Technology

Last June, Amazon created a Counterfeit Crimes Unit to fight the knockoffs plaguing its gigantic storefront, and today, it’s announcing its first action against purveyors of fake gadgets. Amazon and GoPro have sued seven Chinese nationals and a pair of businesses for distributing hard-to-detect knockoffs of its “Handler” floating camera hand grip and “3-Way” tripod grip, ones that blatantly use GoPro’s own logo, in an April 2021 lawsuit that’s just now being unsealed — because there’s a parallel criminal investigation in China against these same sellers, the complaint reveals. While the lawsuit doesn’t say how many people actually bought these counterfeit GoPro accessories, it suggests at least some buyers were fooled by the fake products. One wrote they were “very disappointed it was prov...

Netflix is tripling down on its reality TV programming by renewing its most popular shows and opening up casting for future programming to anyone over the age of 18 in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, or Ireland, the company announced Monday. Anyone interested who meets that criteria can submit a one-minute video on Netflix’s new dedicated reality TV site. The application can be used for multiple shows on Netflix’s current slate, from baking competitions like Nailed It! to saucier romantic options like Love is Blind. (Netflix also offers the option to apply to all of its shows at once if you prefer a more “spaghetti meets wall” approach.) Netflix will let you apply for shows across a broad spectrum of topics at once.Image: Netflix Netflix is also renewing several of its most well-known show...

Heatworks‘ plumbing-free Tetra countertop dishwasher was a pint-sized revelation for city dwellers and RV residents alike when it debuted at CES 2018. Garnering acclaim for its compact size, clever, pipe-less construction and myriad of uses — you can also call upon the Tetra to wash your fruit, steam a lobster or even clean your hats — the compact yet mighty machine was highly anticipated, and now it’s been made available for pre-order. How the Tetra works is simple. After connecting it to an electrical outlet, filling its three-liter tank with water and loading up a recyclable cartridge with concentrated detergent, you can pack it with up to three place settings’ worth of dishes. After the cycle is complete, you simply pour out the used water and refill it for another load. Though this ma...

Serial 1, the electric bike company that spun out from Harley-Davidson last year, is making one-of-a-kind, custom-built e-bikes and auctioning them off online. The first one is the Schwinn Sting-Ray-inspired Mosh/Chopper, which the company describes as a “psychedelic, hand-painted banana seater,” and oh boy do I want it. Unfortunately, my chances are slim to none. First of all, Serial 1 is only making, well, one of these. The Mosh/Chopper is the first product from the company’s new 1-OFF series, in which it’s custom designing, building, and releasing single-edition (i.e. runs of just one) e-bikes throughout the year and auctioning them off online. I desperately want to put baseball cards in its spokes and attach streamers to the handlebars The current bid is $6,700, which is a bit too expe...

The mind behind one of Netflix’s most unsettling shows is back with a new series. Midnight Mass is a new seven-episode show from Mike Flanagan, perhaps best-known as the creator of The Haunting of Hill House and its follow-up The Haunting of Bly Manor. And while the new series — which stars the likes of Rahul Kohli, Zach Gilford, and Hamish Linklater — isn’t part of that anthology, the first trailer has some very similar, and creepy, vibes. Check it out above. Here’s the basic premise, from Netflix: Midnight Mass tells the tale of a small, isolated island community whose existing divisions are amplified by the return of a disgraced young man (Zach Gilford) and the arrival of a charismatic priest (Hamish Linklater). When Father Paul’s appearance on Crockett Island coincides with unexplained...

Netflix’s anime Witcher spinoff film — The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf — is almost here, and a new full-length trailer shows off a lot more of the epic monster fighting and charismatic heroics of its protagonist, Geralt’s mentor Vesemir. The film is set before the events of the live-action series and will look to explain more about the Witcher’s world, including how the magically mutated monster hunters are created. It’ll also provide useful backstory on Vesemir, who’s set to appear in the upcoming second season of the show when it arrives this December. The new trailer for the anime spinoff also shows off a lot more of the expanded Witcher universe, and some rather impressive-looking fight scenes and effects, the sorts of which would have been far harder to achieve in the live-action s...

Ohio-based startup Workhorse says it has to redesign its flagship electric van to meet customer needs, after finally getting the vehicle into production this past quarter following years of struggles. The company announced Monday morning that it needs to “revise the design [of] the vehicle” to increase the payload capacity, which has been reported to be around 6,000 pounds. The C-1000 van, as it’s called, has 1,000 cubic feet of cargo space. The company says the electric powertrain will remain untouched and that it will continue to deliver some C-1000s as they come off the line to customers who are fine with the van’s current capabilities. “We’re going to go through full vehicle design reviews down to the bill of materials with both our engineering team, and our purchasing team,” CEO Rick ...

Across generations, music and fashion have proven to be some of culture’s most influential juggernauts, with artists across all genres holding the power to kick off a trend or sellout a product. Look no further than the current landscape, where hip-hop and pop stars elevate brands and styles to new levels and are some of today’s most looked-to fashion icons. It’s a trickle down effect that inspired the latest shoppable video streaming app, droppTV, which impressively raised $15 million USD in its series A funding — an indication of a bright future. The platform lets viewers shop pieces from top music videos, eliminating the guessing and Googling game when it comes to copping an artist’s style choices. With droppTV, the thought of dressing like your favorite musician doesn’t feel so impossi...

As of its latest beta release, Valve’s SteamVR software can add floating desktop windows inside VR games, letting you keep an eye on other apps without leaving VR. It’s a helpful addition, allowing players to keep an eye on anything from Discord, to a Twitch chat, or Netflix during a lower-intensity game. Road to VR suggests you could even watch YouTube during longer flights in Elite Dangerous. The ability to interact with the rest of your desktop from within SteamVR’s dashboard is not a new feature, but recently Valve has been making the system more flexible. Earlier this year it added the option to view individual application windows in the dashboard, and to be virtually attached to VR controllers ingame. This made apps viewable at a glance, but until now it lacked the ability to float w...

In a new FAQ, Apple has attempted to assuage concerns that its new anti-child abuse measures could be turned into surveillance tools by authoritarian governments. “Let us be clear, this technology is limited to detecting CSAM [child sexual abuse material] stored in iCloud and we will not accede to any government’s request to expand it,” the company writes. Apple’s new tools, announced last Thursday, include two features designed to protect children. One, called “communication safety,” uses on-device machine learning to identify and blur sexually explicit images received by children in the Messages app, and can notify a parent if a child age 12 and younger decides to view or send such an image. The second is designed to detect known CSAM by scanning users’ images if they choose to upload th...

Valve is aiming to make its Steam Deck handheld gaming PC ready for Windows 11. While we’ve known for weeks that the Steam Deck can run Windows, it wasn’t clear how well this would be supported by Valve, or whether an option for a Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) would be enabled to get Windows 11 on the Steam Deck. Now, Valve has confirmed it has been heavily focused on Windows support. “There’s work looking at TPM just now,” says Greg Coomer, a Valve Steam Deck designer, in an interview with PC Gamer. “We’ve focused so much on Windows 10, so far, that we haven’t really gotten that far into it. Our expectation is that we can meet that.” Valve is working with AMD to make sure that TPM is supported at a BIOS level, and that the Steam Deck is ready for Windows 11. “So there’s nothing to indica...

We now have the clearest picture yet of how different the world is today as a result of human-driven climate change. The most comprehensive report to date on the physical science of climate change was published today by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Extreme events — from floods to heatwaves and droughts — have gotten worse, it says in a nutshell. And scientists are even more certain than they were before that humans’ greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide and methane (which makes up a majority of “natural gas”), are to blame. “It is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change.” “We’ve known for decades that the world is warming, but this report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid, intensifyin...