YouTube on Wednesday said a new learning special called “BookTube” will feature a panel discussion with Michelle Obama about her memoir Becoming. The special will premiere in March during Women’s History Month.   The former first lady will talk about her bestselling book with YouTube creators including Jouelzy, Ariel Bissett, Kat O’Keeffe, Jesse George and …

Google has made “major changes” to its recommendations system on YouTube that have reduced the amount of “alt-right” videos recommended to users, according to a study led by Nicolas Suzor, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology. During the first two weeks of February, alt-right videos appeared in YouTube’s “Up Next” recommendations sidebar 7.8 percent of the time (roughly one …

The Android version of the Brave browser uses 35 percent less power than Google’s Chrome on ad-heavy websites, Brave said Wednesday, highlighting a major difference in a world where we often have to keep a close eye on our phone battery. On tests loading 20 news sites on a Samsung Galaxy S9 phone, Brave’s lower power consumption would let you …

Anyone playing the new Metro Exodus game on PC, as it’s clearly meant to be played, has run into a few roadblocks along the way. Not only are monsters and mercenaries trying to stop your escape from Moscow, but the forces of PC game retailing are trying to stop you from sneaking in a little playtime at work. That’s because …

Phones have been getting bigger for years, but rarely do they get fatter. We may want a big display for video and internet, but we still want a slim phone that’s easy to carry. Energizer, the same company that makes batteries, didn’t get that memo. At MWC 2019 in Barcelona, it showed off a new phone called the Power Max …

Blade’s Shadow Ghost is a cool little box that lets you use the Shadow desktop-in-the-cloud service with just a TV or monitor. No PC required.  The box that gives you the device and network connections you need to use the Windows-based desktop service. When I tried it out, I kept forgetting I wasn’t on a local PC and never found …

Samsung makes some of the world’s fastest storage, not just phones. And the company announced today that it’s started mass producing 512GB mobile-focused flash memory with over twice the read speed and 1.5 times the write speed of the previous leader, the 1TB module announced last month at CES.  The V-NAND (PDF) memory is based on its embedded Universal Flash …

Good things come to those who wait. LG’s 2018 OLED TVs, with the best picture quality CNET has ever tested, have hit new all-time lows from multiple retailers. Pricing is substantially lower than the company’s Super Bowl sale, which was significantly lower than the Black Friday price. In fact the prices below, from Best Buy, mark the lowest I’ve seen …

Social video app TikTok will pay $5.7 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it illegally collected personal information from children.  TikTok, previously known as Musical.ly, lets users record themselves lip-synching to popular music videos and share the clips with friends. The app has reportedly surpassed 1 billion downloads on iOS and Android.  The FTC had alleged that the …

Wi-Fi naming is getting a makeover — and it’s not a moment too soon.  Until now, Wi-Fi standards have been an alphanumeric soup with designations like 802.11g, 802.11n and 802.11ac. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the letters didn’t seem to “mean” anything. Is 11g faster than 11ac, just because it’s higher in the alphabet? Actually, no — it’s slower.  That’s …