 400/800, the TI 99/4, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Sinclair ZX, the Amstrad CPC, the…

SteelSeries has released a new family of mice for gamers. The wired Aerox 3 costs USD60, and the tail-less version, USD100. Available as of November 10, these game-changing mice are the first to receive an IP54 rating, making them practically water-…

Since the release of the Xbox Series X almost a year ago, the Internet has been rife with sardonic references to its fridge-like size. So Microsoft doubled down and actually created an Xbox Series X fridge, proving that the console is, in fact, much…

Are you STILL using Internet Explorer? If so, life as you know it is about to end, since Microsoft has finally and mercifully decided to put an end to its agony (IE’s). And to forestall backsliding, Microsoft will make it impossible to access…

On Monday evening, SpaceX began sending out email invitations to a few lucky Americans and Canadians to its Starlink public beta, a programme that aims to eventually provide world-wide Internet coverage from space. To be part of the trial, dubbed…

Zoom’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) has arrived, letting both free and paid users secure their meetings so that only participants, not Zoom or anyone else, can access their content. Zoom says E2EE is supported across its Mac, PC, iOS, and Android…

Sony’s next console is going to be much more than a plain video-game system. In a blog post on Thursday, the company confirmed that several popular streaming services like Apple TV Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, Hulu, MyCanal, Netflix…

After its underwater data center coup, Microsoft unveiled a modular data center that can be deployed to remote areas, as well as a partnership with SpaceX to connect those data centers to high-speed Internet through Starlink’s constellation of low…

On Tuesday, Microsoft released its Windows 10 October 2020 update. Like last year, this second yearly update looks more like an old-fashioned Service Pack than a major new release of the operating system. However, Microsoft has made a few…

Acer has teamed up with Porsche Design to create a new, high-end laptop, the Porsche Design Acer Book RS. Under the hood, the machine has a 11th Gen Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, 8 or 16GB of RAM and 512GB or 1TB of storage. As for the GPU, you…

Intel is selling its SSD business to South Korean company SK Hynix in a deal worth $9 billion, which will see the chipmaker almost completely exit the flash memory and storage business — except for Intel’s high-end Optane 3D XPoint non-volatile…

Vivaldi is a great Chromium-based browser that you must really give a try. And the fact that it now comes with a built-in game may just tip you over the edge! The game, called Vivaldia, is a retro side-scroller set in a cyberpunk universe. It is…

Microsoft’s AI researchers have achieved a significant breakthrough with a new image description model which, in certain tests, is more accurate than a human in describing the contents of a photo. This feat will no doubt be applauded by the blind…

Using Microsoft’s xCloud service and a little ingenuity, Richard Mallard has managed to get Doom Eternal running on a Samsung smart fridge. The trick was to sideload the Android version of the Xbox Game Pass app onto his fridge. The video of this…

A recently released jailbreak tool is letting anyone exploit a vulnerability on the more recent Macs to bypass Apple’s trusted T2 security chip and gain deep system access. While Apple may be able to slow down potential hackers, the flaw is…

Facebook is donating 1.2 million pounds sterling (CAD2.05 million) to Bletchley Park, the UK computing museum. Bletchley Park’s finances have suffered since the beginning of the crisis, with a revenue shortfall of £2 million due to plummeting…

Talk about diversifying in new directions! Fortnite creator Epic Games is partnering with General Motors to use its Unreal Engine game development platform to build in-car software. The first car to use Unreal Engine’s human-machine interface (HMI)…

AMD CEO Lisa Su announced a new family of processors for desktops, the RyZen 5000 series, replacing the 3000 series launched in May 2019. Four new processors, based on Zen 3 architecture, were shown: the 16-core RyZen 9 5950X (USD800), the 12-core…

It seems that Sony beat iFixit to the punch by making their own teardown video of its PlayStation 5 console, long before its launch, scheduled for November 12. In the video, in Japanese with English sub-titles, Yasuhiro Ootori, VP of mechanical…

Google announced a major rebranding of its G Suite office tools, now called Google Workspace. The rebranded suite, which already includes Gmail, Docs, Meet, Sheets and Calendar, will progressively see new features added to strengthen…

Videoconferencing systems have become an overnight must for many working stiffs. But who hasn’t experienced some or all of the following problems with them: bandwidth slumps that freeze the image, distracting background noises, or just plain poor…

Sourcegraph, a company specializing in universal code search, polled more than 500 North American software developers to identify issues in “Big Code” complexity and management. Its general findings are, among others, that the volume of code…

On Thursday, the startup IonQ  announced that the next generation of its ion-trap quantum computer was ready for use. The new machine marks a major jump for the company, going from 11 qubits up to 32. While this still trails the offerings of…

Microsoft has just announced its newest addition to the growing Surface family, the Laptop Go, a very attractively-priced Windows 10 Home laptop clearly positioned to compete against the Chromebooks. Priced at USD550 (CAD760), the sleek Surface…

Microsoft is officially revealing it’s working on x64 app emulation support for Windows on ARM. Currently, Windows on ARM devices like the Surface Pro X can only run native 32- and 64-bit ARM apps, alongside 32-bit x86 emulation apps. The vast…

It’s bad enough to be put on hold for what seems like hours on end before you can speak to a banking adviser or a customer support rep. But it’s even worse when companies and governments force terrible music on you while you’re waiting… Google…

Ring has unveiled the Always Home Cam, an autonomous security drone for your home. It autonomously flies around your house or apartment, then returns to its docking station to recharge its battery. The advantage of this device is that it provides…

Amazon announced the launch of the fourth generation of its main smart speaker, the Echo, with a new spherical design and better sound. Thanks to the AZ1 Neural Edge, a processor developed in collaboration with MediaTek, Alexa can now respond faster…

Microsoft is planning to launch a preview version of its Edge browser for Linux next month. After officially confirming plans for Edge on Linux earlier this year, Linux users will be able to download a preview of the browser in October. The preview…

Announced in a blog post on Tuesday, the release of Swift 5.3’s toolchain enables developers to build, run and debug code directly on Windows 10. With the announcement, developer Saleem Abdulrasool provided a demonstration with a small app, a basic…

Microsoft is buying ZeniMax Media, the corporate parent of Bethesda Softworks, the owner of game franchises like Dishonored, Wolfenstein, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Starfield, Quake and Prey. At 7.5 billion dollars cash, this transaction is…

After the announcement of the price and availability date of the Xbox Series S and X last week, we finally know more about the PS5: Sony’s new PlayStation consoles will hit the market from November 12, two days after the Xbox. The PS5 will cost…

At Apple’s latest Special Event, Tim Cook announced a new iPad Air. Starting at USD600 (CAD780), it comes in five colors (silver, space gray, rose gold, green, and sky blue), and two storage options: 64GB or 256GB. With a 10.9-inch Liquid Retina…

On Sunday, SoftBank announced it was selling ARM Holdings to Nvidia for USD40 billion in cash and stock. The ARM architecture, sold under license, powers most modern phone processors, countless computers, gaming consoles and graphics cards. SoftBank…

Have you always wanted to take part in your Zoom meetings looking like a supervillain? Now you can! Behold, the scorpion cockpit by Cluvens, priced at USD3,000. According to Cluvens, it can support an ultra-wide 49-inch monitor, or three curved…

In 2014, seeking to extend its cloud capacity in a “greener”, environmentally-friendly way, Microsoft launched Project Natick, a proof-of-concept to test the feasibility of operating a server farm underwater. The expected benefits were limitless…

Long ago, we would complain of motormouth colleagues, of noisy keyboards and of the myriad office noises that affected our concentration, forcing us to wear a headset at work. Now, after months of teleworking, alone in a quiet house (now that the…

Microsoft’s Surface Duo, a dual-screen Android phone, is now available. Announced last October, it’s Microsoft’s first phone since the scrapping of the Windows Phone platform five years ago. This expensive device (USD1,400) has two separate 5.6-inch…

After months of speculation, Microsoft finally revealed a “suggested retail price” for its high-end Xbox Series X: USD499. The company said this model is launching at the same time as the Series S (USD299), on November 10. The existing “All Access”…

For almost a year now, rumours had swirled about a more affordable version of the future Xbox console, code-named “Lockhart”. This Tuesday, leaked information about this budget box flooded the Net: the console, called Xbox Series S, will be priced…

Razer’s latest gaming accessory is… chewing gum. No, really. This is an actual product unveiled by the company better known for its peripherals and laptops for gamers. Called “Respawn”, this gum is said to boost concentration and reaction time in…

Nvidia has unveiled its latest line of graphics cards, the 3000 series trifecta. Based on the new Ampere architecture, the GeForce RTX 3070, GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 introduce the second generation RTX ray tracing cores, GDDR6X memory…

Intel has had a few setbacks lately, being ditched by Apple and experiencing ongoing problems with its 7nm process. Perhaps to cheer itself up, it has treated itself to a revamp of its logo, for just the second time in its entire 51-year-history.

At a surprise announcement on Thursday, Nintendo unveiled two hardware releases: an unexpected Game & Watch and a Mario Kart game of radio-controlled cars driven around in augmented reality. If you’re too young to remember, way back in the ’80s…

Qualcomm has announced the arrival of a new version of the Snapdragon 8cx, its ARM processor for Windows laptops. Of course, it provides significant performance gains over its predecessor and, according to the manufacturer, it is 18% more powerful…

Gaming portables come all decked out with high-end components, but are usually characterized by heavy and bulky chassis. Lenovo is trying to buck this trend with the Legion Slim 7i. Weighing in at 1.8kg and just 17.9mm thick, the Legion Slim 7i is…

Amazon is getting into the health gadget market with a new physical activity tracking band, called Halo. Unlike most fitness bands, like the Fitbit or Garmin’s Vivosmart, the Halo doesn’t have a screen; it interfaces with a mobile application…

Sony has introduced a novel process to preorder its much anticipated PlayStation 5, though it has yet to reveal its price or release date. Starting today, hopeful buyers can go to Sony’s official preorder site to sign up, but only if they have a…

If your office is overwarm, or if your gaming sessions send your heart rate soaring, you may experience sweaty palms. Mindshunter has a solution: the Zephyr, a mouse with a built-in fan that blows cool air directly onto your palm. A dedicated button…

Jelly 2, a Kisckstarter project that’s already amassed almost a million dollars, is a truly miniature 4G Android device: just 9.5x4.9x1.6cm, and 110g. It has a 3-inch, 480x854 pixel screen, and offers all of the features of a more typical phone.

Mozilla now has a VPN service for Windows, Android and iOS (and says that macOS and Linux support is coming!). Based on the most excellent WireGuard, Mozilla’s VPN targets a wide audience with a simple and easy configuration, and a low price tag:

A new iOS app from Epic Games allows game developers to easily and quickly register facial expressions and import them directly into the Unreal engine. The application uses several existing Apple technologies, notably its ARKit augmented reality…

Have you ever seen someone’s name in writing but not been sure how to pronounce it? Have you been embarrassed at making a massacre of the name of the person with whom you had an appointment at a company? LinkedIn has added a handy feature that will…

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute has announced the year-end release of a new video encoding standard which reduces the size of video files by 50%. H.266 / VVC (Versatile Video Coding) follows the current H.265 / HEVC compression standard and…

After the excellent Genesis / Mega Drive Mini and the recent Game Gear Micro, Sega has unveiled an unexpected surprise: the Mini Astro City. For those unfamiliar with the original 1993 Astro City, this is not a console, but an arcade machine used in…

In 2019, we set a record for the amount of electronic waste produced worldwide: 53.6 million tons of phones, computers, TVs, cameras and other gadgets were scrapped. According to a new international report that was intended to document global…

It serves no functional purpose and is completely superfluous (especially in lockdown when you have no chance to use your computer in public), but we still find it supercool: the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 can be configured with a LED dot-matrix display…

Who hasn’t deleted a file by mistake, with most unpleasant consequences, like losing hours of work? Until now, Microsoft didn’t have a Windows utility to recover them. That’s why the release of the Windows File Recovery tool, which works with the…

Fugaku, the supercomputer jointly developed by the RIKEN research institute and Fujitsu Ltd based on ARM technology, was crowned fastest computer ever by Top500, a listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers. It earned the top spot with a LINPACK…

After opening some 70 stores in the U.S. and 7 in Canada, Microsoft is giving up on physical retail. Microsoft’s retail foray had started under Steve Ballmer with the opening of the first two stores in 2009, to coincide with the launch of Windows 7.

If you’re into retro games, you’re going to love Blaze Entertainment’s portable console, the Evercade, and especially its price. The starter pack, which includes the console and a cartridge with 20 Atari classics, will cost you just CAD100. You can…

Google recently released a free and very useful extension for its Chrome navigator. Called Link to Text Fragment, it allows you to create a URL pointing to a specific fragment of text on a Web page, and highlights it. With the extension installed…

Logitech, the well-known maker of keyboards and mice, plans to inform consumers of the carbon impact of its products. Labels with this information will appear on its gaming products by the end of the year, with a goal of eventually extending labels…

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 690 is the first SoC in its 6-series chips to get support for 5G — although it’ll only support the slower sub-6GHz versions of 5G, not the faster mmWave standard. The new Snapdragon 690 also promises a variety of other…

Robot-maker Boston Dynamics is finally ready to sell its four-legged robot, Spot, outright. After years of development, the company had started leasing its robot last year, but only today has it started allowing American companies to actually…

Lego is launching a new 949-piece set that allows you to build five different robots (Blast, Charlie, Tricky, Gelo, and a modular vehicle). The largest robot, Blast, stands 36cm tall. A free app (available for Windows 10, macOS, iOS and Android)…

After unveiling the magnificent DualSense controller in April, Sony piggybacked on the announcement of new games for its future PlayStation 5 to finally show us what the console will look like. Not surprisingly, the futuristic design complements the…

Despite its name, the mobile iOS/Android application that Adobe has just launched has nothing to do with Photoshop. But it’s still very cool, and it’s free, which is always a nice feature. The application allows you to easily apply filters to your…

On June 8 1995, on a Usenet discussion group, Rasmus Lerdorf announced the birth of version 1.0 of a suite of CGI programs written in C, called “Personal Home Page Tools” (PHP Tools). Its functionalities were basic: track Web site visitors in…

You can now install the Android 11 beta version on your phone, as long as it’s a Pixel 2, 3, or 4. For other phones like the OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo Vivo, Sharp, Realme and Transsion, you’ll have to wait a few more weeks. You can easily enroll to…

The ARMisation of the Mac rumour mill is still going, and gaining steam. After the story broken by Ming-Chi Kuo last February, now, Bloomberg says that Apple will be announcing the transitioning of Mac to ARM processors during the keynote speech at…

On a guest post on IEEE Spectrum, three MIT scientists plead for more efficient code as a way of saving Moore’s Law. For decades, our ability to miniaturize components led to us doubling the number of transistors on a silicon chip every two years or…

Over the last four years, we’ve experienced a wave of mini retro consoles, with the NES Classic Edition, Sega Genesis Mini, PlayStation Classic, among others. Now, it’s time for micro retro consoles with Sega’s Game Gear Micro, a new console that is…

After the tech world’s many pandemic-induced delays and cancellations, now the grim news coming out of the U.S. is causing many companies to reschedule their events and product launches. While some people will be disappointed, most will agree that…

A big, bad Android bug is disabling phones through poor background image choices. The issue came to the attention of the general public when Ice Universe tweeted an image causing the crash; the bug has since been verified by 9to5Google and…

Google has added a feature to its Maps service for mobile devices to quickly and easily obtain a 7-character code for any location on earth. For example, Spiria’s offices in Montreal can be found at G9MJ+77. These “Plus Codes” were originally…

On its tenth year of polling developers from all over the world, Stack Overflow received some 65,000 responses to its lengthy questionnaire. This year, the three most-loved languages by programmers are Rust, TypeScript and Python, in that order, the…

GameGAN is a powerful new neural network model created by a Toronto-based Nvidia artificial intelligence research lab. This model is able to generate a functional simulation of a video game just by watching it being played on-screen and observing…

Microsoft President Brad Smith now believes the company was wrong about open source (better late than never): “Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me…

Walmart has just released two new versions of its Onn tablet, for the very attractive price of USD99 for the 8-inch model, and USD20 more for the 10-inch version. These tablets provide features not usually found on Android devices at this price…

There is a viable alternative to Zoom and Google Meet: Facebook’s new video chat product, Messenger Rooms, is now available to everyone on both mobile and desktop, the company announced on Thursday. The product is a more feature-rich and expanded…

Epic Games unveiled the next generation of its game engine, the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), with an impressive real-time demo running live on PlayStation 5, Sony’s new console due to come out at the end of the year. The two new core technologies that…

Nvidia is unveiling its next-generation Ampere GPU architecture today. The first GPU to use Ampere will be Nvidia’s new A100, built for scientific computing, cloud graphics, and data analytics. While there have been plenty of rumors around Nvidia’s…

Engineer and YouTuber Shane Wighton has developed a basketball hoop that ensures that you never miss a shot. Thanks to robotics and artificial intelligence, the backboard tracks the shot, calculates the angle, and adjusts its position to bounce the…

At its virtual Satellite event, GitHub announced the launch of the beta version of Codespaces, providing developers with a complete, cloud-based development environment, based on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code Online editor (in case you missed it…

DJI has launched its second-generation light drone, the Mavic Air 2. The device, which weighs 570g, has been redesigned with new motors, improved aerodynamics and “advanced” battery technology for a maximum flight time of 34 minutes. Thanks to the…

The Raspberry Pi foundation has launched a new camera module with a 12.3 megapixel Sony IMX477 sensor. Besides the high-quality sensor, the other nice thing about it is the ability to pair it with any off-the-shelf C- and CS-mount lenses, as well as…

Microsoft Build 2020 is not cancelled, it’s just different. For one thing, it’s entirely online, and for another, it’s entirely free (a CAD$3,300 savings!). the event will cover and cater to all time zones, streaming free content and events…

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has ruled that only humans can be credited as an inventor in a patent, and artificial intelligence systems cannot. The decision came in response to two patents — one for a “fractal profile” food container…

Now that webcams can’t be had for love nor money due to the worldwide shift to teleworking, Canon has launched a free utility (only available for Windows 10 for the moment) that lets you plug in just about any Canon camera to your PC over USB to use…

New TVs always come with outrageous amounts of packaging to protect them, all of which ends up on the curb. Samsung came up with the bright idea of helping its clients turn all the cardboard that comes with its Serif, Frame and Sero TVs into useful…

Following up on Ming-Chi Kuo’s report in February about the release, in 2021, of an ARM-equipped Macintosh, Bloomberg states that, “according to people familiar with the matter”, Apple is working on a line of ARM-based SoCs for its Macs. These…

Apple has just unveiled an iPhone which, while not ground-breaking, will surely be popular thanks to its excellent value. The new model replaces the iPhone 8, which will soon be pulled from the market. This iPhone SE 2020 version (the SE suffix was…

Razer has unveiled two new Blade Stealth 13 GTX Ultrabooks, one for gamers and one for content creators. Both come with the same 10th generation Intel CPU (Core i7-1065G7) and GPU (GeForce GTX 1650 Ti). The only difference between them is in the…

At Microsoft, 47,000 developers generate nearly 30 thousand bugs a month. These items get stored across over 100 AzureDevOps and GitHub repositories. Faced with such a volume of data, Microsoft found it difficult to quickly and efficiently rank bugs…

Minecraft fans have been waiting for years for a major visual overhaul of their game. On Thursday, the beta version of Minecraft RTX with ray-tracing rendering was finally made available as a free update, exclusively on Windows 10. One major caveat…

At a time when an unprecedented number of Americans are losing their jobs, at least 12 American states use elderly COBOL-based systems to manage their unemployment benefits. COBOL is a 6-decade-old language, and the systems that run on it are simply…

Following the trend launched in 2016 by Nintendo with the NES Classic, Konami has launched the TurboGrafx-16 Mini, a miniaturized version of the TurboGrafx-16 console released by NEC Home Electronics in Japan in 1987. The console comes with lots of…

Apple has released a new tool, available to the general public, to track mobility trends broken down by type of transportation (driving, walking, public transit) in different countries and major cities. The data is generated by the requests made to…

Have you noticed that most Android phones are pretty much functionally identical? That’s because they all rely on the same processors, built by Qualcomm. With a shared processor, phone builders have a hard time differentiating their offer with new…

At a time when Zoom is serving more than 200 million daily meeting participants and Teams collaboration software has jumped from 32 to 44 million active users, Google will be extending free access to some advanced features in its teleconferencing…

Until now, most of us were using our webcams for personal purposes. Now that we’re “all” teleworking and looking to upgrade our camera, external webcams are impossible to find: builders and traditional retailers are sold out. Due to the lockdowns…

Quite unexpectedly, Sony unveiled the new controller for the future PlayStation 5. The DualSense, with its black and white, sleek design, garners unanimous approval: it is as beautiful as it is really different from its predecessors. Sony says that…

To improve Linux files integration in Windows 10, Microsoft will be providing access to your Linux files directly in File Explorer. A new Linux icon (i.e. Tux, our favourite penguin) will be available in the left-hand navigation pane in File…

While audio cassette recorders and CD burners are going extinct, reports of the death of microgroove disks are greatly exaggerated. In fact, LPs cling so hard to life that Yuri Suzuki, a London-based designer, has created the Easy Record Maker, a…

BBC Micro Bot is a Twitter account that waits for people to tweet code to it (@bbcmicrobot). Then the bot takes the tweet (maximum 280 characters), runs it through an emulator of the classic BBC Microcomputer (co-developed in the 1980s by BBC and…

Nathan Taeha Kim, 24, is at the leading edge of the high-end, personalized mechanical keyboard movement. Nathan has found a unique niche that is attracting increasing interest from the gaming community. He has built bespoke mechanical keyboards for…

The new versions of Safari for all platforms (macOS, iPadOS, iOS) will block third-party cookies by default. This means that when you use Safari, no advertiser or website is able to follow you around the internet using the commonplace tracking…

Phone manufacturers seem to be passing over Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865. The reason? Too expensive. According to a couple of recent reports, Google and LG have both decided not to use this SoC this year, opting instead for a chip that is cheaper in…

ReMarkable’s first e-ink tablet, launched in 2017, certainly was a remarkable product, but it did have some major flaws, like an unstable system, poor usability and a hefty price tag (USD500). Even so, the tablet did have its niche of aficionados.

Two big pieces of news about GitHub! The first is that the development platform is finally available on mobile devices, with very decent official applications for iOS and Android. These apps should help developers manage projects while away from…

No, it’s not April 1st yet! Last year, we were getting ready to say good-bye to floppy disk drives on Linux. Linus Torvalds had called the project “orphaned”; Jiří Kosina, the Czech developer of the Linux kernel who was in charge of the floppy disk…

Chinese company Nubia has announced a new phone designed for gamers, the Red Magic 5G, with an internal cooling fan, just like a good old PC! The device has a 6.65-inch 2340×1080 144Hz OLED display (notice the record-breaking frequency). Other…

Unlike other major events such as F8, E3 and Google I/O which have been cancelled, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the yearly summit of Apple developers, is going ahead in June, but in a new format in keeping with the times: on-line.

Thursday, Microsoft released a fix for a critical security flaw that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code that can spread from one vulnerable machine to another without user interaction. The flaw, in version 3 of Microsoft’s…

If you were thinking of exploring games development, there is an open-source alternative to the massive (and sometimes intimidating) tools like Unity or Game Maker: Godot. The fully integrated, free and MIT-licensed development environment works on…

Corellium is a company that supplies an iOS simulator which is especially used by security researchers. It is in trouble with Apple, which accuses it of copyright infringement. But that hasn’t stopped Corellium from persevering and presenting a new…

Mobile phone manufacturers are tripling down on foldable phones. TCL unveiled a bold concept for a phone with two hinges and three displays, making it both a phone and a tablet. Unfolded, this functional prototype has a 10-inch diagonal (25.4cm)…

Samsung unveiled a range of productivity monitors for home and office use, with a curvature of 1000R (the curvature of a circle with a radius of 1 meter). Called the T55 series, these new monitors adapt a concept that Samsung applied to gaming…

To celebrate his one-billion-seconds anniversary, Daniel de Bruin, a Dutch designer, built a machine with 100 gears, each of which has a 10:1 reduction ratio. This means that the speed of any one gear is equal to one-tenth the speed of the gear…

After the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress, now the Game Developers Conference, scheduled for March 16 to 20 in San Francisco, is threatened by Coronavirus Disease. Though the organizer maintains that the conference will go on, an…

In a blog post, Phil Spencer, Executive Vice President of Games at Microsoft, reveals a glimpse of the future of the Xbox Series X game console. Specifically, the CPU, a Zen-2–architecture processor, will offer four times the processing power of an…

Sony unveiled the next version of its Xperia 1 high-end Android phone. Named Xperia 1 II, it is the first Sony device to support 5G connectivity. Like the previous generation, it has a 6.5-inch OLED screen (3840×1644) and its size is almost…

According to renowned analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, a Mac equipped with an ARM processor, a 5nm SoC developed by Apple, should be released in the first half of 2021. Several rumors suggest that Apple is designing ARM processors internally for its Macs. This…

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered a powerful new antibiotic compound using a machine learning algorithm. The computer model, which can screen over one hundred million chemicals in a few days, is designed…

Google has released the first developer preview for Android 11, the next version of its mobile operating system. It comes fully loaded with big promises: improved support for 5G, better privacy features and new messaging interfaces. This first…

Engineers love Python, JavaScript, and Java. Employers, on the other hand, shine their light on Go. That’s the takeaway of the Hottest Coding Languages section of job site Hired‘s annual State of Software Engineers report. Engineers experienced with…

For decades, the trend was for more and more of a computer’s systems to be integrated onto a single chip. Today’s system-on-chips, which power smartphones and servers alike, are the result. But complexity and cost are starting to erode the idea that…

When a car’s basic function (i.e. rolling forward) relies on network connectivity, you can end up as roadkill on the information superhighway. This is what happened to the tech reporter at the English daily The Guardian. Kari Paul had planned on…

Justine Haupt, a cosmology instrumentation engineer at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, took the rotary dial of an old Western Electric Trimline telephone, connected it to an Adafruit Fona 3G, and stuffed the whole thing in a…

Dismal news for the mobile industry: with the ongoing 2019-nCoV epidemic and last week’s announcement by LG that it wouldn’t attend MWC 2020, other companies followed suit: AT&T, Amazon, BT, Ericsson, Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Intel, Facebook…

Three years after launching its first (and last) smartphone, Essential, the company founded by Andy Rubin, “the father of Android”, announced it was closing down. The company had been valuated at USD1.2 billion before it had sold a single product…

After the Galaxy S10, we assumed we’d be getting the S11. But Samsung’s marketing geniuses had a brainwave: the S20. This new high-end phone comes in three sizes: S20 (6.2 inches), S20+ (6.7 inches) and S20 Ultra (6.92 inches). While display size…

Silica is a Microsoft-led research project that uses ultrafast laser optics and artificial intelligence to store data on quartz glass. To test the concept, Microsoft teamed up with Warner Bros. Entertainment and, together, the team managed to store…

The Mobile World Congress, to be held in Barcelona from February 24 to 27, is the world’s largest mobile technology event. Just about every major builder attends, organizing press conferences to unveil new products. However, some of them are…

Apple Watch is not only the best-selling smartwatch in the world, but also the best-selling watch, period. Accoding to Strategy Analytics, Apple sold almost 31 million units in 2019, an increase of 36% over 2018, while the entire Swiss watch…

GeForce Now, the cloud-based gaming service for Windows, macOS and Android, is now open to all after a months-long closed beta. Unlike Google Stadia, this service is based on the BYOGame concept: you can use it to play any game you’ve bought off of…

Chinese phone-maker TCL tweeted on Monday that it would stop selling BlackBerry phones as of August 31. TCL has been making BlackBerry-branded Android phones with physical keyboards since December 2016, but will not be renewing its brand license —…

Google Maps determines congestion by gathering the location and motion speed of phones in a given area. Generally speaking, those phones are going to be in the road because they’re with drivers, inside vehicles, and so measuring the phones’ speed is…

Unicode Emoji 13.0 has been finalized, and with it come 62 totally new emojis plus 55 gender and skin tone variants. The 117 new glyphs bring us to 3,304 total emojis. The new glyphs include, in no particular order: lungs, a ninja, a black cat, a…

You have to be plucky, and maybe a little insane, to try to imagine a phone outside of the iOS/Android ecosystem, especially when you’re a small enterprise with limited means. Yet that’s exactly what Purism has done: the maker of open-source laptops…

Since Henry Ford’s Model T, the auto industry has innovated its way to electric, driverless vehicles. But there is one cabin accessory that hasn’t changed since its inception: the sun visor. While you can’t live without it when you have the sun in…

JetBrains, the software company best known for its integrated development environments, Kotlin language and continuous integration tool TeamCity, has developed a monospace font optimized to reduce developers’ visual fatigue. Since developers spend…

The world’s most popular programming languages all have one thing in common: their keywords are in English (if, else, return, print, etc.). In fact, English is so integral to programming that it’s hard to imagine a programming language in any other…

Microsoft announced today that future Office365 Pro Plus installs and updates will include a Chrome extension that forcibly changes the default search engine to Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing. Yes, you read that right. What’s more, it will do…

Last October, Microsoft surprised the world with its dual-screen folding phone, the Surface Duo, which runs on… Android! Today, Microsoft announced the availability of a preview SDK for this device (Surface Duo SDK Preview Release), along with…

Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors specializing in autonomous vehicles, unveiled Origin, its first car to function without human intervention. The electric vehicle with no steering wheel, pedals or even a dashboard was designed with space and…

Sometimes, you have to unplug to get back to the basics, to focus on a task or simply to get back in touch with your surroundings. Unfortunately, we are all chained to our smartphones, which are so clever at monopolizing our attention, keeping us…

According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is considering equipping its bricks-and-mortar stores (Amazon Go, Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Whole Foods) with a system to let customer pay for purchases by scanning their palms. Last December, the US…

Have you had it with the Android/iOS duopoly? Here is the PinePhone, a device on which you can install your own Linux OS. The handset comes with no pre-installed system so users can flash their own OS. There are several available, from Ubuntu Touch…

Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012, canceling out its emissions by purchasing renewable energy and carbon offsets. Today, the company committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030, meaning that it plans to draw down more planet-heating…

With no fanfare, Apple acquired Xnor.ai for USD200 million. The Seattle-based start-up specializes in developing image recognition tools that work locally, independent of the cloud, unlike most AI solutions. One major advantage of local computing is…

Logitech is expanding its ergonomic product line with a new, wireless keyboard called Ergo K860. Its wave-like surface provides better support for the wrists, improves posture and reduces muscle strain. According to Logitech, the ERGO K860 reduces…

Google is planning to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years. The announcement only comes after similar updates by Chrome’s main competitors, but is still a big win for privacy advocates, who have long decried the use…

Microsoft addressed a severe bug (CVE-2020-0601) in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/19 reported by the NSA that allows an attacker to spoof the digital signature tied to a specific piece of software. Such a weakness could be abused by attackers…

After last year’s folding phone fad, brace for the Windows 10 folding laptop/tablet craze. That’s what it looked like, anyway, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, with the unveiling of Intel’s Horseshoe Bend functional prototype, Dell’s…

Panasonic has unveiled some prototypes of virtual reality glasses that break away from the usual ski goggle design. These very cool steampunk welder’s glasses are also the first to offer HDR (High Dynamic Range) images thanks to ultra-high…

You’ve finally gotten to bed and are about to sink into a delicious dream when you’re yanked back to consciousness by the dreaded, high-pitched drone of a mosquito. You turn the light back on and throw yourself into the task of tracking it down and…

SelfieType is a virtual keyboard developed by Samsung’s C-Lab that uses your phone’s front camera in tandem with AI to analyze the movement of your fingers as you type on an imaginary keyboard, and convert the information into QWERTY keyboard…

Samsung has unveiled a very curvy, monster monitor 49 inches from corner to corner (1.24m) for gamers. Called the Odyssey G9, it has a resolution of 5120x1440 pixels, a refresh rate of 240Hz and a response time of 1ms. It is compatible with AMD’s…

Apple, Google, Amazon and the Zigbee alliance have teamed up to create a working group whose mission is to develop a new standard for automating smart homes. The future standard, called “Connected Home over IP”, or CHIP for short, will make it…

Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox Series X will be unveiled ahead of the E3 Expo, which will take place in Los Angeles starting on June 9, 2020. Xbox Series X is the new, official name of the Xbox Scarlett. This powerful console will have a…

Typhoon game development studio was founded in Montreal in early 2018 by Ubisoft’s former creative director for Far Cry 4 and two former employees of Warner Brothers Games Montreal who worked on Batman: Arkham. Recently, Typhoon was acquired by…

If you’ve ever tried Ikea’s Trådfri line of products, you already know how frustrating this offering can be. Ikea told The Verge that the issues bedeviling the line will soon be a thing of the past, thanks to an overhaul of the underlying software…

After a complete teardown, iFixit gave the new Mac Pro a 9 out of 10 for repairability, which is unheard-of from them for an Apple product. Apple’s latest phone got a mediocre 6 out of 10, while its last few laptops did even worse, including a…

When the newest Mac Pro was unveiled at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference last June, we wondered how much the optional wheels might cost, given that they might not be an option if you’re called to move your 40-lb machine around. We wrote:

Created by Finnish company Rovio Mobile Oy, the mobile game that went on to take the world by storm was launched for iPhone and iPad on December 11, 2009, 18 months after the debut of the iOS App Store. After selling over 12 million copies on iOS…

The Sarcos Guardian XO is a 24-degrees-of-freedom full-body robotic exoskeleton. While wearing it, a human can lift 200 pounds (90 kilograms) while feeling like they’re lifting just 10 lbs (4.5 kg). The Guardian XO is fully electrical and…

While Apple likes to tout its experience designs and user interfaces, it is not above your odd fail. Take Apple TV’s remote, which is a disaster of usability and intuitiveness. Sure, it’s understatedly elegant (and probably designed by Jonathan…

This month, Apple will be receiving its first delivery of “clean” aluminum, produced by Elysis, a Montreal-based joint venture between aluminum producer Alcoa and mining company Rio Tinto. The metal comes from Alcoa’s labs in Pittsburgh…

At its Snapdragon Tech Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the chip builder Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 7c and 8c, two new processors inaugurating a new line of ARM chips for Windows laptops. The 8c is positioned as the successor to the Snapdragon 850…

Motorola has unveiled a nice little mid-range phone, the One Hyper. It comes with a camera with a 64Mpx image sensor, a 32Mpx pop-up selfie camera, 4Gb of RAM, 128Gb of storage (1Tb with a microSD chip), and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 with an…

On Tuesday, Google announced that its very discreet co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are relinquishing their positions at the head of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and handing over responsibility to Google’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai.

To appropriately mark PlayStation’s 25th anniversary, iFixit performed a full-on teardown of a PlayStation 1 from 1994. Unlike contemporary electronics, the original PlayStation doesn’t require specialized tools: all you need to take the whole thing…

After the USB-C port problem, the Raspberry Pi 4 is facing a new bug. Users of the mini computer are puzzling over an issue where setting some display resolutions have the side-effect of killing the Wi-Fi connection. The problem was noticed by…

Did Tesla’s Cybertruck, unveiled last week, leave you perplexed, even dubious? You’re not the only one. Its angular, retro-futuristic lines had some truckers thinking that the announcement was just a particularly sophisticated joke, and not an…

Twitter has a problem: new Twitterers are having a hard time finding a username that’s simple and isn’t already taken. To solve this problem and free up hundreds of thousands of names, Twitter decided to purge all inactive accounts, i.e. those whose…

Movie-related merchandizing tends to reach ridiculous heights. But if you happen to love stew as much as Star Wars, you might be interested in the latest line of Instant Pot pressure cookers. With the upcoming release of Star Wars: The Rise of…

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” said Nixon in 1969. Or is that in 2019? The nightmare scenario we warned against, back in August 2018, has materialized (Putting words…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed the car maker’s long-promised electric pickup truck, dubbed the “Cybertruck,” in Los Angeles, Calif. near Space X’s rocket factory. The retrofuturistic truck will come in three versions with 250 miles, 300 miles and 500…

After canceling its Dash Buttons, Amazon now has a new and improved product for SMEs: the Dash Smart Shelf, a smart scale for office supplies. Just stock like items on these shelves and, when supplies run low, the device automatically re-orders…

The team behind this product had already made macrophotography lenses back in 2016. Now, they’re back, with a more advanced product, the DIPLE, which promises true microscope quality to examine all manner of microorganisms, bacteria, and even all…

Google has added a useful little feature to its search engine. Just type “How do you pronounce” in the query bar, followed by the word you’ve been wondering about, and Google Search will say it out loud for you, in American or British English (and…

Rumors of a name change for Perl 6, derived from the script language developed by Larry Wall in 1987, had been swirling for months. The thing is, Perl 6 is fundamentally incompatible with Perl 5, and many programmers don’t believe that the two are…

What is the creator of Linux and Git, Linus Torvalds, doing these days? Well, he’s spending his life responding to email, and the major part of his role as “benevolent dictator for life” consists in saying “no”, he said to Dirk Hohndel, VP of VMware…

Though it’s still a month away from launch date (November 19), Google’s new gaming service is already over-successful: the company has announced that it will not be able to honor all preorders. To be one of the lucky first users of the service, you…

Sensor manufacturer OmniVision has created what has now been confirmed as the smallest commercially-available image sensor in the world by Guinness World Record. The OmniVision OV6948 is an ultra-compact 1/36-inch sensor that measures just 0.575mm…

German air taxi startup Lilium has completed its first phase of testing, with its five-seater electric plane prototype. The fixed-wing prototype has 36 tilting, electric jet engines that propel it at speeds of up to 100km/h (62mph). It has no tail…

Researchers at Microsoft are working on new virtual reality technologies that let users stay fully immersed in a virtual world while walking around in the real world. Wearing the DreamWalker, you’ll be able to walk down your street while seeing an…

If you’re one of those people who yawn at the sight of dark mode, wake up! On smartphones, dark mode combines form and function, potentially extending battery life by 30%. According to tests performed by PhoneBuff on the iPhone XS Max, dark mode can…

Google launched the fourth generation of its Pixel phones. The latest Pixel is free of surprises, since it has no new, revolutionary features, and the specs were leaked long ago. While the Pixel 4 is a souped-up version of the 3, the price remains…

Yahoo Groups, which belongs to Verizon since 2017, will be shutting down after 18 years, and all of its contents will be deleted by mid-December. “Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site,” the…

Analogue, already known for its sleek video game consoles compatible with Sega Master System and Super Nintendo, has announced a new, portable product: the Analogue Pocket, basically a luxury clone of the Game Boy. The Pocket is compatible with the…

Slate polled a group of developers, journalists, scientists and historians on which pieces of code changed history. Among the 36 pieces of code listed by Slate are the greats: the code responsible for the alarm “1202” launched by the lunar module…

Google announced a new Chrome OS laptop, the Pixelbook Go. When open, the device looks a lot like a MacBook, with its large trackpad and a strip of speaker grills flanking either side of the keyboard. The big design difference is on the outside of…

Following a successful Indiegogo campaign, Canon USA is officially launching the IVY REC, a clippable, display-less camera, designed for outdoors enthusiasts looking for an alternative to fragile, bulky phones to immortalize their adventures. Under…

BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) is an ancient version of Unix, created 42 years ago. At the time, cyberthreats were today’s cybertreats, and security technologies were much less advanced. For example, the hashing function protecting passwords…

Ubuntu’s next version (19.10, “Eoan Ermine”) will support ZFS in its installer, making it the first Linux distribution to offer native support for this first-class file system. But support will be “experimental” at first – i.e. do not install on…

The 16th version of the operating system formerly known as OS X has been released! To read up on Catalina, you can turn to the classic “Ars Technica Review” (link hereunder), which examines every last detail of the new system. Among the more…

Despite the flop of its first phone, the PH–1, and massive lay-offs, Essential, founded and led by Andy Rubin, the “father of Android”, unveiled a new phone. The unmistakable Gem is an oddly-shaped device that looks like a remote control. Andy has…

Probably named after the lovable little fish in Finding Nemo, this little submarine drone is just 20cm wide and carries a F1.6 camera lens and a 1/2.9” CMOS sensor capable of recording at 1080p. It’s field of view is 100°, and a ±45° Tilt-Lock…

When it introduced its latest Surface products, Microsoft saved the bombshell for last: its return to the smartphone market. The Surface Duo, to be released at the end of 2020, will not run some operating system descended from Windows Phone, but…

The Surface Pro X is a slim Windows 10 tablet with a detachable keyboard and stylus and, more importantly, an ARM processor. In fact, the SQ1 ARM chip was specifically developed by Microsoft jointly with Qualcomm for the Surface Pro X. Its design is…

The time when Tesla reliably missed its production targets seems to be well in the past. Indeed, Elon Musk’s company has set new production and delivery records for the third quarter of 2019, with 96,155 vehicles built and 97,000 delivered (95,200…

No, we’re not talking about shuffling the Four Seasons on your telephone. We’re talking about the browser named after the great Venetian composer, developed by former Opera employees, with admittedly low market share despite the software’s many…

Amazon seems determined to never let you leave home without Alexa. The cloud and on-line shopping titan has introduced several new products that let you access your Alexa assistant on the go, for example with the wireless Echo Buds earbuds, or, in…

The Boston Dynamics videos showing their robots performing their latest tricks are like chocolate: we just can’t get enough. So here’s the latest, showing the famous bipedal robot, Atlas, doing his morning calisthenics. Jumps, handstands, spins…

After a disastrous launch in February, the foldable Samsung phone is back in an improved, more robust and hopefully problem-free version. Indeed, the early buyers and reporters who had gotten their hands on the early devices found the display…

Xiaomi unveiled what it calls a “concept” phone, in other words a phone with a new and bold design. What makes the Mi Mix Alpha unique is that its screen wraps around the device, covering most of its surface. The status icons (battery, connectivity…

Google revealed its new Play Pass service which, for USD5 per month, gives you unlimited access to a library of over 350 Android games free of microtransactions. Strangely, Google also included non-game applications like Photo Studio Pro and…

HTC is releasing its PC-powered Vive Cosmos VR headset next month. Originally unveiled earlier this year at CES, the Cosmos is HTC’s latest bid at a mainstream VR headset. The Cosmos does not require external sensors and uses six video sensors for…

Dutch company Fairphone builds Android phones for durability, making them cheap and easy to repair. So easy, in fact, that you can make your own repairs with a simple Phillips 00 screwdriver, included with your purchase. Further, Fairphones are…

At Apple’s latest Keynote, new technological developments were to be found in the chips aisle. First, there was the A13, which will grace the new generation of iPhones. This is the second generation of Apple ARM SoCs with the 7-nanometer TSMC…

At a time when people can store thousands of photos on their phones and the cloud, printed photos still have an undeniable charm, and gifting a framed photograph to a loved one is so much nicer than just sending them the digital file. This is why…

IEEE Spectrum has published its sixth annual ranking of the top programming languages. Their methodology combines data for 11 metrics from 8 different sources and then categorizes them by domain, since a language that’s a cornerstone of one…

At the IFA 2019 show in Berlin, HMD Global, the Finnish company that bought Nokia’s mobile division from Microsoft in 2016, announced a new version of the Nokia 2720 Fold, a GSM flip phone first issued in 2009. It seems that there is still a strong…

Everyone agrees that the worst thing about Android is not getting version updates in a timely manner, or at all, if you don’t have a Google phone. If you don’t own a Pixel but still want to know more about the new, sugar-free Android 10, Ron Amadeo…

Logitech’s MX Master mouse is the favourite rodent of cool productive cats. So how do you improve on a tail-less mouse that’s already great? Logitech has managed to do just that for its third-generation mouse, with small adjustments that make it…

The 8K Association (8KA) was created at the beginning of this year by industry actors like Samsung, TCL, Hisense, Panasonic and Tencent. Its goal is to set specifications for future 8K displays and to stamp 8k-compliant computer or television…

At the IFA 2019 show in Berlin, Samsung unveiled its first SoC with an integrated 5G modem. The Exynos 980 is a mid-range octacore SoC with two Cortex-A77 clocked at 2.2GHz and six Cortex-A55 at 2.2GHz. Among the improvements on the Exynos 9610 SoC…

Back in the 60s, Bell Labs was collaborating with MIT and General Electric on a “time sharing” project called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (Multics). Computers at the time were so expensive that it made sense to share a single…

Apple has long shut out small independent repair shops, refusing to supply them with spare parts for the iPhone. But the Cupertino company seems to be softening its policy: independent repair shops will now be able to purchase parts, repair and…

In a post shared on Weibo on August 27, Chinese manufacturer Realme unveiled the Realme XT, a phone with a 64Mpx camera which will probably use Samsung’s new sensor, the Isocell Bright GW1. The Realme XT comes with a 6.4-inch screen (1080x2340), a…

While Insta360 literally made its name with its 360° cameras, its new Go is far more conventional, producing 1080p videos at 25fps. What is less conventional is its size (just 5cm high) and weight (a mere 18.3 grams). Thanks to its magnetized base…

Stephen Cass of IEEE Spectrum did a short interview with Eben Upton, the creator of the popular Raspberry Pi. Upton explained how the design of the mini-computer has evolved to meet the needs of an increasing number of professional developers and…

Until today, the successive versions of the Android operating system had their own, sweet codenames, working their way down the alphabet. Version 8.x was Oreo, coming after Nougat (7.x), which itself followed on Marshmallow (6.x). It seems that this…

Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the chip developed by California startup Cerebras and introduced at Stanford University’s Hot Chips conference, is a mastodon. In fact, it’s the largest ever built, with a surface of 46.22cm2, 400,000 cores and a whopping…

Chinese company Segway-Ninebot Group has unveiled new products, including the KickScooter T60, a three-wheeled electric scooter that uses AI to autonomously return to its charging station. These smart scooters are intended for scooter fleet…

At the SIGGRAPH conference, the Unreal Engine team presented an impressive real-time VFX technology that could change the way films are made. This technology could be a game changer and make the chroma keying (green/blue screen) obsolete. For this…

Less than half of Google searches now result in a click, according to a report by Rand Fishkin of digital marketing company SparkToro. And the figure for mobile searches is even worse, with two-thirds of all searches coming up clickless. In the…

Microsoft announced the release of Azure Dedicated Host. It gives you the option of leasing a physical server just for yourself to host one or more Azure virtual machines. This means that you don’t share any resources on this server with anyone else…

Though the market for Android tablets has not been very kind to Samsung, the company perseveres. It has announced a high-end tablet, the US$ 650 Galaxy Tab S6. The device, which has kept the 10.5-inch Super AMOLED display (2,560 × 1,600 pixels)…

There’s a cheeky Microsoft advertisement going around that somehow revives the Get a Mac saga that pitted a Mac (played by Justin Long) against a PC (John Hodgman). Surface’s ad creatives found an Australian actor named Mackenzie Book … “Mac”…

ThinkTiny is a miniature game console that picks up the ThinkPad design with the iconic red TrackPoint nub as a joystick. Based on an ATtiny1614 microcontroller by Microchip (8 bit, 2KB RAM, 16KB of storage), this Paul Klinger creation allows you to…

Drone delivery is not yet fully developed and this raises legitimate questions about safety. For example, Swiss Post suspended its pilot drone-delivery project following a second crash. For nearly a year, Swiss Post and California startup Matternet…

At first glance, Aquanaut looks like a traditional unmanned mini-submarine, until its hull opens up like a Transformer, exposing two arms that fold out and a head packed full of sensors. The sleek submarine is now a half-humanoid robot, ready to get…

A leaked internal Windows 10 build (18,947) has revealed a brand new Start menu experience that replaces tiles with a more traditional grid of apps on a grey background. This Start menu, which looks like it’s still in the early stages of…

Bandai Namco is launching a new platform, Tori, which will combine physical toys with iOS and Android mobile apps. Tori is the product of a collaboration between Bandai Namco and the French technology firm ISKN, which developed the Slate graphics…

Apple is in the final stages of negotiations to buy the bulk of Intel’s modem chip business, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Journal says the deal, valued at $1 billion or more, could be finalized in the next week. The deal would involve the…

Apple is close to signing a deal with Taiwanese manufacturers to start using microLED displays in its products as early as next year, according to Chinese newspaper Economic Daily News. According to sources in Apple’s supply chain, the company is…

Barsys, the robotic mixologist, is the perfect party host. It can hold 5 bottles of alcohol and has 3 insulated tanks for mixers (soda, carbonated water or fruit juice). You can control it with a phone or a tablet, via Bluetooth. The application…

On Monday, Tesla announced lowered prices on its entire line of vehicles, making most versions of Model S, X and 3 more affordable. However, the cheaper versions of the S and X models, called “Standard”, have been eliminated. The price for the “Long…

In August 2018, a reporter for The Intercept revealed that Google was working on an Android search engine for the Chinese market. Responding to the demands of the country’s authorities, the application was supposed to block searches on human rights…

Though it ended Windows 10 Mobile, Microsoft is still very present in the smartphone applications market. For instance, since its release in 2015, Microsoft Word for Android was installed more than one billion times, according to official statistics…

Alan Turing, the mathematician who helped crack the Enigma machine code during World War II and who pioneered computing and artificial intelligence, will appear on the new GBP50 banknote (CAD82, EUR55). The mathematician was chosen from among 989…

Launched in March 2017 to compete with Slack, Microsoft Teams has just overtaken its rival. Microsoft has announced that Teams has more than 13 million active daily users, compared to about 10 million for Slack. The amount rises to 19 million when…

Nintendo unveiled a more affordable version of its Switch gaming console, which has sold more than 35 million units. Called Switch Lite, it’s for mobile use only (it can’t be plugged into a TV) and costs USD100 less than its older sibling. Also…

Mistakes happen to the best of us… With the all-new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, the power connector has evolved into a USB-C (instead of a USB micro-B) because the new SoC is more energy-hungry. Unfortunately, there was a bug in the execution. People…

SimBlock is a blockchain simulator developed by Kazuyuki Shudo, associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which allows users to easily experiment with the functioning of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and soon, Ethereum. It runs on any…

The Urban Flying Opera project, held in Turin, Italy, consisted in collecting small illustrations from the artistic community via an application and then selecting a number of them to paint on a 14x12-meter wall in the empty shell of an old Iveco…

Euro NCAP is the organization that tests the safety of new vehicles sold in Europe. Based on crash tests, it rates vehicles on a scale of zero to five stars. The Tesla Model 3 got a perfect score of 5 stars. The video below shows the crash tests on…

A quasi-daily occurrence for web surfers is stumbling on irritants, be they poorly-designed interfaces, intrusive pop-ups that interfere with your reading, idiotic forms or impossible CAPTCHAs. Now, a Belgian design studio has collected and featured…

Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware, addressed some good questions to Jeff Bezos, and Amazon provided answers you didn’t want to hear. In short, Amazon’s Alexa keeps all data with no expiration date, and shares it too! Be worried: this…

The 10th version of the Android OS, dubbed “Q”, is expected to release in its definitive form in Q3 of this year. Reporters from Ars Technica sat down at length with Dave Burke, VP of engineering for Android, Iliyan Malchev, principal engineer at…

Sony is celebrating the 40th birthday of one of its most iconic products, the Walkman: the first portable music player ever. Released on July 1st, 1979, it revolutionized the way we listen to music, even though we don’t use cassettes or CDs anymore.

The Raspberry Foundation unveiled a major new upgrade of its miniature computer. While the new Pi 4 Model B keeps the dimensions and entry-level price of its predecessor (USD35), it is three times as powerful, thanks to its 1.5GHz quad-core ARM…

At the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, Chinese builder Oppo unveiled the first-ever phone to have a camera hidden under the screen. Gone is the intrusive notch, thanks to a transparent area on the screen that still has pixels and touch…

You would have thought that Apple had given up on autonomous driving, especially after last January when it laid off 200 staff working on the secretive Project Titan. Nothing is further from the truth: in fact, the company bought Drive.ai, a…

Walmart has confirmed it is using image recognition and AI technologies in over 1,000 stores to fight shoplifting, and checkout errors. The surveillance program, named “Missed Scan Detection” by Walmart, uses cameras to identify items that clients…

During an interview organised by venture capital firm Village Global, Bill Gates said that his greatest regret was failing to lead Microsoft in the smartphone race, leaving the field wide open for Google. Gates took full responsibility for the…

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed software that can create a 3D animation from a single image of a person. The Photo Wake-Up algorithm, which relies on artificial intelligence of course, also works with any drawing depicting…

The likeness of the new Mac Pro to a cheese grater has not gone unnoticed. But could it really be used to grate parmesan on your spaghetti? A youtuber, Winston Moy, went to great lengths to find out, using the Autodesk Fusion 360 to model the new…

What do you do while waiting for your electric car to recharge? Game, of course! And when you have a large touch-screen in your car, it’s so much better than gaming on your phone. This is the idea behind Tesla Arcade, a suite of games available on…

Kano is a startup that specializes in assembly-ready educational computers. So far, its models were based on Raspberry Pi 3 and on an operating system developed by the company. Kano now offers a new kit to assemble a touch-screen laptop that works…

Lumi is a light-up keyboard with 24 colorful keys that ties into an iPad app to teach you to play the piano, sort of like Guitar Hero. Multiple keyboards can be hooked up together for more octaves, and the unit also functions as a standard MIDI…

A recent study found that only 5.5% of security vulnerabilities discovered by researchers were actually ever used by hackers. Why? Quite simply, because all vulnerabilities are not created equal, and hackers seek to control the most computers with…

As the trade war between the U.S. and China heats up, Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer of the iPhone and iPad, says that whatever happens, Apple phones will remain available for the American market. While most of Foxconn’s manufacturing occurs in…

Every year, Chinese drone-maker DJI organizes a major robotics competition, called RoboMasters, where student-built robots do battle in an arena. Now, the company has launched a scaled-down, educational combat robot for the home. Called RoboMaster…

At the E3 show in Los Angeles, AMD unveiled the first two RDNA-architected 5700-series graphics cards. Available as of July 7, the 5700XT (USD450) and 5700 (USD380) are upper-mid-range cards intended to tackle the ever-popular Nvidia cards for…

Thanks to the E3 show, this week is gaming news week. Microsoft capitalized on this major show to reveal a few details on the successor to the Xbox One. Code-named “Project Scarlett”, the console should launch in 2020, in time for the Holidays. At…

Stadia, Google’s new cloud-based gaming service, will be available as of November, just in time for the Holidays. To be among the first users of the service, you’ll need to pay USD130 up-front to purchase the Founder’s Edition gamepack (already…

At Amazon’s re:MARS Conference in Las Vegas, the retail and cloud giant unveiled a new drone design, the Prime Air, able to fly up to 25 km and deliver packages weighing up to 2.25 kg in under 30 minutes. The new drone is capable of…

TU Delft University, in the Netherlands, has unveiled a spectacular V-shaped long-distance commercial airplane. The aircraft’s design integrates the passenger cabin, the cargo hold and the fuel tanks in the wing structure. Its improved aerodynamic…

The highlight of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California, was probably the unveiling of the long-awaited new Mac Pro. The previous Mac Pro (the aluminium cylinder, or “trash can”) dated back from 2013 and hadn’t…

Chances are, you already know of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) for its Radeon cards. What you perhaps didn’t know is that its graphics technology is also found in the PS4 and Xbox One consoles, and that it will run Stadia, Google’s future cloud…

Researchers have discovered a sophisticated piece of Linux malware that has escaped detection by all 59 commercially-available AV products and that appears to be actively used in targeted attacks. Dubbed HiddenWasp, it is a complete suite of…

Are you spending less time on Facebook? You’re not alone; in fact, you’re part of a trend. According to a study by eMarketer, daily time spent on Facebook declined by 3 minutes among U.S. users in 2018, from 41 minutes in 2017; and usage is expected…

Asus, the Taiwanese hardware company that started out as a motherboard maker in 1989, is celebrating its 30th birthday by presenting the Prime Utopia, its vision for the future of desktop PCs. The idea is to throw off the shackles of Intel’s ATX…

Pregnancy can be a chancy business, as all women – and their partners – know. Ruling out pregnancy is now possible, but falling pregnant is still not guaranteed, to the dismay of many hopeful moms. Now, they have another device in their arsenal: the…

At the Computex trade show, hardware builder Asus unveiled an over-the-top laptop: the ZenBook Pro Duo. Besides its main 4K, 15-inch OLED display, it has a second, 3840×1100px, 32:9 IPS touchscreen just above the keyboard. Redundant, you say? Not if…

Panic is a funny little company. Its creators established themselves thanks to their smart utilities for macOS developers, like the Transmit FTP client and the Coda text editor. Next, they conquered iOS with Prompt, an SSH client. Then, they…

GitHub has launched Sponsors, a beta version of a system to financially support your favorite developers. Sponsors allows anyone with a GitHub account to fund any Sponsors-registered open-source developer through a recurrent monthly payment. During…

Autonomous delivery vehicles are nothing new: last August, we wrote about the Nuro delivery service in Arizona. But there was always a missing link – the final stretch from car to doorstep. Now, the Ford motor company has teamed up with Agility…

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is about to test self-driving mail shipment. Over a two-week period, California start-up TuSimple, a self-driving trucking company, will be hauling mail between USPS’s distribution centres in Dallas, Texas and…

Google’s AR glasses are back, in a enterprise-focused version. The latest Google Glass comes with a larger battery (820mAh, up from 570mAh), a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 processor (a VR/AR-specific SoC) instead of the previous generation’s Intel Atom…

After the wind delayed the launch of the first 60 satellites of the future SpaceX Starlink constellation from May 15th to 16th, problems with the satellite software forced the company to cancel the second attempt 24 hours later, which will delay the…

DJI, the well-known drone manufacturer, is breaking into the sports camera market with the Osmo Action, positioned to compete directly with GoPro’s high-end Hero 7 Black. Indeed, all of the DJI’s technical features are equal or slightly superior to…

Google’s Titan Security Keys come in two versions: the USB version for computers and the Bluetooth LE version for IOS and Android devices. The latter version is the one that has revealed a security flaw that is rather embarrassing for a product that…

Razer’s BlackWidow is an excellent keyboard that comes in several different versions, including the Huntsman Elite, at USD200. As of this year, you can get a new, more affordable model: the BlackWidow Lite, for USD90. This keyboard doesn’t have a…

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Surfing the latest craze for foldable phones, Lenovo has unveiled a functional prototype of a portable, foldable PC. And it’s not just a tech demo: Lenovo has been developing this for over three years and has…

After years of delays and problems with its 10nm processors, which had originally been announced for 2016 (Cannon Lake), Intel announced at an investor conference in Santa Clara that the Ice Lake processors will be widely available as soon as June…

Last July, Sony introduced its 48-megapixel sensor for smartphones, the IMX586, which was already pretty impressive. On Thursday, Samsung responded with its 64-megapixel sensor, the Isocell Bright GW1. This means that it is more powerful than the…

At the I/O conference, Google announced the new Pixel 3a and 3a XL phones, the more affordable versions of the Pixel 3 and 3 XL. What does the A mean? No-one knows. But the point is that these phones keep the superb, high-end Pixel cameras…

AMD and Cray have announced that they will be building the Frontier, a new supercomputer, for the US Departement of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It will have over 1.5 exaFLOP/s of power, or 1.5×1018 operations per second, or…

The current Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a Microsoft-created emulation that translates Linux kernel APIs to Windows NT kernel APIs. It works pretty well, but has a few shortcomings in terms of compatibility and speed. But this will soon be a…

Virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive need to be tethered to powerful PCs, while mobile-phone VR is skinny and far less immersive. But Facebook’s new Oculus Quest seems to the best solution available, at a (relatively)…

Samsung has unveiled a rotating 43-inch TV that works vertically, allowing millenials to watch their vertically-filmed videos on the largest surface possible. The screen swings from portrait to landscape on inclined navy-blue stand. The company…

Sad new for the techno gadget world: Anki, the creator of the adorable miniature robots Cozmo and Vector, is closing shop, laying off some 200 employees. The reason given by Boris Sofman, CEO of the San Francisco-based company, is the failure of the…

Chinese manufacturer Nubia unveiled its Red Magic 3, an Android 9 phone for gamers. The device takes 48-megapixel photos, records 8K-videos, and has a super slow-motion mode of up to 1,920fps! In fact, the device works so hard that it comes with a…

Sea Hero Quest is a video game developed in partnership with Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, game studio Glitchers and several European universities. It is designed to identify individuals who might have early symptoms of dementia. In this mobile VR…

Zipline, the company we spoke of back in 2017, has continued its expansion in Africa, consolidating its success in vast countries with transport infrastructures not always adapted to the emergency delivery of medical products. After Rwanda and…

Samsung’s Galaxy View 2 is a portable television (17.3-inch 1080p display) and an oversized Android tablet (Oreo 8.1) all at once, measuring 41.7x26.4x1.7cm and weighing in at 2.28kg. Powered by a hefty 12,000mAh battery, the device comes with an…

Who doesn’t have an old phone they’re not using, because it’s either obsolete or broken and not worth fixing? Why not turn it into wall art? This is what Reddit user TheIncorporeal has done, patiently taking apart an old iPhone, glueing the parts…

Until today, Tesla’s on-board computers ran on Nvidia chips. Now, the company has developed its own on-board computer equipped with its proprietary Tesla SoC. The in-house development team was led by Pete Bannon, a veteran engineer who has worked at…

How many SpotMini quadruped robots does it take to pull a 26,000-pound truck across a parking lot? Just 10, shows the video that Boston Dynamics released recently. The company announced that these Spot robots are coming off the production line and…

On the eve of a jury trial in San Diego, Qualcomm and Apple unexpectedly agreed to end their legal disputes over patent royalties. Apple had accused Qualcomm of extortion and in response, Qualcomm sued Apple for patent infringement in courts…

Surface Hub 2S is a Microsoft device that is intended for collaborative work in meetings. It combines several features, including a digital whiteboard and video conferencing, and comes with integrated Teams, Skype and OneNote software. The large…

After the German site WinFuture picked up leaked marketing materials, it revealed that Microsoft is about to release All-Digital, a version of the Xbox One S without a Blu-ray player. The documents show that the console will go on sale May 7 in…

In its annual Theatrical Home Entertainment Market Environment report, the Motion Picture Association of America described an immensely sharp drop-off of physical media sales over the past five years. According to the data, global sales of video…

LG has filed a patent for a phone that’s not just foldable, but also transparent. TV shows and sci-fi flicks are replete with transparent tablets and displays; but what possible use could they have back here in real life, except maybe to look cool…

Close to 90,000 developers from all over the world participated in Stack Overflow’s 2019 survey. Here are the main findings: Python is once again the fastest-growing programming language; it is also the second most loved language, behind Rust. The…

Samsung’s Galaxy S10 features a new fingerprint sensor, the 3D Sonic Sensor by Qualcomm, which uses ultrasonic technology to generate a 3D representation of your finger. This innovation allows for an invisible, in-display fingerprint reader, touted…

Did you know that you can play Atari games on the dashboard display of a Tesla? This feature appeared last year with version 9 of Tesla’s system software. Back then, the initial list of games included Missile Command, Asteroids, Lunar Lander and…

Amazon wants to launch thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit (590 to 630 km) to provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity across the globe. Its Kuiper project aims to deploy no less than 3,236 satellites to cover all latitudes…

Between 2009 and 2016, in the United States, Office Depot and OfficeMax stores graciously offered their clients a free computer health check-up, using the PC Health Check software developed by Support.com. Problem is, the software was designed to…

Two years ago, Boston Dynamics, now owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, unveiled its impressive Handle, a wheeled two-legged robot. Today, the company published a video showing Handles working in a traditional warehouse: one Handle takes…

Chris Capossela, head of Marketing at Microsoft, issued a memo warning employees not to indulge in the traditional April Fool’s pranks on Monday, explaining that this kind of very public practical jokes has very little positive impact on the…

Google is integrating AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), its lite version of HTML/JS, in e-mail. Web Gmail will support AMP content as of today, and mobile Gmail in the near future, soon to be joined by Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail and Mail.Ru. Integrated…

Though fast-food companies often cannibalize each other, for instance when Burger King gobbled up Tim Horton’s in 2014 for 14 billion dollars, it is much rarer to see one scooping up a software development company. The fast-food world was therefore…

To celebrate the birthday of composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach on March 21 1685, Google created its first Doodle using artificial intelligence technologies. Designed in partnership with the Google Magenta and Google PAIR teams, the…

JetPack Aviation is taking advance orders for its flying motorcycle called Speeder, promising delivery next year. The aircraft, equipped with four turbojet engines, a stabilization system and a collision detection system, could reach an altitude of…

At its annual GDC show, Epic Games showed demos including this short movie, titled Rebirth, that illustrates the photorealistic capabilities of Unreal Engine. It was produced by Quixel, which markets hundreds of 2D and 3D assets (Megascans), some of…

At the Game Developers Conference, Google introduced not a gaming console but Stadia, an online game service, along with an optional game controller. Stadia, which is based on Project Stream, runs games on Google’s servers and streams video on the…

Nvidia has launched a new, single-board nano-computer dedicated to artificial-intelligence applications for an affordable 99 USD. The Jetson Nano is a very powerful computer (472 gigaflops) that allows you to run multiple neural networks in parallel…

In Los Angeles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk showed off a prototype version of the Model Y, the fourth mass-produced vehicle that the electric car maker will bring to market. As expected, the vehicle will be a larger SUV take on the Model 3, much like the…

Mozilla has launched a new encrypted file-sharing service called Firefox Send that is similar to WeTransfer. It allows users to send up to 1 GB of files free of charge. Users can increase their transfer capacity to 2.5 GB if they open a…

Razer is launching three new gaming peripherals: a keyboard, a mouse and a headset, all of which are affordable, compared to the usual prices. The low prices don’t mean low quality, but rather reduced functionality in comparison to more expensive…

All the signs suggest that Google might present a game console at the Game Developers Conference taking place March 18 to 22 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. First clue: Google published a video on YouTube that promises to reveal its “vision…

Google released a beta version of its upcoming Android operating system. The highlights of this release include new privacy and security controls, support for new foldable phones, a sharing menu that finally really works, and a faster application…

If you have a smart speaker, you might own a Google Home or more likely, an Amazon Echo. In U.S. smart speaker owners grew 40 percent over 2018 to now reach 66.4 million — or 26.2 percent of the U.S. adult population. Though market share is…

Concerned about pollution, police in Fremont, California, have decided to convert their fleet to zero-emission vehicles, starting with no less than the Tesla Model S! Of course, the Tesla catalog doesn’t feature police cars. The administration…

Google has begun marketing its Coral-branded devices that are dedicated to developing artificial intelligence applications based on machine learning. Powered by the Google Edge TPU chip (Tensor Processing Unit), the first batch of devices delivers…

Two Azure data centers were brought online in South Africa–one in Cape Town and the other in Johannesburg. This makes Microsoft the first major cloud service provider to enter the African continent. Despite delays (the centers were to open…

Colourise is a free online service that allows you to colorize old black-and-white images with deep learning AI, Generative Adversarial Networks. It was developed during a hackathon by engineers from GovTech, Singapore’s government technology…

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is back with a new version of its Cheetah robot, the Mini Cheetah, which is unique in being able to do backflips, a first for a quadruped robot. This 9 kg robot is powerful and robust. It can…

According to the New York Times, Facebook is planning to roll out its own cryptocurrency. Facebook money would be good on its WhatsApp messaging application, allowing users to send money to friends and family. Unlike other, speculative…

You can now get a .dev domain name, no doubt the Holy Grail for developers, thanks to Google, which has just opened this extension to all. You can now reserve your .dev domain name through your registrar for the usual price, typically 12 to 15 USD…

No sooner had Samsung introduced its Galaxy Fold than the competition leveraged the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to unveil their own version of the foldable phone. 2019 will be known as Year I of the era of foldable phones, with Huawei, Oppo…

Foldable screens aren’t just for telephones anymore. Other applications are being dreamt up, like Nubia Alpha’s smart watch, unveiled at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress. The eSIM version could be thought of as an Android phone with a 960 x 192…

Microsoft has unveiled the second generation of its augmented reality headset. With a wider field of vision and improved ergonomics, the HoloLens 2 addresses the biggest issues with the first-generation device. Each eye has a display of 2,000 x…

Nike recently launched Adapt BB, the first smart-phone controlled, self-lacing shoe. Thanks to a motor built into the sole, an application makes it possible to tie and untie the laces. Unfortunately, many users of these 350 USD shoes indicate that…

At the 2019 Unpacked event in San Francisco, Samsung’s presentation of its new collapsible phone stole the show, leaving the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus in the shadows. In shut phone mode, the device has a screen of 4.6 inches (840 x 1,960 pixels).

Sphero, known for its ball-shaped educational robots such as the Bolt, has introduced a new robot with a completely different design concept. Called RVR, it is a robust little four-wheeled tank with tracks. Unlike other Sphero robots, the RVR is…

Given the huge success of services like Netflix, iTunes and Prime Video, the Blu-ray format seems to be stalling, especially in North America. Samsung, for example, told Forbes and CNET that it would no longer launch new Blu-ray player models and it…

Based in Seattle, start-up Xnor presented a prototype wireless mini camera that runs entirely on solar energy and can analyze the image captures. The sensor has a resolution of 320 x 320 pixels and is coupled with an FPGA integrated circuit to…

Researchers at the École polytechnique fédérale de Zurich (ETH Zürich) have built Skaterbot, a four-legged robot on skates. Skaterbot’s legs, which are 3D-printed, are modular, so that their design can be modified with the addition or removal of…

North’s Focals smart glasses look like regular glasses, but provide an AR environment. Unlike Google Glass, they don’t have a camera; but they do let you see notifications from your phone through Bluetooth, much like a smartwatch. You can control…

Ants in temperate climates use pheromone trails to navigate. But pheromones don’t last in arid climates, on hot, sandy ground. Desert ants have therefore learned to navigate using the only signpost available to them: the sun. Researchers have tried…

Mozilla is in the process of deploying Clever-Commit, a machine-learning tool dedicated to hunting down bugs. This software was developed in Montreal by Ubisoft La Forge, the game developer’s research lab, in partnership with Concordia University.

In the beginning of micro-computing, computers had severely limited sound ability: they could beep, and that’s about it. Nor did you want to hear that beep, as it usually meant an input error, a crash, or a hardware problem. IBM’s Personal Computer…

The Raspberry Pi Foundation opened a boutique in the Grand Arcade shopping center in the heart of Cambridge, home of the world’s most famous nano-computer. You can buy the Raspberry Pi, of course, but also additional modules, accessories, books…

Unicode finalized a list of 230 new emojis for 2019. That might sound like a lot, but if we don’t count the new variations of colors, skin tones and gender, it’s actually only 59. But these are really essential emojis! How have we gotten this far…

Cybersecurity specialist Linuz Henze has discovered a major security breach in the Keychain Access application on macOS Mojave, which is specifically responsible for protecting all your login credentials and sensitive information (passwords…

Google has released a Chrome extension called Password Checkup. Its role is to check passwords, both those stored in the password manager and those you enter manually, to ensure that they are not associated with hacked accounts. It operates through…

According to the security company Trend Micro, Google has removed 29 malicious Android applications from its Google Play Store. These are applications that in appearance improve and transform photos, but in fact hide malicious features. Of the 29…

Researchers at New York University and Stanford University convinced Facebook users to take a break from the social network for four weeks. Nearly 3,000 users accepted the challenge and completed detailed questionnaires about their daily routine…

iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum, announced Terra, its first autonomous lawnmower. While most autonomous lawnmowers require buried wires in order to define the boundaries of the area to be mowed, the Terra only requires wireless beacons around…

When you think of computers or accessories by Razer, black immediately comes to mind–not pink. But this is a special, limited-series operation for Valentine’s. The company will not charge the notorious “pink tax”: the price is the same as for…

Gadgets and gizmos have gradually worked their way into our homes. When they break down or need upgrading, we discard them. But there are unforeseen hazards to throwing out (or recycling, if you have a green conscience) a connected object such as a…

Samsung has announced the arrival of a eUFS storage chip (embedded Universal Flash Storage) for phones, with a capacity of one terabyte, which is a worldwide first. This new chip is the same size as the previous one, which was 512 GB, and…

Apple News, the mobile news application launched in 2015 with iOS 9, was initially exclusive to customers in the United States. Since then, it has been made available in Great Britain and in Australia with iOS 9.1. Today, Apple announced that News…

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new technology for 3D printing that is 100 times faster than conventional additive printing. If you’ve ever stood around a 3D printer watching it build your object at an agonizingly slow…

DxOMark is known for rigourously testing the quality of cameras and smartphones, but until now, it had ignored the front-facing cameras, mainly used for selfies. The new DxOMark Selfie listing, which scores the 12 most popular devices (for now)…

Since Apple killed off the audio jack, smart phones have steadily been evolving towards a portless future. Audio jacks are becoming extinct, and the “Home” button now seems to be at risk. Chinese company Meizu has taken the trend to its natural…

OLED (Organic light-emitting diode) screens for laptops are coming sooner than expected. Samsung’s Displays division announced that next month, it will start producing a 15.6-inch, 4K OLED display for premium laptops (OLED displays being much more…

Nostalgia seems to be a lucrative niche in technology gadgets … The legendary 2004 Motorola Razr will be making a comeback as a smart phone, for the price of … hang tight … USD 1,500. Motorola Mobility, which Lenovo bought out from…

A youtuber, publishing under the pseudonym Electronic Grenade, designed an absurd laptop–a conceptual work of art, in fact. It’s a mouse that houses a computer with a keyboard and a screen, and the mouse-house doubles as the mouse for the mini…

In a year from now, on January 14, 2020, Microsoft will no longer offer any technical support or security updates for Windows 7. Launched in 2009, Windows 7 came with regular support until January 2015, the year Windows 10 appeared. Since then, the…

Bocco Emo is the new generation of emotive robots by the Tokyo start-up Yukai, the same one that designed Qoobo, the petting robot. This new little robot expresses its empathy through gestures and sounds, in response to the user’s voice or text…

All Lovot wants is to be loved. And to this end, Kaname Hayashi, a former developer of the humanoid robot Pepper, made the robot irresistible, like a hybrid between a stuffed penguin and a teletubby baby with large dreamy eyes. It doesn’t even…

With the long awaited ramp-up of its 10nm production, Intel was finally able to present some exciting new features at CES Las Vegas that will come out in 2019. The major announcement was the release of Ice Lake chips based on the new Sunny Cove…

Designed by a French company, the connected sofa that we were all waiting for, that vibrates, lights up, activates Alexa, and recharges your phone, was presented at the latest CES in Las Vegas. The Smart Sofa uses several technologies, including…

Area-51m, unveiled at CES in Las Vegas, is going for the gamers’ hardware dream: a game-oriented laptop that lets them swap out the processor (CPU), the graphics card (GPU), the storage (HDD) and the memory (RAM). In short, a laptop that offers all…

Some people like to have more than one keyboard, for example if you need to write in two different languages. You may also want to customize your keyboard to suit your particular needs. At the CES in Las Vegas, a French company presented an elegant…

To mark the end of the year, Google is offering a little game in the form of a multiple-choice quiz that lets you test your knowledge (or your hunches) about the most popular Internet searches in 2018. Did users google Justin Trudeau or Justin…

Apple confirmed for the editors of The Verge that some of its iPad Pros, 2018 vintage, come with a slight curvature to the aluminum chassis. But nothing to worry about, according to the company: this is a “side effect of the manufacturing process”…

According to Bloomberg, next year, LG Electronics plans to start selling a 65-inch TV screen that can, at the touch of a button, roll up and disappear into a box. The device uses OLED technology, which makes for screens that are much more flexible…

Nvidia researchers have created an artificial intelligence capable of generating realistic portraits of imaginary individuals through a generative antagonist network (GAN). Such systems have been generating human faces for a while now, but never…

Serve is an experimental robot by Postmates, an American courier delivery company. The future of this kind of delivery robot outside of highly protected environments is doubtful, but with its design that is indubitably reminiscent of Wall-E, its big…

SplashData analyzed more than 5 million passwords that were leaked on the Internet, and just like the seven previous years the company has reviewed the data, people continue to set predictable, easy-to-guess passwords that rely on strings of letters…

At its re:Invent 2018 event, Amazon Web Services introduced several new features, including its hybrid cloud offering, Outposts, which allows businesses to have a piece of AWS’s cloud in-house, in a shared space, or in a data center of their choice.

To run an online game, you need a suite of services that goes beyond the functionality of a game engine like Unreal. Epic Games has developed and intensively field-tested such a suite of services with Fortnite, its worldwide hit that brings together…

Puma is reissuing a limited edition of its RS-Computer running shoe, originally released in 1986. These shoes, which wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Stranger Things, had a strange protrusion on the heel of the right shoe that housed an…

Many key players in consumer electronics are trying to anticipate the effects of the trade war between the United States and China. In order to avoid taxation on its Chinese-made cameras upon entry into the United States, GoPro announced that it…

Cryptocurrencies are undoubtedly an idea before its time, but their potential has yet to show its value. These past weeks have been brutal on the stock market and cryptocurrencies are slipping as well. Ethereum network’s currency, ether, fell below…

Microsoft will replace its current Edge browser, which uses its own EdgeHTML rendering engine, and Chakra JavaScript engine, with a new browser based on Chromium (a Blink rendering engine and V8 JavaScript engine). For now, the new browser’s code…

Qualcomm officially unveiled its new Snapdragon 855 SoC. It will ship with the next generation of top-of-the-line Android phones, most likely starting with the Samsung Galaxy S10. As with Apple’s A12, its 7 nanometer process will make the processor…

A startup in San Francisco purchased the rights for the Palm trademark from TCL last year to launch a mini Android phone named Palm Phone, which bears no relation to the old products associated with the brand that went under in 2010. The device is…

DJI introduced a new mini camera mounted on a gimbal called The Osmo Pocket. It’s 12.2 cm tall and weighs just 116 g, which means it’s so portable that you wouldn’t think twice about bringing it along. Its small size has no bearing on its…

Microsoft has won a $480 million contract to develop a HoloLens-type augmented reality prototype for use in combat and military training for the US Army. According to Bloomberg, the agreement could eventually lead to the purchase of over 100,000…

There’s a lot of talk about self-driving cars, but the revolution has also spread to other modes of transport. In Norway, the Folgefonn, an 85-meter ferry belonging to the Norled company, autonomously sailed to three different ports of call. All…

Samsung just revealed its new solid state drive (SSD) lineup that comes in three flavors and doesn’t break the bank: 1, 2 and 4 TB. The 2.5-inch form with SATA interface fits into most laptops and desktops. On the performance front, the…

If you’ve been following us, you know how much we’re liking SpotMini, Boston Dynamic’s four-legged critter. So we sat up when we heard of the idea to transform it into some creepy centaur. The Italian startup Youbionic came up with a torso and two…

A trio at Osaka University has been working on an android head-and-face since 2011. They’re making progress. By deforming 116 micropoints of its facial anatomy, they can raise its eyelids, pucker a lip, or release all features of the face. It…

Nera is an electric motorcycle that is entirely 3D printed. Like the bicycle tire we wrote about in May, this motorcycle is the work of BigRep, a German company that distributes big Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printers, which can produce objects…

In an interview with Axios on HBO, Tim Cook defended Apple’s decision to use Google as the default search engine. This decision doesn’t jibe with the company’s strong rhetoric on the protection of personal data and private life, considering that…

In a post published on his personal blog, Bill Gates admits liking Silicon Valley, the popular HBO series that follows the tribulations of the startup Pied Piper. “The show is a parody, so it exaggerates things, but like all great parodies it…

KOSEN are schools in Japan that teach technology. They offer a 5-year engineering program for 15-year-olds graduating from high school. Teams of students representing various KOSEN schools throughout the country compete on a given theme at an annual…

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, a single-board nanocomputer using an ARM processor. Its goal is to offer something more affordable and less cumbersome than its Pi 3 Model B+. Introduced at US$ 25, it’s 10 bucks less…

Microsoft launched a preview of PlayFab Multiplayer Servers, a new Azure-based service that gives game developers tools that ease many things that are normally a tedious aspect of multiplayer game development: managing players’ identities and…

Just over a month since its initial release, Microsoft is making the Windows 10 October Update (the new name for the old “Fall Creators Update”) once again available, but only for select customers (those skilled users who manually tell their system…

HTTP, aka Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the foundation of the World Wide Web, will abandon its TCP data transport layer. Since the TCP/IP Model has been fundamental to the Internet since its inception, the change is significant. In its next version…

Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Institute (AIST) has developed a humanoid robot able to take on a variety of tasks typically performed on construction and renovation sites. Called HRP-5P, it can be seen putting up drywall in a…

In 2017, Samsung said it would launch a foldable Galaxy Note in 2018, while cautioning that there were still “challenges to overcome”. The challenges must be stubborn, since no folding phone looks to be launched this year. However, on Wednesday, at…

Netgear unveiled its first 802.11ax-compatible routers, the new standard recently renamed Wi-Fi 6. Though the Nighthawk AX8 and Nighthawk AX12 are very high-end routers, we’re not impressed so much with their function as with their form: with their…

Yongnuo, a Hong Kong photographic equipment manufacturer, unveiled a mirrorless camera that runs on Android 7.1 and is EF-compatible, which means you can use it with any high-end Canon lense. Temporarily called “YN450”, the device offers a…

At Microsoft’s Future Decoded conference taking place in London, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that underwater server farms are part of the company’s plans for future data centers. He cites the proximity of humans to water: half of the…

The European Union has launched the iBorderCtrl project to further monitor third-country nationals who want to cross the borders of the Schengen area. Users will interact with a digital border guard that will direct them to enter their passports and…

IBM announced its intent to acquire Linux’s Red Hat for the handsome sum of $34 billion. Red Hat, started in 1994, made a name for itself with its eponymous Linux distribution which was widely used until its phase-out in 2004. With the Red Hat…

You find cats irresistible, but the hair, the scratched furniture, the soiled litter, and the smell of cod liver cat food aren’t your thing? Here’s a solution: a cat robot that eats nothing but electricity. Nybble is a feline robot with a structure…

Following a rough patch caused by CEO Elon Musk’s series of bad PR moves, Tesla finally has some good news: it’s in the black. Last Wednesday, the electric car manufacturer published its quarterly returns, unveiling revenues of close to 6.8 billion…

Last June, we reported that Apple was working on iOS 12 so that law enforcement would find it much harder to hack locked iPhones. A favourite among police forces, the GrayKey device, which connects to the Lightning port to unlock iPhones, was in the…

Just like we do, IEEE Spectrum magazine loves robots. Its team just launched a new web site featuring about 200 robots that aims to be a core reference for robotics enthusiasts. For each robot, you’ll find a description along with photos and even…

As soon as it appeared in 1997, Winamp was the most popular free MP3 player on Windows and also the most downloaded freeware. Its creator, Nullsoft, was bought by AOL in 1999 for around 100 million. Since then, Winamp has been in a slow tailspin…

Apple is paying $300 million in cash for a portion of Dialog, including licensing power-management technologies, assets, and more than 300 employees. The company will advance an additional $300 million cash flow as an upfront for the components it…

Mochibot is a strange and remarkable robot made of 32 individually actuated telescoping legs, developed by a team of researchers from the Keiō and Tokyo universities. Its shape—which looks like a sphere when it’s at rest—is based on a rhombic…

Google just unveiled its third-generation Pixel 3 and 3 XL smartphones. The exterior design has evolved since the previous generation. Though the dimensions are the same, the aluminum back has been replaced by a glass panel and a big notch now…

Since the departure of Steve Ballmer, who was of the opinion that Linux was the pox for anything related to intellectual property, it’s been a veritable honeymoon between Microsoft and Linus Torvald’s brainchild. Latest installment in this new love…

Though it’s been quiet, Google Plus, the social network launched in 2011 to counter Facebook’s dominance, still exists. But not for much longer. After the Wall Street Journal reported that Google exposed the private details of some 500,000 Google+…

A group of health researchers in India have tried to tally the death toll from selfie taking, counting 259 deaths worldwide from October 2011 to November 2017. This probably underestimates the casualties, as the researchers went only from news…

According to a report by Sandvine, 15% of the total volume of data traffic is consumed by Netflix—an indicator of how video dominates the internet. And right behind Netflix’s number-one position worldwide–yet more video services. In second…

The WiFi Alliance consortium has revised its naming conventions for Wi-Fi standards to make them easier to tell apart. Until now, the versions had convoluted names such as 802.11ac or 802.11g, which were difficult to memorize. Going forward, we’ll…

HP unveiled a new ultra-thin laptop computer, usable as a tablet, with a leather cover on the outside. Integral to the design, the thick leather sheet is not removable. It even has a functional purpose: it attaches the screen to the body, acting as…

A recent report revealed that the voting machines used in 26 American States as well as in the District of Columbia have a serious security flaw. Election Systems & Software’s Model 650’s update procedures pose a security risk that had been…

Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially launched their company on September 4, 1998, headquartered in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Now, on Google’s 20th birthday, you can see the…

Tomorrow, in New York, Amazon will open a new store that only sells the most popular products on its on-line platform. Called Amazon 4-star, the store sells electronics, kitchen and home items, toys, books and games that have garnered a 4-star…

The famous Rubik’s cube, invented in 1974 in Hungary by Ernő Rubik, an architect and professor of design, has been sold by the hundreds of millions. Today, it is practically being reinvented: thanks to the ingeniousness of a Japanese engineer, the…

Amazon announced the impending release of its first kitchen appliance: a microwave oven that is compatible with the Alexa system. Moreover, it will include Dash Replenishment Services, which means it can automatically order popcorn from Amazon. With…

Using Linux on Windows 10 has never been easier. With the Fall Creators update, the Hyper-V Quick Create function, which offers three-click creation of Virtual Machines, now offers a Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS system image specifically configured for this…

Following in the footsteps of the successful NES Classic Edition and Super NES Classic, Sony is emulating the Nintendo strategy to bring back an older console as a miniature gaming device and calling it “Classic”: nearly 25 years after its initial…

Do you still have money to burn after you’ve purchased the new iPhone X? You now need a case worthy of your new device and we have it all dialed in for you: the Gray brand out of Singapore offers titanium cases with a starting price of CA$1,130 for…

Flying insects like bees, dragonflies, and fruit flies can perform impressive aerodynamic feats, particularly when seeking to escape predators or the movements of an annoyed human. Now Dutch scientists have built a flying robot capable of executing…

In the upcoming version of Windows 10, set to launch in October, when you try to install Chrome or Firefox, a large window will pop up with the message, “You already have Microsoft Edge – the safer, faster browser for Windows 10.” You’ll then have…

Sphero unveiled the Bolt, its new and improved version of the spherical educational robot Spark+ from 2016. Its trademark see-through shell displays several innovations, like an 8x8 LED diode matrix making a screen that can display a smiling…

Samsung is releasing a tracker – a tag allowing you to locate the object it is attached to – that’s powered by LTE-M network, unlike other, competing trackers, like Tile Mate, that work with Bluetooth and have a limited range of a couple of hundred…

Qualcomm has released a new processor for smartwatches and other wearables, the Snapdragon Wear 3100, intended to extend battery life, enhance always-on displays, and offer greater versatility. This new development was highly anticipated by the…

The Scoobe3D is an affordable, handset-sized 3D scanner that is touted to be accurate to an outstanding 0.1mm. This accuracy is delivered through a combination of three technologies: time of flight, photogrammetry and polarized 3D. Scoobe3D can scan…

It looks like the Cambridge Analytica debacle just won’t quit. A few months back, it was revealed that the former consulting firm had collected data on millions of Facebook users without their consent. Now, a recent survey shows that in the past 12…

Just one month after Apple, Amazon passed a market value of 1 trillion dollars yesterday. After 24 years of operation, the company is the second in history to reach the symbolic milestone of 1,000 billion dollars (1012). Founded in 1994 by Jeff…

For its tenth anniversary, Google’s Web browser, which dominates the market, has been given a new, minimalist look. Chrome’s new user interface, available on all Chrome-supported platforms, follows Google’s Material Design 2 system, for a more…

Though this toy is ostensibly for children aged 8 and up, we believe that children of all ages will love it! Created by Mattel, Alpha Training Blue is a robotic velociraptor weighing 4lbs and standing a foot high with its beak turned to the sky. It…

Lenovo has unveiled its second-generation Yoga Book, following up on the first version in August of 2016. The concept is original: the Yoga Book opens like a book, with a touchscreen on the left-hand side (LCD IPS, 10.8 inches, 2560 x 1600) and, on…

At the IFA show in Berlin, Acer unveiled an impressive gaming armchair called Predator Thronos. It looks like a cockpit equipped with a seat that reclines to 140°, and three 27-inch screens providing a panoramic view that wraps around the player for…

Last November, we celebrated the resurrection of Sony’s dog robot, Aibo, which was killed a dozen years ago. But the new Aibo ERS-1000 was unfortunately only available in Japan at the time. Now, there’s a new development: after selling 20,000 units…

Lithium-ion batteries have made headlines for the wrong reason: as a fire hazard. Lithium-ion batteries store much more energy than previous chemistries could manage, making them crucial to the future success of phones, drones, electric cars, etc.

Starting this week, residents of Scottsdale, Arizona, can get their groceries delivered by a self-driving vehicle. This on-the-ground experiment is the result of a partnership between autonomous vehicle builder Nuro, and Kroger, the U.S.’s largest…

After a year of wild speculation that saw Bitcoin and Ethereum reach new highs, 2018 has been a disaster for cryptocurrencies. The trend was reversed at the beginning of the year and their value started dropping, and never stopped. Today, the market…

Google Chrome is slowly but surely taking over the world of desktop browsers. According to analytics vendor Net Applications, which keeps statistics on tens of thousands of websites all over the world, its main rivals have lost yet more ground over…

“Where’s Waldo?” is a series of picture books created by Martin Handford. The idea is to find the main character, Waldo, in an image. The problem is that each image is crammed with hundreds of people and objects, making it tough to quickly find…

On Thursday, in New York, Samsung unveiled 3 new products: the new Note 9 phone, a smart speaker called Galaxy Home, and the new Galaxy Watch. The Note 9, which will be available as of August 24, looks an awful like its predecessors, but is more…

On Wednesday, Anki unveiled its new robot, Vector, which looks a lot like the adorable Cozmo. Just like Cozmo, Anki reminds us of a palm-sized WALL-E, but with far more features. Vector comes with a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon, a wide-angle…

After raising some 2.3 billion dollars and working draped in secret for 8 years, the mysterious startup Magic Leap is finally releasing a product, the augmented reality headset Magic Leap One, for US$2,295. This headset is relatively light (415g)…

To the dismay of those who still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Earth is flat, Google has given up the Mercator projection for its mapping services. If you zoom out on the web version, you’ll find that Earth is now a globe. This…

The Naked 3D Scanner is a mirror that creates a 3D clone of your body. The integrated computer scans your body to produce some 4GB of data, compresses it down to a 4MB 3D model, then sends it to a mobile application that lets you see the changes in…

Last May, Google removed its long-time unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil”, from the company’s corporate code of conduct. Just wait until you know why. To satisfy the Chinese government’s strict Internet censorship rules, Google has developed a…

The worldwide tablet market has been declining for the last 4 years, and the second quarter of 2018 did nothing to reverse the trend. In fact, only Apple and Huawei were able to post modest growth, according to IDC’s latest report. The number of…

In the late morning of Thursday, August 2, 2018, Apple made history when its share price hit US$207.05 on Wall Street, becoming the first company to ever be worth one trillion (1012) dollars. Not bad for a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy…

Samsung launched its nifty Tab S4, the successor to last year’s S3. The S4 works in both classic touchscreen tablet and desktop modes thanks to Dex software that allows you to connect it to a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor, while offering an…

This quarter, Facebook had 185 million users in the U.S. and Canada, roughly the same number as in the first quarter. North America is Facebook’s most lucrative market by far, with the average user generating US$25.91 in revenue. This is the fourth…

Windows 10’s next semi-annual update will use machine learning models to make update-related reboots less annoying for users. Currently, Windows can detect whether you’re working or not (inactive mouse and keyboard, no video streaming, etc.) and…

The first smart device running on Android Things is here. The “Smart Display” is a smart speaker with built-in touchscreen, like Amazon’s Echo Show, but using Google Assistant. Android Things is a lite version of the Android system, specifically…

Sony has introduced a new 48-megapixel sensor for smartphones. Current phones are usually equipped with 12 megapixel cameras (Apple, Samsung Galaxy), sometimes 20 megapixel. Sony’s IMX586 sensor is 6.4 x 4.8 mm with a pixel size of 0.8…

Good news for gamers! Thanks to a dampening of speculation activity on cryptocurrencies, the price of graphics cards (which are used massively for mining) is coming back down from its stratospheric levels. The Radeon RX 570, a popular mid-range…

Dale Sande and Kianosh Pourian, from Spiria Boston, recorded an hour-long podcast for the Internet show Shop Talk. Of course, it’s all about their passion and specialty: the Internet of Things. If you’re interested and want to know more, go listen…

Behind the CurlicueCal handle is a Doctor in Entomology specialized in ant behaviour. Recently, CurlicueCal posted ratings of various ant emojis on her Tumblr page: Microsoft’s, Apple’s, Facebook’s, Twitter’s and others. From a myrmecological point…

Researchers have put together a kit that masquerades as a GPS satellite in order to lure receptors into sending drivers in the wrong direction. The team, made up of researchers from Microsoft and Virginia Tech in the U.S. and China’s University of…

Tuesday July 17 was World emoji Day, and to celebrate, Apple emojified its entire leadership team. From Tim Cook to Eddy Cue, through Craig Federighi and Jonathan Ive, every last director was replaced by memojis, avatars that can be personalised to…

To celebrate the Infobar phone’s 15th birthday, Japanese company KDDI will be launching a third iteration of the handset in October, and it’s fair to say that third time pays for all. Of course, it’s still an Android phone with bare-bones…

It looks like Microsoft is out to overtake Slack on the enterprise chatting and messaging market, offering Microsoft Teams for free. Of course, the free version has some limitations, but they are far less restrictive than Slack’s. For example…

Big Clapper is a one-meter tall robot that looks like a stand-mounted tomato with hands coming out of its top. The robot’s main goal in life is to clap its hands in various modes: one clap, three claps, continuous clapping, on-demand claps, clapping…

David Zarrouk, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, unveiled Rising STAR, a robot with amazing locomotion skills that can crawl like a turtle or roll on wheels, as it pleases. The neatest aspect of its locomotion is its variable…

Microsoft launched the Surface Go, a new entry-level tablet which is basically a smaller version of the Surface Pro, at a wallet-friendly price of US$400 (US$500 with the Type Cover keyboard). It features a 10-inch touchscreen with a 1800 x 1200…

CNBC has produced a story on the world’s largest collection of Apple prototypes. Over the last 10 years, Henry “Hap” Plain collected over 250 prototypes of Apple products, which are rare items by definition. Aside from numerous Macintoshes, there…

There’s competition for Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini…Today, MIT presented the Cheetah 3, a 40kg, four-legged robot similar to SpotMini. The major difference between the two robots is that the Cheetah 3 has no cameras to steer itself; it’s blind. It…

What is old is new again, at least if you ask Amazon. After the demise of the Toys ‘R Us chain, the online retailer is stepping up to try to fill the void. This holiday season, the e retail giant is releasing a massive old-fashioned hard copy toy…

The BASIC Engine is an open-source single-board nanocomputer the size of a Raspberry Pi, with functions based on PCs from the late 80s and early 90s, that will tickle those who yearn for that time and all things retro. It connects to a monitor or a…

Samsung smartphones are no longer spontaneously combusting, but another weird and disturbing quirk has arisen: some users have had their pictures randomly sent to others. According to complaints on Reddit and on official Samsung forums, several…

Tesla announced that in the second quarter, it produced 53,339 vehicles, an increase of 55% over the first quarter. For the first time, production of Model 3s edged higher than the combined totals of the S and X models (28,578 vs. 24,761); the…

After breaking his phone, Philip Frenzel, a 25-year-old student of mechatronics engineering at the University of Aalen, in Germany, invented a “mobile airbag” that automatically deploys when you drop your phone, protecting it from damage. Frenzel…

Several companies, like Nuro, are working on autonomous delivery vehicles. But Robomart is turning the idea on its head by bringing the entire grocery store to your doorstep. In the promo video, the autonomous vehicle is equipped with shelves…

Wi-Fi devices have been using the same security protocol for over a decade. But today, that’s about to change: the Wi-Fi Alliance, which oversees the adoption of the Wi-Fi standard, will start certifying products that support WPA3, the successor to…

Cemtrex has taken the idea of an all-in-one office desk to a whole new level. Its sleek SmartDesk features three 24-inch IPS touchscreen displays, a proprietary gesture recognition system which allows you to turn pages with a wave of the hand, a…

At the University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab, roboticists have developed a robot called DRAGON. This flying, modular robot can literally transform on the fly, for example stretching out from a square to a snake to pass through a narrow opening, then…

Unlocking your car with your smartphone and doing away with a bulky key is no longer the stuff of dreams. A consortium of automobile and smartphone builders recently published specifications for a digital key that would work on all phones and all…

To obtain quality slow motion in a 24 fps video, you need to film at a rate of 48 fps. And to capture split-second events like the bursting of a balloon, you will need thousands of frames per second using expensive, specialized equipment. This is…

In San Francisco, in front of a small assembly of reporters, IBM Research displayed a new AI machine dedicated to the art of debate and argument. Two humans took on the machine to debate various issues, while the audience graded the human and…

There’s also good news in Elon Musk’s world: The Boring Company, its tunnel-boring outfit, has won its first contract. On Thursday, the City of Chicago announced that the Mayor’s office had chosen Musk’s company to build an express line from…

Things aren’t going so well at Tesla. On Tuesday, staff were told that the company would shed 4,100 jobs out of 46,000, or about 9% of its workforce. In mid-May, Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, had warned that the company would undertake a “thorough…

Apple is planning to add a new feature to iOS, an enhanced version of the “USB Restricted Mode” that appeared in beta iOS 11.4.1, making it much harder for law enforcement officers to access data on locked iPhones. If your future iOS 12 remains…

The United States is back in supercomputer pole position since last week’s announcement, by the US Department of Energy and IBM, of the Summit, the world’s newest most powerful computer, lapping China’s Sunway TaihuLight. With a peak performance of…

The leak of internal Microsoft documents has given us an idea of what new hardware the company has in store for us. A new version of its HoloLens AR headset, code-named Sydney, should hit the market in the first quarter of 2019, for developers and…

Google announced a new beta version of Android P which includes updates of existing emojis as well as 157 new emojis, like a skateboard and a lobster. Observant observers observed that the green salad emoji no longer includes a slice of hard-boiled…

Good news: Linux app support is now available for Samsung’s Chromebook Plus. Mind you, it’s still not standard, nor will most Chromebook users want it. To obtain it, you’ll have to specify you want the developer version of Chrome OS, enable beta and…

Security researcher Troy Mursch has found that over 115,000 Drupal Web sites — including those of large universities, government organisations and media companies — are wide open to hacker takeovers because they haven’t installed critical security…

At Computex 2018, Nvidia unveiled two new products: Nvidia Isaac, a new development platform, and the Jetson Xavier, an artificial intelligence computer, both designed to power autonomous robots that navigate the real world. The Isaac platform is a…

Microsoft has reached an agreement worth 7.5 billion dollars with GitHub, the source code repository and collaborative software development platform. The all-stock deal should close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval in the US…

Time magazine’s latest issue features a piece on the explosion of drones in our culture and, to illustrate the point, the cover was made with 958 illuminated drones, and a 959th one to take a photo of them. The drones all hover in formation to…

Yesterday, Asus announced a new motherboard called H370 Mining Master. As its name suggests, it was developed specifically for mining cryptocurrencies. In fact, the motherboard sports a whopping 20 PCIe-over-USB ports supporting as many graphics…

EDG, a New York architecture and engineering firm, has developed a 3D printing process to restore the city’s architectural gems. Thanks to a 3D scanning laser, software like 3DSMax and Rhino as well as specialized algorithms, EDG is able to print…

After a long-drawn-out, seven-year battle in the courts, which included a retrial, Samsung has had to pay Apple US$539 million in damages for patent infringement. Samsung was found to have copied two utility and three design features of the…

After the wheels comes the frame: Arevo, a Silicon Valley startup, has just unveiled a carbon-fiber bicycle frame fabricated using additive manufacturing, a world first. The company has taken a standard six-axis robotic arm and equipped it with a…

VPN Filter, a sophisticated malware, uses known vulnerabilities to infect routers made by Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, QNAP and TP-Link. Once installed, the malware uses a central infrastructure to install specialized plug-ins on the router. One…

According to Bloomberg, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) started mass production of new generation processors ahead of the launch of the new iPhone later this year. The chip, which is expected to be called the A12, will probably be the…

British on-line grocery store Ocado has developed an impressive robotic grocery order assembly platform. Videos of its Andover, Hampshire warehouse are mesmerizing: a swarm of 600 robots, coordinated through artificial intelligence, swish back and…

Russian handset company Caviar, whose claim to fame is flamboyant, pricy devices, has developed its “Tesla” model of the iPhone X, its first equipped with photoelectrical cells. The large solar panel on the back powers a dedicated battery, which in…

BigRep is a German 3D printing company able to print objects of up to one meter per side on its proprietary large-scale 3D printer, BigRep One. Marco Mattia Cristofori, a designer at BigRep, has developed and printed a honeycomb bicycle tire with no…

Researchers with the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign and Intel have developed a deep neural network that brightens ultra-low light images without adding noise and other artifacts. The network was trained using over 5,000 pairs of images…

Today, Boston Dynamics released two YouTube videos showing the progress made by its Atlas and SpotMini robots. SpotMini’s is more interesting: you see the four-legged bot cruising around autonomously on a designated route across an office and a…

Chinese phone manufacturer ZTE Corporation, which was founded in 1985 and employs 75,000 people, has announced it’s shutting down operations, and is likely headed for bankruptcy, unless there’s a drastic turnaround from the Trump Administration. ZTE…

During its annual developer conference, Google officially announced the launch of its Internet of Things platform. Like Android TV, Android Automotive or Wear OS, Android Things is a version of the Android operating system specifically designed to…

A new world record for the Rubik’s cube has been set by Feliks Zemdegs, who solved the cube in 4.22 seconds. This isn’t the first world record for the 22-year old professional “speedcuber” from Australia – he previously won the world record at 4.73…

French website MacGeneration has developed a nifty graphic that plots iPhone, iPad and Mac sales from 2007 to today. It shows that sales of Apple phones from 2008 onwards exploded, but seem to have levelled off after 2016. Between 2017 and today…

Creating deep learning models is difficult and time-consuming. You’ll need the time to master many skills before you even start, and the learning curve for the techniques is quite steep. Some talented artificial intelligence engineers have recently…

Misty Robotics, an offshoot of Sphero, recently announced Misty II, the second generation of its programmable robot, which was first introduced at the CES last January. It’s a more refined version, targeted to a wider audience, but still heavy on…

On Tuesday, Facebook officially launched Oculus Go, the autonomous virtual reality headset that was first announced last October. Its $199 US price tag (for the 32 GB version) and its ease of use may well make it popular with the masses. You…

Have you ever dreamt about a real-life Transformer? If so, your dreams have come true. A team of three Japanese robotics and design firms has unveiled the J-deite RIDE, a car that transforms into humanoid form. It has been in development since 2014…

Her name is Vera, and she’s able to interview up to 1,500 candidates each day. She’s even able to check out profiles on employment websites, sift though applications and send out personalized emails. She can work 7 days a week, without the slightest…

In 2016, Apple came up with the idea of replacing the handgun emoji with a green plastic water pistol. Now, the days are numbered for the lethal weapon across all platforms. Google has hopped on the bandwagon with its latest Android update, and in…

The next version of Microsoft’s Windows 10 will include a new “Lean edition” developed for devices with less storage space. It will be offered to OEMs for use in low-cost laptops and tablets. This slimmed-down Windows 10 is aimed at devices with…

BBMW has unveiled a prototype motorcycle whose chassis and swingarm are entirely made by additive printing, using selective laser fusion. The company hasn’t yet released much information on this S1000RR Series motorcycle . The uber-futuristic and…

There are two kinds of people: those who love putting together Ikea furniture and derive a sense of pride and satisfaction from it, and those who absolutely hate it and find it a stressful, unnecessarily challenging experience. Now, thanks to…

To mark Earth Day, Apple has introduced Daisy, a new robot that disassembles old iPhones, making it easier to re-use and recycle their parts. Housed in an Apple factory in Austin, Texas, Daisy replaces her predecessor Liam, and uses certain…

Researchers at the University of Maryland, with the US Army Research Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, have unveiled a new zinc and water “aqueous zinc” battery that combines the best properties of zinc and lithium…

Microsoft has introduced Azure Sphere, a new solution to create connected objects. It’s made up of three main components: microcontrollers (MCUs) which integrate Microsoft security technology (Pluton sub-system), Azure Sphere Security Service, a…

When giving directions, we often use landmark buildings and businesses: “You’ll be taking a left after the pharmacy,” “Take a right just after McDonalds,” “Once you get to the church, stick to the left,” etc. Google Maps has decided to test this way…

Yes, we totally agree, this type of geeky thing really serves no purpose, but it’s fascinating nevertheless. A French hacker came up with the idea of running Mac OS 8.1, which dates from 1998, on the iPhone X, with an emulation of a Quadra 900, a…

A phone manufacturer that innovates in the realm of design and that doesn’t jump on the Apple bandwagon with notches everywhere, is deserving of notice. This being the case, on a prototype of a Doogee phone, you’ll notice the screen slides down to…

The cat and mouse game between municipalities and recipients of parking tickets has heated up. Meet the lawyer bots who will challenge parking tickets on your behalf, and who could end up costing cities big bucks. DoNotPay, for example is a free…

Louis Vuitton, the leather maker best known for its overpriced handbags and luggage emblazoned with loud monograms that turn you into a walking billboard for the luxury brand, is venturing into high tech with the same formula: overpriced and…

In North America, like in Asia, more and more youth between the ages of 18 and 35 live alone. In Korea, this phenomenon is particularly widespread, and researchers are trying to find ways to minimize the sense of isolation. Last month, during the…

The storm clouds are gathering over Tesla. At the beginning of April, its stock tumbled below $260 US, wiping out all of its gains from the past year, while last June it was soaring at more than $380 US. Its market capitalization has dipped back…

The BionicWheelBot is a new octopod robot whose design is inspired by the gymnast spider cebrennus rechenbergi, an arthropod discovered a decade ago in the southern Morocco desert, with locomotion that’s adapted to the dunes. The machine is…

Huawei presented its two new high-end phones in Paris in front of a crowd of 1500 journalists at the majestic Grand Palais. They both run on Android 8.1; the P20 Pro has an OLED screen and the P20 an LCD, but both display the same resolution (2,240…

After starting with Ubuntu, Microsoft has added other Linux distributions that can be used with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux): SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, openSUSE, Debian, Kali Linux. That’s great and all, but if Microsoft didn’t support your…

It seems that Samsung is having difficulties with its own processors. You may not know it, but the manufacturer uses a different system-on-a-chip on its high-end phones depending on the regions of the globe: for the most part, American, Chinese…

IBM has unveiled the world’s smallest computer — a device the size of a grain of salt. Presented at the Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas, the chip measures only 1x1mm, but has the processing power of an x86, i.e. that of the first IBM desktop…

Developed by a team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, SoFi is a soft-bodied robotic fish that can swim independently alongside real fish in the ocean. Its main use is as a research tool to observe marine life without…

Bloomberg has revealed that Apple has a secret manufacturing plant in Santa Clara, California, where it designs and creates its own screens using MicroLED technology. It’s likely doing this to sidestep Samsung and its OLED screens in future devices.

This is the conclusion of a long-term study that was just published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. At a time when too many people, including the President of the United States, think that video games are a part of the cause of violence among…

Shelly is a South Korean robot-tortoise that was created to teach young children to respect robots. The idea is to reduce or eliminate aggressive behaviours during interactions with the creature. Shelly is a toy that’s fun to play with and that…

The foundation waited for Pi (π) Day to announce an updated version of Raspberry Pi 3, its first 64-bit ARM processor single-chip nano-computer. Dubbed the model B+, there are no changes to its dimensions, connections, or price ($35 USD, or $46 CDN…

Now you too can own a replica of HAL-9000, the evil supercomputer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is also a virtual assistant that can control your home. Employees from the now-defunct Master Replicas, which created a range of props from Star Wars…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has just announced a milestone for the company’s heavy-duty electric trucks: the first production cargo trip for the Tesla Semi is now underway, with two trucks en route from the Sparks, Nevada Gigafactory, to the Tesla factory…

If you’re thinking of jumping into the cryptocurrency mining business, here’s an added bonus: you can heat your entire house by using a cryptocurrency mining rig with a wall-mounted radiator. Qarnot’s QC-1 “crypto heater” is one sleek-looking…

Or, to be precise, Microsoft is putting an end to Windows 10 S as a full-fledged operating system, and replacing it with a Windows 10 setting. Windows 10 S, which was launched last year, is a pared-down operating system primarily targeted towards…

Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology enables websites to load quickly on mobile devices. Today, the company announced that it is working to do away with the shortcomings of this technology by creating a standard that everyone can use.

Two hardware hackers have created a robot that has broken the records for fastest solving of a Rubik’s cube — in 0.38 seconds, which is 40 percent faster than the previous record of 0.637 seconds. In contrast to a human player, who would use a…

Google’s Chrome browser is now compiled with Clang on Windows. It replaces the Microsoft Visual C ++ compiler; the same compiler will be used by Google going forward for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. No doubt this makes Chrome the first major…

It looks like the US has hit peak Facebook and that it won’t be getting more users anytime soon. According to new research from the Pew Research Centre, 68 per cent of Americans use Facebook, a number that has remained stagnant for two years.

The new 4G LTE Light Phone 2 is simple and minimalist, radically design, equipped with a nice matte screen backlit with E-Ink, and weighs about 80 grams. The premise of this phone is to allow you to “reclaim your life”, because without…

Waymo has released a new video that allows you to step into their driverless vans and see what it’s like to experience a trip in one of their Chrysler Pacificas, providing a 360-degree view of what the car sees and how it works. Launched in…

Vulkan is the open graphics API that replaced OpenGL and is supported by all platforms, except iOS and macOS, as Apple uses its own Metal API. Game developers who want to create iOS or macOS versions have to use either Metal, which requires a lot of…

Samsung unveiled its new high-end phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. There weren’t any surprises, as most of the Galaxy’s features had already been leaked online. Externally, for the S9 as well as the bigger sibling the…

Sony’s Koov is a kit made up of over 300 pieces (see-through bricks, wheels, gears, sensors, motors, etc.) created to teach robotics and programming to youth ages 8–14. The kit comes with 23 plans for robots, but nothing prevents users from…

Skydio, a startup launched four years ago by MIT researchers, has announced its first product: the autonomous R1 drone, which is able to automatically follow your movements and film them in 4K. The R1 is equipped with 12 small onboard cameras, and…

Pixel phones generated a lot of buzz in the media, earning praise for their undeniable features, but the commercial success of the phones remains actually quite modest and has relegated Google to being a minor player in the market. According to…

AMD has launched two new four-core Ryzen processors (based on the Zen microarchitecture): the 5 2400G ($169 USD) and the 3 2200G ($99 USD). They are the first of their series to offer an integrated graphics processor (GPU), the Radeon…

Boston Dynamics has posted a video on Youtube depicting an interaction between two SpotMinis, those agile and graceful four-legged robots. The video, entitled, “Hey buddy, can you give me a hand,” shows a SpotMini heading towards a closed door and…

In early February, iBoot, which is code from the secure boot-up part of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, was leaked online and posted to GitHub. Apple sent GitHub a Digital Millennium Act takedown request, thus confirming it was indeed genuine…

Cleo Robotics has released a tiny, donut-shaped compact drone that can fit in the palm of your hand (it measures 95 mm in diameter, 33 mm thick, weighing 90 grams). It’s got a single pair of propellers on the same axis, housed inside a ring-shaped…

Intel has released a prototype of their smart glasses that look just like a regular pair of glasses, which is good news if you don’t want to turn into a strange cyborg, as with the failed Google Glass. They’re connected via Bluetooth to a phone…

Nissan has developed a nifty system that sends slippers to their rightful place at the entryway of a traditional Japanese inn (or ryokan) all by themselves, with the click of a button. Each slipper is outfitted with tiny wheels, a motor and sensors…

We’re now convinced that the head of Tesla and Space X can sell absolutely anything. Last year, Musk sold 50,000 Boring Company logo caps for $20 each. “After 50k hats, we will start selling The Boring Company flamethrower,” he joked. Today, he made…

At the beginning of last year, HMD Global, the Chinese manufacturer that exploits the Nokia brand, brought back the Finnish brand’s iconic model - the 3310, a sturdy, no frills and cheap phone which sold 126 million units during its heyday. After it…

Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, two roboticists who worked as engineers on Google’s autonomous vehicle project (now called Waymo), founded Nuro in 2016. This company is developing a completely autonomous electric vehicle, dubbed R1, that’s…

Lixies are number displays modelled on good old Nixie tubes. They use WS2812B smart LEDs, the light from which is directed to a stack of acrylic sheets. The pros: they’re cheaper, sturdier, longer-lasting, multicoloured and only need a low voltage…

At an event in New York, DJI just announced the newest model to join its line-up of drones, the Mavic Air. On the DJI range it rests between the foldable Mavic Pro and the ultra-portable Spark, combining some of the best features of the two. The…

According to a report from the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, we now spend almost an entire day each week online. The 15th annual report sheds some light on how our online behaviours are changing. Since 2000, the amount of time we…

Device manufacturer LG has filed a patent application for a phone with a foldable screen that can be opened like a book, turning into a tablet. The phone has an exterior display that shows the date and time, as well as notifications, when the device…

Ars Technica looks back on a prediction made in 2012, which at the time generated a lot of press: that the era of video game consoles was coming to an end. Time has proven this wrong, of course, as the game console market is thriving these days. NPD…

The developers at Misty Robotics, who also brought you Sphero, have created Misty I, an adorable little “advanced personal robot, that’s affordable and easy to program.” It’s targeted towards developers, who can program the device using a JavaScript…

A new set of AR smart glasses, dubbed the Blade, was recently unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by display provider Vuzix. Unlike previous versions developed by the company, the entire display and its power source are contained…

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a firm called Furrion unveiled Prothesis, an enormous four-legged exoskeleton. This strange, mobile monster measures 4.5 metres, weighs in at a whopping 3,620 kilos (watch your toes…) and was clocked at…

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Japanese startup Xenor unveiled a smart shirt with 14 sensors that can transform your torso into a video game controller. While the device seems limited in its current iteration, it’s clearly blazing a…

German security firm SYSS has just released a report that shows the vulnerability of Windows Hello: a printed photo of the device’s owner can be used to unlock devices where Windows Hello had previously been activated. Windows Hello has an infrared…

Virgin Hyperloop One has announced that its XPI prototype pod has achieved a new record-breaking speed—it was recently clocked at 387 km/h. This speed surpasses the 300 km/h reached by the French TGVs (“train à grande vitesse”, or high-speed train)…

Facebook is beefing up its use of facial recognition technology, and will now alert you if a friend, or a friend of a friend, uploads a picture with you in it, even if you weren’t tagged in the photo. If you aren’t OK with the publication of that…

Microsoft has just released a free version of its Quantum development kit, which includes the Q# (“cue-sharp”) programming language developed specifically for quantum computing, a quantum simulator and other resources for anyone interested in…

Within the Apple family, the iMac has always been the all-in-one entry-level model, right from the birth of the “Bondi Blue” iMac G3 19 years ago, with its daring design and translucent enclosure. Now, the iMac is all grown up: the impressive…

On Wednesday, Qualcomm unveiled its latest system-on-a-chip (SoC), Snapdragon 845, which will power all new high-end Android phones as of next year. Built by Samsung, the 10nm chip promises increased energy-efficiency combined with superior…

Paper Signals is an open-source Google project that allows you to build voice controlled folded paper objects; origami you can direct vocally. Using your voice, you can order these cute little guys to track the weather, bitcoin or rocket launches…

Last May, Google released its first AIY Project kit stemming from its partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, dubbed Voice HAT. Yesterday, Billy Rutledge, Google’s AIY Project Director, showed off Google’s new image recognition kit. The…

A web developer has just posted a video on DIY website howchoo, featuring his creation that’s a hybrid of Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa and Furby, the talking stuffed animal that was once on many children’s Christmas toy lists.

The field of robotics is constantly trying to imitate creatures from the animal kingdom, with much effort devoted to attempting to authentically imitate movement patterns. An area of robotics that’s less explored (no doubt due to ethical…

Remember last month’s brouhaha about the cheeseburger emoji for Android 8.0, when Google’s designers had the audacity to put the cheese slice under the beef patty? Right away, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was in full damage control mode; Google’s…

Vienna-based designer Klemens Schillingers has developed a series of five “Substitute Phones” to help people dealing with cellphone addiction. The phone-like objects have the same weight and shape as a smartphone, and contain stone beads that are…

Last June, it was rumoured that Toyota was on the verge of acquiring robot-maker Boston Dynamics, which at the time was a subsidiary of Alphabet-Google. SoftBank ended up sealing that deal, but that hasn’t dampened Toyota’s robotic ambitions, as…

Robby the Robot, star of the 1956 sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet, just broke the world record as the most expensive movie prop in the world, after clinching a winning bid of $5.37 million USD at auction in New York City. Measuring 7 feet tall, Robby…

Last night, in an airport hangar in Hawthorne, CA., Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a stylish prototype electric semi-truck that he said will travel 800 km (500 miles) on a full charge of its lithium-ion battery pack, go zero to 100 km/h (60 mph) in 20…

MekaMons are four-legged battle bots that can be controlled with your smart phone. They can be upgraded, and come with detachable feet, shields and weapons. They’re equipped with four IR sensors, which allow them to take stock of the environment…

Robot-maker Boston Dynamics, which is now owned by Japanese tech giant SoftBank, just posted a short YouTube clip showing off a new version of its four-legged robot, SpotMini. This robot, first unveiled in June 2016, became famous for its dramatic…

For the first time, China has become the country with the most systems on the yearly list of top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. China took 202 spots in the ranking, eclipsing the United States, with only 144 systems – its lowest ranking…

Slovakian firm Kinazo Designs has unveiled the “Enduro e1”, a stylish e-bike, created using 3D printing and available for approximately $23,500 USD. Volkswagen Slovakia helped the firm develop the bike through the loan of their X Line 2000R 3D laser…

Rumours about the resurrection of Aibo the dogbot proved true. Eleven years after his demise, Sony announced the imminent arrival of a new puppy. Called “aibo” (all in lower case), model ERS-1000 is cuter, smarter and more interactive than its…

Razer, the well-known gaming company, unveiled its first smartphone, simply called Razer Phone. The introduction of an Android phone by a company known for its gaming-oriented PCs, keyboards and mice is the result of Razer’s January purchase of…

Google may have axed its atrocious yellow blobs, but there’s still plenty to laugh at. A new Android emojigate is rocking the Web: a burger emoji. Specifically, a cheeseburger emoji. Google designers actually placed the cheese slice beneath the…

Yamaha has developed a professional robot motorcycle rider. The robot hunches over an unmodified bike, sensing the environment, calculating what to do, keeping the bike stable, managing acceleration and deceleration—all the while factoring in road…

Walmart is no stranger to technology, having acquired online shopping sites to grow it’s e-commerce business, tested straight-to-the-fridge grocery delivery and worked with Google to create a voice shopping assistant. But its latest foray into…

Google’s DeepMind lab has developed AlphaGo Zero, an artificial intelligence programme that is exceptional because it was able to teach itself to play Go. Google says the programme independently acquired “superhuman abilities”, becoming virtually…

We all know and love Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, AlphaDog, Spot, SpotMini, and other robots it has introduced over the years. So does Xing Wang, a Chinese roboticist and founder of his own robotics company, called Unitree Robotics. Unitree’s first…

Ever see a roach on its back, flailing its legs around helplessly? Ron Fearing, of UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, has the answer to their prayers: a tail. Biomimetic Millisystems has been working on cockroach robots for years. At IROS…

Facebook introduced the Oculus Go, its new virtual reality headset, which will be sold for a relatively reasonable US$200. The first thing we noticed about it is that it’s a standalone headset: no need for a PC, or the attendant wires. The Oculus…

Sony launched its original robot dog, Aibo, in 1999. It was lovable and was an immediate hit, especially in Japan, where 10 different models were available until 2005. But it wasn’t cheap. For example, the ERS-7 model, launched in 2003, cost…

Intel announced that it was making a 17-qubit chip available to its research partners. According to Jim Clarke, director for quantum hardware at Intel, the company settled on 17 qubits because it’s the minimum required for error correction. The…

apanese company Omron has developed a table tennis robot called Forpheus, which will not only play with you but also teach, coach and encourage you along the way. Forpheus (“Future Omron Robotics technology for Exploring Possibility of Harmonized…

Do you like petting a soft, furry pet? Does it relax and calm you? Would you like to enjoy all the benefits of a pet, without the stoop-and-scoop or litter cleaning? Or maybe you’re allergic? Well, technology has come to the rescue with Qoobo, a…

We didn’t expect a new Sphero robot so soon after the recent announcement of the BB-9E and R2-D2. Yet the company has just announced the arrival of a new addition to the Star Wars family: the R2-Q5, an Imperial Astromech Droid that made its debut…

Yesterday, Google unveiled the second generation of the Pixel smartphone: the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. The Pixel 2 is made by HTC, has a 5-inch screen, is available in white, black and blueish grey, and is similar in design to the previous…

Waymo, Google/Alphabet’s self-driving car division, is set to launch “a commercial ride-sharing service powered by self-driving vehicles with no human ‘safety’ drivers as soon as this fall.” Anonymous sources have mentioned the pressure Alphabet CEO…

LG has introduced a new entry-level Android phone in India, called the LG K7i. It will be sold for 7,990 rupees, or CA$150. Its unique feature is the built-in Mosquito Away technology: a bulge on the back houses an ultrasonic wave emitter supposed…

PocketBeagle is a new nano-computer measuring 56x35mm, similar to the Raspberry Pi Zero. It is based on the 21x21mm Octavo OSD3358 system-in-package and includes 512MB of DDR3 RAM, a 1GHz ARMv7 Cortex-A8, two 200 MHz programmable real-time units, a…

A prototype of the driverless flying taxi developed by German start-up Volocopter was tested passenger-less on the outskirts of Dubai. The craft is basically an 18-rotor electric drone able to fly for up to 30 minutes at 100km/h. Dubai is pioneering…

Robots are great when they’re up, but once they’re down, they stay down. A team from the University of Tokyo and Kawasaki Heavy Industries has adopted a new approach: fall-proof instead of fall-less. The Robust Humanoid Robot (RHP2) falls over all…

Canon unveiled a system it is developing to simulate a video camera in real-time. The virtual camera will give viewers the impression of being in the thick of it at events like soccer games, for example. The system requires about fifteen high-res…

Broadcom announced it will soon release a chip that can take advantage of the new generation of global navigation satellite signals (L5 GPS signal). The chip will provide the next generation of smartphones 30-centimetre accuracy instead of the…

The job of inventory managers is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Boxes, packages and even entire pallets can be misplaced or moved with no record of their new location, leading to wasted time and missed sales when goods can’t be found. A…

Researchers at the universities of Nottingham and Kingston in the UK have developed an AI tool that turns 2D portraits into 3D models. Unlike other, similar tools, this one can produce a good likeness based on a single photo. It uses a convolutional…

California company Hyperloop One identified the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto route among the top ten ideal locations to test its new method of transportation, magnetic levitation pods electrically propulsed through low-pressure tubes.

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s other company, has been working on its Falcon 9 rocket to make it reusable, one iteration at a time. The path to success was paved with spectacular failures, as shown in this cringe-worthy video showing the company’s fiery…

Equifax, the credit reporting company that has collected and analyzed the personal data of 800 million consumers applying for credit, has experienced a massive breach and the exposure of data related to some 190 million accounts (including…

Nintendo made enemies last April when it suddenly discontinued its wildly popular NES Classic Edition after just 1.5 million units and six months on the market, with no explanation (some suspect supply issues). But all is forgiven: today, Nintendo…

We already wrote about Cassie, the robot made up of two ostrich-like legs joined at the hip. Now, Agility Robotics published a video on YouTube showing two Cassies touring their offices.

If owning the latest iPhone is just too plebeian for you, why not try a gold-plated one or, better yet, a solid gold one? Would you like diamonds with that? London and Dubai-based GoldGenie had given the iPhone 7 Plus the bling treatment last year…

On its site, Stack Overflow has remarked on the phenomenal growth of Python’s popularity, overtaking Java and JavaScript in rich countries and leaving in the dust languages like R, Swift, Go, TypeScript, Rust, Scala…

A page in IT history has turned. The San Jose Mercury News revealed that Oracle is about to lay off 983 employees at its Santa Clara facility.

You thought that the “reverse mouse” had gone the way of the dodo? Logitech doesn’t think so; in fact, today, it released a new trackball mouse — the first in years. The wireless MX Ergo, with its thumb-operated trackball, promises a 20% decrease in…

Just months after the NYPD issued its officers with 36,000 Microsoft-based smartphones, the force is switching to iPhones. The city bought Windows-based Lumia smartphones as part of a $160 million NYPD Mobility Initiative that Mayor Bill de Blasio…

Sphero is known for its adorable BB-8 robot, launched two years ago and controllable by smartphone. Today, BB-8 has two new friends: the R2-D2, which needs no introduction, and the BB-9E, BB-8’s evil twin which will play a starring role in The Last…

Google has launched a development kit for Android to ease the integration of augmented reality in mobile applications. Called ARCore, it works with Java/OpenGL, Unity and Unreal. It provides motion tracking using the telephone’s camera to observe…

Drone startup Zipline has been making deliveries to remote hospitals in Rwanda since 2016. Today, it announced a major expansion into Tanzania, with four distribution centers with up to 30 fixed-wing drones each, making up to 500 delivery flights…

In what is nothing less than a high-stakes wager, Samsung has unveiled its Galaxy Note 8. After one of the greatest disasters in the history of consumer electronics, the South Korean company decided to face the challenge head-on without giving up…

Equipment builder ASUS has launched a laptop for tight budgets that will probably be popular with parents: the machine will sell for US$280 (CA$350). Plus, it’s been built tough, to withstand the hard-knock undergrad life.

Google chose the day of the solar eclipse to reveal the treat selected for its latest version of Android: “Nougat” will be followed by “Oreo”. Google and Nabisco have inked a deal for the use the brand. This is the second time Google uses a brand…

RemoteLock 6i is an Internet-connected door lock that can be operated three ways: remotely, with a traditional key, or with a keypad code. This, along with its remote blocking and reprogramming features, can be super practical for some, like airbnb…

Specdrums are rings that turn colour into sound. They connect to your phone through Bluetooth and use optical sensors to read the colour of any surface they come into contact with. An application lets you personalize the sound associated with each…

Ubiquiti Networks, a company specializing in networking products, has launched FrontRow, its take on wearable cameras. FrontRow is a large medallion weighing 55 grammes, with an 8-megapixel camera on one side (with optical stabilizer), a 5-megapixel…

Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman, two reporters for the Wall Street Journal, revealed that Facebook is monitoring potential rivals, including new startups with exceptional performance, thanks to an in-house database. Facebook acquired the database…

Black eye for Microsoft: Consumer Reports, the well-known American consumer protection magazine, has announced that it no longer recommends Surface tablets and laptops because of an unusually high number of problems, far higher than the…

When it comes to PC gaming accessories, you can have any choice of colours as long as it’s black. Same thing goes for Razer’s gaming suite: black mouse, black keyboard, black mousepad, and did we mention the black headset? But now you have choices!

Most mammals are four-legged, with very few exceptions being occasionally or completely bipedal. But the animal kingdom has no examples of three-legged animals; the kangaroo, which uses its tail for balance, is not considered to be truly tripedal.

RED, the high-end 4k and 8k camera manufacturer, caused a stir when it announced that it would produce a “holographic” Android phone, called Hydrogen One. Skimpy on details, the company promised a 5.7-inch screen able to convert from 2D to 3D…

On Friday, at a ceremony at Tesla’s Freemont, California factory, Elon Musk handed the keys to the lucky owners of the first thirty Model 3s to roll off Tesla’s production line. “Frankly, we’re going to be in production hell,” he told a crowd of…

Adobe announced that it would end support for Flash at the end of 2020, after which the player will cease to be developed and distributed. The veteran of Web animation and interactivity finally died a death by a thousand cuts: a history of security…

Just over a month ago, Lenovo showed us a flexible computer concept that left us somewhat skeptical. Today, the Chinese company showcased a tablet prototype that looks far less outlandish. Called Folio, the tablet features a 7.8-inch flexible screen…

TurtleBot3 is a robot specifically developed to teach the Robot Operating System (ROS), a popular platform with academic researchers and industrial developers. The robot comes in two flavours, the Burger and the Waffle. The Burger, based on the…

On July 16, the Windows Central Web site discovered that the Microsoft sites for the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and India had changed the name of the next Window 10 update from Fall Creators Update to Autumn Creators Update.

Nokia, or more accurately HMD Global, the company that produces Nokia-branded phones, has unveiled two new phones for emerging markets, the 105 and 130. These are basic devices, with 1.8-inch screens, an LED torch and up to a month’s worth of…

Building on the established success of the NES Classic and the probable one of the imminent Super NES Classic, Atari has announced the latest member of its video game dynasty, a mini console which once again banks on retro style and nostalgia.

The Raspberry Shake 4D is a more sensitive and powerful update to last year’s Raspberry Shake seismograph. Available by preorder on KickStarter for US$249, it includes the Raspberry Shake 4D, a 4.5 Hz geophone and a weatherproof box. Delivery is…

Ikea has launched a new collection of decorative objects for the home, some of which are entirely 3D-printed. 3D-printed objects are already being created by numerous artists, but this is the first time that they are being mass-produced by a major…

Researchers at the University of Teheran have been working actively for years on robots, specializing in human-size humanoid machines like the impressive Surena III, which stands 1.9 metres tall. Today, they unveiled a smaller, cuter robot, called…

On July 9, Elon Musk showed off the first Tesla Model 3 vehicle on Twitter, to the delight of the 400,000 people who have placed an order since March 2016. This entry-level sedan, more affordable than the Model S, at US$35,000 (CA$44,550), can reach…

Ofer Dekel is a researcher at Microsoft, in Redmond, Washington. Dekel has a problem: squirrels are feasting on flower bulbs and bird seed in his backyard — a problem experienced by most North-American homeowners. Dekel has developed a solution that…

Does the mini Super NES, unveiled ten days ago, still feel too bulky? The keychain-sized Keymu may be for you. This ultra-mini Game Boy-style console features a 1.5-inch OLED screen and an Intel Edison processor. The hitch? You’ll have to build it…

Swedish trucking company Einride unveiled its T-Pod prototype, a cabless truck that will revolutionize the driverless transportation of goods. The 7-metre truck can carry 15 standard pallets over 200km between charges, operating fully autonomously…

In 2015, Sony launched First Flight, a Japanese crowdfunding platform for its own products. First Flight funded original products we wouldn’t have expected from a mainstream electronics titan, for example a scent diffuser (Aromastic), a toy to…

Salto-1P is a miniature robot that gets around in leaps and bounds, much like a large grasshopper. But look closely, and you’ll see that the critter has just one leg, making its agility all the more astonishing. Salto-1P can jump 1.25 metres high…

Waymo, the Alphabet/Google subsidiary dedicated to autonomous transportation, confirmed last month that it was working on a driverless truck. The rumour was confirmed today when Jalopnik posted photos leaked by an anonymous source.

Rumours confirmed: Nintendo is about to launch a SNES Classic console, a miniaturized version of the magnificent Super NES of the early 90s, no doubt to the delight of nostalgia players worldwide. The SNES Classic will come with 21 games (Super…

Female mosquitoes are particularly adept blood-sucking pests, able to “bite” their victim undetected. No surprise then that bioengineers would try to mimic them to create a device able to monitor blood chemistry, for example for diabetics who must…

Chip designer AMD unveiled its new line of processors for data centre servers. This is of course a full frontal attack against Intel’s last, most profitable bastion, the Xeon processor. These new SoCs are based on the new Zen microarchitecture…

You know Salvador Dalí’s melting watches? That’s what Lenovo’s new flexible computer reminds us of. It’s basically a bendable screen with a built-in keyboard and the Thinkpad’s trademark “Tagada strawberry” mousenub (or whatever it’s called).

Traditional Sumo wrestling opposes two wrestlers in a round ring, the dohyō. The winner must force his opponent outside the dohyō or get him to touch it with a body part other than his feet.

Maluuba, the Montreal company specializing in deep learning and bought last January by Microsoft, achieved the highest possible score of 999 900 points on the classic video game Ms. Pac-Man, Atari 2600 version (from 1982).

Stack Overflow’s latest annual survey revealed that developers who use tabs to indent their code earn US$43,750 per year on average, while those who use spaces earn US$59,140, vindicating Jeff Atwood, who has always maintained that only morons use…

Franklin Robotics, the Massachussetts company that brought us the Roomba, has designed a solar-powered robot to weed the garden. Tertill is a round, 2.5-pound bot that uses sensors to identify weeds, then trims then near the ground using weed wacker.

At the E3 conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One X, its new game console long known only as “Project Scorpio”. It will come with 6 teraflops of graphical power, more than its main rival, the PS4 Pro, with 4.2 teraflops.

The problem with wireless mice is that they run out of battery every 20 to 30 hours. Logitech has made this problem history with the Logitech Powerplay, a mouse pad that recharges your mouse as you use it.

In 2014, Google presented a prototype for a completely autonomous vehicle. The cute, round, self-driving car was dubbed Firefly by its creators. After three years of experimentation, Waymo (Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle division) announced the end…

At the end of 2013, Google acquired Boston Dynamics with a view to setting up a new robotics division. Andy Rubin, father of Android, headed up the division, eventually called “Replicant” by Google. But analysts at Alphabet Inc. concluded that…

Boson’s DFRobot kits are designed to look like toys to turn kids on to electronics, programming and robotics. The modules are divided into four easily-identifiable, color-coded categories: blue for inputs, green for outputs, yellow for functions and…

IBM, working with Samsung and GlobalFoundries, has unveiled the world’s first 5 nm silicon chip. Beyond the usual power, performance, and density improvement from moving to smaller transistors, the 5 nm IBM chip is notable for being one of the first…

It came out of the blue, with no sneak leaks… so we were completely surprised when the iMac Pro was unveiled at the WWDC developers conference. This 27-inch model with a 5K display in a “space grey” shell is propelled by 8, 10 or 18-core Xeon…

At the annual WWDC developers conference, Phil Schiller unveiled a brand-new Apple product, the HomePod, a connected system of seven tweeters and an array of basses for 360-degree sound, which works with Apple Music. The interface is vocal thanks to…

Motorola unveiled the Moto Z2 Play, a midrange smartphone running on Android 7.1.1. Nougat, with a 5.5-inch display, more RAM, and a better camera. It will sell for $499 and will be available from Verizon or unlocked from Motorola’s website this…

Next Monday, Apple will be launching the latest update for Swift Playgrounds, the iPad software for learning to program in Swift. This version will control robots and drones! Apple announced that many products are already compatible with the…

Last January, Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android operating system, founded a startup focused on consumer electronic devices, called Essential Products. At the Code Conference, Rubin unveiled the first Essential phone, which runs on Android…

Android O (Oreo?)’s new beta version (available in Developer Preview since Wednesday) features several new developments, including, at long last, real emojis! Sayonara yellow blobs! Existing emojis have been redesigned and new ones (Unicode…

Additive printing is about to make a splash in the maritime sector. Damen Shipyards Group, RAMLAB, Promarin, Autodesk and class society Bureau Veritas have entered into a consortium to develop the world’s first class-approved 3D-printed ship…

At its I/O conference, Google unveiled a “reference design” for virtual reality headsets compatible with its Daydream platform, which is already being used with smartphones. The headset is truly standalone, just like the Oculus Rift and the HTC…

Elon Musk announced on Twitter that its solar roof tiles were available for preorder as of today, May 10. Two types are currently available: smooth and textured. Roman and imitation slate tiles are not yet in production.

Amazon has unveiled its latest voice assistant, the Echo Show, equipped with a 7-inch touchscreen. The Show has the same basic capabilities as the regular, voice-only Echo, but the built-in display adds new functionalities: videoconferencing…

Google unveiled a light new operating system called Fuchsia. We thought at first that it would be IoT-oriented, but now, it comes with a graphic interface for mobile devices (telephones and tablets), called Armadillo. Unlike Google’s two other…

Thanks to a partnership with Google, issue number 57 of The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, comes bundled with a special hardware kit. Voice HAT enables users to easily add voice interactions to their Raspberry Pi project through the…

We had been anxiously awaiting the elusive Windows 10 Cloud; we ended up with a very mundane, very locked-down Windows 10 S, positioned somewhere between the Home and Pro versions. You’ll be restricted to Windows Store applications, Edge as a Web…

Musicians are flocking to tablets such as the iPad to replace traditional sheet music. The problem, though, is that tablet screens are small, making it impossible to display a double page comfortably. Another problem is that they’re too obtrusive to…

In Florida, the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition unveiled its Planar Elliptical Runner (PER). This light, bipedal robot is unique in that it can keep its balance purely mechanically, without the assistance of a computer. The cat-sized…

You’ll either love it or hate it. If you’re a lover, and willing to give up the manufacturer’s guarantee, Jerry (he of YouTube JerryRigEverything fame) can show you how to make the glass backing of your Galaxy S8 totally see-through. Judging from…

ARM has unveiled the Mali-C71, an image signal processor (ISP) specifically designed for automotive applications. New driver assistance and autonomous driving systems require an increasing number of on-board cameras, but images produced must be…

It’s robots vs. humans. Last year, a Knightscope security robot knocked over a toddler in a shopping centre. This year, one of its colleagues was tipped over in an altercation with a drunk. The robot escaped with a few scratches. Knightscope, a…

Waymo, Google/Alphabet’s self-driving car unit, is looking for hundreds of families in the Phoenix, AZ area to test-use its self-driving vehicles in real-world conditions. The vehicles are Chrysler Pacifica mini-vans, a model that has already been…

Kitty Hawk, a company backed by Google cofounder Larry Page, is dedicated to dreaming up flying machines. This week, it released a video showing a prototype of an electric pleasure over-water craft. The Flyer does not require a pilot’s license, and…

Microsoft first announced its plans to bring Windows desktop apps to mobile ARM processors last year. The software giant is planning to allow partners to build laptop devices first, with a version of Windows 10 that will support ARM chips directly…

Intel and Micron Technology have been working together since 2012 on a new non-volatile memory technology, called 3D XPoint, claimed to outperform the flash NAND technology used in all current SSDs. Intel is about to launch its first product with…

Google is gearing up to implement an ad-blocking feature in its Chrome browser, which corners nearly half of the browser market. Of course, it would not block out all ads, and especially not Google’s Adwords ads.

Facebook wants to connect the world, including in the virtual world. It launched the new Spaces application, currently in beta version on Facebook’s Oculus Rift, at its yearly F8 developer conference. The product lets users create a digital, 3-D…

The Internet Archive Web site lets you play with emulations of old Macintosh operating systems: System 6, released in 1988, in the days of the Macintosh IIx, and System 7, released in 1991 along with the Quadra 700 and 900, the first Macs to run on…

Today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that the first Tesla electric truck was set to be unveiled next September, saying that “…the team has done an amazing job”.

Some farmers already use drones to monitor their crops, but a team of researchers from Georgia Tech have created a far more interesting alternative. Instead of designing yet another drone, they created a robot inspired by the sloth.

BlackBerry was awarded US$815 million (CA$1.08 billion) in the arbitration of a dispute with chipmaker Qualcomm, i.e. the amount Qualcomm supposedly overcollected on its patent royalties

Japanese toy maker Bandai has re-released the first edition of the electronic pocket pet, complete with the original six characters. Bandai’s also stayed faithful to the six hardware designs it first released, though there is one noticeable…

German shoemaker Adidas will begin mass-producing a shoe with a 3D-printed sole. The process will allow for more personalized shoes, shaped to an individual’s weight and gait.

British entrepreneur Richard Browning has created a real-life Iron Man suit, by attaching miniature jet engines to his limbs. He has just founded Gravity, a tech start-up who has built and filed patents for the human propulsion technology that could…

Matrix Labs released last year the Matrix Creator, a powerful Raspberry Pi accessory that adds a whole bunch of sensors to the miniature computer (including a microphone array, temperature, UV, pressure, and more), letting you extend a Raspberry Pi…

Samsung, like Motorola (Atrix) and Microsoft (Continuum) before it, is trying to turn a phone into a PC. Samsung’s Galaxy S8 will pair with a new Samsung Desktop Experience (DeX) dock accessory to morph into a desktop PC-like environment.

In an interview with the Guardian, former Microsoft font designer Vincent Connare said he’s proud of Comic Sans MS, a sans-serif casual script typeface that has divided the internet since its release in 1994. “It was for novice computer users and it…

Ikea is getting into the home automation game with its own system for smart lighting. The new range of products is called Trådfri — which means “wireless” in Swedish — and is built around the ZigBee Light Link standard for connected lights (the same…

Apple Insider has discovered a patent filing that covers laptops that include docks for an iPhone or iPad. In one example an iPhone can be docked into the trackpad section of the laptop, providing the processor, graphics card, memory, and storage…

Here you are, wearing your HTC headset and lost in your immersive irreality game, frolicking with pink unicorns in a verdant valley. Suddenly, Whiskers decides he needs human contact, or rather, that you need to be brought back to reality, since…

Cisco Systems revealed that over 300 Ethernet switches have a critical vulnerability that permits the CIA to use a simple instruction to remotely execute malware and take over targeted devices.

With its new SoC Qualcomm 205, presented at an event in New Delhi, the leader in chips for mobile phones has updated its entry-level processor for the first time in three years.

Ever so discreetly, Microsoft has released a new migration tool to help users transfer documents, photos and multimedia files from Macintosh to Surface.

Google has developed and open-sourced a new JPEG algorithm that reduces file size by about 20–35% percent, while still maintaining compatibility with existing browsers, image processing applications and the JPEG standard. This new encoder is called…

Leigh Orf, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is trying to unravel the phenomena that lead to the formation of tornadoes. Why do some, but not all, supercell thunderstorms turn into devastating tornadoes?

One of just eight known functional Apple I computers is going to auction on May 20 in Koln, Germany. It is expected to fetch an auction price of US$190,000 to 320,000, compared to an original selling price, in 1976, of US$666.66. Pretty good return…

Joto, the first connected display board that uses a pen, is a fun whiteboard reminiscent of those plotters of yore. Except that it’s designed to be vertical, i.e. hung up on the wall like a traditional board, and the drawings are ephemeral, i.e.

You dream it, and Claudiu, a Romanian programmer, makes it! Introducing PC Building Simulator, a program that lets you virtually build the PC of your dreams without spending a penny. You start with an empty tower and a budget, and are set loose on a…

At the Geneva Auto Show, Volkswagen Group presented its vision of autonomous vehicles with its self-driving car prototype, Sedric.

Today, at the Google Cloud Next Conference in San Francisco, Google announced three new Google Cloud regions: the Netherlands, Montreal and California.

In 2012, IBM succeeded in storing one bit (a 0 or 1 value) on just 12 atoms. Today, IBM researchers have reached the final frontier of magnetic storage media: one bit, one atom.

This house, printed on site by a 3D-printer in Stupino, a town about 100km south of Moscow, demonstrates how additive technology could revolutionize some aspects of construction.

At the Barcelona show, the biggest news was of course the reissuing of the mythical Nokia 3310. Russian company Caviar, best known for its over-the-top phones, is surfing the wave with its Supremo Putin version of the 3310.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sony unveiled its flagship Xperia, the XZ Premium. The design is boxy and boring, but the specs are to die for: 5-second videos at 960 frames per second, a 5.5-inch, 4K (801 ppi) screen, nothing less… And…

Last year, we wrote about the possibility of Google selling off Boston Dynamics. A year later, the company is still part of the Alphabet family. Another thing that hasn’t changed is Boston Dynamics’ impressive yet creepy creations. To wit, their…

To celebrate its fifth birthday, Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled a new variant of the Raspberry Pi Zero, with Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi (802.11n) connectivity, priced at just US$10. The rest of the Pi stays the same, with a single-core processor…

The rumours had been circulating for months, and expectations were at fever pitch. Today, Jen-Hsun Huang, President of Nvidia, finally unveiled the company’s new graphics card at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti…

Original design is a scarce commodity in the Android phone market, where one handset looks much like the next. So let’s raise our devices to a very different phone, the Alcatel A5 LED, produced by Chinese manufacturer TCL. This mid-range smartphone…

Elon Musk unveiled a year ago a new electric car Tesla, called Model 3 (after Model S and Model X). This entry-level car will have a range of 345 km and a price of 35,000 USD (45,770 CAD). Its speed can go from 0 to 100 km/h in less than 6 seconds.

For BBC’s latest animal program, Spy In The Wild, John Downer and his team were tasked with creating animatronic animals convincing enough to live among their wild counterparts. Over 30 hyper-realistic robots were developed and deployed all over the…

When he reviewed the new Samsung Chromebook Plus, reporter Dieter Bohn was pleasantly surprised by the very decent performance of its ARM System on a Chip (SoC), especially since the machine cost just US$450. Are ARM processors finally giving Intel…

Apple’s newest campus, covering 70 hectares, will start welcoming employees in April. Its official name has been announced: Apple Park. The transfer of over 12,000 employees will take all year. The mammoth ring, providing 260,000m2 of “creativity…

Scorpion-3 is an electric quadcopter that rides like a bike. Invented by Alexander Atamanov and developed by russo-californian company Hoversurf, the flying object has stability-control software and, for safety’s sake, height and speed…

This week, Agility Robotics unveiled Cassie, a bipedal robot that walks like a chicken. Cassie’s design mimics animal morphology, with a hip joint with three degrees of freedom and flexible ankle joints, giving it better stability than previous…

Would you believe that 99.6 per cent of all new smartphones now run on either Android or iOS? Windows and BlackBerry are close to complete and utter extinction. According to Gartner, 1.1 million Windows smartphones were sold in the fourth quarter of…

Is your server slow? Are calculations endless? Good news: Intel has just unveiled the processor for you! The E7-8894 v4, of the Xeon family, can be yours for US$8,898. You will have guessed that it is meant not for your run-of-the-mill computer, but…

The Roads and Transport Authority of the City of Dubai has just announced a plan to introduce an autonomous flying taxi service by next July. The EHang 184, an electric drone built in China, will carry passengers between helipads. Each drone weighs…

The biggest and probably most surprising news at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, running from February 27 to March 2, could be the comeback of the unforgettable Nokia 3310. The news would delight Snake II diehards, as well as fans of…

After months of delay, Google is finally launching Android Wear 2.0 with two new watches from LG: the LG Watch Style and the LG Watch Sport. The update, which will roll out to more watches later this month, is a complete redesign of Google’s smart…

Senstone is a voice-recording device that looks like a large brooch. You can pin it to your collar, wear it as a pendant, or even as a bracelet. Just tap on a button and record your latest flash of inspiration; the companion app sends the audio file…

Piaggio, the Italian company that brought us the timeless Vespa, recently unveiled Gita, a rolling trunk that dutifully follows its owner around. The barrel-like container was developed in Boston by Piaggio Fast Forward, a company dedicated to…

Researchers have developed a drone mimicking bats, called Bat Bot (B2). This biomimetic flying robot reminds us of the hapless Clément Ader who, at the end of the XIXth century, attempted to fly bat-like airplanes. The Bat Bot is a motorized…

AOC has come out with a classic, 17-inch, 2560×1440 pixel monitor, for US$499. But for an extra $100, you can get the rose gold version encrusted with genuine Swarovski crystals on the back. We’re not sure if this is chick schtick (think pink) or…

A team of MIT scientists developed hydrogel-based robots that are virtually invisible under water. A video shows an unsuspecting ryukin goldfish suddenly ensnared in the four arms of a robotic hydrogel claw, produced thanks to 3D printing. To…

Gentlemen: Yo turns your smartphone into a microscope able to zoom in on a semen sample, count the total number of sperm and the number of active ones. FYI: to reproduce, you’ll need lots of wrigglers. Yo can confirm your reproductive ability or…