Technology

Apple is working on a new safety feature that will detect when iPhone users are in a car crash, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. According to the outlet, the new feature will be called “crash detection” and will be available on iPhone and Apple Watches sometime next year. It is said to use data from sensors built into the devices, like the accelerometer, to detect inconsistencies. The Journal added that Apple has been collecting data shared anonymously from its iPhone and Watch users over the past year to build out this service. The company has also been cross-referencing 911 call data to improve the accuracy of the feature. It’s unclear if or when this feature will release, and Apple would be following in the footsteps of Google, which has already introduce...

Toronto-based smart home thermostat startup Ecobee is being acquired by Generac Holdings for $770 million, the companies announced Monday. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter. Ecobee CEO and founder Stuart Lombard told The Verge that he will stay on as CEO, and the company will operate as a subsidiary of Generac. It has no plans to move out of its Toronto office and has plans to “significantly” grow the office later this year, Lombard said. Ecobee was founded in 2007 and has expanded from the smart thermostats it’s known for, adding a voice-controlled home security camera that doubles as a home security system to its lineup. Generac, based in Waukesha, Wisconsin, was founded in 1959 and makes backup residential and commercial power generators — the New York Times rec...

Epic Games, the developer behind Fortnite, is shutting down the battle royale in China in mid-November (via CNET). A translated post on Fortnite’s website reveals that the “test” of the game “has come to an end.” The post says users will no longer be able to sign up or download Fortnite starting Monday. On November 15th, Epic Games will shut down Fortnite’s servers completely and bar users from logging in. The notice thanks players for “boarding the bus” and participating in the game. Epic didn’t provide any additional information on why it decided to close out the game. Epic Games doesn’t provide any additional information on why it decided to close out the game However, it may have something to do with China’s new gaming restriction for kids — as of August, children under the age of 18 c...

On the same day that it announced the new $200 Fit Pro earbuds, which are receiving universal praise in early reviews, Apple’s Beats brand is thinning out the rest of its product lineup. As noticed by MacRumors, the company has quietly discontinued the Powerbeats, noise-canceling Solo Pro headphones, and entry-level Beats EP headphones. All three products are no longer available directly from Apple, and while stock may remain at third-party retailers, they’ll be gone once current inventory is sold through. A Beats spokesperson confirmed the news, but declined to go into detail on why these specific products have gotten the axe. It’s reasonable to speculate that their sales came in well below the company’s more established hits. Clearly the Powerbeats, introduced fairly recently in March 20...

Zillow is trying to offload around $2.8 billion worth of houses onto investors after it bought them with the intent of selling them to hopeful homeowners and landlords, according to a report by Bloomberg. This follows another Bloomberg report that the real estate browsing website had to stop buying houses when it found itself with excess inventory after the company told investors it planned on ramping up its flipping business. Some readers may be surprised that Zillow buys and sells houses, rather than just acting as a place for real estate agents to post listings — I was too when I first heard about it, but the company has actually been doing this for years through its Zillow Offers program. According to its site, the idea is that Zillow will buy your house in cash, streamlining the proce...

Just six months after Apple implemented its new privacy policy, the social media industry has reportedly lost almost $10 billion USD. According to an investigation undertaken by the Financial Times, since the introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy back in April, companies including Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have lost a staggering $9.85 billion USD combined. The new policy required apps to ask for permission before tracking data, and the report indicates that Facebook has been hit the hardest “in absolute terms” largely due to the size of its platform. However, Snapchat “fared the worst as a percentage of its business” since the app doesn’t have a desktop version and so almost all ads ran on smartphones. “Some of the platforms that were most impacted — b...

Instagram has launched a new “Add Yours” sticker for Stories, allowing users to respond to other users’ Stories on a public chain with a custom prompt or topic. Users can place the interactive sticker on their Stories to create a content chain that other users can then contribute to with their own Stories. In Instagram’s example, one user employs the sticker to post an “Outfit of the Day” Story, which several other users were then able to add to, via their own Story. “With custom prompts and public responses, you can share the sticker and see who responds to it in their own Stories,” the social media company wrote in a tweet. Add Yours = a sticker that creates public threads in Stories ? With custom prompts and public responses, you can share the sticker and see who responds to it in their...

Google says it’ll fix the ghostly screen flickering that some users have reported seeing when pressing the Pixel 6 Pro’s power button while the phone is completely powered down (via Android Central). From most reports, the flickers don’t happen when just the screen is off, like it would be if the phone was sleeping, though at least one person says that it’s happened while the phone was on and in use. Google describes the issue as occurring when the power button is pushed “with slight pressure but not enough to turn [the Pixel 6 Pro] on.” In a support document for the issue, Google says the fix is coming in a December software update and that you can avoid it by not pressing the power button when the phone’s powered down. While that could be read as a bit of a “you’re holding it wrong” inst...

Walmart’s latest PS5 and Xbox Series X restocking event appears to be over. All of the three consoles link to dead pages, so we’ll take that as a good indicator that it’s wrapped up. We’ll be keeping a look out for other restocks. We originally thought that Walmart was going to just open up the floodgates and let people buy them, but shortly after the consoles went up, we noticed that Walmart has incorporated a new queueing system. If you load one of these pages, you’ll get a place in line, and you can keep browsing Walmart’s site as a timer runs down to let you purchase a console, assuming there’s still stock left. This should remove the urgency from having to add or update your billing and shipping info in a flash, but you should do that as you wait. Anything you can do ahead of time to ...

A Facebook fan page for Elon Musk with 153,000 followers has been verified as the official page representing the Tesla Technoking — in violation of Facebook’s own rules. To be clear, the page isn’t pretending it’s Musk; it openly states that it’s a fan page in its About section (emphasis ours): Musk owns a Tesla Roadster car 0001 (the first one off the production line) from Tesla Motors, a company in which he is an early investor. The Roadster is a battery electric sportscar with a 220 mile range. This is a fanpage, uploading tweets etc from him Here is the page’s description, which states it’s a fan page. There are only 10 posts on the page, with the earliest dating from October 21st. One is a photo of Musk, one is a notification that the page updated its profile picture to be one featuri...

Twitch is giving streamers who focus on furry friends a place to group their streams with its new Animals, Aquariums, and Zoos category, which may just end up being the greatest page on the internet. The company says that the category, launched as part of its Animal Week, is meant to bring together a bunch of streams from zoos, conservation projects, and animal owners that had been spread out over the site, making it easier for people to find them. If you’re looking for something relaxing, the category makes it pretty easy to find. As I write this, the category’s page features a New York wolf conservancy’s den livestream, video from an otter enclosure, and a stream from the Monterey Bay Aquarium that features a beautiful oceanside view (though at the moment it’s more ASMR than animal). The...

NASA‘s Juno probe has captured a deeper view of Jupiter‘s atmosphere. Scientists have developed the first three-dimensional look at Jupiter’s atmospheric layers, showcasing the mechanics of the planet’s turbulence in greater detail. The results examine the inner workings of the belts and zones of clouds that circle the planet, along with its polar cyclones and its Great Red Spot. “These new observations from Juno open up a treasure chest of new information about Jupiter’s enigmatic observable features,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, in a statement. “Each paper sheds light on different aspects of the planet’s atmospheric processes – a wonderful example of how our internationally-diverse science teams strengthen und...