Technology

The free-to-play MMO Lost Ark has had a huge debut in the West, hitting the second-most concurrent players in Steam history just 24 hours after its February 11th release. Unfortunately, that popularity has meant that players in Europe have had to wait in long queues to play, though developer Smilegate and the game’s Western publisher, Amazon Games, are working to try and fix things. The long queues were an issue for the Europe Central server soon after launch, and the developers quickly promised to implement a new Europe West server to give players another place to play. While that Europe West server is now active, “the Europe Central region is at capacity and unfortunately there is no way to increase the number of players per world in Europe Central,” according to a post from the develope...

Instagram is discontinuing some app time limit options and encouraging users to update their settings, according to a report from TechCrunch. Originally, users were able to select a time limit as low as five minutes a day, while the new options begin at 30 minutes and go up to three hours. In screenshots sent to TechCrunch by an Instagram user who had previously set a 10-minute daily limit, a popup now appears at the top of their feed urging them to set a new daily limit value in accordance with an app update. Though the popup says the user can keep their existing limit if they want, clicking the edit button directs them to select a preset option, the lowest of which is 30 minutes. An additional popup on the activity page in the app says the 10-minute value is “no longer supported.” The ap...

Amazon is tying two of its big gaming efforts, the Twitch streaming platform and its Luna cloud gaming service, a bit closer together. If you’re looking at a game’s page on Twitch and that game is available on Luna, you might now see a “Play on Luna” button that takes you to the title on the cloud gaming service (via 9to5Google). While the button could be a handy way to hop directly into an interesting game you found on Twitch, there are still a lot of limitations to Luna that make the process of just jumping in and playing a game harder than it should be. We need more people playing Sonic Mania on Twitch. Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge First of all, to see the button at all, it appears you need to be logged into Twitch, have linked your Amazon account to Twitch, and been accepted in...

The OnePlus 10 Pro is out in China, and while it has some flagship specs, including a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor and a 5,000mAh battery, it turns out it might not be the most durable phone on the market. YouTuber Zack Nelson, creator of the popular JerryRigEverything channel, put the OnePlus 10 Pro through his usual durability test, and when he pushed on the middle of the phone to try and bend it, it snapped nearly in half. See for yourself — the bend test for the portion of the video starts at 6:57 (and that’s where the embedded video below should begin). [embedded content] When Nelson first pushes on the OnePlus 10 Pro, the back glass begins to crack, and many of the cracks appear under the phone’s stovetop-like camera bump. When he pushes again, those cracks turn into a full-on break,...

A group of users on NFT exchange platform OpenSea has been hacked, leading to a loss of hundreds of NFTs. According to new reports, 32 accounts on the service were hacked through what the company believed to be phishing attacks. 254 tokens were stolen, including works from Azuki and Bored Ape Yacht Club. Web3 expert Molly White estimates the total loss to be roughly 641 ETH, or approximately $1.7 million USD. “We have confidence that this was a phishing attack,” OpenSea co-founder and CEO of OpenSea Devin Finzer explained on Twitter. “We don’t know where the phishing occurred, but we’ve been able to rule out a number of things based on our conversations with the 32 affected users.” He emphasized that the website itself was not a vector for the attack, and hackers did not exploit any vulner...

Final Fantasy XIV is finally getting its free trial back on February 22nd, over two months after Square Enix stopped offering it to reduce player load after the incredibly popular Endwalker expansion. The news comes from FFXIV’s latest Letter from the Producer Livestream from director and producer Naoki Yoshida that took place over the weekend, via NME. Final Fantasy XIV has a generous free trial option for new players, allowing them to play the entirety of the base A Realm Reborn release and the Heavensward expansion for as long as they’d like. Square Enix’s enthusiastic social media hype for the free trial has even become a meme in its own right. Endwalker may actually have been too popular when it was first released in December. The trial doesn’t actually include access to the latest ex...

The US Copyright Office has rejected a request to let an AI copyright a work of art. Last week, a three-person board reviewed a 2019 ruling against Steven Thaler, who tried to copyright a picture on behalf of an algorithm he dubbed Creativity Machine. The board found that Thaler’s AI-created image didn’t include an element of “human authorship” — a necessary standard, it said, for protection. Creativity Machine’s work, seen above, is named “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” It’s part of a series Thaler has described as a “simulated near-death experience” in which an algorithm reprocesses pictures to create hallucinatory images and a fictional narrative about the afterlife. Crucially, the AI is supposed to do this with extremely minimal human intervention, which has proven a dealbreaker for t...

Anker has managed to hold its own against giant tech rivals by delivering better-than-expected sound and cramming features into its Soundcore-branded wireless earbuds — all while pricing them lower than the competition. The Liberty 3 Pros are the latest example of this and a showcase of how far the company has come in designing audio products. At $170, the Liberty 3 Pros are the most advanced earbuds in the Soundcore lineup, with dual drivers in each bud, active noise cancellation, wireless charging, plus extra conveniences like multipoint and LDAC support. They offer a powerful, rich sound signature that’s a rung above something like the Liberty Air 2 Pro, lengthy battery life, IPX4 water resistance, and more. They also come in a range of colors, including white, black, purple, and the gr...

Crypto exchange FTX is launching a new team focused on driving cryptocurrency and non-fungible token (or NFT) adoption in the gaming world, according to a Bloomberg report. The initial offering from the new gaming unit will reportedly be a “crypto as a service” platform through which game publishers can launch tokens and provide support for in-game NFTs. “We are launching FTX Gaming because we see games as an exciting use case for crypto,” an FTX spokesperson told Bloomberg via email. “There are 2 billion+ gamers in the world who have played with and collected digital items, and can now also own them.” The new gaming-focused team from FTX is a sign of the continued push to bring blockchain-based products into the gaming space, as demonstrated by projects like GameStop’s own NFT marketplace...

Truth Social, a social media network developed by former president Donald Trump’s new media company, is now live on the iOS App Store in the US. Reuters reports that the iOS app was available to download shortly before midnight, eastern time, prior to Presidents Day on February 21st. The service appears to be closely modeled on Twitter, which was previously Trump’s preferred social media platform. The former president was banned from the platform in early 2021 after Twitter said he was inciting violence in the wake of the storming of the US Capitol building. An image included on Truth Social’s App Store listing.Image: Truth Social / App Store As of this writing, Truth Social’s website is loading intermittently, but collecting names and email addresses for users who wish to sign up. When we...

Twitter might be testing an escape hatch for users who don’t want to be part of a thread. On Friday, writer and researcher Jane Manchun Wong tweeted an apparent screenshot of a new “leave this conversation” feature. As described in the screenshot, the feature would untag your username from a Twitter conversation, prevent people from mentioning you in the conversation again, and stop you from receiving notifications about it. (You can still see the thread.) The feature looks different from “mute this conversation,” an existing option that turns off notifications for a thread you’re mentioned in. According to a followup tweet, leaving the conversation will make your Twitter handle appear as plain text in the tweet where you’re mentioned, rather than the hyperlink someone would normally see i...