Technology

Sony’s PlayStation games on Steam are now published by PlayStation PC LLC instead of PlayStation Mobile. Forum posters at Resetera noticed the change yesterday, and it appears the PlayStation PC company was formed earlier this year. It could mean we’ll see Sony use more PlayStation PC branding in the future. Sony has been gradually growing its presence on PC over the past year, after Horizon Zero Dawn arrived on Steam in August 2020, followed by Days Gone in February. Sony is also bringing God of War to PC on January 14th and the remastered Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection at some point in 2022. Days Gone is now published by PlayStation PC. Sony’s head of PlayStation Studios, Hermen Hulst, revealed in June that Sony was still early on in its PC plans. “I want to emphasize that PlayS...

A new support document released yesterday details a “Scale to fit below built-in camera” option in macOS that will forcibly scale apps to only use the display below the notch. It’s a temporary workaround for apps that don’t currently play nice with the notch on Apple’s new MacBook Pros. The camera notch cutout on Apple’s latest laptops was meant to enable a more expansive edge-to-edge screen. But as we saw yesterday, owners of the new MacBook Pro models have seen both apps and the OS misbehave, whereby app menus and status bar items can get hidden under the camera cutout. The scale-to-fit workaround fixes this, but results in the type of large bezels the notch was meant to negate. The scaling feature was demonstrated by artist @Jatodaro on Twitter, showing how checking the box for ‘Scale t...

A group of students in China has now sued Apple for not including chargers in its iPhone 12 sales. According to a report from the Shanghai Law Journal, the students argue that Apple isn’t omitting the charger for eco-friendly reasons but actually wants to both cut costs and promote the sales of its own MagSafe charger. As the group points out, the cable included with the iPhone 12 is a USB-C to Lightning cable which is not compatible with wall chargers that came with previous iPhone models, therefore forcing consumers to either buy a new USC-C wall charger or the company’s MagSafe charger. The students are now asking for Apple to provide a wall charger as well as a fee of roughly $16 USD for breach of contract. While the amount Apple is being sued for is minimal, the sentiment behind ...

The U.S. General Services Administration, a federal agency that manages government buildings and real estate, is selling 4.94 Bitcoin through its clearinghouse website. The GSA Auctions website was developed as a solution to handling surplus federal assets and offers items ranging from furniture and office supplies to airplanes, vehicles and heavy machinery. The site is hosting an auction called “Fall for Cryptocurrency,” which includes 4.94 Bitcoin across five individual lots. The lots range from 0.44 Bitcoin on the lower end to 1.5 Bitcoin on the higher end and are valued at about $300,000 USD combined. The auction is set to close on Thursday evening Central Time, and bids can be placed in increments of $5 USD. GSA Auctions first started auctioning cryptocurrency on behalf of the U.S. go...

A little more than two years after its original release, DJI has now given its Osmo Action a massive revamp, reimaging the compact action camera as the magnetically mounted Action 2. Unlike its predecessor, the new model comes with a modular design that allows you to attach various accessories and add-ons via a magnetic mounting system, such as an additional touchscreen for easier functionality, a second OLED display for monitoring your footage, up to three additional microphones for extensive sound capture, and even an individual battery module that brings the Action 2’s 70-minute battery life up to three hours. Performance-wise, the revamped action cam will boast all the video recording capabilities you’d expect, including 4K shooting at 120 frames per second, or 1080p at 240 fps. The se...

Photographs from a historic moment in tech news history, the day a Gizmodo reporter published hands-on pics of the then-not-yet-announced iPhone 4, are now missing. And they’re not alone — vast quantities of pictures from G/O Media sites like The Onion, Jalopnik, and Deadspin (as well as Gizmodo) have been removed, reportedly intentionally, according to Gawker. A recent Gawker report highlights that Buzzfeed has also been wiping many older images from the web. Still, Buzzfeed’s reason for doing so is relatively apparent after management explained the copyright claims on old photos deemed some of them “high-risk.” Both cases are examples of “link rot,” where content on the internet is drastically changed because it either disappears entirely or because essential pieces have gone missing. Li...

The cryptocurrency Shiba Inu (SHIB) recently made headlines as it surged 59% in 24 hours to surpass Dogecoin which is also based on an image of a Shiba. The SHIB dog-inspired meme token is now the 7th-largest cryptocurrency in the world with a market cap of more than $44 million USD at the time of writing according to CoinMarketCap. According to the Morning Brew, an unknown individual who bought SHIB 44 times since last August, spending a total of roughly $8,000 USD worth of Wrapped Ethereum (WETH), saw the value of his coins grow by $1.6 billion today. The individual’s total holdings of 70,200,003,107,584 SHIB are now worth more than $6.04 billion USD at the time of writing, making the buyer a crypto billionaire from the August purchases alone. If the individual cashes in, the transaction...

Android 12 has launched along with Google’s new Pixel 6 lineup and brings with it a new look that Android VP of product management Sameer Samat called “the biggest design change in Android’s history.” That’s in reference to Material You, which applies a new set of principles for creating interfaces, in addition to changes that will help Android adjust to bigger screens. We’ve already gotten a hint of how the look affects usability across the updated OS and Google’s own apps, but now the focus is expanding to reach more of the apps made by others. Today at Google’s Android Developer Summit, the company announced that Material You is available in Jetpack Compose, so app designers can more easily adopt the look in their own products. Material You design in Android 12Image: Google New elements...

In 2020, Samsung weathered the pandemic by posting a record high for revenue in the third quarter of 66.96 trillion won. The company just revealed that it set another record for the same period in 2021, reaching 73.98 trillion won, or about $63 billion. While its revenue was up about 10 percent, Samsung says its profits grew by 26 percent from last year to hit 15.82 trillion won ($13 billion). Despite a shortage of key chips worldwide, the memory chips and processors Samsung makes that go into everything from servers to mobile phones are in as much demand as ever. Shifts to hybrid work mean have companies buying more SSDs, CPUs, and RAM for servers Samsung will “reorganize” to focus on quantum dot 4K TVs instead of LCDs As the world’s largest chipmaker, high prices for memory chips mean hi...

Shiba inu, a dog-inspired cryptocurrency, has surged 59% in the last 24 hours and reached an all-time high above $0.00007, according to data from Coin Gecko. The meme token now ranks as the 9th-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of more than $33 billion USD, according to CoinMarketCap. During its surge, Shiba inu beat out Dogecoin, which is currently the 11th-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap above $31 million USD. Shiba inu, which is billed as a “dogecoin killer,” builds its branding off of the same animal that dogecoin is based on, utilizing an image of a Japanese shiba inu dog to represent its trade. The coin was established in August 2020 by an anonymous collective known as “Ryoshi.” Shiba inu’s creators call the coin “an experiment in decentralized spontaneous ...