The South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, starts Friday. It’s grown from a grassroots event to a phenomenon that attracts 400,000 people. For attendees, it can feel overwhelming. What’s worth your time? Where’s the buzz? The latest AP Travel “Get Outta Here” podcast offers strategies for conquering FOMO …
Classic children’s books are getting a 21st century upgrade, as British researchers have begun testing a project that would bring 3D versions of children’s stories to life on gaming platforms. VOA’s Elizabeth Cherneff reports. …
Tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google are taking steps to police terrorists and hate groups on their sites, but more work needs to be done, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Tuesday. The organization released its annual digital terrorism and hate report card and gave a B-plus to Facebook, a B-minus …
Porsche is studying flying passenger vehicles but expects it could take up to a decade to finalize technology before they can launch in real traffic, its head of development said Tuesday. Volkswagen’s sports car division is in the early stages of drawing up a blueprint of a flying taxi as …
Shoes that promote health and safety were featured last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Faith Lapidus reports. …
Every day, billions of photos uploaded to the Internet contain faces. Experts say sophisticated algorithms can collect these images, compare and glean information – some for law enforcement agencies and some for hackers, intent on stealing and misusing that data. An Israeli company says there’s a way to prevent that. …
Washington became the first state Monday to set up its own net-neutrality requirements after U.S. regulators repealed Obama-era rules that banned internet providers from blocking content or impairing traffic. “We know that when D.C. fails to act, Washington state has to do so,” Gov. Jay Inslee said before signing the …
Pennsylvania’s attorney general is suing the ride-hailing company Uber, saying it broke state law when it failed to notify thousands of drivers for a year that hackers stole their personal information. The lawsuit filed Monday in Philadelphia said hackers stole the names and drivers’ license numbers of at least 13,500 …
From a shopping center and an airport to a concert venue or even your own phone, these are all places facial recognition technology can now be used due to technological advancements in the last few years. The types of applications are growing in a world where the idea of privacy …
For months, university students Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte had been tracking about 1,500 political propaganda accounts on Twitter that appeared to have been generated by computers when they noticed something odd. In the hours after the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the bots, short for robots, shifted into …
Social media users like to have friends and followers on various platforms. But how many accounts are real and how many are generated by computers? Two university students in California say they have a way of detecting if you’re communicating with a human or a “bot”. Michelle Quinn reports. …
“A game-changer for weather forecasts.” That’s what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA are calling the just-launched GOES-S satellite. It is the second in a pair of the most advanced weather satellites ever built. Faith Lapidus reports. …
Instagram users fed up with the service becoming more and more like Facebook are flocking to a hot new app called Vero. Vero lets you share photos and video just like Instagram, plus it lets you talk about music, movies or books you like or hate. Though Vero has been around …
An Egyptian teenager has turned cables and sheets of aluminum and metal into a robotic exoskeleton that he says can one day help the disabled walk. Faith Lapidus reports. …
Forget self-driving cars! Imagine a future filled with flying cars. The latest design comes from the Netherlands, where a company plans to officially unveil the newest combination of a gyrocopter and a sports car. VOA’s George Putic has more. …
Facebook Inc on Thursday put an end to a test of splitting its signature News Feed into two, an idea that roiled how people consumed news in six countries where the test occurred and added to concern about Facebook’s power. The test created two streaming series of posts. One was …
Equifax said Thursday that an additional 2.4 million Americans were impacted by last year’s data breach, however these newly disclosed consumers had significantly less personal information stolen. The company says the additional consumers only had their names and a partial driver’s license number stolen by the attackers, unlike the original …
The battle to identify and remove extremist video online just got a new weapon. Video-sharing sites can now use artificial intelligence to scan thousands of videos as they are uploaded. Faith Lapidus reports. …
Facebook wants to make it easier for people to find low-skilled jobs online. After testing the new software in U.S. and Canada since last year, Facebook added job postings Wednesday in another 40 countries across Europe and elsewhere. The software works with both Apple and PC operating systems. Users can …
Several high-tech companies are teaming up on a plan to put a mobile phone network on the moon next year. Vodaphone Germany, Nokia, and Audi are working on a mobile network and robotic vehicles that are part of a private expedition to the moon, timed to coincide with the 50th …
Facebook Inc has told a British parliamentary committee that further investigations have found no new evidence that Russia used social media to interfere in the June 2016 referendum in which Britain voted to leave the European Union. Facebook UK policy director Simon Milner in a letter Wednesday told the House …
The world’s biggest mobile phone trade fair, the Mobile World Congress, or MWC, opened earlier this week in Barcelona, Spain. Except for Apple, which traditionally stays away, all other big and small phone manufacturers and developers are displaying their wares as they continue to battle a market valued at $478 …
Ford Motor Co. is making Miami-Dade County its new test bed for self-driving vehicles. The automaker and its partners — Domino’s Pizza, ride-hailing company Lyft and delivery company Postmates — are starting pilot programs to see how consumers react to autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. Self-driving startup and Ford partner Argo …
Authorities in China have launched an intense crackdown on online commentary in the wake of a proposal by the country’s communist party leaders to amend the constitution and scrap a two-term limit on the president’s time in office. A wide range of phrases in Chinese have been banned such as “constitutional …
The U.S. Justice Department and Microsoft will face off against each other Tuesday when the Supreme Court hears arguments on whether tech companies’ desire to protect user data is at odds with the government’s interest in pursuing criminals who use the internet. The case, known as United States v. Microsoft …
After researching digital currencies for work last year, personal finance writer J.R. Duren hopped on his own crypto-rollercoaster. Duren bought $5 worth of litecoin in November, and eventually purchased $400 more, mostly with his credit card. In just a few months, he experienced a rally, a crash and a recovery, …