The thin, sleek look of Apple’s new M1-powered iMacs looks great — until you need to grope around the back of the machine for a USB port to plug in an external drive, flash memory card or security key. New USB hubs from Hyper and Satechi, though, clamp onto the bottom of the machine so …

A host of established companies and fledgling startups are racing to build special-purpose chips to push the capabilities of artificial intelligence technology to a new level. The new chips are geared to help AI grasp the subtleties of human language and handle the nuances of piloting autonomous vehicles, like the ones carmaker Tesla is developing. Some of the new chips …

A sci-fi vision is coming into focus. On Tuesday, startup Mojo Vision detailed its progress on a tiny AR display it embeds in contact lenses, providing a digital layer of information superimposed on what you see in the real world. The Mojo Lens centerpiece is a hexagonal display less than half a millimeter wide, with each greenish pixel just a …

Intel’s new Alder Lake processor could boost the performance of personal computers by as much as 30% while delivering longer battery life, a breakthrough the chipmaker credits to a hybrid design that marries modules for top speed with others for efficient operation. It’s an approach that’s been used for years in smartphones. At its Architecture Day event on Thursday, Intel …

Facebook on Wednesday shared hardware and software designs for its Time Cards, the devices it uses to keep its massive data centers working at peak efficiency. The timekeeping technology, based on ultra precise atomic clocks and navigation satellites, ultimately helps speed up services running at enormous internet scale. Just about every digital device has to know what time it is, …

WIth the release of Firefox 91 on Tuesday, Mozilla has introduced a bigger hammer for smashing the cookies that websites, advertisers and tracking companies can use to record your online behavior. The new feature, called enhanced cookie clearing, is designed to block tracking not just from a website, but also from third parties whose code appears on the site. The …

A researcher at Switzerland’s EPFL technical university won a $3,500 prize for determining that a key Twitter algorithm favors faces that look slim and young and with skin that is lighter-colored or with warmer tones. Twitter announced on Sunday it awarded the prize to Bogdan Kulynych, a graduate student examining privacy, security, AI and society. Twitter sponsored the contest to …

Twitter has a new way to rid itself of artificial intelligence bias: pay outsiders to help it find problems. On Friday, the short-message app maker detailed a new bounty competition that offers prizes of up to $3,500 for showing Twitter how its technology incorrectly handles photos. Earlier this year, Twitter confirmed a problem in its automatic photo cropping mechanism, concluding the …

T-Mobile has updated its coverage map so you can now tell what type of 5G you can get — the kind that’s relatively fast or the kind that just covers a lot of territory. An updated T-Mobile US network coverage map offers a darker color for the faster 5G “ultra capacity” than for the 5G “extended range.” The colors are …

Intel unveiled on Tuesday a smorgasbord of new technologies designed to help it reclaim processor manufacturing leadership within four years. The plan bears the fingerprints of newly installed CEO Pat Gelsinger, who’s pledged to restore the company’s engineering leadership and credibility. Qualcomm and Amazon, whose processors rival Intel’s, are now becoming Intel chipmaking customers. Intel’s technology developments include a new …