Technology

Apple’s iOS 15.2, which includes a ton of features and fixes, has started to become roll out to iPhones after an extensive beta period. According to Apple’s release notes, posted by 9to5Mac and MacRumors, the update includes: The update also brings with it some of Apple’s communication safety features, one of which will blur iMessages sent to children that an on-device scan tags as potentially being explicit. The feature was part of Apple’s controversial suite of changes meant to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM), which involved on-device scanning of photos uploaded to iCloud, as well as automatically notifying parents if their child chose to view pictures tagged as inappropriate. Apple has since delayed the photo library scanning feature and has made it so that children get to choo...

Alpha Motor Corporation is nominally an electric vehicle startup. It has spent the last year pumping out retro-futuristic design after retro-futuristic design, one of which just won the award at this year’s LA Auto Show for best electric coupe. But for every new vehicle design Alpha Motor Corporation has released, there are more questions left unanswered. How is the startup funded? What are its plans to build these vehicles? What exactly is Alpha Motor Corporation? Bengt Halvorson at Green Car Reports put up a mighty effort trying to track down some of those answers in August. He found some, sort of — it appears that the startup was founded, and perhaps funded, by the same person (or people behind) another EV startup called Neuron, which had ties to China but disappeared from the US startu...

LiveWire, the electric motorcycle company spun out of Harley-Davidson, is going public by merging with a special acquisition company, or SPAC. The transaction will net LiveWire approximately $545 million at a pro forma enterprise value of approximately $1.77 billion, Harley-Davidson says in its announcement. LiveWire is the latest electric vehicle company to go public by merging with a SPAC, which are also known as “blank check” companies. LiveWire is merging with AEA-Bridges Impact Corp. (ABIC), a SPAC formed by John Garcia and Michele Giddens, two private equity executives based in New York and London, respectively. Garcia and Giddens teamed up last year with the express purpose of merging with a business that is working toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, according...

For the last week or so, I’ve been buried in cartridges from my youth. I’ve spent hours slicing through cute blue slimes in Dragon Warrior III and reacquainting myself with a decades-old team of monsters in Pokémon Yellow. While all my friends have been raving about Halo Infinite, I’ve instead been reminding myself just how inexplicably good Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was on the Game Boy Advance. Often going back to play classic games like this can be a reality check. There have been plenty of times when I’ve popped in an old cartridge only to realize that these games I grew up with just don’t look the way I remember them. But that hasn’t been the case this time — in fact, they’ve looked better than ever. This is the promise of the Analogue Pocket. Analogue has made a name for itself by releas...

Adobe knows there’s a bigger audience of would-be creators out there than full-on pros, so it’s launching a new app that attempts to open up some of its more powerful tools to amateurs. The app, called Creative Cloud Express, offers basic versions of image and video editing tools, letting users work with layers, AI effects, and a huge font library, all with a simplified interface that’s supposed to make the features easier to use. “A lot of people need something simple and more accessible, and these customers are increasingly content-first and more focused on outcomes than process,” Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer, tells The Verge. Creative Cloud Express is designed so new users don’t have to “endure the learning curve” of Adobe’s more capable tools like Photoshop and can quick...

How much have you ever lost on a typo? Probably not hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that’s just what happened to one unlucky individual this weekend, who accidentally sold a Bored Ape NFT for $3,000 instead of $300,000 — all because of a misplaced decimal point. As first reported by CNET, the NFT’s owner Max (or maxnaut) listed the NFT for sale on Saturday. Max, who describes himself as a “solo-traveller, bored ape, marketing agency owner & NFT investor,” had meant to price the NFT at 75 ether (around $300,000) but accidentally typed 0.75 ether instead (roughly $3,000). Before they could correct the mistake, the NFT had been snapped up, apparently by a bot programmed to find and buy undervalued listings. You can see the drama play out on the NFT’s OpenSea page. “How’d it happen? ...

Some University papers graded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has just sold for almost $8,000 USD. According to CNN, the papers came from a former Wharton School of Business student at the University of Pennsylvania named Brian Thomas, who took “Entrepreneurship: Implementation and Operations” under Professor Myles Bass back in 1995. It so happened that at the time, Musk was Bass’ teaching assistant and ended up grading Thomas’ paper, initialing it with “EM” at the end. Seeing an opportunity here, Thomas consigned the papers over to the Boston-based RR Auctions, which managed to sell it off for $7,753 USD. The report also notes that there wasn’t much writing from Musk himself aside from a comment calling the use of the term “sh*t hits the fan” rather “graphic.” He also never writes ...

Peloton has responded to a plot-line in HBO Max’s new Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That…, turning around a commercial in less than 48 hours after the company’s stock continued to plummet in reaction to events on the TV show over the weekend. (Spoiler warning: the following discusses a major plot point from the first episode of And Just Like That…) The plot point in question involved the sudden death of Mr. Big (Chris Noth), who suffers what appears to be a heart attack after enjoying a 45-minute Peloton workout. That workout happened to be led by a character played by a real-life Peloton instructor (Jess King). Peloton says it approved King’s appearance in the show, but knew nothing about Big’s death. “We were not made aware of the plotline,” Peloton’s SVP of global c...

Instagram has tapped into the minds and behaviors of its Gen-Z users to create its first-ever trend report for 2022. The social platform dived into its extensive data collection to to take a closer look into categories like music, fashion, creators, beauty and social justice and learn more about what certain behaviors could mean, especially when it comes to shaping culture in the next year. In the world of fashion, Instagram is predicting a big year for Dark Academia, Goth, Goblincore and Nostalgic wear with 50% of teens and young adults expected to experiment more with bolder looks, while nearly one in four young people are expected to thrift more online through second-hand websites like Depop and Poshmark. The amount of plant-based skincare, vegan makeup and products with sustainable ing...

Following a partnership with Valentino promoting global COVID-19 vaccination, UNICEF has announced plans for launching the United Nation‘s largest-ever NFT collection to date, releasing 1,000 unique data-driven artworks titled Patchwork Kingdoms, which will contribute to connecting schools and children around the world to the Internet. The Ethereum-based NFTs will be digitally watermarked to commemorate the UN agency’s 75th year. As mentioned, the funds from the sale will go to the UNICEF Global Office of Innovation, including Giga, which seeks to connect schools to the Internet using new technologies such as low-orbit satellites, machine learning, and blockchain. Giga has connected over 3,000 schools benefitting more than half a million children and has mapped over 1 million more as can b...

Oswalds Mill Audio has just shared its latest creation of bespoke hi-fi speakers. Created for the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City, the “Museum Speaker” is an extremely powerful, compact, professional-level speaker made from solid Pennsylvania ash wood. The wood is treated to torrefaction, a thermal process that makes the wood darker and more stable for increased tonality. The cabinet houses two 15” woofers, a coaxial compression driver on the wooden mid, and a high-frequency stadium-shaped conical horn. The front of the speaker sees a grille made from sheets of phenolic, while it sits on a stand made from heavy gauge cold rolled steel. This four-way system delivers “concert level output” with very little power — 100db 1watt/1meter efficiency — and is equated to having a “Formula ...