Technology

Snapchat has announced a series of measures it’s taking to counter drug dealing on its platform, and to educate users about the dangers of fentanyl and other drugs. When users search for drug-related keywords like “fentanyl,” Snap says it will direct them to a new educational portal called Heads Up. It’s also ramping up actions against drug dealers on its platform, including improved in-app reporting tools and proactive detection. The announcements follow a recent investigation by NBC News into a spate of deaths involving teens and young adults who were suspected of having bought fentanyl-laced drugs through the social network. The report alleged that drug dealers are able to use Snapchat to find buyers, and that the platform isn’t doing enough to remove their accounts and keep them off th...

Anker’s Soundcore brand is today refreshing its flagship true wireless earbuds with the new $169.99 Liberty 3 Pros. Both the earbuds and their slider-style charging case look very similar to the Liberty 2 Pros, though the buds are 30 percent smaller and have an “air pressure relief structure” in their wingtips for added comfort. Anker has made more significant improvements to the features they offer: the new earbuds have active noise cancellation — you’d hope for as much at this price — and the “HearID ANC” system is optimized for efficiency and comfort. Anker says it monitors outside ambient noise while also taking in-ear pressure into account, so the level of ANC automatically adapts to the environment. The dual-driver acoustic architecture of the Liberty 3 Pros has been refined, and the...

NFTs and cryptocurrencies have been prone to many scams. It is not uncommon for developers to quite literally create digital pieces and take the money and run. The most recent case of this involves an NFT project titled Evolved Apes. The project is described on the NFT platform OpenSea as “a collection of 10000 unique NFTs trapped inside a lawless land. Fighting for survival, only the strongest ape will prevail.” Just a week after the Evolved Ape is launched, the anonymous developer behind the project has seemingly disappeared and gone dark on social. The creator, who also promised a much-hyped fighting game that comes with the project, has vanished from the social verse, deleting the official Twitter page and taking down the website. According to Vice, the developers still left a blockcha...

Uber Reserve is now expanding its services to cover more than 20 airports in the U.S. The feature first launched back in November last year and allowed Uber users to book rides up to 30 days in advance from airports they would be arriving in. To make your life easier, the company is able to track your flight and adjust your ride’s reservation time according to any delays or early arrivals. Drivers will then wait for up to 60 minutes at no extra cost. With COVID-19 restrictions slowly easing, Uber is now hoping to bring this feature to more users, making it available for Uber Black and Uber Black SUV customers at more than 20 different airports stateside, including locations such as New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta. You’ll also be able to ask for curbside pickups th...

Instant messaging app Telegram has gained 70 million users following the outages experienced by Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, making a record 10% gain in users in just one day. The outage across Facebook’s various platforms occurred earlier on Monday and lasted roughly six hours, making it the biggest global outage for the company since 2008. While both competitors Telegram and Signal gained a significant amount of users as a result of the breakdown, Facebook itself also lost out greatly, with many investors selling off the company’s shares which ultimately resulted in CEO Mark Zuckerberg losing $6 billion USD. Facebook has since explained that the outage was caused by configuration changes on its side and shut down any suggestion of data breaches and leaks. While Facebook’s services h...

Camera expert Canon has now created the world’s first digital interchangeable lens with the ability to capture stereoscopic 3D 180-degree virtual reality imagery using a single image sensor. Designed to be used in tandem with the company’s 45-megapixel full-frame EOS R5 camera, the new dual fisheye lens offers a short focusing distance of just 7.87 inches and an aperture range from f/2.8 all the way to f/16. Its wide-angle coverage works with the R5’s updated firmware to provide total 180-degree 3D image capture that can go up to 8K DCI 30p or 4K DCI 60p, perfect for VR devices such as the Oculus Quest 2. As usual, the lens also comes fluorine-coated with dust and weather resistance in mind, and also features a built-in gelatin filter holder for when you need an ND gel filter. For the phot...

What If..?’s finale debuted on Disney Plus today, and it brought some bigger multiversal mayhem with it. But fans may have already gotten the big reveal of the finale spoiled for them all the way back in August… thanks to a Hyundai Tucson commercial? Spoilers for “What If… The Watcher Broke His Oath” and What If…?’s first season below: Marvel projects are no stranger to commercials and product placement, of course, but the Hynduai commercial (part of a series of ads that the company has been doing together with Disney Plus) marks a particularly strange turn — one that mashes storytelling with advertising. The main conceit of the bulk of What If…?’s early episodes was that the series was an anthology, providing standalone tales in different corners of Marvel’s multiverse that offered altern...

Sony is making it a little bit harder to buy games digitally on the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Vita. Beginning October 27th, you won’t be able to use a credit card, debit card, or PayPal to purchase games or add money to your wallet on those systems, according to a support document. Instead, you’ll have to use a PlayStation Store gift card or load up the wallet tied to your account on the PlayStation Store on the web, your phone, or on a PS4 or PS5. This disappointing change is the latest in something of an ongoing story of Sony’s support for its older consoles. In March, Sony announced it would be closing the PlayStation Store for the PS3 and Vita, but it reversed that plan a few weeks later, saying it “made the wrong decision.” As part of that original March announcement, Sony als...

Netflix’s immensely popular Squid Game is getting an edit after phone numbers shown in the series dialed real numbers, leading to what the company described as “unfortunate” prank dials. The Korean drama about a sadistic “game,” in which players find themselves with no option but to participate in a series of twisted challenges, contains visible phone numbers in multiple scenes (a phone number is also clearly visible in the Squid Game trailer). Reuters, which earlier reported the news, cited Netflix and production company Siren Pictures as saying they purposefully did not include a complete number and weren’t aware the number shown would reach a real line. Netflix confirmed to The Verge that the numbers that appear in Squid Game will be edited, adding that it hopes that the change will end...

Syniverse, a telecom company that helps carriers like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T route messages between each other and other carriers abroad, disclosed last week that it was the subject of a possible five year long hack. If the name Syniverse sounds familiar, the company was also responsible for the disappearance of a swath of Valentine’s Day text messages in 2019. The hack in question was brought to light in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Syniverse published last week. In it, Syniverse shares that in May 2021 it “became aware of unauthorized access to its operational and information technology systems by an unknown individual or organization.” The company did its due diligence notifying law enforcement and conducting an internal investigation, resulting in the discovery ...

Twitter is testing new prompts on iOS and Android that warn before you jump into a conversation that could get heated. In one example, there’s a prompt dropped right into a conversation in progress that says “conversations like this can be intense.” In another, which seems like it appears if you try to reply to one of those intense conversations, is titled “let’s look out for each other” and lays out three bullet points to encourage empathetic and fact-based conversations. You can get a look at the prompts in the tweet below: Ever want to know the vibe of a conversation before you join in? We’re testing prompts on Android and iOS that give you a heads up if the convo you’re about to enter could get heated or intense. This is a work in progress as we learn how to better support healthy conv...

Two new iPhone 13 Pro camera features that Apple promised would be coming in future software updates have shown up in the latest developer beta of iOS 15.1. Now users can record video with Apple’s ProRes codec, and there’s a switch to turn off the automatic macro mode switching (via 9to5Mac). With this release of the third beta, users have gained access to the toggles, which could indicate that the features are coming soon. In the current versions of iOS, the iPhone 13 Pro will automatically switch from the main camera to the ultrawide camera when it detects that you’re close up to a subject, enabling the close-focus macro mode. Some reviewers found the switch (which happens without much of a UI indication) jarring, and Apple said it would add a setting to turn it off. Now that it’s shown ...