Technology

After the gold rush of signing Joe Rogan, Spotify now has to deal with the harvest. The latest difficulty in reaction to Spotify’s controversial star turn comes from singer and songwriter Neil Young, who says he’s extremely unhappy to be sharing a platform with Rogan. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” Young wrote in an open letter to his manager and record label (which has since been deleted from his website). “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.” The reason? Rogan’s hand in spreading vaccine misinformation. As first reported by Rolling Stone, Young writes: “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by th...

Amazon is bringing its cashierless Just Walk Out technology to a new format of stores aimed at suburbs, the company announced today. The new stores will use the Amazon Go branding that the company already uses for its locations in city centers, but will instead be located further afield where they’ll sell food, snacks, alcohol, and “a few every day essentials.” They’re convenience stores, basically, and come at a time when a shift to home working means that people are spending more time in the vicinity of their homes rather than commuting into city-based offices. Like its other Just Walk Out stores, Amazon says customers will be able to browse the store, pick up items, and then leave without having to interact with a cashier or self-checkout. Selling food, snacks, alcohol, and everyday ess...

A cryptocurrency cohort, Spice DAO previously paid $3 million USD for an original 1975 copy of Dune. The price was approximately 100 times asking price, well over the market value for the artifact. The autonomous organization originally purchased the piece and planned to make the book free to the public as well as produce an animated limited series to sell to a streaming service and NFTs. However, the group ran into an issue as the book is already free online and purchasing the book itself does not give the owners the legal rights to create any animated series based on the story. When Spice DAO announced it purchased the book, many dismissed it as a stunt by social media. Recently, the group posted to Medium dictating their next steps – “After two months of outreach, conversations with for...

Bitcoin has hit a minor snag, trading at approximately half of its all-time high price. While many cryptocurrency traders are recovering from their losses in the market, a digital token collector has turned a McDonald’s employee application into an NFT. Listed as the McDonald’s Job Application on OpenSea, the NFT consists of 1,111 application forms. The NFT creator went as far to poke fun at crypto enthusiasts hit by the current Bitcoin dip with a statement about the collection, “Is ETH sinking? Can’t you afford to live? We got you! Apply for your dream 9 to 5 McDonald’s job now with our application.” According to the creator, the first 1,000 applications are free to mint while the remaining 111 will cost 0.01 ETH, which adds up to approximately $25 USD at the current exchange rate. As of ...

Quentin Tarantino’s first Pulp Fiction NFT sold for $1.1 million USD, defying efforts by Miramax, the film studio that produced the 1994 cult classic, to stop its sale. The project, called Tarantino NFTs, is offering the original handwritten screenplay from the film broken into several iconic scenes minted as one-of-a-kind NFTs. In collaboration with SCRT Labs, the never-before-scene scripts also come with audio commentary from Tarantino himself explaining the scene’s significance. Miramax has filed a lawsuit claiming intellectual property rights over the content. “Whatever limited rights Mr. Tarantino has to screenplay publication, they do not permit the minting of unique NFTs associated with Miramax’s intellectual property, and his contrary position is the subject of a pending lawsu...

A bug on popular NFT marketplace OpenSea exploited prices and allowed hackers to buy and flip NFTs for cheap. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic wrote in a blog post on Monday that hackers used the glitch to “steal” $1 million USD from OpenSea sellers. The company said it identified at least three attackers who purchased eight NFTs or more — including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats and Cyberkongz NFTs — for way less than their current market value. A screenshot posted by Elliptic shows that one user by the name of jpegdegenlove purchased Bored Ape #9991 for 0.77 ETH (about $1,800) at around 7 a.m. before flipping it for 84.2 ETH (about $196,000 USD) moments later, making about $194,000 USD in profit. The same user is said to have spent $133,000 USD for seven NFTs ov...

Update January 24th, 4:56PM ET: Costco’s listing sold out at this time and has been removed from its site for now. We are continuing to keep an eye out for more restocks happening soon. The Sony PlayStation 5 comes and goes fast, with high demand at each and every restock opportunity. If you have not landed one yet, your options can be slightly improved by paying for subscriptions to select retailers that give special access. If you are a Costco member then you already do just that, and your time is now. You can order a PlayStation 5 console from Costco right now, bundled with additional accessories and 12-month PlayStation Plus membership card. You must be a paid Costco member to place this order. A membership starts at $60 per year and can be purchased here. Consoles are some of the item...

Twitter appears to be working on a feature that lets you share tweets with a specific group of people (via Input). If this sounds familiar, it’s because Instagram’s Close Friends feature lets you do the exact same thing — but in Twitter’s case, you’ll be limiting your tweets to your “Flock.” Twitter first gave us a glimpse of the feature last July, which it called “Trusted Friends” at the time. Since then, mobile developer Alessandro Paluzzi has been keeping track of Twitter’s progress, and it’s really starting to take shape. #Twitter continues to work on Twitter Flock by adding an explanation of how it works ℹ️ You can choose up to 150 people to include in your Twitter Flock ℹ️ People won’t be notified if you remove them from the list pic.twitter.com/xtGc...

Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin looks like Square Enix’s biggest departure yet for the long-running Final Fantasy series. Though the name Final Fantasy has been synonymous with RPG for the last 35 years, Stranger of Paradise is an action game focused on challenging and fast-paced combat. With only two months to go before launch, The Verge spoke with its developers to talk about Stranger of Paradise and the unique place it occupies in the Final Fantasy family. More than setting itself apart by being an action game, Stranger of Paradise looks and feels vastly different from its numbered siblings with its bloody aesthetic. Most Final Fantasy games entice by offering a bright world to explore with beautiful people to befriend. Stranger of Paradise, by contrast, lets you know right up...

The release dates of the seventh and eighth installments of the Mission: Impossible series have been pushed back again due to pandemic-related delays, Deadline reported. The two flicks are the latest in a long list of movies to be delayed by the pandemic, which upended Hollywood as it has struggled to deal with closed movie theaters and halted or scaled back productions. The films Mission: Impossible 7 and Mission: Impossible 8, both co-produced by Paramount Pictures and Skydance, are the latest installments in the film series that began in 1996, starring Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, an agent for Impossible Mission Force. Mission: Impossible 7 was supposed to be released last year on September 30th but is now set for July 14th, 2023, and Mission: Impossible 8’s original release date was most ...

Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies dipped to new lows early on Monday, wiping $130 billion USD from the overall crypto market over a 24-hour period, according to CNBC.  According to Coinbase, Bitcoin dropped to $32,933 USD just before 8 a.m. ET on Monday, while Ethereum dipped to $2,159 USD during early trading hours — their lowest prices since July. Both coins rebounded later in the day. CNBC said that cryptocurrency prices have moved alongside traditional stocks, which have continued to fall since the beginning of the year. The Wall Street Journal attributed the decline to a broader market selloff of riskier assets. Bitcoin, Ethereum and other popular also saw steep declines on Friday, with prices hitting lows not seen in months. In other news, New York Cit...

Meta on Monday announced that it working on building the fastest AI supercomputer in the world. Called the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), Meta claims that it is “among the fastest AI supercomputers running today” and will be the fastest globally when it is fully built out by mid-2022. The company began designing the new computing infrastructure in early 2020 in order to accelerate the process of training large AI models, with the goal of one day training models with over a trillion parameters of data — equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video. “Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform — the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role,” Facebook’s parent company ...