explainer
Latest
Why Facebook is betting $1 billion on creators
Facebook is spending a billion dollars to win over creators as it tries to make up for lost time.
How the rising popularity of EVs could lead to a resurgence of drum brakes
Drum brakes are some of the automotive industry's oldest technologies. They have been falling out of favor with automakers for years but are now poised for a resurgence thanks to the rising popularity of EVs.
Meet the biggest games publisher you’ve never heard of
Embracer, formerly THQ Nordic, has spent billions to acquire the best of the rest game developers in the world.
Everything you need to know about 'Battlefield 2042'
Most importantly? It's not Battlefield V.
Here's why AirPods Max don't support Apple Music Lossless
Apple Music's entire library will be available in lossless soon, but it won't work with AirPods Max. Here's why that's the case.
Why Elon Musk's first Loop is, and isn't, as silly as you think
The Loop here is designed to solve a specific problem.
Everything you need to know about at-home COVID testing
In recent months, the FDA has approved a number of COVID tests which can be administered in the comfort of your own home and return results in a matter of minutes rather than days.
NFTs are both priceless and worthless
NFTs could become the next big thing for investment, or not.
Ableton Live 11: The biggest upgrades explained
Ableton Live 11 is partially about playing catchup and partially about looking to the future.
What you need to know about Disney+ Star
Today, in several countries outside the US, Disney+ is debuting a new "channel" dubbed Star. It's the new bucket into which the media giant will put all of its titles not suitable for young eyes.
Everything you need to know about getting a VPN
Here's a list of the best VPN services you can get right now, plus advice on how to choose the best VPN for you.
Ray tracing explained: The future of hyper-realistic graphics
Ray tracing has long been gaming's holy grail. A method of creating hyper-realistic lighting and graphics, for years ray tracing has been promised as the technology that will take games the next step closer to total realism. Ray tracing has perennially been just on the horizon, but at GDC 2018, both NVIDIA and Microsoft showed off technology that could make real-time ray tracing a reality. Typical graphics technology, struggle with how light works. Most games used rasterization, which draws a frame almost the same way someone paints a picture, one bit at a time, and with a lot of approximation. Ray tracing hews closer to how light works in the real world, by modelling millions of beams of light, and calculating how they'd bounce around a scene.
Making sense of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica nightmare
Over the weekend, a series of bombshell reports from The New York Times, The Observer and The Guardian told the story of Cambridge Analytica (CA) and how it harvested information from 50 million US Facebook profiles -- mostly without consent. The reports were (and remain) chilling. The idea of a data science company no one has ever heard of attempting to poke around in a country's collective psyche sounds like a plot out of Black Mirror, and yet here we are. More troubling is the idea that the sort of mass-scale psych profiling Cambridge Analytica allegedly carried out was done with a political endgame in mind. The jury is still out on whether its work with data ultimately swayed the result of the 2016 election -- CEO Alexander Nix denies using this kind of data-driven "psychographic" profiling for Donald Trump's presidential campaign -- but by now it's clear that Nix isn't overly concerned with ethics. Let's take a closer look at what you need to know about Cambridge Analytica and the firestorm it ignited.
What’s the deal with Google and HTC?
Rumors out of Taiwan suggest that Google is preparing to purchase some or all of HTC's smartphone division. If true, it would mark a sad end for the company that built the first Android phone. What's not clear, however, is why Google wants to buy HTC, and what it's looking to get out of the deal.
What you need to know about the laws of space
Neil deGrasse Tyson has said he loses "sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe." It's a valid concern. We've put a man on the moon, landed on a comet and roved around on Mars, but it's really only the tip of the iceberg. There's so much that we haven't seen and don't know, it seems almost impossible to fully understand the universe. It's not for lack of effort, though. People and spacecraft keep going up into space investigating the unknown, hoping to glean something new, or finding the Holy Grail -- a place that can sustain life. And as human beings become a more frequent presence in the cosmos we've had to establish rules to ensure that places like the International Space Station don't deteriorate into complete bedlam and that we're not fighting wars over uninhabitable swaths of Martian desert. The international community has actually come together and written regulatory guidelines for space exploration and laws that keep the final frontier from turning into the Wild West.
Beyond Facebook: What you need to know about texting apps
If you live in the United States, you might've been surprised when Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion -- or, in other words, thing-you'd-think-you'd-have-heard-of money. Facebook identified what those of us in the US with texting plans and Apple Messages haven't noticed: There are whole ecosystems of social networking and instant messaging separate from those we customarily use. There are a number of advantages services like Line and WhatsApp have over basic texting: They're cross-platform and international, allowing people to talk to other users in other countries, on other devices and other networks, with no extra cost. Of course, for individual users, there's only one thing that distinguishes one service from others: the presence of their friends.
What you need to know about HTTP/2
Look at the address bar in your browser. See those letters at the front, "HTTP"? That stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the mechanism a browser uses to request information from a server and display webpages on your screen. A new version of the reliable and ubiquitous HTTP protocol was recently published as a draft by the organization in charge of creating standards for the internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This means that the old version, HTTP/1.1, in use since 1999, will eventually be replaced by a new one, dubbed HTTP/2. This update improves the way browsers and servers communicate, allowing for faster transfer of information while reducing the amount of raw horsepower needed.
How to build a high-end, overclocked PC (as written by an idiot)
This is not an article from a PC virtuoso who builds water-cooled, quad-SLI gaming rigs with not a wire out of place. Nope, it's by a guy who's fantastic at buying stuff on Amazon, but more likely to start an electrical fire than build a sophisticated PC. But that's never stopped me before! So, with a screwdriver in one hand and unmerited self-confidence in the other, I set out to build an overclocked Intel Haswell-E Core i7 machine for video editing, 3D animation and light gaming. Whatever could go wrong?
What you should know before flying a drone in the UK
Drones used to be scary, specialist equipment reserved for the military and dystopian sci-fi novels. But now they're everywhere. Companies have worked out how to make these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cheap and reasonably easy to fly, enticing a whole new wave of amateur pilots. Whether you want to use one for photography or filming purposes, or simply to master the art of flight, it's never been easier to have a go. The rapid rise in drone ownership has left many governments scrambling to work out how, if at all, these lightweight aircraft should be regulated. The rules and restrictions vary around the world, so it's always a good idea to familiarise yourself before launching a drone somewhere new. Keen to start flying in the UK? Here's everything you should know first.
A brief attempt at explaining the madness of cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency may as well be called "cryptic currency," because it's nowhere near as easy to figure out as typical money. For one, while most of them (and yes, there's more than one) have names that end with "-coin," they don't usually come in physical form. Yes, they do represent money in digital form, but using them is a bit more complicated than digital payment services like, say, PayPal or Google Wallet. Also, unlike banks and online services, they're decentralized, with no single governing body overseeing and verifying transactions -- there's a reason why bitcoin was (is?) the currency of choice for black market regulars.
