Category: iT news

A father who found the security flaw was initially blocked by Kids Pass on Twitter, but the issue is now fixed.

Zero Latency uses technology that allows players free-roaming while they are playing their games.

Amazon’s competition to create a warehouse robot is won by a machine with an unusual design.

Some Google Home users are reportedly experiencing problems with controlling Philips Hue lights and other devices through Google’s AI assistant, according to various forum threads complaining about the issues (first spotted by Android Police).

The problem seems to stem from the action of actually using the Home to turn lights on or off, which apparently simply isn’t working for some users. Other commands, like dimming the lights, reportedly work fine for affected users, although your experience may vary.

Google is aware of the issue, commenting to The Verge on Friday, “A small number of Google Home users have reported issues controlling some of their devices via Google Home, including Philips Hue. We have since released a partial fix,…

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Alphabet’s secretive research lab X is developing a new way to store renewable energy that otherwise might be wasted — by using salt and anti-freeze, reports Bloomberg. Researchers are developing a system that can be located anywhere, has the potential to last longer than lithium-ion batteries, and compete on price with new hydroelectric plants and other energy storage methods.

“If the moonshot factory gives up on a big, important problem like climate change, then maybe it will never get solved,” Obi Felten, a director at X told Bloomberg. “If we do start solving it, there are trillions and trillions of dollars in market opportunity.” The project is codenamed “Malta,” but isn’t an official X project yet, so it doesn’t currently enjoy…

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The question of whether, and to what extent, cars are like phones has been gently bubbling along over the past few years as we’ve watched the nexus of innovation shifting from the technology we carry in our pocket to that which carries us along the roads. It’s obvious now that cars will experience transformative change like phones did before them, but how many parallels between the two are really there?

If you want to see a company doing its utmost to reduce the complexities of a car down to a familiar phone-like interface, you need look no further than Tesla and its new Model 3. This is the most affordable electric car in Tesla’s stable and it has the most aggressively stripped-down interior — from any manufacturer. There’s a 15-inch…

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Microsoft first released its Windows Phone keyboard for the iPhone more than a year ago, with a unique one-handed mode. Microsoft is now removing it from the App Store and encouraging users to download SwiftKey instead, according to a support note spotted by Windows Central. “The Word Flow experiment is now complete,” reads the note.

Microsoft has tested out a number of iOS keyboards, and it now appears the company is focusing solely on SwiftKey after acquiring the app last year. We haven’t seen any major additions to SwitftKey since Microsoft acquired it, apart from a separate Swiftmoji emoji predictor in July last year. Microsoft’s SwiftKey keyboard now competes against the likes of Google’s Gboard keyboard and various other iOS and…

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The move is part of efforts to stop Russians accessing banned websites.

AMD is finally unveiling its Radeon RX Vega family of GPUs today, designed to compete with Nvidia at the high end of gaming PCs. Its been years since AMD has truly competed at the top, and the last new flagship card, the Fury X, was released back in 2015. AMD’s Fury X was a reasonable competitor with its unique high-bandwidth memory (HBM), but Nvidia toppled it by releasing the powerful GTX 980 Ti. More than two years later, there’s now a gap in the market that’s been dominated by a standard combination of an Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia GTX 1080 grahics card. AMD wants to attack that gap on August 14th.

We’ve seen plenty of teases about the Vega architecture over the past year, but AMD is now revealing pricing and release dates…

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Apple’s HomePod smart speaker will run iOS — like an iPhone without the screen, but it won’t support third party apps or extensions according to firmware posted online. That was probably to be expected at launch, though Apple could still announce third-party support before HomePod’s release later this year. The code was first analyzed by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, as spotted by 9to5Mac and others.

Troughton-Smith found that the smart speaker’s shell app is called SoundBoard. That’s most likely a nod to SpringBoard, the application that manages the iOS home screen. The speaker seems to run a full iOS stack, according to the developer, with the apps prefixed with “Air,” such as AirMusic and AirPodcasts. The firmware also confirms the…

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