Technology

Another year, another gigantic tech tradeshow that looks like it may be falling apart as the COVID-19 pandemic continues — now that T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert, one of the Consumer Electronics Show’s featured speakers, has publicly announced that his company won’t be attending the world’s largest electronics show next month. I’m sorry we’ll miss seeing everyone at CES this year, but we are prioritizing the safety of our team and other attendees. Our statement here: https://t.co/WAIkFYMzc7 — Mike Sievert (@MikeSievert) December 22, 2021 “T-Mobile will continue to serve as a CES sponsor and title sponsor of the DRL Championship Race but the vast majority of our team will not be traveling to Las Vegas,” reads the company’s press release. “Additionally, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert will no longer b...

Are monitors with traditional aspect ratios just not getting the job done for you? LG might have the answer. Today the company has announced what it touts as “a completely new format in the monitor market” called the DualUp. With a unique 16:18 aspect ratio, LG claims the DualUp gives you “the same screen real estate as two 21.5-inch displays and has a vertical split view function that lets users see more in one glance.” With a resolution of 2560×2880, the DualUp (model 28MQ780) tops out at 300 nits of brightness and covers 98 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. It attaches to LG’s included Ergo stand, which can clamp to “most” desks and tables to save on space. Aside from the productivity and creative possibilities opened up by this form factor, LG claims the double-height display has...

New forensic analysis indicates that representatives of the United Arab Emirates government installed Pegasus spyware on the phone of Hanan Elatr, wife of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, just months before her husband was killed. The analysis was conducted by Toronto-based privacy and security research laboratory Citizen Lab on behalf of The Washington Post, which reported the findings on Tuesday. According to the Post’s report, a forensic investigation of two Android phones owned by Elatr revealed that an unknown person used one of the phones to visit a website that uploaded Pegasus spyware onto the phone. This took place after security agents at the Dubai airport had confiscated the phone from Elatr. Further analysis from Citizen Lab suggested the website was controlled by NSO group...

“Habenero” Jack Dorsey did some spicy tweets last night. The Twitter founder and Block CEO tweeted out some thoughts on crypto and “Web3” that managed to exasperate some of the idea’s biggest boosters. This wasn’t the kind of Web3 criticism we’ve seen time and again — Dorsey didn’t come at them with a “right-clicker mentality” or anything so trivial. Instead, Dorsey went for the metaphorical jugular: he said users don’t actually own Web3, which is a movement that prides itself on decentralization and community. In reality, Dorsey said, it’s big venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which has dedicated more than $3 billion to investments in the space (and has made investments in several dozen crypto companies, including OpenSea and CryptoKitties / NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs)...

A new blog post from Meta marks the six-month anniversary of its newsletter publishing platform, Bulletin. Amid its plugs for the writers who publish work on the service, the company lets us know just how many publishers it has on board to help compete with companies like Substack and Twitter: 115. Unlike Substack, the buzziest newsletter platform of the moment, you can’t just start writing with Bulletin — Meta has continued to add writers to the platform in batches instead of having a public sign-up process. While the number implies that the company isn’t doing a huge push to get people on the platform as fast as possible, that does appear to be on purpose, at least to some extent (there’s always the possibility it hasn’t been as successful at courting writers as it planned). If it wanted...

The future of America’s electricity grid hangs in the balance as Democrats try to salvage their giant environmental and social spending bill. After West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin imperiled Democrats’ Build Back Better bill — which would have transformed the grid and helped stave off catastrophic climate change — environmental advocates are figuring out a plan B. The most recent version of Democrats’ environment and social spending bill included $555 billion to tackle climate change, which would have been the biggest US investment ever on the crisis. At the heart of the bill was a plan to wean the power grid off fossil fuels. But over the weekend, Manchin (who has earned millions off investments in coal) seemingly killed those plans by saying he would vote with Republicans to block the bill...

Pixel 6 Pro owners just got another reason to give Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud game streaming service a shot. The service can now stream games at 120fps on Google’s latest flagship smartphone, according to a recently updated support page spotted by XDA Developers. It’s unclear when the update rolled out exactly, but it means games should feel smoother and more responsive to play compared to when they were capped at 60fps. That makes Google’s phone the first non-Samsung smartphone to support 120fps. According to Nvidia’s help page, the feature has previously been available for Samsung’s S21 lineup, as well as its S20 FE and Note 20 phones. You’ll need to pay for GeForce Now’s top-of-the-line RTX 3080 tier to stream games at this higher framerate, which costs $99.99 for six months of service....

Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics has released a holiday video featuring its dog-like Spot robot, and it’s turned out as creepy as ever. The video, posted to Twitter, starts innocuously enough — there’s a large present of the type anyone would be happy to see under their tree, sitting in a courtyard. Then, the gift stands up and walks off-screen, kind of like Metal Gear’s Solid Snake moving through a jungle disguised as a cardboard box to stalk a private military contractor. While the video ends with a “Happy Holidays” greeting, it’s perhaps not as heartwarming as it was meant to be. It’s hard to come away from it without the feeling that Spot’s going off on a mission to terrify a child or pull a prank on someone who thought they were about to get something really cool for Christmas. Happy hol...

The Matrix Resurrections warned me its existence was a bad idea, and I kept watching anyway. I really have nobody but myself to blame. The Matrix Resurrections is, to its credit, a fairly weird film — but one that’s often more concerned with being self-aware than being good or enjoyable. Directed by Lana Wachowski instead of the typical Wachowski-sister duo, Resurrections starts with an intriguing bit of metatextual loopiness before devolving into a tepid sequel. It’s a gratingly uncool and reactive cut-up of an effortlessly cool and timeless work, albeit seemingly deliberately so. It seeks to dissect the adulation and mythos that have grown up around The Matrix over 22 years but without the masterful craftwork that inspired that adulation in the first place. And worst of all, the kung fu ...

DuckDuckGo, the company best known for its privacy-focused search engine of the same name, is working on a desktop browser that should bring the same focus on avoiding being tracked to your entire web experience. In a post on its blog, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg offers a glimpse at what the upcoming browser will look like and notes that we can expect it to perform the same way its browsing app does on mobile. Weinberg explains that the desktop browser will offer “robust privacy protection” by default, without you having to toggle on any hidden security settings. Like the mobile app, the desktop equivalent will come with the same “Fire” button that instantly erases all of your browsing history, stored data, and tabs in one click. It’s also built around “OS-provided rendering engines” —...

Exactly one year from the launch of the Mi 11, Xiaomi is set to launch the successor on December 28th, the company has announced via its official Weibo account. The new lineup will be called the Xiaomi 12 series, following the company’s decision to phase out its Mi branding earlier this year. A teaser poster features Chinese sprinter Su Bingtian, which sets the expectation that the event is likely to be focused on the Chinese market before the Xiaomi flagships make their way to global markets in 2022. Xiaomi’s 12 series lineup could include as many as four different devices, according to Gadgets 360. These include the Xiaomi 12, the 12 Pro, the 12X, and the 12 Ultra, although it’s possible that not all of them will be announced during the December event (this year’s Mi 11 Ultra wasn’t anno...

Tesla’s annual holiday software update for its cars is here, Electrek reports. It includes useful driving features like automatic access to a car’s blind spot cameras, as well as fun additions like new games built into Tesla Arcade, TikTok support, and a feature that lets the electric cars “dance to a choreographed light show.” The update’s version number is 2021.44.25, and should be rolling out over the coming days. The most useful inclusion in the update could be its blind spot camera feature which automatically shows a live camera view of the car’s blind spot whenever a driver activates a turn signal. Tesla CEO Elon Musk indicated the feature was in development in July 2020, but now it’s here to (hopefully) make maneuvers like changing highway lanes a little bit safer. Other practical i...