Technology

Mobile World Congress organizers will ban some Russian companies from the world’s largest mobile technology show which will run from February 28th to March 3rd, Reuters reports. The Russian Pavilion will not exhibit the country’s mobile products this year at the Barcelona-based event because of international sanctions imposed upon Russia after it invaded Ukraine, confirmed the GSMA, the industry trade body that organizes the event. Although the GSMA strongly condemned the invasion in a statement on its website, its chief executive John Hoffman told Reuters there are no plans to cancel or reschedule the conference. However, he added “it’s an evolving situation” that they “will continue to monitor.” While Hoffman also said a “handful, a few” of Russian firms and their executives will be barr...

Discord is overhauling its policies and community guidelines to tackle health misinformation, off-platform behavior, and hate speech, the company announced on Friday. It’s the first big policy update for Discord in nearly two years and is designed to target groups or individuals that participate in organized violence, spread harmful anti-vaccination material, or harass other Discord users with hate speech. After two years of a pandemic, Discord is making its policies more clear about health misinformation. In new community guidelines, which go into effect on March 28th, Discord says users “may not share false or misleading information on Discord that is likely to cause physical or societal harm.” This includes content that could result in damage to physical infrastructure, injury to others...

Meta has reportedly broken up the around 300-person team tasked with working on an OS for AR and VR headsets, moving some of the engineers to teams working on AR glasses and Oculus (er, Quest) headsets, according to a report by The Information. This comes after recent reports — which Meta denied at the time — that the company had halted work on the team’s project creating a unified custom operating system for its VR and AR headsets. In January, reports surfaced that Meta canceled the “XROS” project the team was working on (XR is a term used to refer to both augmented and virtual reality). After the reports came out, Reality Labs Vice President Gabriel Aul tweeted that the company was “growing this team, not shrinking it,” and included a link to the Meta careers page. Aul also said that the...

The announcement of new sanctions against Russia provoked a strong reaction from the head of Russia’s space program, Dmitry Rogozin, yesterday, who seemed to threaten that the restrictions would destroy Russia’s partnership with NASA and lead to the demise of the International Space Station. Though Rogozin is known for his bluster and provocative statements, his comments did spark concern over what NASA would do if the Russians abruptly pulled out of the ISS program — a move that could be a substantial problem. President Joe Biden announced the new sanctions on Thursday in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, claiming the sanctions would “degrade [Russia’s] aerospace industry, including their space program.” A list of the sanctions released by the White House mentioned denying experts...

I just put up a 4,000-word review of Valve’s Steam Deck portable gaming PC, which just went on sale to the first batch of early adopters today. But the company had a surprise announcement too — Aperture Desk Job, a new bite-size experience set in the Portal universe that’ll be a free download March 1st. It’s designed to introduce new Steam Deck buyers to the handheld’s incredible array of controls, and it involves… toilets and chairs. Assuming you’re not already halfway through the video teaser atop this post, here’s how Valve tries to thread the needle between our rampant desire for Valve to remember how to count to three and the potential disappointment that Valve has not yet managed it: Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them...

Returning to its all-time low price, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 gaming monitor is discounted to $1,999.99 at Amazon, a hefty discount from its typical $2,499.99 price. While there are certainly less expensive gaming monitors out there, few of them can boast specs quite like the G9. The 49-inch curved, mini-LED gaming panel has a resolution of 5120 x 1440p and a whopping 240Hz refresh rate. The display has a pair of HDMI ports but also has a single input for a DisplayPort connection, and its two USB-A ports also support data passthrough. With so much screen real estate, it’s handy that the G9 can display two different video sources at their native resolution simultaneously, allowing you to take full advantage of the vast display. Read our review. Samsung Odyssey G9 $2,000 $2,500 21% o...

Tumblr and New York City’s Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) have settled discrimination allegations related to the company’s 2018 adult content ban, which city regulators say disproportionately affected LGBTQ users. The settlement requires Tumblr to revise its user appeals process and train its human moderators on diversity and inclusion issues, as well as review thousands of old cases and hire an expert to look for potential bias in its moderation algorithms. The settlement, which did not involve a formal legal complaint and was signed last month, marks one of the first times that regulators have reached an agreement to change a social network’s moderation policies based on algorithmic bias issues. It resolves an investigation that the CCHR began in December 2018, shortly after Tumblr ba...

Video doorbells are handy devices, alerting you to events at your front door via your smartphone, wherever in the world you are. But when you’re just chilling out at home it’s often easier to turn to your Echo Show or Google Nest Hub to see what’s going on outside, rather than pulling out your phone — or actually getting off the sofa. Many smart doorbell cameras can connect to Alexa or Google smart displays, including third-party options from companies like Lenovo and Facebook, as well as Fire TV and Chromecast enabled TVs. This lets you bring up a live view of your doorbell camera on a bigger screen with a simple voice command. Then you can see, hear, and, in some cases speak to your visitor or check on that package on your porch. It’s easy to connect your smart doorbell to your smart dis...

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was a subject of fascination within Silicon Valley and the tech press even before her eventual downfall and recent conviction for defrauding investors. But Hulu’s The Dropout is confident there are still people out there dying to know more about the woman behind the disruptive medtech unicorn that could have been. Adapted from ABC News’ investigative true crime podcast of the same name hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, and produced by Taylor Dunn and Victoria Thompson, The Dropout chronicles Holmes’ (Amanda Seyfried) journey from being just another Stanford dropout with a half-baked dream to becoming one of the most infamous American CEOs of the 21st century. Like the podcast, the new Hulu show — which Jarvis, Dunn, and Thompson co-executive produced along with se...

Patreon says it’s suspended the crowdfunding page for “Come Back Alive,” a Ukrainian NGO that was collecting money to support the the country’s military in response to Russian aggression. In a statement given to CNBC, the platform said it “does not allow any campaigns involved in violence or purchasing of military equipment, regardless of their cause.” Come Back Alive’s page said that funds would be used to train soldiers, as well as provide technical equipment, according to Patreon’s blog post. Come Back Alive’s Patreon page dates back to at least May 2020, according to the Daily Dot, but as of January 26th this year it had a modest 936 patrons bringing in around $19,000 a month. That all changed this week after Russia invaded Ukraine, when its crowdfunding drew widespread attention, and ...

Remember when you were signing up for a new phone plan and you considered options from four major wireless carriers? You don’t — at least, not if you were shopping around in the last couple of years. In the US, we only have three major carriers while Dish Network is in the process of building what is supposed to be our fourth option. That’s the agreement that was reached in the wake of the T-Mobile / Sprint merger, and the company is running up against a Federal Communications Commission-imposed requirement to cover 20 percent of the population by June 2022. So how’s that going? Just fine, according to Dish, even though its 2021 Q4 earnings call today didn’t paint the rosiest picture of its current state. Chairman Charlie Ergen spoke with his typical candor about a recent visit to Las Vega...