Technology

Hyundai is discontinuing its first mass-market electric SUV, the Kona EV, in South Korea following a massive recall due to a fire risk in the battery pack, the Yonhap news agency reports. The automaker will instead turn its focus to the forthcoming Ioniq 5 (and the EVs that will follow it), though Hyundai will still sell the Kona EV in the United States, according to Roadshow. More than a dozen reports of fires in Kona EV battery packs have been documented since 2019, and so this February, Hyundai finally decided to spend nearly $1 billion to recall 76,000 Kona EVs across its home country (though battery supplier LG Chem is contributing a big portion). It also recalled some Ioniq sedans and electric buses that used the same battery technology. Sales of the Kona EV dropped dramatically foll...

For years, tech companies like Facebook and Amazon have faced the brunt of antitrust criticism by Congress, and Apple has gotten far fewer questions. But that changed on Wednesday, when Congress finally sunk its teeth into Apple as part of a hearing titled “Antitrust Applied: Examining Competition in App Stores.” The hearing brought in representatives from companies like Spotify, Tile, and Match Group, a dating app company, to explain how Apple’s App Store fees and walled-garden business strategy harms their companies. All three companies gave harsh testimony, accusing the iPhone-maker of anti-competitive behavior over the burdensome fees it charges some app developers on its App Store. “If Apple turned on us, it can turn on anyone.” The timing couldn’t be worse for Apple, coming just a da...

President Biden’s pick for NASA administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson, breezed through his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, as expected. Facing questions from his “old buddies” about NASA’s commercial partnerships, climate change, and workforce diversity, Nelson’s hearing was uneventful and garnered bipartisan praise. He backed the agency’s current plan to send its first crew of astronauts to the Moon on a SpaceX rocket and emphasized NASA’s role in studying climate change. Just over a month after being tapped by Biden for NASA chief, Nelson told lawmakers he supported the president’s 2022 summary budget request for NASA and defended the $2.3 billion it set out for the agency’s Earth sciences wing — a 15 percent increase from the prior year. “It’s a very important increase. You c...

The US plans to officially ratchet up its climate commitments going into Earth Day tomorrow, but many advocates are skeptical that it will be ambitious enough to balance out the nation’s inordinate role in creating the climate crisis. “No possible ethically justifiable story in which the United States does not do more” Biden is expected to commit the US to slashing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least half compared to what they were in 2005. That’s already a significant ramp-up compared to the trajectory the US was on before. (Barack Obama committed the US to a roughly 27 percent cut by 2025.) But there’s still somewhat of a mismatch between what the US is willing to commit to and what some say it owes to the rest of the world. “There exists in my mind no possible ethically justifiable...

Facebook Reality Labs has offered more detail about a virtual reality remake of Resident Evil 4, following Capcom’s original announcement last week. The game will launch later this year exclusively on Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 headset, although the exact date is still a mystery. As Capcom’s first trailer indicated, it’s a first-person VR adaptation of the 2005 third-person game, with a focus on making weapons and movement feel more natural with Oculus Touch motion controllers. Resident Evil 4 for VR uses the game’s original levels and animations, revamped with remastered textures, and Oculus says cutscenes will be rendered “in their original format.” But developer Armature Studio has added VR-friendly locomotion options like the ability to teleport or walk around a room-scale environment, ...

Disney and Sony Pictures have signed a multi-year “content licensing agreement” that will bring new Sony theatrical releases, starting with its 2022 films, to Disney-owned platforms. The deal also gives Disney the rights to many of Sony’s older films, including Spider-Man titles — meaning that movies starring the web-slinger, which are notably absent from Disney Plus’ collection of Marvel films, could eventually make their way to the streaming service. Sony’s theatrical releases from 2022 through 2026 are included in the deal, and Disney will get access to them following their “Pay 1 TV window.” Starting in 2022, that window, which follows a film’s theatrical and home video runs, will be owned by Netflix, thanks to a deal announced earlier this month. (That means new Sony films will hit th...

Google has announced some new features coming to Chromebooks, including the company’s Live Captions feature that will be added to Chrome on “most” Chrome OS devices in the coming weeks. Once Live Captions are available, users can flip them on in the accessibility settings to get captions for any media with audio right inside their browser. The feature rolled out to Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux in March. Google is also beefing up the Chrome OS Launcher, which lets you search for files and apps, with some new capabilities, allowing you make simple calculations and check the weather, the definition of a word, and stock prices. Searching for weather in the Launcher.Image: Google The search giant is also adding a new Diagnostics app to Chrome OS that lets you check the status of and run te...

Amazon One is expanding to its biggest area yet: the company is now testing its palm-scanning payment technology in Whole Foods, starting with a single store in Amazon’s home city of Seattle. The company has been using Amazon One payment technology in its Amazon-branded stores in the Seattle area (including Amazon Go and Amazon Books), but the Whole Foods rollout will make the most substantial expansion of the technology yet. The company says that thousands of customers have already signed up with Amazon One. According to an Amazon FAQ, the palm-scanning technology analyzes “the minute characteristics of your palm — both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns” in order to identify a customer, allowing them to use the biometric scan...

Get ready for Twitter to start looking a whole lot crisper — starting today, the company is letting all users tweet (and view) pictures in 4K on iOS and Android. Twitter’s web app already supports higher-resolution images (at up to 4096 x 4096 resolution), but the mobile apps had been limited to just half that, with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 2048. The company had previously started testing the 4K image upload option for mobile users earlier this year, and it seems those tests went well, as its now rolling out the feature to all users starting today. Time to Tweet those high res pics –– the option to upload and view 4K images on Android and iOS is now available for everyone. To start uploading and viewing images in 4K, update your high-quality image preferences in “Data usage” settings...

Microsoft is releasing a new stylus for classroom use: the Classroom Pen 2. The pen will be available on April 27th and will be sold directly to schools. The company launched its first Classroom Pen in 2019. That stylus sold for $39.99 per unit. It was compatible with any device that supported the MPP protocol (including a number of non-Surface Windows devices). Microsoft is going even more budget with this release. The Pen 2 will be sold to schools in packs of 20 for $399.80, which works out to $19.99 per pen. Per Microsoft’s blog post, however, it seems like this pen may only be optimized for Microsoft’s own Surface Pro and Surface Go devices — other Windows devices aren’t mentioned. [embedded content] Microsoft claims that the device has an “improved design” from the previous model, tho...

Early in development, before the team at Deck Nine Games had settled on a main character or even a story for the next Life is Strange game, they knew the general theme they wanted to tackle. “We did know early on that we wanted to explore empathy,” says Felice Kuan, senior staff writer on Life is Strange: True Colors. “We were particularly interested in pushing that concept as far as we could.” The result was Alex Chen, a new protagonist who has the power to see, experience, and manipulate the emotions of those around her. At the outset of the game — which launches in September — Alex moves back home to live with her brother, who then dies in an accident. She’s forced to use her powers to find out exactly what happened. “We were looking for a protagonist who would have some vulnerability a...

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has proposed banning police from buying access to user data from data brokers, including ones that “illegitimately obtained” their records — like, its sponsors say, the facial recognition service Clearview AI. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act is sponsored by a bipartisan group including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and 18 other members of the Senate. The bill would make law enforcement agencies obtain a court order before accessing people’s personal information through third-party brokers — companies that aggregate and sell information like detailed user location data, surreptitiously gathered from smartphone apps or other sources. Wyden announced the bill last year in an interview with The Verge, following reports that several gover...