Technology

In the video game Under A Star Called Sun, players wake up alone on a spaceship. There are only a handful of things to do: make coffee, water the plants, gaze out upon the cosmos. Walking along the ship’s winding corridors, you come across a room with a machine that lets you re-create memories. Suddenly, you’re transported to a pixelated sidewalk, then to brunch, and next to a quiet park. It’s a snapshot of two friends hanging out together on an ordinary August day — a memory, but one that’s likely to fade, to corrupt, as the protagonist says, “like a JPEG saved over and over.” Under A Star Called Sun was made by Cecile Richard, a Melbourne-based graphic designer and zine maker. Richard explains over Zoom that it’s a response to grief. A friend passed away in 2019; they loved sci-fi, so a ...

Pixar’s Turning Red, from director Domee Shi, may be Disney’s latest animated feature aimed at kids. But any adult over the age of 30 or so needs to understand that the movie is also a kind of one-way time machine back to the halcyon days of 2002 when burning CDs was the easiest way to share music with your best friends. Though Turning Red’s rooted in a moment from our past, its story about a young girl trying to break free of her lovingly-overbearing family is both timeless and a surprising testament to its studio growing up in some very important ways. Turning Red’s central character Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang) is the sort of 13-year-old girl that most parents of grade eights (the movie is unabashedly Canadian to wonderful effect) dream of. Meilin stays on top of her grades, dives into e...

YouTube is now hoping that podcasters will begin recording videos for their shows. According to a new report from Bloomberg, the video hosting giant has begun paying content creators to film their podcasts so they can be uploaded onto the platform. Sources close to the matter reveal that YouTube is ready to pay upwards of $200,000 USD to $300,000 USD to podcast networks to create either filmed versions of their podcasts or other kinds of video content, while individual shows will also receive $50,000 USD. YouTube has already been a successful platform for podcasters to reach a wider audience. Channels like Joe Rogan and H3 have leveraged the website to become some of the U.S.’ most popular podcasts, and the company itself has also started making moves to bolster its position in the ma...

Ahead of its March 8 Apple event, additional rumors have surfaced regarding a new “Mac Studio” desktop, based on the Mac mini. 9To5Mac reports that while it is based on the mini, the “Mac Studio” is expected to be feature a more powerful hardware. Two renditions are currently in the works at Apple with one featuring the M1 Max chip and the other to feature the Apple Silicon Chip, making it even more powerful than the current M1 Max. The “Mac Studio” would present a new category that lands itself between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro. Rumors have also indicated that the company is working on an “Apple Studio Display” which would allow for 7K resolution. It is unclear if the new monitors would use the A13 chip from the iPhone 11. The size is currently unknown as well, though with higher resol...

OPPO has now unveiled its latest flagship smartphone: the Find X5 Pro. A successor to the tech company’s Find X3 Pro from last year, the new X5 carries a very similar design aesthetic, utilizing a thin, lightweight body with a raised camera cluster on the top rear left of the device. On the front sits a 6.7-inch WQHD+ curved AMOLED screen that covers 100% of the P3 color gamut, displaying more than one billion colors and a peak brightness of 1,300 nits, all protected by a Gorilla Glass Victus layer. The processor comes in the form of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, heralded as one of the most powerful Android chips currently available on the market, and its battery pack also gets an increased capacity of 5,000mAh. Much like its predecessor, however, the new model also places its focus ...

It’s no secret that many businesses and brands are either making moves or pondering moves into the metaverse. The restaurant biz is one example as last Fall Robinhood and Burger King linked up to give consumers one Dogecoin for every $5 spent and McDonalds has been cooking up NFT Big Macs. And now, popular fast-food chain Shake Shack has now hopped onto the bandwagon as it has just announced that for every purchase that is executed with a Cash App debit card through mid-March, it will refund its customers 15% of the total in Bitcoin. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the restaurant’s CMO Jay Livingston stated that it’s a trial to see if cryptocurrency will have any form of appeal to its customers. “You’re always trying to place your bets on those things that truly will be meani...

TikTok is suspending new video uploads and livestreams on its app in Russia, citing the country’s newly-passed “fake news” law as the reason for the change. 2/ In light of Russia’s new ‘fake news’ law, we have no choice but to suspend livestreaming and new content to our video service while we review the safety implications of this law. Our in-app messaging service will not be affected. — TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) March 6, 2022 “In light of Russia’s new ‘fake news’ law, we have no choice but to suspend livestreaming and new content to our video service while we review the safety implications of this law,” TikTok writes on Twitter. “Our in-app messaging service will not be affected.” Russian President Vladimir Putin signed off on the fake news law last week. It punishes people with f...

Netflix is suspending its services in Russia over the country’s invasion of Ukraine, as first reported by Variety. “Given the circumstances on the ground, we have decided to suspend our service in Russia” “Given the circumstances on the ground, we have decided to suspend our service in Russia,” Netflix spokesperson Emily Feingold said in a statement to The Verge. Last week, Netflix said it wouldn’t comply with a new Russian law that requires large streamers to host 20 Russian propaganda channels, such as NTV and the state-backed Channel One. The streaming giant later announced that it’s halting all productions and acquisitions in Russia — Netflix had been working on four Russian originals at the time. According to Bloomberg, Netflix currently has around 1 million subscribers in Russia. Net...

Halo Infinite’s second season won’t ship with online campaign co-op when it launches on May 3rd, 343 Industries announced. It’s set to launch “later” during season two, with no word on an exact release date. “It’s going to take more time to land a high-quality, full-featured 4-player network co-op experience” Joseph Staten, the head of creative on Halo Infinite says 343 is “aiming to deliver Campaign network co-op later in Season 2,” but won’t be bundling it at launch. It’s unclear whether split-screen and online campaign co-op will release simultaneously, though, as Staten only mentions network co-op as slated for release during season 2. “It’s going to take more time to land a high-quality, full-featured 4-player network co-op experience in the massive, wide-open world of Halo Infinite,”...

Apple is poised for its first livestream event of 2022 on Tuesday, March 8th at 1PM ET. The company sent out press invitation emails for the event titled “Peek Performance,” with rumors strongly suggesting Apple will announce a new third-generation iPhone SE with 5G. The iPad Air might also get a new spec bump update at the event, with upgrades to both 5G and an A15 Bionic processor, similar to last year’s iPad Mini. Another rumor suggests an Apple Silicon “M2” upgrade alongside a redesigned MacBook Air might be coming. New Macs, including a Mac Mini with an M1 Pro / M1 Max processor update, could also get a showing, and new iMac and Mac Pro hardware are said to be in the works — but those will likely show up later in the year. Whatever the case might be, we might see at least one of these...

The parents of an Activision Blizzard employee who died by suicide during a company retreat in 2017 are suing the company for wrongful death, according to a report by The Washington Post. Paul and Janet Moynihan, the parents of Kerri Moynihan, a 32-year-old finance manager at Activision Blizzard, allege sexual harassment was a “significant factor” contributing to her death. Investigators ruled Moynihan’s death a suicide after she was found dead in a hotel room at Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa in April 2017. The suit claims Activision Blizzard “permitted a work environment in which sexual harassment was pervasive” As noted by The Post, Moynihan was anonymously referenced in the lawsuit filed by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) last July, which sued ...