All posts
- Xbox Confirms Its Next Big Showcase Slips to July
Microsoft says its next Xbox Series X event lands in July, letting Sony's PS5 reveal own June's news cycle.
- IBM Walks Away From Facial Recognition
IBM's CEO told Congress the company will stop selling general-purpose facial recognition software, citing surveillance and racial profiling risks.
- Are Foldable Phones Ready for Prime Time Yet?
A look at where foldables stand after Samsung's Z Flip and Motorola's Razr reboot, and why most people should probably still wait.
- How Lockdown Reshaped Developer Collaboration Tools
Remote-first tools like Zoom, Slack, and Live Share have become the backbone of software teams navigating a world without offices.
- SpaceX Sends Up Another 60 Starlink Satellites, Sticks the Landing (Again)
A Falcon 9 launched 60 more Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral and landed its booster on a droneship, continuing SpaceX's rapid constellation buildout.
- Google's Pixel 4a Launch Slips Into Limbo
Google pushes back the Pixel 4a's expected June 3 unveiling with no new date, leaving budget phone shoppers waiting.
- Android 11 Beta 1 arrives quietly, minus the show Google had planned
Google shipped Android 11 Beta 1 for Pixel devices today, having scrapped its planned launch event to make space for coverage of the George Floyd protests.
- A Weird Spin: 200,000 Galaxies Show a Directional Bias Nobody Expected
Astronomers surveying over 200,000 spiral galaxies found a roughly 2% asymmetry in clockwise vs counterclockwise rotation across the sky.
- Vivo's X50 Pro Puts a Camera Gimbal Inside a Phone
Vivo launched the X50 series in China with the X50 Pro's built-in micro-gimbal stabilization, a hardware answer to shaky-phone-video woes.
- Liftoff: SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts, Ending a 9-Year Gap
SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour carried NASA astronauts to orbit and docked with the ISS, the first crewed U.S. launch since 2011.
- Google Pumps the Brakes on Android 11's Beta Launch
Google postponed its June 3 Android 11 beta event, saying now isn't the time to celebrate amid nationwide unrest.
- Starship SN4 Goes Out With a Bang After Its Sixth Static Fire
SpaceX's SN4 prototype, the most durable Starship test article yet, was destroyed at the South Texas site when a ground fitting failed post-test.
- GPT-3 Arrives: OpenAI's 175-Billion-Parameter Language Model
OpenAI's new paper introduces GPT-3, a 175B-parameter model that tackles NLP tasks from a handful of examples with no fine-tuning.
- Windows 10 May 2020 Update arrives with WSL2 built in
Microsoft's version 2004 rollout starts today, making WSL2 a standard feature and bundling Cortana changes plus a Cloud Download reset option.
- T-Minus One Day: Final Countdown to Crew Dragon's First Crewed Flight
NASA and SpaceX are one day from launching Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard Crew Dragon 'Endeavour,' with weather already looking iffy.
- 5G Phones Are Finally Getting Affordable
A wave of new launches from Motorola, Infinix, Realme, and Xiaomi shows 5G handsets creeping toward mainstream prices, led by the $699 OnePlus 8.
- Who Pays the Maintainers?
As remote work spotlights enterprise reliance on open source, GitHub Sponsors and similar programs face fresh attention.
- Starlink's Satellite Swarm Has Astronomers Worried
SpaceX has launched hundreds of Starlink satellites since May 2019, and astronomers are increasingly vocal about the trails they leave in telescope images.
- Inside the 2020 SSD Boom: Why Laptop Storage Doubled Overnight
Falling NAND flash prices and Apple's storage bump are pushing PC makers toward bigger, faster default SSDs in 2020.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons gets a bug-catching overhaul
Update 1.2.0 flattens insect spawn rates to a 25% chance per species per month, changing how you hunt bugs on your island.
- Apple and Google Flip the Switch on Exposure Notification
The joint Apple/Google Exposure Notification API is now live for public health agencies, running Bluetooth-based COVID exposure alerts at the OS level.
- Build 2020: Terminal Goes 1.0, WSL2 Ships, and Windows Gets a Package Manager
Microsoft's Build 2020 keynote delivers Windows Terminal 1.0, WSL2, a winget preview, Project Reunion, and details on its OpenAI supercomputer.
- What to Expect from Microsoft Build 2020
A preview of Microsoft's free 48-hour digital Build conference, covering Windows tools, Azure, and its OpenAI partnership.
- Artemis and the New Race Back to the Moon
NASA's Artemis program is targeting a 2024 crewed lunar landing with SLS, Orion, and commercial partners like SpaceX.
- Summer of Gaming Fills the E3-Shaped Hole in Our Calendars
With E3 2020 cancelled, IGN and partners are launching a Summer of Gaming showcase to carry reveals through to PS5 and Xbox Series X news.
- Inside the Apple-Google Contact-Tracing API, Ahead of Its Launch
A look at the Exposure Notification API before Apple and Google hand it to public-health agencies this week.
- Nvidia Unveils the Ampere A100, Its Biggest Generational Leap Yet
Nvidia's new A100 GPU packs 54 billion transistors and up to 20x the AI performance of its predecessor, launching at a virtual GTC 2020.
- There's More Water on the Moon Than We Thought
New lunar research suggests water may be widespread across the Moon's surface, even in sunlit regions, strengthening the case for Artemis-era resource use.
- Google I/O 2020 Cancelled: Here's What Happened Instead
Google I/O was supposed to open today; instead we got a surprise Android 11 preview and a tentative June 3 beta date.
- AMD's 'Big Navi' and the GPU Arms Race Heating Up for Late 2020
Lisa Su confirmed AMD's RDNA2 'Big Navi' GPU for late 2020, set to power next-gen consoles and take on Nvidia's flagship cards.