Geek News

On Saturday, the USS Colorado, the US Navy’s latest Virginia-class attack submarine, went into service from the Naval Submarine Base New London in Connecticut. It comes with an unconventional piece of equipment: an XBox controller, according to USA Today . The Navy said in September that the new submarines would come equipped with a pair of photonics masts, which replace the previously-used periscope. The masts feature high-resolution cameras that can rotate 360 degrees and feeds their imagery to monitors in the ship’s control room. Initially, the masts were controlled with a “helicopter-style stick,” but those were described as heavy and clunky, and were swapped out with an Xbox 360 controller. According to the Colorado’s commanding... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2GH09mM"

Following Facebook and Google’s footsteps, Twitter is reportedly planning to ban advertisements for cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs), according Sky News . In January, Facebook prohibited ads for currencies such as Bitcoin in an effort to combat deceptive marketers, while Google followed suit last week . Sky News says (via Engadget ) that the new advertising policies would ban worldwide ads for ICOs, token sales, and cryptocurrency wallets. The site might also ban ads for cryptocurrency exchanges, but with some possible exceptions. The ban could begin in as soon as two weeks. We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment, and will update this post if we hear back. This isn’t the first set of steps that Twitter has taken to... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2DBj1AE"

Match Group, the company that holds a large portfolio of dating services, such as Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, to name a few, and was in talks last year to purchase dating and professional networking service Bumble. According to Recode , Match is still looking to acquire the service, but it’s going about it in an unconventional way: by suing it for patent infringement. On Friday, Match filed a lawsuit that accuses Bumble of infringing on a pair of patents held by Tinder : one called “Matching Process System and Method,” in which users swipe cards and mutually select one another, as well as “Display Screen or Portion Thereof With a Graphical User Interface of a Mobile Device,” which it describes as an “ornamental aspect” of... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2FTniRO"

If you sleep on your Apple Watch the wrong way, you might get a wake-up call from the police. That’s what happened to Jason Rowley, who tweeted about the incident earlier this week. Using his watch as a sleep tracker, he ended up holding down the crown button to trigger an emergency call to the police, who showed up in his bedroom at 1AM. Rowley told us the police were friendly and helpful, and accustomed to WatchOS misdials like this one. Public service announcement: If you sleep with an Apple Watch on, consider turning off the Emergency SOS feature, or you too may wake up to 3 cops in your bedroom at 1 AM. — Jason D. Rowley (@Jason_Rowley) March 16, 2018 If you scan through Twitter , you’ll find a surprising number of stories like... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2tZozoX"

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I’ve never been much of a gadget blogger. My entries on The Verge’s Circuit Breaker have been met with sentiments ranging from “is this a joke?” to “I have difficulties getting your writing style” to “this is why I swiped left on you on Tinder,” which was deleted by the moderators. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t loved any gadgets in my time. For example, I love the PneuHound , a tiny robot dog built in the Hosoda Laboratory at Osaka University in 2016. I love my co-worker Lizzie Plaugic’s description of him, which was: “It runs frantically, but without moving very much at all. It shivers constantly. It slams its little dumb body into walls.” I also love SynDaver Labs’ anatomically correct synthetic dog , built the same year, which Lizzie... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2IzJyCi"

On Friday, Facebook announced that it had suspended Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and its political data analytics company, Cambridge Analytica , for violating its Terms of Service, by collecting and sharing the personal information of up to 50 million users without their consent. The incident is demonstrative of ways that Facebook’s core business model — delivering individualized ads to users — can be exploited, while raising uncomfortable questions about how such data might have been used to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica is owned in part by hedge fund billionaire Richard Mercer, and first aided Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2015 , before helping the Trump campaign in 2016. It... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2G0jkdF"

Facebook is reportedly planning to launch its Oculus Go standalone virtual reality (VR) headset at the company’s F8 developer conference this year. Variety reports that the VR headset is likely to make its debut at F8 in May, alongside Facebook’s promise of “the biggest AR / VR news from Facebook to date.” Oculus first unveiled its new standalone VR headset back in October, which will be priced at $199 once it ships. The Go is designed to be a standalone headset that will sit in-between the $129 Gear VR and the $499, without inside-out tracking or fully tracked motion controllers. The Oculus Go will be built by Xiaomi and has a Snapdragon 821 processor inside. Recent leaks suggest the base $199 model will include 32GB of storage, while a... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2IAjh6u"