Lawmakers from nine parliaments around the world met Tuesday in London to discuss the problem of disinformation on Facebook. But one seat at the table remained starkly vacant. Behind the nameplate “Mark Zuckerberg” was an empty chair. Zuckerberg declined repeated invitations to attend the inaugural session of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation, which took …

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, but it’s still a great time to get a deal on a tablet, laptop, desktop or monitor. Some retailers are continuing their incredible Black Friday sales — including B&H, which is still offering the brand-new MacBook Air for $1,099 and serious, serious discounts on other Apple laptops (although not as good as it was on Cyber …

More phones may be able to use Google’s wireless service, Google Fi. That is, if the reports are true. Google is reportedly adding devices from Samsung, OnePlus, LG and Motorola to its list of Google Fi-supported phones, according to XDA Developers and Droid Life. The publications indicate that this info comes from a purported broken embargo, so until Google makes …

More Chinese tech firms are erring on the side of caution when it comes to policing content on their platforms. iFlytek, a voice recognition technology provider in China, has begun censoring politically sensitive terms from its translation app, South China Morning Post reported citing a tweet by Jane Manchun Wong. Wong is a software engineer who tweets frequently about hidden …

Amazon’s holiday shopping weekend broke records, and this year’s Cyber Monday now stands as the company’s single biggest shopping day ever. The e-commerce behemoth didn’t provide exact sales numbers for the day, but revealed that customers on its US site ordered more than 180 million items during the five-day period from Thanksgiving Thursday through Cyber Monday (known as the Turkey …

You won’t be able to see annotations on YouTube videos pretty soon. On Tuesday, the Google-owned video-sharing service said it will stop displaying video annotation on Jan. 15, citing a drop in the number of people who see the marked-up videos. Annotations only work on desktop computers, YouTube said, but video traffic has shifted to mobile, resulting in fewer viewers. The video-sharing service …

Consumer groups in seven EU countries on Tuesday sought action against Google for allegedly breaching privacy laws by tracking people’s movements. The complaints from groups in Norway, the Netherlands, Greece, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland and Sweden say the search giant’s location tracking is violating the General Data Protection Regulation, based on Norwegian research. The European Consumer Organisation, an umbrella …

The next generation of wireless technology is speeding your way. 5G will reach more than 40 percent of the world’s population and cover 1.5 billion people by the end of 2024, according to the latest mobility report from telecommunications company Ericsson, which says its networks currently carry nearly half the world’s mobile traffic. The report came out Tuesday. 5G, short …

YouTube is making its streaming services more affordable for college students, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday. The discounts are the biggest changes to the programs since YouTube launched them last year. YouTube Music Premium competes with other services like Spotify Premium and Apple Music, both of which offer their own student discounts. YouTube Music lets users stream music, …

Black Friday is over but Cyber Monday discounts are here — and some of them are old Black Friday deals that are still in effect. Whatever the semantics, we’re curating some of the best deals available today, so you can take advantage right now.  The page includes links to sales — and our top picks — at top retailers like …

It’s Wednesday, so the big Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 sales are mostly gone. That goes for most retailers, including Target, but a few nice deals are still available today at Target.com. Most of them involve discounts on the Google Home Mini smart speaker with Google Assistant. There’s also a stray Bose bluetooth speaker deal still around. Let’s take …

Welp, it’s a wrap. Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 are solidly in the rear-view mirror, and all those great sales on Chromecast, Roku, Nvidia Shield TV and most Fire TV streamers are over too. They’ve assumed their standard pricing, starting at $30 for the Roku Express and $35 for Chromecast and others. Deal hunters who don’t mind the Fire …

The darling of retailers this holiday season is the smartphone. Following years of less-than-stellar sales through mobile devices, phones have now turned into reliable cash machines for online merchants looking to move as many TVs, toys and trinkets as possible during the busy shopping season. For nearly half of US holiday shopping, phones have become the default device for browsing …

Facebook rolled out a feature called “Watch Party” in July that allows users to watch and chat about a video in one spot as if they were sitting together in a digital living room. Facebook’s “Watch Party” feature. Facebook Now that tool, which was made available first within Facebook Groups, is expanding to all pages and profiles on the social …

There are lots of advantages to solid-state drives (SSD): they have no moving parts that can break and render the thing useless; they’re quicker to start up than traditional hard drives; and they’re small, light and energy efficient. But SSDs are usually more expensive than hard drives, which is one reason many people don’t use them in laptops or PCs. Samsung’s new …