Technology

The United Steelworkers Union (USW) said Friday it has reached a tentative contract deal with a sub-contractor for Google Pittsburgh. The announcement comes almost two years after employees of engineering and IT contractor HCL Technologies voted to unionize, saying that even though they worked alongside Google employees, they didn’t receive the same benefits. Amanda Parks, a member of the USW bargaining committee who works at HCL, said in a statement that the proposed three-year contract includes “meaningful wage increases” and addresses pay parity concerns. It includes language that offers job security and additional time off, according to the statement. “We work hard, and we deserve what all workers deserve, an agreement that reflects our important contributions to the company’s success,...

Games like League of Legends and Dota 2 are massively popular, and have been for the better part of a decade. But they can also be impenetrable to new players and viewers: there are so many characters and strategies that figuring out what’s happening on-screen is a huge challenge. The just-launched Pokémon Unite aims to fix that. It doesn’t just add cute monsters to the genre, but also some clever fixes to streamline it and make things more approachable. It’s kind of like a mashup of a strategy game and basketball, but with a Gengar thrown in. For the uninitiated, a MOBA — or multiplayer online battle arena, to use the genre’s unnecessarily long full name — is a five-on-five competition where the goal, usually, is to destroy the opposing team’s base. You do this by forming a squad of chara...

Instagram users around the platform share one central concern right now: that the app’s new sensitive content filter is blocking their posts. In posts on both the feed and in Stories, account holders are warning their followers that the setting is limiting their reach and that their followers should disable the filter to ensure their posts get through. “Over the past 24 hours, I’ve had many conversations with artists and other creators who are incredibly frustrated by having their work hidden,” Phillip Miner, an artist and the creator of queer hobby magazine Natural Pursuits, wrote in a post. “Conversely, people are frustrated that they can’t find the content the want to see.” An earlier post of his alerting people to the filter has reached over 700,000 people and has been shared 192,000 t...

A major bug in a recent Chrome OS release (91.0.4472.147) left some users bricked out of their Chromebooks. Reddit, in due course, has already spotted the issue. As some eagle-eyed users, including one “elitist_ferret” (first spotted by Android Police), have pointed out, the problem appears to boil down to a missing ampersand in Google’s code. Specifically, it seems that Google used one “&” in a conditional statement in its Cryptohome VaultKeyset, rather than two “&&”, which is the “AND” operator in C++, breaking up the line. The mishap prevented Chrome OS from checking user passwords against stored keys, as Ars Technica notes, and that left some users unable to log in. Google has not yet responded to a request for comment. The Chrome OS subreddit was aware of the bug in 91.0.4...

Apple Music listeners on Android can now take advantage of the Dolby Atmos spatial audio and lossless-quality streaming features that debuted on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS over a month ago. The latest update of the app for Android adds support for both features. Lossless should be available pretty universally on Android devices. Apple includes all the same warnings as on iOS about it consuming “significantly more data.” Like on Apple’s own platforms, Apple Music advises that external hardware like a DAC is required if you want to step up to hi-res lossless. (I’m curious whether this still applies on LG’s audiophile-friendly phones, which have an excellent built-in DAC, but haven’t had the chance to test yet.) Spatial audio support on the Android side seems a more limited, however. Although the...

Amazon will investigate allegations of discrimination and harassment within its Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit, following an employee petition that criticized AWS’s culture, The Washington Post reported. More than 550 Amazon workers signed the petition, which calls out AWS for its “underlying culture of systemic discrimination, harassment, bullying and bias against women and under-represented groups,” the Post reported. The petition further alleges that Amazon’s system to investigate claims of discrimination are “not fair, objective or transparent.” The petition pointed to allegations from former AWS employees: In May, five women sued Amazon, alleging race and gender discrimination. One of the women, Cindy Warner, worked in the AWS division and had accused a manager of making homophobic co...

Despite having to weather a variety of controversies having to do with its content and its ownership, TikTok persists as a popular video app — and no wonder. It allows you to quickly create videos, add a variety of effects, text captions, and audio backgrounds, and show to the world what you think is cute, funny, politically problematic, deadly serious, or in need of fixing. TikTok is full of cute animals, weird dances, snarky remarks, and imaginative dialogues between the same individual dressed up in two different ways. In fact, it is hard to say who is having the most fun: those who are swiping through the wide variety of videos out there, discovering what other people are doing, dancing, and discussing, or those who are creating these imaginative videos and enjoying the attention and c...

Let’s get this out of the way: you shouldn’t buy the HTC Vive Focus 3 for home VR. The Vive Focus 3 is HTC’s latest virtual reality headset, part of the Vive line that it first released in 2016. The Vive helped establish the modern VR industry, and the Focus 3 is one of only two big-brand standalone (as opposed to PC- or console-tethered) headsets on the market alongside Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2. But as Facebook lengthens its lead in consumer VR, HTC has voluntarily taken itself out of the running. The Focus 3, which opened for preorders last month, is meant for businesses, research institutions, and other professional settings. It’s equipped with a small suite of apps that hold little consumer appeal, and it is sold with HTC tech support and other enterprise-oriented features. At $1,300,...

Apple plans to announce a redesigned MacBook Air with a 13.3-inch Mini LED display in the middle of 2022, according to a new investor note from reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo seen by 9to5Mac and MacRumors. The prediction is in line with Kuo’s previous reports, but offers a more specific timeframe. It also suggests the new Air will have a slightly smaller display than the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros that are said to be on the way this year. Mini LED is a relatively new display technology that’s designed to offer some of the benefits of OLED — such as better contrast levels and improved dynamic range — without the risks of burn-in. It made its Apple debut on this year’s 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Kuo has previously listed around half a dozen Apple devices scheduled to migrate to the new displ...

If you think microchips are ubiquitous now, appearing in everything from washing machines to lampposts, just wait until circuits can be printed onto plastic, paper, and fabric for the price of pennies. That’s what chip designer Arm is promising, with the company this week unveiling a new prototype plastic-based microchip named PlasticARM. This isn’t the first flexible chip we’ve seen, but it is the most complex. PlasticARM contains a 32-bit Cortex-M0 CPU (the cheapest and simplest processor core in Arm’s Cortex-M family), as well as 456 bytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. It’s comprised of over 18,000 logic gates, which Arm says is at least 12 times more than the previous plastic-based chip. The chip was designed in coordination with flexible electronics maker PragmatIC, and as the company’...

A new report indicates that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent more than $20 million USD of his company’s money on his personal security in 2020 alone. According to research from Protocol which looked at the amount spent by companies on 11 different big tech executives, Zuckerberg came out on top by far with a cost of $23.4 million USD across the last year, contributing to more than half of the collective cost of $46 million USD spent by all 11 executives. Following closely in second place (without surprise) is Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who spent $7.6 million in 2020. In comparison, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon‘s former CEO Jeff Bezos spent $5.4 million USD and $1.3 million USD respectively, with Apple‘s Tim Cook down at just $460,000 USD. According to Facebook, the exo...

National Geographic has just published a new article that takes a closer look at the mysterious eighth continent Zealandia, or Te Riu-a-Māui. The idea of the eighth landmass presented itself as early as the mid-’90s, where Zealandia, a continent almost the size of Australia is submerged with New Zealand its only part to exist above sea level. “Continents are sort of like icebergs,” says study author Keith Klepeis, a structural geologist at the University of Vermont. “What you see at the surface is not really the full extent of the beast.” Analyzing tiny crystals of zircon collected from the few islands of Zealandia that stick out from the water, it was determined that this lost continent is a lot older than first imagined — over a billion years old. This finding is some of the first bits o...