Technology

Five major publishers have sued Shopify over pirated learning materials like PDFs of ebooks and test materials, saying the e-commerce platform fails to remove listings and stores that violate the publishers’ trademarks and copyrights. The lawsuit, filed today in the US District Court for Eastern Virginia, claims statutory damages higher than $500 million. The publishers — Pearson Education, Inc., Macmillan Learning, Cengage Learning, Inc., Elsevier Inc., and McGraw Hill — say in the lawsuit that Shopify “assists and profits from the online sale of infringing copies” of the textbooks and other products. The publishers also say that Shopify has received “detailed notices virtually every week for years” that identify listings selling pirated content and related store URLs but has failed to bl...

An indictment from the Department of Justice suggests that the Ubiquiti hack reported in January, and subsequent whistleblower claims of a cover-up, were the work of someone who was then an employee of the company. The DOJ alleges that Nickolas Sharp, 36, was arrested on Wednesday on accusations that he used his employee credentials to download confidential data and sent anonymous demands to the company he worked for pretending to be a hacker in an attempt to get a ransom of 50 Bitcoin. You can read the full indictment below. The indictment doesn’t specifically name Ubiquiti, only referring to a “Company-1.” However, all the details line up. In January, Ubiquiti sent an email to users saying an unauthorized party had accessed its “information technology systems hosted by a third party clou...

Apple has apparently introduced a business-only program that enables members to obtain and eventually upgrade computers for a relatively low monthly fee. A tweet from writer Max Weinbach shows an image of Apple’s “New Mac Notebook Upgrade Program” promotional material that popped up for a customer with access to a business portal (via MacRumors). The credit application makes clear this is all about the Apple M1 refresh The deal appears to be in partnership with CIT Group, a bank for business customers where this landing page for the program shares the monthly rates for different MacBook models — starting with the 13-inch MacBook Air for $30, 13-inch MacBook Pro for $39, 14-inch MacBook Pro for $60, and 16-inch MacBook Pro for $75. Apple did not respond to requests for comment from The Verg...

Migos’ Takeoff has debuted his own NFT platform, Apes in Space. Announced on Tuesday, the project will allegedly be selecting one of its NFT owners to join the rapper on a future trip to space. The first NFT collection from the platform will be released later this week. A pre-sale for 2,000 whitelisted members, 20% of the NFT supply, will kick off on December 5, followed by a public sale on December 6. “The Apes In Space team has years of experience in the marketing and digital space under its belt,” the project’s website reads. “With Takeoff (1/3 of Migos) as part of the team, the Apes In Space project has more connections in the NFT space than any other collection.” “We spent months crafting the art of the project and we couldn’t be happier with the final result,” it continued. Whil...

The $50 USD Cyberwhistle inspired by Tesla’s upcoming Cybertruck is out of stock just a day after it was announced. On Tuesday, Elon Musk tweeted the whistle, which was available for purchase on Tesla’s online store. “Inspired by Cybertruck, the limited-edition Cyberwhistle is a premium collectible made from medical-grade stainless steel with a polished finish,” its description read. “The whistle includes an integrated attachment feature for added versatility.” In his announcement, Musk joked about the Apple Polishing Cloth. The $19 USD cloth became Apple’s most back-ordered product shortly after its release late last month. “Don’t waste your money on that silly Apple Cloth, buy our whistle instead,” Musk tweeted. Blow the whistle on Tesla!https://t.co/c86hLA0iQK — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) De...

Facebook on Wednesday removed a block on searches for the name Kyle Rittenhouse that it had put into place following his arrest for an August 2020 shooting in Wisconsin that left two people dead and a third seriously injured. Last month, a jury in Kenosha acquitted Rittenhouse on all charges. In the days following the shooting, the company removed Rittenhouse’s profile from Facebook and Instagram and blocked users from creating new profiles using his name, to prevent copycats from spreading misinformation. By the end of that week, Facebook was blocking searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse,” as well as removing expressions of praise or support for him on the platforms. “After the verdict in Kenosha we rolled back the restrictions we had in place that limited search results from returning content ...

HMD Global is not only reneging on its promise to bring Android 11 to the Nokia 9 PureView, but it is also dangling a discount for a new phone at customers who just found out their current devices are no longer supported. These are customers who paid between $599 and $699 for the premium Nokia 9 PureView back in 2019 after it made quite a splash with its quintuple rear camera array at World Mobile Congress that year. At the time, Nokia was even known as the best phone brand for receiving fast software updates, according to Counterpoint Research, so customers understandably might have felt they could trust Nokia and HMD Global. As one of the devices in the Android One program, the Nokia 9 PureView runs a near-stock version of Android 9 and is supposed to get at least two years of OS upgrade...

It’s December 1st, which for Spotify users, means the annual tradition of the music streaming service’s Spotify Wrapped roundup: customized, flashy infographics of the top songs, playlists, artists, and podcast that you’ve listened to over the last year, chock-full of data, mood boards, and just a sprinkling of judgment. I, unfortunately, do not use Spotify. Instead, I pay Apple $10 per month for Apple Music, Spotify’s biggest competitor. And so while virtually everyone I know on Twitter and Instagram is spending the entirety of today putting their personal taste in music on blast, I get… a playlist of the songs that I listened to the most this year. This is fine. Spotify has been eating Apple’s lunch for years now with Wrapped, which has practically become its own internet holiday e...

In February 2021, Nvidia committed to reissuing some of its older GPUs — namely the RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti — to give gamers a couple of low-cost options that scalpers or crypto miners (hopefully) won’t see much use for during the chip shortage. The company is following through on at least part of that promise by releasing a new variant of the RTX 2060 that has 12GB of video RAM, doubling the memory of the standard configuration originally released in 2019. Nvidia says that various models should become available starting Tuesday, December 7th. The specs for revised Founders Edition GPU are available right here. Note the slightly higher base clock speed and the slightly increased CUDA cores (2,176 versus 1,920 in the standard RTX 2060). Its specs looks similar to the RTX 2060 Super in some...

Elon Musk is reportedly worried about the financial security of SpaceX due to its recent production crisis. The space company has made less progress than Musk hoped for on producing the Raptor engines that power its Starship, CNBC reported on Tuesday. The Starship is a massive rocket designed to carry both passengers and cargo on future missions to Mars and the Moon. Though Musk didn’t mention him by name, SpaceX’s former Vice President of Propulsion Will Heltsley, who was previously working on the development of the Raptor, departed the company last month. In an internal companywide email obtained by CNBC, Musk expressed his concerns: “The Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago,” he wrote. “As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior se...

In the third episode of Hawkeye, Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) does something very unexpected: she requests a USB dongle in the midst of a battle. The highlight of the episode is a scene where Kate and her reluctant mentor, Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), are fighting their way through the Tracksuit Mafia amidst some hectic New York City traffic. While Clint drives, Kate goes through his collection of trick arrows. Most are the kind of comic book goofiness you’d expect: one arrow creates a bubbling purple foam; another becomes destructively huge. Later, though, Clint hands Kate something much less useful in a fight: an arrow with a USB-A port on the end. “God, I hope he’s got a dongle to make this useful,” Kate quips afterward. (It turns out to not be very useful.) This isn’t the first time...

Barnes & Noble has once again remembered that it ostensibly wants to sell e-readers and has announced the Nook GlowLight 4, a $149 e-reader that offers a refreshed design, more onboard storage, and USB-C charging to the company’s lineup. The last dedicated Nook e-reader, the GlowLight 3, was announced 49 months ago (to the day) on November 1st, 2017, although Barnes & Noble did give the Nook brand a shot in the arm earlier this year with a new, Lenovo-made budget tablet. The new GlowLight 4 doesn’t appear to move the needle much compared to the 2017 model, though. The display is an identical six-inch, 300ppi e-paper display with an integrated backlight and adjustable color temperature functionality, although the company has slimmed down the bezels and overall size of the new model....