Technology

Spotify released its quarterly earnings today during a particularly fraught time for the company. Its star podcaster, Joe Rogan, spurred multiple musicians to pull their discographies from the platform over his show’s spreading of misinformation; Spotify-employed podcasters themselves spoke out, and even the White House responded. CEO Daniel Ek fielded questions about the backlash to having Rogan on the platform and stood by the company’s decision to host, distribute, and monetize the show. He instead tried to reframe the discussion as one of free speech and making Spotify a platform that can help all audio creators make a living, regardless of their opinions. “We’re trying to balance creative expression with the safety of our users, and of course, this is a very complicated issue,” he sai...

The FBI has confirmed to The Washington Post that the agency had a license to use NSO’s Pegasus spyware and that it tested out the software’s capabilities. The bureau insists that the software, which is capable of silently infecting phones and accessing camera and microphone feeds, contacts, texts, and more, was never used “in support of any investigation,” but the Post’s report says that there were at least discussions within the FBI and Department of Justice about how the FBI might go about deploying the spyware. The confirmation comes after The New York Times released a sweeping report last week, which included details about the FBI’s relationship with NSO. Not only did the FBI try out the spyware on phones using foreign SIM cards, according to the Post, but the agency also carried out ...

Two members of Google’s Ethical AI group have announced their departures from the company, according to a report from Bloomberg. Senior researcher Alex Hanna, and software engineer Dylan Baker, will join Timnit Gebru’s nonprofit research institute, Distributed AI Research (DAIR). In a post announcing her resignation on Medium, Hanna criticizes the “toxic” work environment at Google, and draws attention to a lack of representation of Black women at the company. “Prior to Timnit’s hiring, Google Research management had never recruited a Black woman as a research scientist,” Hanna states. “In one town hall around Googlegeist (Google’s annual workplace climate survey), a high-level executive remarked that there had been such low numbers of Black women in the Google Research organization that t...

SpaceX’s Starlink internet service has introduced a new premium price tier that promises higher speeds and the ability to withstand extreme weather conditions. Starlink’s says that premium users can expect download speeds of 150-500 Mbps, latency of 20-40ms and access to customer support 24/7. “Starlink Premium has more than double the antenna capability of Starlink, delivering faster internet speeds and higher throughput for the highest demand users,” the company’s website reads. The service is billed as being designed specifically for high-demand users and is ideal for rural and remote locations. Premium is priced at $500 USD per month, a jump from the company’s $99 USD standard service. While there are no long-term contracts for signing on, the premium plan also requires a $500 deposit,...

CNN president Jeff Zucker, a leading proponent of forthcoming streaming service CNN Plus, has resigned from the company following the discovery of a consensual relationship with another high-ranking executive. The relationship, which was not disclosed internally when it began, was discovered as part of an investigation into conduct by former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. Cuomo was fired from the network in December following a probe into his own involvement in the handling of sexual harassment allegations against his brother, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Zucker reportedly had a consensual relationship with EVP and chief marketing officer Allison Gollust, who will remain in her position at the company, the New York Times reported. CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter shared a c...

As this is being written, we are still in the midst of the Spotify controversy, during which artists are abandoning the audio service in protest of that company’s contract with podcaster Joe Rogan. Neil Young was the first to pull his music from the service, followed by Joni Mitchell and others. And some subscribers are deciding to follow the musicians’ example. Although some Spotify fans might disagree, there are quite a few alternatives available for good music listening. If you’re one of those who do use Spotify but who has decided to look elsewhere (or if you’re just interested in what music services are out there), here’s a quick rundown of just some of the better-known possibilities. Amazon Music Along with Apple Music and Google’s YouTube Music, Amazon Music is one of the most well-...

The European Commission inflamed tensions over what role nuclear energy and gas should play in the clean energy transition when it proposed new rules today on what can be labeled a “green investment.” After more than a year of heated debate, it decided to consider gas and nuclear “sustainable” under certain conditions. “Taking account of scientific advice and current technological progress, the Commission considers that there is a role for private investment in gas and nuclear activities in the transition,” the Commission said in its announcement. The EU has committed to producing no net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 — a target research has shown is necessary worldwide to prevent the worst effects of climate change. By 2030, the EU plans to slash emissions by more than half compared to ...

The release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is being delayed until next year, according to a report from Bloomberg. The game, which is being made by Rocksteady (the studio behind Batman: Arkham Asylum, City, and Knight), was scheduled to come out sometime in 2022. The game’s Twitter account still lists the release date as 2022 in its bio, but as Bloomberg points out, a tweet from WarnerMedia’s CEO about the company’s 2022 game lineup didn’t include Kill the Justice League. It’s a slightly odd delay, given that the first gameplay trailer was just released in December and made the game look like it was getting close to being done. As we’ve seen, though, making a game during a pandemic is difficult, and most high-profile games on the horizon have pushed the release dates back at lea...

Scammers are becoming increasingly prevalent across social media platforms. According to a new report from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, more than 95,000 people reported $770 million in losses due to fraud on social media in 2021. This accounts for 25% of reported fraud cases over the year. Only 5,000 people reported $42 million USD in scams in 2017, so these new numbers represent an eighteenfold increase in reported losses over a five-year period. And counter to the notion that the elderly are most at risk of being conned, data showed that people 18 to 39 were more than twice as likely to lose money as older adults. The FTC said that many of these scams take the form of bogus investment opportunities, often with transactions via cryptocurrency. Following investment scams, the second ...

DeepMind has created an AI system named AlphaCode that it says “writes computer programs at a competitive level.” The Alphabet subsidiary tested its system against coding challenges used in human competitions and found that its program achieved an “estimated rank” placing it within the top 54 percent of human coders. The result is a significant step forward for autonomous coding, says DeepMind, though AlphaCode’s skills are not necessarily representative of the sort of programming tasks faced by the average coder. Oriol Vinyals, principal research scientist at DeepMind, told The Verge over email that the research was still in the early stages but that the results brought the company closer to creating a flexible problem-solving AI — a program that can autonomously tackle coding challenges ...

On a cold day in January, NFTs started disappearing. Major services like MetaMask and Twitter were suddenly unable to display images associated with newly uploaded tokens, even though the users had clear records of ownership. Something in the distributed, decentralized technology stack had gone terribly wrong. The problem was the NFT marketplace OpenSea, which was suffering a database outage. The outage brought down OpenSea’s image-loading API, jamming up any service that relied on it to upload tokens. In a scene full of militant decentralizers, a single company had found its way to the center of nearly every product. Reporting on the chaos, Vice spotted one user who had photoshopped the company’s logo to read “ClosedSea.” It was an awkward moment but a revealing one. A year into the NFT b...

Hump Day is better when it’s paired with excellent deals, and excellent deals are all the better when one of them is a great TV for a new low price. There’s a great deal on Vizio’s P-Series of 2021 TVs that fits nicely with anyone seeking a match for the latest consoles. The P-Series Quantum supports many of the sought-after specs that a PS5 or Xbox Series X owner should look for, including HDMI 2.1, HDR, and a variable refresh rate with 120Hz at 1080p and 60Hz at 4K. When it comes to streaming TV shows and movies, there’s built-in Chromecast and Apple AirPlay 2 compatibility. These TVs come in 65 inches, 75 inches, and a massive 85 inches. Right now, you can get the 65-inch P65Q9-J model for just $899 on Amazon, knocking $300 off. The 75-inch P75Q9-J01 is also on sale for $1,599 — a much ...