Technology

Microsoft has elevated its Garage project Journal, a notetaking app designed for styluses and pens, into a full-fledged product now called Microsoft Journal, the company announced Tuesday. The app offers “a delightful freeform personal notetaking experience that lets you take notes and reason through ink,” Microsoft’s Renee Malone said in a blog post. The app lets you write and draw like many other notetaking apps, but it also supports gestures like scratching out words to erase them and circling words or phrases to select them. You can use the app to mark up PDFs, which is a popular thing to do, according to Malone; a pie chart in her post says that 59 percent of all page types in Journal were PDFs. A screenshot from Microsoft Journal.Image: Microsoft Garage is Microsoft’s brand for its m...

PayPal is now introducing a new credit card that’ll give you up to 3% cashback for your transactions. Aptly named the PayPal Cashback Mastercard, the new offering will continue to provide unlimited 2% cashback and all your purchases, but you’ll be able to get 3% cashback instead if you choose to pay through PayPal, whether online, via mobile, or even in-store with the company’s QR codes. Much like the Apple Card, there won’t be any annual fees at all, and you’ll be rewarded the cashback daily as opposed to waiting till the end of the month. With a redesigned user interface on both its website and mobile app, you’ll be able to access your rewards much easier as well. As for eligibility, existing PayPal credit card users will automatically be upgraded to the cashback program, while new users...

Epic Games has developed a new mobile app that utilizes augmented reality to turn photos into usable 3D scans. Epic is utilizing the technology created by the company Capturing Reality, which Epic acquired last year, to convert these images into assets. Capturing Reality created the photogrammetric software called RealityCapture, which easily takes laser scans or images and transforms them into digital 3D scans of the product. With this technology, Epic hopes that creatives will be able to use real-world object scans in their digital design projects. Upon signing into Epic Games, the app prompts users to take at least 20 photos of any item and RealityCaptures exports these scans for use in their own 3D, virtual reality and augmented reality projects. The app is currently in limited beta wi...

A former employee at DeepMind, the Google-owned AI research lab, accuses the company’s human resources department of intentionally delaying its response to her complaints about sexual misconduct in the workplace, as first reported by the Financial Times. In an open letter posted to Medium, the former employee (who goes by Julia to protect her identity) says she was sexually harassed by a senior researcher for months while working at the London-based company. During this time, she was allegedly subject to numerous sexual propositions and inappropriate messages, including some that described past sexual violence against women and threats of self-harm. “Whether it was 10 months or 7, it was far, far too long.” Julia got in contact with the company’s HR and grievance team as early as August 20...

Within the news of Elon Musk taking a significant ownership stake in Twitter — and the revelation that it really is working on an edit button for tweets — many people noticed a wrinkle that seemed small at first but could cause problems later. On Monday, Musk filed beneficial ownership report paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to note his ownership of 73,486,938 shares of Twitter (about 9.2 percent of its outstanding common stock and enough to make him the company’s largest individual shareholder), and the box checked on the form (pdf) indicated it was a Schedule 13G, which allows for a simple disclosure for investors who intend to remain “passive” in the company’s affairs. We don’t usually get into stock market minutiae, but this is important because of what happe...

Block, the parent company of products like Cash App and Tidal, said in an SEC filing that a former employee downloaded “certain reports” that “contained some US customer information” without permission from Cash App Investing (via Protocol). Data in the reports, which Block said were downloaded on December 10th, included “full name and brokerage account number” and for “some customers” included “brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings and/or stock trading activity for one trading day.” The employee, who downloaded the data after they left the company, had access to the reports “as part of their past job responsibilities,” according to Block. “The reports did not include usernames or passwords, Social Security numbers, date of birth, payment card information, addresses, bank...

Plex’s latest beta features are a modern solution to a modern problem — having to search through HBO Max, Netflix, Disney Plus, and like, three other services to find something to watch. The company announced a new “Discover” feature, which aggregates and recommends content from various streaming services and a universal watchlist that gathers everything you want to watch all in one place. The Discover screen acts like most streaming services’ homepages, giving you recommendations on what to watch next, but with the ability to show content from many different catalogs. It shouldn’t overwhelm you with selections you don’t have access to, though. There’s a setting that lets you choose only the services you have. Plex has been working for several years to slide into position as a legitimized ...

German authorities shut down the server infrastructure for the Russian darknet marketplace Hydra, seizing €23 million (~$25.2 million USD) worth of Bitcoin in the process, Germany’s Federal Crime Police Office (BKA) announced on Tuesday (via Bleeping Computer). Hydra is a large marketplace on the dark web that serves as a hub for drugs, stolen credit card information, counterfeit bills, fake documents, and other illegal goods or services. The market primarily caters to criminals in Russia and surrounding nations. “Treasuremen,” or dealers connected with the site, push drugs throughout the region by hiding them in geo-tagged pickup locations. Hydra has the highest turnover rate out of any illegal market in the world With the shutdown of the German-based server, authorities are now launching...

Helbiz, a shared electric scooter and bike provider that operates in the US and Europe, failed to pay its US-based employees this past week, The Verge has learned. In an email to employees, the company’s CEO blamed “an error in our payroll system” and promised each employee a $100 bonus to make up for the snafu. “I personally apologize for this mistake and hope you know it does not reflect my knowledge of the value you all provide to the success of this company,” Helbiz CEO Salvatore Palella said in the email, which was obtained by The Verge. In an email, head of communications Matt Rosenberg confirmed the missed payroll, adding that it only affected the company’s US-based employees. Helbiz employees in other offices were paid on time, he wrote. “On payroll, there was an update in our payr...

Wi-Fi is excellent for connecting battery-powered security cameras so you can have wire-free surveillance of your property. But there are plenty of places Wi-Fi can’t go where you still might want some digital eyes. Eufy Security’s latest smart security camera, the 4G Starlight Camera, is designed to solve this problem. The 4G Starlight can be left unattended in remote locations while still providing the owner with access to any footage it captures. The Starlight uses 4G LTE cellular connectivity through AT&T to communicate with the Eufy app on your phone or tablet. It also has a built-in GPS location tool to help recover it if it’s lost or stolen. The camera costs $249 and will be released on April 15th. It also has the option of a $20 solar panel to keep it charged. The AT&T SIM ...

It’s a feature that Twitter users have been requesting for so long that it’s become a meme, but now the mythical “edit button” is actually becoming a reality. Twitter has announced that it’s working to allow users to edit their tweets after posting them. The idea is that you’ll be able to fix any typos or errors in a tweet without sacrificing any replies, retweets, or likes it’s already accrued. Twitter plans to begin testing the feature with Twitter Blue subscribers in “the coming months,” the company said Tuesday. Jay Sullivan, the company’s VP of consumer product, said that editing has been “the most requested Twitter feature for many years” in a thread on Tuesday. The company has been looking into how to build the feature “in a safe manner” since last year. “Without things like time li...