Technology

YouTube will scale back a significant portion of YouTube Originals, which produced original content including scripted series, educational videos, and music and celebrity programming. Chief business officer for YouTube Robert Kyncl announced the changes today in a statement on Twitter. Going forward, the company will only fund originals in the YouTube Kids Fund and the Black Voices Fund, a program created in 2020 that committed $100 million to “amplify” Black creators on the platform. “With rapid growth comes new opportunities and now our investments can make a greater impact on even more creators when applied towards other initiatives, like our Creator Shorts Fund, Black Voices Fund, and Live Shopping programming to name a few,” the statement reads. Over six years, YouTube made few titles...

On Tuesday, Democrats introduced a new bill that would ban nearly all use of digital advertising targeting on ad markets hosted by platforms like Facebook, Google, and other data brokers. The Banning Surveillance Advertising Act – sponsored by Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) – prohibits digital advertisers from targeting any ads to users. It makes some small exceptions, like allowing for “broad” location-based targeting. Contextual advertising, like ads that are specifically matched to online content, would be allowed. “The ‘surveillance advertising’ business model is premised on the unseemly collection and hoarding of personal data to enable ad targeting,” Eshoo, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a Tuesday statement. “This pernicious practice all...

The US government’s site to claim free COVID tests, which has started accepting orders a day before it was scheduled to, is drawing in a lot of visitors — more than every other government page combined, according to the government’s own analytics site. Web traffic numbers change by the second, but at 1:32PM ET, when I ran the report to download real-time numbers for all governmental pages, COVIDTests.gov (along with its FAQ page and versions of the site in other languages) had 685,817 visitors. The visitor counts for the 3,853 other pages included in the report totaled 419,615. Traffic doesn’t seem to have dropped since then. At times, the COVIDtests.gov page had over 705,000 visitors. There have been concerns that the site wouldn’t be able to handle the load since it was announced. So far...

Nearly a month after President Joe Biden first announced that Americans would be able to order rapid at-home COVID-19 tests for free from the government, the administration’s website finally went live on Tuesday. But hours after the site’s launch, users struggled to place orders to homes or apartment buildings where other tenants may have already placed an order. The extent of the problem is still unclear as of publication, but White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said, “It’s a really small percentage and USPS will be sending our statement on this shortly.” Users trying to order tests to multiple-family homes and apartments seem to be experiencing this issue the most. Once a user enters their information into the form, they’re prompted with an error message that says their order could not ...

Since Activision Blizzard was sued in July by the state of California for a culture of “constant sexual harassment,” among many other troubling issues, the company has been in a state of controversy. There were a pair of employee walkouts, and more than 1,500 employees signed a petition to remove CEO Bobby Kotick. An Activision Blizzard spokesperson recently told the Wall Street Journal that 37 people had exited the company, and 44 have been disciplined as part of its investigations. Kotick will continue as CEO, for now Kotick himself was the center of another WSJ report saying the publisher’s former CEO was not only aware of but participated in the company’s pervasive toxic culture. Employees called for Kotick to step down not long after the report was published, as the bosses of both Pla...

Microsoft announced that it intends to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, a deal that will make Microsoft one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. With the deal, popular gaming franchises like Call of Duty, Warcraft, Overwatch, and more will be in the fold of Microsoft’s ever-expanding portfolio of studios, alongside Bethesda and its own Xbox Game Studios. Also included as part of the deal is King, the makers of Candy Crush, signaling that Microsoft may utilize the company to compete in the mobile space. In early 2021, Take-Two Interactive (which houses developers like 2K, Private Division, and Rockstar Games) purchased Zynga for $12.7 billion. Though the deal hasn’t come to pass, Microsoft’s intent to acquire Activision Blizzard raises questions around antitrust and a...

Last week, the White House announced COVIDTests.gov, a site that you can use to order four free at-home COVID-19 rapid antigen tests per household, and it looks like it has gone live ahead of schedule. It was initially set to start taking orders on January 19th, but it appears you can place an order for your free tests now. Some users have reported not seeing the “Order Free At-Home Tests” button, which connects you to the order page via the USPS website. However, you can get around this by heading directly to the ordering page. To place an order, simply fill out your name and address, and it will ship free starting in late January. No credit card is required, and they are supposed to ship within 7 – 12 days. A statement from the White House says that you’ll also be able to call a ho...

Coinbase is partnering with Mastercard to allow card payments on its upcoming NFT marketplace. This means you’ll be able to directly purchase an NFT with fiat currency (also known as a government-issued currency, such as the USD) using your Mastercard credit or debit card, all without having to buy cryptocurrency first. The cryptocurrency exchange says it’s working with Mastercard to “classify NFTs as ‘digital goods,’” which should, in turn, make NFTs more accessible to someone who might be uncomfortable purchasing and storing cryptocurrency. Most NFT marketplaces require that you purchase cryptocurrency first, add it to a secure wallet, and then connect that wallet to the marketplace, a process that obviously isn’t as simple as your typical online purchase. “Expanding the audience for NFT...

CEOs from major US airlines including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Southwest Airlines have warned that the impending deployment of new 5G spectrum on Wednesday could cause “catastrophic disruption” for flights across the country starting tomorrow. The warning, which was also signed by shipping companies including UPS Airlines and FedEx Express, was issued in a letter from the CEOs seen by Reuters, which said that both commercial and cargo flights could be affected. The letter was sent to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, FAA Administrator Steve Dickson, and White House National Economic Council director Brian Deese, Reuters reports. The 5G spectrum in question is known as C-band, and ...

The next big update for Fortnite brings back something old and adds something new. As fans have long expected, the snow on the battle royale island has slowly melted, revealing the return of Tilted Towers, an iconic urban area that dates back to Fortnite’s first island. Elsewhere in the v19.10 update is the addition of a new kind of creature: a giant, adorable monster called a Klombo. It looks like something ripped out of How to Train Your Dragon, and developer Epic says that they’re mostly gentle and they appear to add a new way of getting around the map. “Ascend their tails to get to the blowhole on their heads, then get launched a great distance upwards to escape a tricky situation,” Epic wrote in a blog post. There’s also a new item, a colorful kind of berry, that can be used to feed t...

Despite being leaked to hell and back, the Garmin Fenix 7 series was a no-show at CES 2022. That’s because Garmin decided to wait until today to separately announce its revamped multisport GPS smartwatches. On top of an updated flagship Fenix 7 lineup, Garmin is also launching the Epix — a rugged outdoors smartwatch with an always-on color display. Some things with the new Fenix 7 smartwatches will be familiar to Garmin fans. There are still three sizes: the 42mm Fenix 7S, the 47mm Fenix 7, and the whopping 51mm Fenix 7X. The Fenix 7S and 7 will come in “regular” versions made of fiber-reinforced polymer, but there are also Solar Editions and Sapphire Solar Editions for all three models. Additionally, the Sapphire Solar Editions upgrade the materials to titanium and a sapphire display for ...

Samsung has now unveiled its first-ever ray tracing-enabled mobile processor, rumored to be powering the upcoming Galaxy S22. Named the Exynos 2200, the new mobile processor was developed in partnership with AMD through Samsung’s very own 4nm EUV production process and carries the Xclipse GPU to allow for full ray-tracing when you’re gaming on the device.  “Samsung’s Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs,” AMD’s senior VP David Wang explained. GPU aside, the processor will be equipped with a single high-powered Cortex-X2 “flagship core” working together with three Cortex-A710 big-cores and four Cortex-A510 little-cores to provide all-around performance to balance power and efficiency. The image processor can also support ca...