Technology

Airbnb announced that it’s changing the way guest profiles are displayed in its app — for Oregon residents specifically. Airbnb hosts who are based in Oregon will now see a potential guest’s initials, rather than their full name, until after they’ve confirmed that guest’s booking request. The change will fully roll out by January 31st. The change aims to prevent racial discrimination among hosts, per the company’s announcement, by stopping them from gleaning a guest’s race from their name. A 2016 study found that Airbnb guests with names that sounded Black were 16 percent less likely to have bookings confirmed than guests with names that sounded white. The announcement follows a voluntary settlement agreement that Airbnb reached in 2019 with three Portland-area women who had sued the compa...

What would a Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, or Deus Ex look like if it were partly powered by the blockchain, so gamers could make money from their contributions? You may get to find out: Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda has revealed that the company’s New Year’s resolution is to release “decentralized games” starting in 2022. While you won’t find any details in Masuda’s letter discussing the company’s strategy for the new year, you will find a good sense of his cautious-but-optimistic stance — not surprising, given how other game companies that recently Leeroy Jenkins’d their way into NFTs saw such immediate whiplash you could practically feel the vibrations over the internet. Here’s the most relevant section, which comes near the end: From having fun to earning to contributing, a wide v...

We are officially in 2022. Know what that means? That’s right: It means Microsoft has failed at its stated goal of bringing Android 11 to the Surface Duo by the end of 2021. Attentive readers may recall that Microsoft said the following this past September: “We remain committed to providing updates to Surface Duo, and we’re working to bring Android 11 to existing customers before the end of this year.” Okay, so the company wasn’t exactly promising Android 11 by the end of 2021 — but that was the heavily implied intention, and it likely gave some Surface Duo users a lot of hope. “We’re working to bring Android 11 to existing customers before the end of this year.” As Windows Central first reported, Duo devices still haven’t received Android 11. While this may be disappointing to the owners ...

BTS has decided to proceed with its NFT launch despite widespread fan outrage. The popular K-Pop band first announced plans to create its own NFTs back in November last year when entertainment company Hybe revealed a new partnership with South Korean crypto exchange Dunamu. The announcement immediately drew criticism from fans, which said that it ran contrary to the band’s usual efforts in sustainability work and environmental activism, including its 2018 appearance at the United Nations General Assembly. Following the news, hashtags such as #BoycottHybeNFT and #ARMYsAgainstNFT started trending, but the company has now confirmed that it’ll be moving forward with its plans regardless. “We believe NFTs have the potential for expansion and hope they will provide fans with more varied experien...

A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and other books, movies, and compositions from 1926 enter into the public domain today in the US. The works are now “free for all to copy, share, and build upon,” according to Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which tracks which copyrighted materials will become public each year. This year, the usual list of books, movies, and compositions comes with a sizable bonus: a trove of around 400,000 early sound recordings. A recent law, the 2018 Music Modernization Act, standardized how early sound recordings are handled under federal copyright law. As part of that, it set today as the date that copyright protections would end for “recordings first published before 1923.” “The advent of sound recording technolog...

US officials have asked AT&T and Verizon to further delay new 5G deployments so that the Federal Aviation Administration can have more time to determine where they might interfere with airlines. US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and FAA Administrator Steve Dickson sent a letter to the CEOs of the two telecoms on Friday requesting a delay of “no more than two weeks,” according to Reuters. AT&T and Verizon had already delayed these deployments by a month over regulators’ concerns and planned to start the rollout on January 5th as a result. The two telecoms now tell Insider they are reviewing the latest request for a further delay. Buttigieg and Dickson write that, even with an additional delay, they expect 5G deployment will still begin in January “with certain exceptions ar...

While the pandemic hit many people hard in 2021, the world’s 10 richest added more than $385 billion USD to their wealth, according to Bloomberg‘s Billionaire Index. Combined, the 10 richest people in the world now have a net worth of $1.39 trillion USD. This year, Elon Musk topped the list of the world’s wealthiest, with a net worth of about $270 billion USD as of December 31. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO claimed the top spot over Jeff Bezos in October, and despite selling more than $16 billion USD in Tesla shares since November to pay for taxes, has retained his lead. According to Forbes, Musk is also likely the richest person to have ever lived. To put it into perspective, Elon Musk’s net worth represents 3.21% of the total wealth of the 500 richest people in the world and is roughly f...

Some tens of thousands of people woke up on Christmas Day to doubled wages and a higher-than-expected bank balance after Santander did an oopsie, depositing £130 million ($176 million) into accounts held by its UK customers. Santander would now like the money back, please. The deposit mishap was the result of a mysterious “scheduling issue,” according to The Times, which first reported the story. The bank confirmed to The Verge that some payments were accidentally doubled. (Santander is characterizing it as a “technical issue.”) Those transactions included those from 2,000 businesses, as well as accidental deposits across 75,000 accounts of individuals and companies like a corporate Ebeneezer Scrooge who’d been scared into generosity. Santander will now use a process called ​​“bank error r...

The US will continue to work with other countries’ space programs on the International Space Station through 2030, NASA announced today. That will allow for an uninterrupted transition to a planned commercial space station (or stations!) in the late 2020s. Funds for the ISS have already been approved through 2024. NASA administrator Bill Nelson told The Verge in May that he wants to continue work on the ISS through 2030. The ISS’s future was called into question in 2018 The ISS’s future was called into question in 2018, when a draft budget proposal from President Donald Trump’s administration had scheduled ending support for the space station in 2025. More recently, escalating tensions between the US and Russia have threatened the cooperation required to work together on the ISS. In Novemb...

CES has dropped the last day of its 2022 tech conference in Las Vegas, and the show will now end on January 7th, the Consumer Technology Association announced today. The shorter schedule is “an additional safety measure” in the face of a surge of COVID-19 diagnoses. Over the last two weeks, a number of large companies — including BMW, Intel, AMD, GM, Google, T-Mobile, Amazon, Microsoft and the company formerly known as Facebook — have dropped their physical presences at the conference. It’s the largest tech conference in the world, which typically pulls more than 10,000 people in each year. The CTA’s president and CEO has said the show “will and must go on.” Yesterday the US set a grim new record in COVID: the highest number of infections reported daily — breaking a record set the day befo...

Dear friends, we’re gathered here today to mourn the death of that once-beloved monarch of the mobile world: BlackBerry. And, yes, I realize that this is not the first time we’ve announced the death of the company or its devices (and, for reasons I’ll explain below, it likely won’t be the last) but this is a very definite ending for legacy BlackBerry hardware. As of January 4th, any phones or tablets running BlackBerry’s own software — that’s BlackBerry 7.1 or earlier, BlackBerry 10, or its tablet operating system BlackBerry PlayBook — will “no longer reliably function,” says the company. Whether on Wi-Fi or cellular, there’ll be no guarantee you can make phone calls, send text messages, use data, establish an SMS connection, or even call 9-1-1. That sounds pretty darned dead to us. If, fo...