Technology

Reddit is taking a look back at some of the site’s biggest moments and trends from 2021, and perhaps unsurprisingly, posts from r/wallstreetbets were the most upvoted posts of the year. r/wallstreetbets became hugely popular after GameStop’s stock price skyrocketed in January and as people followed updates from Keith Gill (aka DeepFuckingValue / Roaring Kitty), the trader who invested heavily in GameStop ahead of the stock’s surge. Here are the top five most upvoted posts, according to Reddit: On r/wallstreetbets, a user bought a billboard in Times Square reading “$GME GO BRRR” and got more than 433K upvotes A screenshotted tweet on r/wallstreetbets alleging Robinhood hid popular meme stocks and encouraging users to “take all the cash you can afford to lose and buy buy buy” had more than 3...

Oppo has released a brief video hinting at a new type of camera design for smartphones. The company’s “self-developed retractable camera” is shown extending from the phone’s body before retracting back inside. The video suggests that the mechanism is waterproof and that it’ll automatically retract the camera if the phone is dropped. Unlike pop-up selfie cameras that hide themselves inside a phone until needed, moving the camera back and forth on the Z-axis could have implications for image quality, though Oppo hasn’t yet claimed anything about any optical advantages of this design. It doesn’t appear to be a zoom lens, given it’s marked simply as 50mm, but it could theoretically help improve telephoto performance. The markings on the camera module show that the sensor is 1/1.56 inches and t...

Self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor Craig Wright has officially prevailed in the 1.1 million Bitcoin dispute. The trial for the lawsuit began on November 1. The lawsuit was between Wright and his ex-business partner Dave Kleiman. According to Reuters the Miami jury has cleared Wright of his fraud charges. With a 1.1 million Bitcoin fortune at stake, which amounts to approximately $54 million USD at the time of writing, the jury does not require Wright to share the cryptocurrency amount with the Kleiman family but is intended to pay $100 million USD to the two’s joint company, W&K Information Defense Research LLC in intellectual property rights. Kleiman’s family contended that when Wright and Kleiman were business partners, “Wright stole the bitcoin stemming from their relationship.” Accor...

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is heading to International Space Station for 12 days ahead of his upcoming trip around the Moon. Astronaut Alexander Misurkin and video producer Yozo Hirano will accompany him on the journey. The trio will launch out of Baikonur Cosmodrome, Khazakstan on the Soyuz MS-20 rocket operated by Russia’s Space agency, Roscomos. The six-hour journey will mark the first tourist trip to the space station in more than a decade. Roscomos notably sent a Russian director and actor to shoot the first feature film in space earlier in October. Following the trip to the ISS, Maezawa is set to embark on SpaceX’s trip around the moon dubbed the dearMoon project. The trip is tentatively set for 2023 and will be the first lunar journey by humans since 1972. Passengers on the...

Caviar — specialists in taking consumer products to a whole new level of luxury — are applying its design language to Apple and its co-founder, Steve Jobs. The bust is made of nickel-plated brass and silver alloy. It is then embellished by Apple’s logo double electroplated with 99.9% gold at the model’s left chest to mimic a pulsating heart. Standing at around 8 inches tall, the bust is supported by a marble base engraved with the name of the former Apple CEO. The team has even gone as far as to cover its custom iPhone 13 Pro in aviation hardened titanium with motifs from the first-gen smartphone iPhone 2G launched in 2007 — embedded with a fragment of the original motherboard sealed in the middle of the Apple logo. The back cover is embossed with a diagram of the circuit board of the devi...

Verizon and AT&T are hoping new swaths of C-band cellular radio spectrum will help make the 5G hype closer to reality, but the big mid-band 5G rollout may have a side effect. Airplanes rely on radio altimeters to tell how high they are above the ground to safely land when pilots can’t see, and the FAA is now instructing 6,834 of them to not do that at certain airports because of 5G interference. The FAA ruled on Tuesday that those thousands of US planes (and some helicopters) won’t be able to use many of the guided and automatic landing systems that are designed to work in poor visibility conditions, if they’re landing at an airport where there’s deemed to be enough interference that their altimeters aren’t reliable. “Landings during periods of low visibility could be limited due to co...

Lisa Bloom, the celebrity lawyer who represented Bill O’Reilley’s, Donald Trump’s, and Bill Cosby’s sexual assault accusers, as well as once advising Harvey Weinstein in his sexual assault case, has announced that she will be holding a press conference on behalf of one of the survivors involved in the numerous sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination allegations against Activision Blizzard. I represent a Blizzard employee who alleges she’s a victim of sexual harassment. Our press release for our press conference tomorrow at the Irvine headquarters where we will demand accountability for the victims who have been subjected to harassment at the video game company: pic.twitter.com/0PisZ1Zomr — Lisa Bloom (@LisaBloom) December 7, 2021 The press conference, announced today in a pres...

The Meta (formerly Facebook) Portal is getting a number of updates, including one that lets you browse through your Facebook friends’ stories hands-free, as detailed in a post on the About Facebook blog. You can access the feature by saying, “Hey Portal, show me Stories.” In addition to Stories, you can now ask the Facebook Assistant to display recent Facebook posts, responses, and photos. Previously, there wasn’t any native support for Facebook, as it was only accessible through a web browser. The Portal will let you take screenshots during Messenger calls by saying, “Hey Portal, take a photo” And while the Portal could always take pictures of you during a call, it never had a feature that let you capture images of your friends or family members on the other side of the screen — something...

I expected more fireworks from a cross-examination of former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes. Instead, today was a disjointed day of questions without a clear narrative throughline. I don’t know why the government chose to send an assassin who didn’t know when to twist the knife. Today was scattered The defense presented a strong narrative on its direct examination. Holmes was a young CEO who believed in Theranos’ technology and had some very credentialed advisors who led her to believe it was real. There was real intellectual property. Holmes never sold her shares. And while she hadn’t done anything wrong, she was also being abused by her boyfriend, Theranos’ president Sunny Balwani, and maybe that clouded her judgment. (Balwani is Holmes’ co-defendant, but he is being tried separately.) To...

Have a gamepad handy and a recent LG TV? You can likely now try Google’s Stadia cloud gaming platform — as of today, it’s an app you can download for your television running webOS 5.0 or webOS 6.0 (read: likely 2020 models or later) in any of the 22 countries that Google covers. You’ll find it in the LG app store on your TV. LG promised that both Google Stadia and Nvidia’s rival GeForce Now cloud gaming service would arrive on its TVs in 2021, and the company’s made it under the wire — GeForce Now arrived in beta in mid-November. Previously, most Stadia-supported TVs ran some version of Android TV. Both Stadia and GeForce Now are free to try with a basic account — though they’re not necessarily equal. We were blown away by GeForce Now’s new $200-a-year RTX 3080 tier; I wrote that it leapfr...

For a goofy satire about a comet destroying the planet, Don’t Look Up sure takes you on an emotional journey. The film — helmed by writer and director Adam McKay, best-known for movies like Step Brothers and Anchorman — starts out hilarious, with big-name stars trading one-liners amid an impending apocalypse. But over its lengthy runtime, it slowly morphs into something else. Laughs give way to anger, frustration, and ultimately a kind of desperate hope. It’s a trajectory that serves as an eerie mirror to the last two years of pandemic life — just don’t go in expecting lighthearted fun. Don’t Look Up doesn’t waste any time getting going. It starts out with a pair of Michigan State astronomers, Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate (Jennifer Lawrence), discovering a massive comet in the sky ...

Microsoft is testing a redesign of its venerable Notepad app, adding some welcomed modern features like a dark mode, a better search / find and replace interface, better undoing, and more. While the visual updates like the addition of dark mode, updated right-click menu, and Windows’ new theme-adopting material are nice, the functional updates will probably be the biggest upgrade to anyone who actually writes in Notepad. In the current version of the app that ships with Windows 11, the text search tool and the find and replace tool are two different pop-up windows, accessed by two different keyboard shortcuts. The redesign combines them into one floating bar instead of something that looks like it’s from the XP era. Find and Replace still has some quirks in the preview (like not automatica...