Technology

Kobo has announced a pair of new e-readers: the $260 Kobo Sage, which is the company’s new top-end device, and the $180 Libra 2, an update to its mid-range Libra. Both devices keep the asymmetrical design popularized by Amazon’s Oasis e-reader, offer E Ink Carta 1200 screens with Kobo’s ComfortLight Pro feature (which adapts the screen brightness and color based on the time of day), and add Bluetooth support for wireless headphones (though they can only play Kobo’s own audiobooks). The Sage is the larger of the two and also functions as an e-note device. It’s compatible with the company’s Kobo Stylus (sold separately for $40), which lets users make handwritten notes on ebooks and PDFs that can be can converted to plain text. With an 8-inch (1440 x 1920) E Ink display, this makes the Sage s...

The Epic Games Store is taking a bit step towards further competing with more established PC game stores like Steam next week with a proper achievement system (called, of course, “Epic Achievements”). To start, Epic Achievements will only be available on a few games, including Rocket League, Hades, Pillars of Eternity, Kena, Zombie Army 4, and Alan Wake Remastered. Achievements will be broken up into four levels: Bronze (which award 5-45 XP), Silver (50-95 XP), Gold (100-200 XP), and Platinum (which is awarded upon achieving 1000 XP in a game and awards players with an additional 250 XP on their profiles). Games that are updated to support Epic Achievements will now show those achievements on the game’s page in the store, in addition to player’s libraries, where they’ll be able to track pr...

Square Enix released Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin’s second demo, showing off a little bit more of what we can expect from the action-oriented Final Fantasy spinoff. The demo gets… interesting. In one cutscene, Jack, the main character, peaced out after a boss fight in hilarious fashion. Players shared the cutscene all over social media with an air of alarmed confusion, but I am here to state for the record that if all of Stranger of Paradise is going to be like that moment, this game is going to kick so much ass. When Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin was first announced, fans were a bit surprised since the game is being developed by Team Ninja of Dead or Alive fame. Team Ninja is also behind the Dynasty Warriors-ification of franchises like The Legend of Zelda a...

Facebook is back online after a six-hour outage due to DNS routing problems. The outage took down Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, and Oculus VR as well. For some, those services are back online now; however, after a DNS issue like this, it could take hours for everything to work properly on every network. Facebook: “We appreciate your patience as we come back online” The outage started just before noon ET on Monday. It was the most significant outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours. Journalist Brian Krebs cites a trusted source who told him the incident didn’t have any malicious origins. Instead, they said it started with a routine BGP update that went wrong, wiping out the DNS routing information that Facebook needs so that other networks ca...

Facebook said in a blog post Monday night that the six-hour outage that took it offline along with Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and OculusVR was the result of a configuration change to its routers — not of a hack or attempt to get at user data. The explanation doesn’t give much in the way of detail, but it seems like Facebook’s machines weren’t able to talk to one another — Facebook says that “this disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an apology Monday evening, saying the platforms were coming back online. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.” The outage began around 11:40AM ET Monday...

Apple on Monday announced that the Apple Watch Series 7 will be available to order starting Friday, October 8, at 5 a.m. PDT and available in stores beginning Friday, October 15. The device features Apple’s largest and most advanced Watch display to date, with a remastered Always-On Retina display and thinner borders. The design is equipped with more rounded corners and a refractive edge, which makes the display appear seamlessly connected with the case’s curve. The Apple Watch Series 7 — which includes a more crack-resistant crystal, introduces a new IP6X certification for dust resistance and continues to hold a WR50 water resistance rating — is available in both 41mm and 45mm sizes. The watch offers several health and wellness tools, including an electrical heart sensor, blood oxygen sen...

Former Apple Design Chief Jony Ive wrote a letter published in The Wall Street Journal Magazine on Monday, honoring his close friend and collaborator Steve Jobs 10 years after his death. “I think about Steve every day,” he wrote. On Jobs’ death, Ive says his memories of that day are “scattered and random,” though his reflections on the former Apple CEO over the course of their friendship remain clear. “We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio. Those were some of the happiest, most creative and joyful times of my life.” He continued: “I loved how he saw the world. The way he thought was profoundly beautiful.” Ive referred to Jobs as “without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever me...

On Monday, Facebook was completely knocked offline, taking Instagram and WhatsApp (not to mention a few other websites) down with it. Many have been quick to say that the incident had to do with BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, citing sources from inside Facebook, traffic analysis, and the gut instinct that “it’s always DNS or BGP.” Facebook is on its way back up, but this all begs the question: What is BGP? At a very basic level, BGP is one of the systems that the internet uses to get your traffic to where it needs to go as quickly as possible. Because there are tons of different internet service providers, backbone routers, and servers responsible for your data making it to, say, Facebook, there’s a ton of different routes your packets could end up taking. BGP’s job is to show them the w...

Amazon has billed today’s Deal of the Day as its “Epic Daily Deal,” and the shoe certainly fits when it includes one of the most epic RPG-in-a-box titles of all time. Gloomhaven is currently on sale, tying its all-time low price of $85 just for today. This shaves 40 percent off its usual MSRP of $140. If you have ever considered playing Dungeons and Dragons but could never get one of your friends to buckle down and put in the work as gamemaster, Gloomhaven might be the perfect solution for you and up to three friends. Gloomhaven $85 $140 40% off Perhaps the closest you’ll get to playing a video game on paper, Gloomhaven is an expansive board game filled with detailed miniatures, evocative art, and a sweeping narrative. As players progress through the story, they’ll open sealed boxes and ch...

In the chaos of Monday’s Facebook outage, it’s easy to lose sight of the company’s reach. Not being able to post a new photo to Instagram is an annoyance, but it’s not necessarily catastrophic. Yet for WhatsApp users, especially outside of the US, losing Facebook’s encrypted messaging service is a life-halting change, and one competing messaging services were eager to capitalize on today. In February last year, WhatsApp announced it had 2 billion users worldwide. Compare that to original flavor Facebook’s 2.5 billion and it’s easy to see how many lives WhatsApp touches. It’s become the default method to contact people in plenty of countries, including around 400 million unique monthly users in India Bloomberg writes. That goes beyond casual communication, as well: WhatsApp is a...

When something like Facebook drops off the internet, there are massive knock-on effects. For example, a website that’s meant to tell you if services are down, called Is It Down Right Now, struggled mightily under the load of people trying to see Instagram’s status. Cloudflare, a company that runs a DNS service (DNS acts like a map for your web browser when it’s trying to find a website and is also the likely culprit when it comes to major outages), reports that it had to mobilize extra resources to keep up with the traffic of people trying to load Facebook (or Instagram or WhatsApp) over and over. If you need to check if other sites are down, you do still have options. There’s the venerable DownDetector, as well as Down for Everyone or Just Me (DFEOJM informed me that it’s not just me havi...