Technology

Amazon has refused to give police access to data from a home gadget that may have recorded audio relevant to a murder investigation. The company says its policy is to only provide customer information if and when it gets a valid court order. The ... request by Arkansas police is for information that may have been recorded by an Amazon Echo. That's a gadget that combines a wireless speaker with voice recognition and an Internet connection. It lets users give voice commands for actions such as selecting music to play, carrying out voice searches of the Internet and controlling smart devices ... (view more)

Tesla's automatic car steering tool will now restrict the car to the local speed limit on most roads. Users had previously been able to set the system to run up to five miles over the limit. The changes are to a feature which has the full title of ... Autopilot Traffic-Aware Cruise Control. It not only controls the car's speed as with normal cruise control, but automatically adjusts to keep a safe distance from surrounding vehicles and steers the car to keep in the lane. (Source: electrek.co ) Freeways an Exception to No-Speeding Policy Once the latest update takes effect, the feature ... (view more)

Experts say toddlers should be allowed limited access to tablets and other gadgets. It reverses previous advice that kids under two be kept away from small screens altogether. The advice comes from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). It now ... recommends 18 months as the minimum age to "use" screen devices, but says children aged five and under should spend a maximum of one hour a day in front of screens. It's not a case of 'anything goes', however. The AAP says young kids should only use screens for specific purposes. These include watching "high quality" ... (view more)

Netflix has called upon the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to examine whether data caps are harming the expansion of broadband data. The company, which also has close interest on the subject, says the FCC might have a legal duty to take ... action on the matter. The company complained in particular about monthly data limits on home broadband such as those imposed by Comcast, which recently enforced a 300GB a month cap on some customers - along with steep overage fees ($10 per 50GB). However, Comcast now says the cap has been bumped to 1TB , with unlimited data available in some areas, ... (view more)

Elon Musk, the man behind the Tesla electric cars, says that the "Autopilot" and other self-driving systems will never be perfectly safe. Instead, he insists that safety for such features is improving, and the latest changes would have prevented a ... recent death. In the case of Tesla models, the autopilot cars are not fully autonomous in the same way as self-driving cars, such as Google's test vehicles . Instead, the technology is pitched somewhere between such cars and the far more common 'cruise control' feature. The Autopilot feature on the Tesla Model S combines a windshield camera, a radar ... (view more)

Audi will soon fit its cars with a technology that can coordinate with traffic lights in several US cities. According to Audi, the feature is being billed as more about convenience, rather than a safety measure. The new feature is being built into ... an existing navigation and information service called Audi Connect, which carries a $25 a month service fee. The feature will involve an extra display on the dashboard that coordinates wirelessly with traffic signals and shows the driver how long they have until the light will turn green if at a full stop. The theory is that this will let drivers ... (view more)

Hulu is ditching its free TV service, though it will still be available in a different form. Analysts believe the move was forced on it by the television industry. Up until now, Hulu users had three options for streaming video online. The free, ... basic service let users watch many network and cable shows the day after broadcast - but only if users watched commercials. In most cases, the five most recent episodes of a show were available online. Customers can also pay $7.99 a month for a "limited commercials" option, or $11.99 a month to cut out commercials altogether. Both of these ... (view more)

Worldwide PC sales have fallen to their lowest level in almost a decade according to new estimates. It's also now four years since sales rose year-on-year. The figures come from analyst Gartner, which gathers together data from a range of sources. ... Strictly speaking, it estimates shipments to retailers rather than actual sales to consumers and businesses. That can have a lag effect, but doesn't affect overall trends - over the long run, sales affect how many units retailers order. (Source: gartner.com ) According to the company, shipments between January and March this year totaled 64. ... (view more)

Google has confirmed that one of its self-driving cars was partially responsible for a minor crash with a bus. It's the first time the company has taken a share of the blame for a prang. The cars operate through a range of technologies including ... sensors, cameras, lasers, GPS and map data. The theory is that these allow them to track the activity of other vehicles on the road and more reliably avoid crashes than cars which are subject to human driver error. California allows companies such as Google which meet set criteria to operate self-driving or "autonomous" vehicles on ... (view more)

A new phone app is said to help detect earthquakes and provide quicker warnings than is currently possible. The 'MyShake app' has many limitations, but could theoretically still save lives. The app uses the accelerometer that's built into most ... modern phones. It's a small gadget that measures movement in the phone along three axes (left-right, up-down, back-forth) and powers all sorts of features, including fitness tools and the way that displays automatically rotate and resize if you turn the phone from landscape to portrait or vice versa. The idea of MyShake is to constantly monitor ... (view more)