Google has taken an important step into a future that doesn’t require passwords, letting phone users log on to some websites using just their Android phones. That means you’ll be able to sign into a site using a passcode or fingerprint, starting with Google’s Pixel phones Monday and spreading to other relatively recent Android phones …

Liking tweets and retweeting them are fine ways to support your favorite Twitter personalities. But you know what’s better? Cash. And now the Brave browser lets you put your money where your mouse is.  Brave has built a Twitter tipping system into the newest version of the ad-blocking browser, released Thursday for Windows, MacOS and Linux. The online gratuity service, …

With the Brave browser, advertisers can put money into a digital wallet when you see their ads. Now you can start getting that money out again, too. But you’ll have to get used to Brave’s cryptocurrency-like payment system and sign up with the Uphold cryptocurrency exchange to retrieve those payments. If you sign up for it, Brave’s ad system gives …

Firefox Reality, Mozilla’s virtual reality browser, now supports Facebook’s Oculus Quest headset. It already worked with the HTC Vive Focus Plus, the Lenovo Mirage and some other VR headsets. But the $400 Oculus Quest, with no wires tethering your headset to a PC, is a new, high-profile option in the world of VR. My colleague Scott Stein says the Quest’s …

Google’s Project Strobe, an attempt to keep Chrome browser extensions from slurping up your personal data, will take effect Oct. 15. The change is part of a broader tech industry move to protect private information that can be gathered for creepy business purposes or leaked through data breaches. Project Strobe imposes two requirements on developers who write the extensions that …

Update: I’ve had a problem with the review unit prototype I’ve been testing. The manufacturer and I are investigating, and we’ll update when we have more information. I’m a fan of the high-speed USB-C and Thunderbolt combination ports on all new MacBook laptops and plenty of Windows machines. But I miss MagSafe, Apple’s magnetic connectors, which saved my computer from …

The human brain is made of something like 86 billion interconnected brain cells, or neurons. Intel has now taken a notable step toward a digital equivalent, building a computer system with 8 million digital neurons. The system, called Pohoiki Beach, is packed with 64 of Intel Labs’ Loihi chips and will be available to researchers who can help the chipmaker …

Browser startup Brave now can show its privacy-first ads on Android, not just personal computers. The company’s browser blocks websites’ ads and trackers by default, but if you opt in to see Brave-supplied ads instead, you’ll get 70 percent of the resulting revenue. With most of Brave’s users on smartphones, the Android move is a significant expansion of Brave’s advertising …

Some of the computing industry’s biggest innovations have come from research labs. The  transistor was created at AT&T’s Bell Labs, the hard drive by IBM Research and the graphical user interface at Xerox’s PARC.  NTT, one of Japan’s telecommunications giants, wants similar success. It’s already got thousands of researchers in Japan working on projects with near-term potential, but now it’s …

Computer storage technology has moved from wires with magnets to hard disks to 3D stacks of memory chips. But the next storage technology might use an approach as old as life on earth: DNA. Startup Catalog announced Friday it’s crammed all of the text of Wikipedia’s English-language version onto the same genetic molecules our own bodies use. It accomplished the …