Facebook wants to help you build a really expensive camera. And once you do, the company says, it’ll be worth it. The social-networking giant is offering filmmakers instructions for how to build a camera designed to capture 360-degree video. The project is called Surround 360, and the camera will cost about $30,000 to make. That …

A video of an Australian woman snowboarding while singing Rihanna’s “Work” — with a bear in pursuit — has roused the doubters. In the video description, Kelly Murphy wrote: “OMG! I was going through my snowboarding videos and I found a bear chasing me!!! I nearly got eaten!!! This was at Hakuba 47 in Japan, filmed yesterday! Be careful people!!!” …

Hailing a ride in the US just got easier for visitors from China. Riders can now use China’s biggest ride-hailing app, Didi, to hail a Lyft car in the US. The rollout this week makes good on a partnership Lyft announced in September, which also includes Ola and Grab, ride-hailing apps that together cover countries from India to Indonesia. It’s …

A quiet announcement about a new Mozilla project sounded like a death knell for the Firefox browser. It wasn’t. But the project, called Tofino, reveals the technology challenges Mozilla faces more than a decade after Firefox’s debut. Hundreds of millions of people still use the browser, but its star is fading compared with Google’s Chrome. Mozilla released details about the …

Facebook’s big F8 developer conference kicks off Tuesday and a big focus of the event is expected to be bots. The social network hopes to get us to spend even more time in its Messenger app by baking in more chat bots, which are snippets of software that can perform simple tasks. These chat bots can already order an Uber …

Now playing: Watch this: Amazon’s next Kindle already leaked? 1:05 It’s no secret that a new Kindle e-reader is expected to drop this week — CEO Jeff Bezos tweeted so himself — but it looks like we might have an unexpected and unofficial sneak peek on our hands. Leaked images from product listings on Amazon China (which have since been …

Remember when Facebook Messenger broke out of Facebook proper? A lot of users, including yours truly, were seriously irked. Why did we have to switch to entire different app just to chat with a Facebook friend? Turns out Facebook had bigger plans for Messenger, including voice calls, chat bots, chess games and — who knew? — mobile payments. It’s true: …

Well, I knew it would be hard to share stories of my on-the-road diary of seven cities in Asia once I crossed over from Hong Kong, which has an open Internet environment, into China, which is infamous for The Great Firewall that blocks a lot of services I take for granted, like Google, Facebook and Twitter. But I didn’t know …

This year’s look for the Apple Watch will be pretty much the same as last year’s. Apple’s wearable won’t undergo a substantial refresh of its external design until 2017, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in a Monday investors note snagged by blog site Apple Insider. A new version of the watch is coming in 2016, but it will sport mostly internal …

North Carolina’s controversial new transgender law is facing even stiffer opposition. Popular porn website XHamster.com began turning away users based in North Carolina on Monday, joining protests against a state law that forces transgender public school and university students to use bathrooms according to their biological sex. Instead of the usual fare of risqué videos, photos and stories, users with …

For many Apple Watch owners, the gadget wrapped around their wrist is much more than just a watch. Around 80 percent of Apple Watch owners said they use the device for fitness tracking and notifications, according to survey results released Friday by advertising technology company Fluent. Listening to music is popular among 77 percent. Exchanging emails and instant messages is …

CNET’s Cheapskate scours the Web for great deals on PCs, phones, gadgets and much more. Questions about the Cheapskate blog? Find the answers on our FAQ page. And find more great buys on the CNET Deals page. If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do…would be analyze the stuffing out of it …

Within just a few seconds, you can remove and replace the battery in LG’s G5 thanks to its new modular design. What’s a modular design? I’m glad you asked. In short: Through this design, the bottom of the phone slides out, bringing the battery with it. Once it’s moved, you can then replace it with a fully charged battery or …

Now playing: Watch this: Send emojis faster with keyboard shortcuts 0:50 Each time you send an emoji, you’re probably opening the menu and selecting it manually. But did you know there’s a faster way to do this? Here’s how: iOS users Emojis can be assigned text labels that make it super quick to add them into any conversation. Head to …

You might not realize it, but you’re probably sending rude emails. Using more than one exclamation point? Rude!! Using the word “need”? Do you really need to be so demanding? The word “actually”? Dropping that one in emails is actually impolite. This public-service announcement comes courtesy of Outsource-Philippines, a provider of global outsource solutions. It’s circulating an infographic titled “These …