Geek News

eBay and PayPal remained tight even after the two headed to splitsville in 2015. That's bound to change in the near future now that the auction site has decided to offer an integrated payment system built by Amsterdam-based company Adyen. The move will give way to a more seamless payment experience -- no need to log into another website to pay -- since Adyen's product (already used by Netflix and Uber) is purely a back-end payment service. You might encounter the new payment system as soon as the second half of 2018, when the e-commerce giant deploys it (on a small scale) in North America. Its availability will expand in 2019 and the year after, until all sellers have been transitioned to the new system by 2021. eBay has an existing contract to continue offering PayPal as a payment option until July 2023, but neither company has announced if they have plans to extend that partnership beyond that point. According to the auction site's announcement, offering its own int...

Nintendo's third big announcement of the evening comes right back to its main star, Mario, and the news that he will star in an animated movie . Shigeru Miyamoto is listed as co-producer along with Illumination Entertainment head Chris Meledandri, but the announcement didn't mention other details like a title or release date. The press release notes that Universal Pictures is co-financing the project and will handle worldwide distribution, and it seems ripe for a tie-in with theme park plans both companies are working on. Developing... Nintendo and Illumination are partnering on a movie starring Mario, co-produced by Shigeru Miyamoto and Chris Meledandri! pic.twitter.com/wVRPLIzcGJ — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) February 1, 2018 Source: Nintendo via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2E5PH9J"

After Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing Pocket , the next Nintendo game to get a mobile version is Mario Kart. Following up on the company's plan to release 2-3 games per year (there's a Zelda game in development too ) Mario Kart Tour is scheduled to arrive at some point before March 2019. Developing... The checkered flag has been raised and the finish line is near. A new mobile application is now in development: Mario Kart Tour! #MarioKartTour Releasing in the fiscal year ending in March 2019. pic.twitter.com/8GIyR7ZM4z — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) February 1, 2018 via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2EpSatf"

Nintendo has announced the latest of its IPs to make the leap to smartphones, and it’s a big one: Mario Kart . An app called Mario Kart Tour is set to be released in the next financial year, meaning anywhere between April 2018 and March 2019. No details about Mario Kart Tour have been made available other than its existence, but the Mario Kart franchise is one of Nintendo’s biggest. Yesterday the company announced that 14.86 million Switch consoles have been sold , and about half as many copies of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — a straight port of a game that managed to sell more than eight million copies even on the Wii U. Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2DQlZlQ"

We knew Nintendo's new online service would launch this year, and now we know Switch owners will be waiting until September for it. The company tweeted that Nintendo Switch Online will launch then, but didn't reveal much else. We know a few of the features (like access to archived titles) and that it will cost $20 per year, but that's about it for now. A few games are already making use of its mobile apps for things like voice chat , but hopefully, we'll find out more information soon. #NintendoSwitch Online will launch in September 2018! pic.twitter.com/h3Rpeyymsx — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) February 1, 2018 via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2nqMPdZ"

Let's say you run Line. Your messaging service, plus other forays like smart speakers and music , aren't enough to avoid substantial losses . What do you do to turn things around? If you ask the company, finance is the answer. Line has created a new financial company that will offer cryptocurrency trading on top of staples like insurance and loans. It's not saying what currencies will trade or when the virtual money service will be an option, but it plans to make all the services available within the Line chat app. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Japan is one the largest cryptocurrency markets , and it still has a huge user base even when you don't include its other products. Its existing payment service has about 40 million users, and this would be a logical extension. New financial services could give Line a healthy source of revenue and lock people in, whether they want to insure their apartment or buy a new car. As it stands, Line isn't bettin...

On January 13th, an officer of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) triggered a missile alert that plunged residents statewide into temporary chaos before the alarm was called off as a mistake. While news emerged yesterday that the employee actually believed the attack was real after misinterpreting a message, and therefore didn't trip the alarm in error, that wasn't a good enough reason to panic the nation. The officer has been fired and the emergency management leader responsible for the agency, Vern Miyagi, has resigned. Another unnamed HI-EMA official has quit before facing disciplinary action and a fourth employee was suspended without pay, but it isn't clear yet what either of their roles were in the fiasco. As state and FCC investigations into the vents of January 13th have revealed, the fired officer wasn't required to check with a colleague or get managerial approval before sending the emergency blast to mobile phones, TV and radio stations acr...

You now have a better idea of when AT&T's next-gen TV platform will roll out to streamers on a larger scale. Alongside the telecom's latest earnings , CEO Randall Stephenson has confirmed that the "next-gen" DirecTV Now will launch in spring 2018. The revamp will bring a cloud-based DVR, "3rd-stream" and interface upgrades, Stephenson said. Beta testers have had access since late 2017, but this would mark the formal launch. The introduction could arrive at a critical time. AT&T added a net 161,000 American video subscribers in the fourth quarter of the year, but that's only because DirecTV Now racked up 368,000 new subscribers to reach nearly 1.2 million. Do some back-of-the-napkin math and that means AT&T would have lost 207,000 US customers if Now's numbers had been perfectly flat. The network doesn't just benefit from internet-only viewers, it needs them. We'd add that this still puts it ahead of at least some of its riva...

Gucci became the first fashion house to release custom Animoji today, made specially for Chinese New Year. Unlike standard Apple-made Animoji, Gucci’s can be accessed within its mobile app, which also houses all the Gucci content, from fashion show footage and wallpapers to a photo booth that lets you stick chic stickers onto your photos. The pair of Animoji dogs are based on Gucci Creative Director Alessandro Michele’s own Boston terriers, Bosco and Orso. The app explains that the Animoji are inspired by artworks by Unskilled Worker, a Gucci collaborator. Shot by @petrafcollins, the Gucci capsule collection for Chinese New Year features whimsical illustrations of dogs inspired by @unskilledworker’s illustrations. Discover more... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2DSOdjZ"

Fat Month Everything worth knowing about macronutrients. Let’s take a hard look at what carbohydrates, fats, and proteins actually are—and how they keep you healthy. via Popular Science "http://ift.tt/2DPDBhA"

Last summer, LG faced a class action lawsuit over bootloop issues with its G4, V10, V20, Nexus 5X, and G5 smartphones. The lawsuit reached a settlement today , with LG offering afflicted device owners in the suit either $425 in cash or a $700 rebate toward a future LG device, according to Android Police . The issue, related to manufacturing defects on LG’s end, meant some owners of those devices were left with inoperable phones or phones that were stuck in a never-ending reboot cycle, hence the bootloop name. If you’re a class member, you’ve either been contacted by the firm representing the class action suit or will be in the next couple of days to file a claim before February 12th. If you didn’t join the class already, unfortunately... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2Es4wkL"

Over the course of the last several years, every major social platform has been plagued by fake news. Now Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has a fake news problem of its own. Because of how the search engine’s autofill feature works, people who visit Bing looking for news videos may be redirected to a flood of fake news videos, all generated by a single source. You can see how it works for yourself: click on the “News” tab from Bing’s homepage. The page autofills the search bar with “Top stories.” Now travel to any other search tab, including “Maps” or “Images” and you’ll see that the search bar retains the “Top stories” query. Autofilling “Top stories” into the search bar appears to be an innocuous design decision — until you hit the... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2GB6rUO"

Technology U.S. Bank Stadium in Minnesota has interesting tech from its huge doors to its glass ceiling. U.S. Bank Stadium, home of the Minnesota Vikings and host of Super Bowl LI, is a record-breaking design straight from the future. via Popular Science "http://ift.tt/2DQSCUl"

Spotify and Apple Music partnered up with Dubset, a rights-management and distribution platform for DJs and remixers, a couple of years ago. Sony Music and independent record company Merlin also partnered with the company to make sure samples in remixed songs are monetized, as well. Dubset's MixBANK system makes sure both artists being sampled and those creating mixes get the royalties they deserve. Now, the company is bringing hundreds of DJ mixes to Apple Music, with three exclusive DJ sets from Steve Aoki, Sigala and DJ Suss One. "How amazing is it to be able to quickly and freely throw together a mix of tracks with no clearances or paperwork required?" said Steve Aoki in a statement. "It's the dawn of a new era. I can't wait to see what aspiring DJs and Aoki fans do with my music in their own sets." Aoki's DJ set is an hour and 40-minute retrospective with 27 songs he collaborated on (with artists like Gucci Mane, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yacht...

Comcast has been expanding entertainment options Xfinity X1 platform, from fantasy football to Jackbox games on its cable boxes . But in anticipation of Americans' most entertaining weekend, the company has added new voice commands to help fans catch up on news before -- and during -- the Super Bowl. Speaking the words "The Big Game" or "Super Bowl" into the X1 voice remote will bring up a page with postseason news and analysis, comparisons between the Eagles and Patriots teams and highlights from the AFC and NFC championship games. You can even request Super Bowl replays or ask for specific facts (in commands like "Tom Brady vs. Nick Foles") to bring up comparative info sheets. And if they really want to, fans can use the app mid-game to replay any commercials immediately after they air. Source: Comcast | Xfinity via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2DM5E1l"

Gadgets From space-scented candles to huggable bouquets. PopSci's 2018 out of this world Valentine's Day gift guide. From romantic space candles to huggable bouquets. via Popular Science "http://ift.tt/2DSHOFt"

Square's Cash App has been helping people send and receive money without fees for a while now. Originally an money-by-email service, Cash App has grown into a more robust offering with its own prepaid Visa card . The company has been testing buying and selling Bitcoin via the app, as well, and has finally made it official . Blockchaiiiiinnnnn! You can now buy and sell Bitcoin instantly with the Cash App! Still unsure what Bitcoin is? https://t.co/5fH7YEolnN 👀 pic.twitter.com/XvYknaEzBl — Cash App (@CashApp) January 31, 2018 The feature is available to most everyone who uses Cash App, unless they're in New York, Georgia, Hawaii or Wyoming. The company promises that it's working on it. This does seem to be a pretty simple way to get into owning Bitcoin, though Square warns that the cryptocurrency's price is "volatile and unpredictable." While the company won't add additional fees when you purchase Bitcoin through its app, it calculates the...

If there's one major takeaway from Microsoft's earnings reports over the last few years, it's this: The cloud is everything for Microsoft. And, based on the company's financials for the second quarter of 2018 , its success in the cloud doesn't appear to be slowing down anytime soon. Microsoft reported a 12 percent revenue jump for the period, reaching $28.9 billion up from $25.8 billion a year ago. And mostly, that growth was driven by the company's investments in cloud services. The "Productivity and Business Processes" group, which includes Office 365 and its cloud apps, saw its revenues increase by 25 percent. Azure revenue jumped by 98 percent, leading to a 15 percent increase for Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud" group. That more than makes up for the relative stagnant 2 percent growth in the "Personal Computing" segment, which includes Windows, Xbox, Bing and Surface. It's particularly surprising that Surface revenue...

After a few months of tweaking the News Feed in order to make it more personal and harder for fake stories to spread, Facebook says that overall usage has dropped by “roughly 50 million hours every day.” That’s a huge and potentially scary number for Facebook — its goal, after all, is to get people to use more Facebook and see more Facebook ads — but company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been warning this moment would come, and he’s argued that in the long run, it’ll be beneficial. The company released the stat today while reporting earnings for its fourth quarter of 2017. Declined usage seems to be showing elsewhere, too. Though Facebook saw a 14 percent year-over-year increase in daily and monthly active users, it actually dropped from 185... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2GBszyr"

The Trump administration has made it very clear that it is pro fossil fuels and has little interest in pushing programs the promote renewable energy. Now, the Washington Post reports that the president's proposed 2019 budget slashes funds for Energy Department programs focused on energy efficiency. While the proposal is just a jumping off point, the fact that it seeks to cut such funding by 72 percent underscores where the administration's interests lie and in which direction its policies will continue to go. The draft budget documents viewed by Washington Post staff showed that the president is looking to cut the Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) budget to $575.5 million, down from the current $2.04 billion level. Included in the budget cuts are funds for programs researching fuel efficient vehicles, bioenergy technologies, solar energy technology and electric car technologies. Additionally, the draft budget proposal seeks to...

The past few weeks haven't been easy for Facebook. After announcing an overhaul to its News Feed earlier this month, one that places emphasis on people's interactions over content from brands, the company has been taking heat for its new approach. Not only because Facebook is leaving publishers who relied on its platform behind, but it also isn't offering the best solution to fix its fake news problem. A blunt two-question "trusted" news survey simply won't cut it. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said that, with these changes, he expects users' time on the site to go down, but he believes keeping people happy will be better for Facebook's bottom line in the long run. And well, today during its Q4 2017 earnings report, Facebook revealed that even though users are indeed spending less time on its site, it is making more money than ever. The company raked in a record revenue total of $12.97 billion last quarter, a 47 percent year-over-year increase. ...

Microsoft posted its second quarter of its 2018 financial results today, reporting revenue of $28.9 billion and net income of $7.5 billion. Revenue has jumped 12 percent year-over-year over the holiday quarter, and the trend of Microsoft’s success with the cloud has continued. This time around, Azure revenue has increased by a massive 98 percent. Surface revenue is up just 1 percent, probably due to the only new Surface device in the quarter being the Surface Book 2 that launched well into the quarter. Microsoft refreshed its Surface Pro, and introduced a new Surface Laptop earlier in 2017. Windows OEM revenue is up 4 percent year-over-year, but Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue decreased 4 percent due to what... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2ntFtpm"

Midway through January, Twitter posted a public statement on their blog confirming that over 677,000 users had followed, liked or retweeted messages from Russian-backed spam accounts. The social network reached out to inform everyone who had. But today, Twitter updated their count to 1.4 million users who had interacted with these accounts leading up to the 2016 election. In a company blog post, Twitter said the increased number included interactions they hadn't previously considered: That 1.4 million encompasses users who retweeted, quoted, replied to, mentioned, or liked those accounts or content produced by them during the 2016 election. (It also includes those who opted out of email notifications and weren't included in Twitter's initial wave of outreach emails.) The social network pointed out that this tally still doesn't include every user ever who was exposed to messages from the Russian-backed accounts -- for example, those who saw their tweets but didn...

Popular GIF hosting and creation site Gfycat has come out against the rising new trend of artificial intelligence-generated fake pornography, according to Motherboard . Colloquially known as “deepfakes,” after the Reddit user who popularized the technique back in December , these short-form videos typically feature porn stars with the faces of celebrities, with the face swapping achieved by feeding a neural network with thousands of photos and videos and then training the network using popular, open source machine learning techniques. “Our terms of service allow us to remove content that we find objectionable. We are actively removing this content,” a Gfycat spokesperson told Motherboard , which first reported on the existence of deepfakes ,... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2GwuOD7"

GoPro has amped up its Plus subscription in a big way. The offering, which was mostly a back-up service for your photos and videos, now comes with device replacement for the same price. GoPro says if you break your camera, it'll replace it for you with no questions asked -- so long as you only go in twice per 12 months of subscription. If you break your GoPro a third time within a year, you're on your own... and you probably need to think of a way to keep your camera safer when you go on your wild adventures. While device replacement is definitely Plus' biggest new feature, GoPro has also tossed in a couple more perks. In the past, auto-backup for photos and videos to the Plus cloud service was only possible from a GoPro camera or a computer, but soon you'll be able to upload your stuff directly from a mobile device. If you have an iPhone, you'll be able to take advantage of the feature as soon as February 20th, but you'll have to wait till spring if you...