Minecraft, a game that skyrocketed to unprecedented levels of popularity among all ages because of its open-ended gameplay, infinite worlds, and limitless possibilities for creation and collaboration, is getting an official deathmatch mode. Is this it? Is this Minecraft’s shark jump (or pig jump, or squid jump) moment? Oh, of course not. But it is […]
Here is some news you don’t read every day: Microsoft and Facebook today announced that they are teaming up to build a subsea cable across the Atlantic that will connect Virginia Beach, Virginia, with Bilbao, Spain. The companies say the so-called MAREA cable will allow them to “meet the growing customer demand for high speed, […]
There are many abstract notions about what the future of infrastructure will look like, but the truth is that the future is staring companies in the face. The adoption of hybrid cloud models, containers and microservices architectures are only the beginning stages of preparing for infrastructures of the future. The largest enterprises have already experienced […]
The American Civil Liberties Union wants to help Microsoft challenge government gag orders that prevent it from telling its customers when it receives warrants for their information. Microsoft sued the Justice Department in April, claiming that the government’s demands for silence were unconstitutional. The company said that Outlook.com and Office365 were the products most often targeted […]
Online abuse remains the big hairy monster in the room for platforms powered by user-generated content. Twitter especially has had some very sizable and public problems with problem users, taking flak in recent years for being the go-to social media conduit for orchestrated misogynistic campaigns, such as the #Gamergate example. Or more recently for being the training platform where trolls were able to teach Microsoft’s ingenue […]
We’ve seen a big rise of apps and bots, and a lot of them have something in common besides being based on artificial intelligence and machine learning: they are written for English-speaking users. Now one of the more interesting personal assistant apps written primarily for Spanish speakers is announcing funding. Sherpa, a personal assistant app based out […]
Niantic Labs, the game maker that was spun out of Google last year following Google’s move to Alphabet, announced today that its new title Pokémon GO is launching into beta in the U.S. Those early adopters who signed up to become “field testers” earlier in May are now receiving their invites to the game, in order to offer […]
Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page defended his company’s development of the Android platform today during an ongoing legal battle with Oracle. Oracle sued Google in 2010, claiming that Android developers copied sections of proprietary code from Java. Google has maintained that the code in question was open source and free for its engineers to […]
One morning last December, I woke up and noticed that a dream of mine came true: I had taken a picture that went viral. A picture I took at a friend’s wedding had been shared by UNILAD on Facebook with the caption “Best wedding photo ever.”
As if you didn’t need more proof that your darn kids need to get off the computer and into the back yard, researchers at the University of Helsinki and Department of Psychology have found that excessive Internet use — essentially bordering on addiction — leads to school burnout in teens. There isn’t much detail on […]