California is to consider a law that would give customers the right to get gadgets fixed by somebody other than the manufacturer. The Right to Repair Act would mean repair guides and any proprietary tools would have to be publicly available. While similar measures are already under consideration in 17 other states, California could be […]
Apple is to stop selling iTunes albums with added material such as liner notes and bonus tracks. It won’t add any new ‘LP’ submissions to the catalog after this month. The name was a nod to the experience of buying physical albums in the vinyl days when artwork and sleeve notes, including lyric sheets, was […]
Trevor Baylis, the inventor of the wind-up radio, has died aged 80. His invention not only helped fight HIV but is credited with inspiring engineers and technology experts to think about products for the developing world. After a professional life that included stuntwork and underwater escapology, he began his inventing career by producing modified household […]
There’ll soon be an Energizer smartphone and as you’d expect, the battery life is the selling point. It could offer a five day life on a single charge. How long a phone lasts is a combination of the battery capacity and the efficiency of the phone itself, and Energizer has certainly addressed the former. The […]
An AI bot appears to have destroyed Q*bert high scores by discovering and exploiting a bug. It’s the result of the unconventional method it took to learning the game. Researchers at Germany’s University of Freiburg were using isometric platform game Q*bert to try out different ways for the system to learn and master the game. […]
A teacher in Ghana helps students prepare for a computer studies exam – despite the school having no computers. Richard Appiah Akoto demonstrates the features using a blackboard. Ghanaian students in the year they turn 15 must pass an exam to move on to the next level of education (high school) and the exam includes […]
If you can’t get decent 4G coverage in your area, there’s an extreme solution: two companies plan to build a network on the moon next year. Don’t book your flight yet, though: the network isn’t designed for human use. Instead it will be used for two lunar rovers as they explore the moon. You may […]
Boxed video games will soon carry a content warning if they allow in-game purchases such as loot boxes. The warning will be along the same lines as those for violence and sexual content. The move may be an attempt to head off legislator concerns about whether loot boxes are a form of gambling and thus […]
A museum wants the right to revive abandoned online games. It’s called for a special exemption to copyright laws. The idea comes from Oakland, California’s Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE), which has proposed an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That’s the law that says its illegal to manufacture or develop something […]
A Steve Jobs job application form is up for auction with an estimated sale price of more than $50,000. The form dates from 1973 when Jobs would have been around 18. Perhaps the most ironic part is that he listed himself as not having a telephone. He was a college student at the time and […]