Technology

    BEIJING / AP China’s biggest online travel service Ctrip.com is buying Skyscanner i n a deal that values the British travel search site at 1.4 billion pounds ($1.7 billion). The deal announced Thursday adds to a string of global acquisitions by Chinese companies in search of technology, brands and access to foreign markets. Ctrip.com International Ltd. said the ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Breaking a sweat? Researchers are creating a skin patch that can test those droplets while people exercise and beam results to their smartphones, possibly a new way to track health and fitness. The experimental gadget goes well beyond activity monitors like the Fitbit. A little larger than a quarter, it’s almost like a tiny lab stuck ...

  Bloomberg U.S. highway safety officials called on smartphone makers to add features that would keep motorists from using functions linked to a surge in deaths due to distracted driving, a proposal that drew immediate opposition from the electronics industry. The voluntary guidelines proposed Wednesday asked device makers to take steps such as blocking some video displays and preventing manual ...

FRANKFURT / AP Volkswagen’s namesake brand hopes to bounce back from its diesel emissions scandal with a broad restructuring that will mean more battery-powered cars, digital services such as ride-sharing, and more SUVs for the U.S. market. Herbert Diess, the head of the Volkswagen division, unveiled the company’s Transform 2025 plan at a news conference, saying that “in the coming ...

  San Francisco / AP Facebook has built a tool for geographically censoring posts at the leading social network as it seeks a path back into China, The New York Times has reported. The New York Times cited three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity, as saying that the tool could filter news feeds at the social ...

  San Francisco / AP An industry-backed autonomous car lobbying group has urged US regulators to go further to remove speed bumps than what was laid out in guidelines published two months ago. In a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a ‘Self-Driving Coalition’ founded early this year by Google, Ford, Volvo, Uber and Lyft hailed the framework ...

  Faye Flam Bloomberg Blind faith in any technology can be dangerous — especially when it comes to areas of forensic science such as DNA fingerprinting. For example, if police have “DNA evidence” against a suspect, most juries will assume that’s proof of guilt. But while the technology for analyzing DNA has become vastly more sensitive since it was first ...

  Bloomberg A U.S. safety agency is investigating an accident involving a massive experimental drone Facebook Inc. is developing to bring the internet to remote areas of the world. No one was hurt in the incident, which came during the unmanned aircraft’s first test flight on June 28. It marks the latest hiccup in Facebook’s plans to wirelessly connect the ...

  NEW YORK / Bloomberg At the largest online travel conference last week, industry executive Steve Hafner was asked an unusual question: What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think about Google? “Annoying,” said Hafner, chief executive officer of Priceline Group Inc.’s Kayak business. Hafner captured the mood well. Despite more than $15 billion in annual revenue ...

  Washington / AFP Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted, Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump: the battle over fake news is heating up after a White House campaign in which the misinformation industry may have swung the outcome of the vote. Last week, Google and Facebook moved to cut off ad revenue to bogus news sites. But media watchers ...