Technology

In March, Twitter said it would soon let you use a security key as your only two-factor authentication method, and on Wednesday, it announced that feature was live on both mobile and web. Being able to use a security key as one of your two-factor authentication methods isn’t new, but now you can make it the only one, if you want to. Physical security keys have advantages over other two-factor methods like an authenticator app or SMS because they don’t rely on a code that a bad actor could intercept. In recent years, Twitter has added a number of features to beef up login security. The company expanded beyond SMS in 2017 by adding support for authentication apps like Google Authenticator and Authy. In 2019, Twitter let you enable two-factor authentication without giving your phone number, a...

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced on Wednesday that it’s fining Robinhood almost $70 million to settle charges over issues it identified with the company’s stock trading service. The authority claims that the financial app company neglected its duty to supervise trades, maintain its own technology, and protect its customers. The fine is the largest in FINRA’s history and Robinhood has agreed to pay. FINRA says since 2016 Robinhood has periodically provided false and misleading information on topics like whether customers were able to place trades on margin (using credit from Robinhood to buy shares), including displaying inaccurate information in its app on how much cash was in customers’ accounts. Robinhood’s lack of customer communication has caused problems T...

Amazon-owned Twitch is rolling out its Watch Parties feature, which lets streamers host viewing parties for movies and TV shows on Amazon Prime, to Android and iOS, the company announced Wednesday. Watch Parties first launched on desktop web in September. While Watch Parties are a potentially fun way for Twitch streamers to hang out with their communities, there’s one important catch: only viewers who also have an Amazon Prime or Prime Video subscription can join the party to watch what’s being shown. But with the expansion to Android and iOS, Twitch is offering more devices from which streamers can host Watch Parties, meaning you might see more of your favorite creators using the feature. Virtual watch parties have become popular due to the pandemic, and other streaming platforms such as ...

The year of cheap 5G phones is upon us, and T-Mobile is offering its customers yet another low-cost 5G phone with today’s announcement of the Revvl V Plus 5G. The T-Mobile-branded device will cost $199, with a huge 6.8-inch 1600 x 900 display and 5,000mAh battery. It’ll go on sale first through Metro by T-Mobile starting on July 12th, with sales through T-Mobile starting on July 23rd. The Revvl V Plus 5G comes with Android 11 and uses a MediaTek Dimensity 700 processor designed with inexpensive 5G phones in mind. It’s paired with 4GB of RAM plus 64GB of built-in storage, which is expandable via microSD. It offers a main 16-megapixel rear-facing camera along with two more unspecified 5-megapixel and 2-megapixel sensors on the back as well as a 16-megapixel selfie camera. There is, of course...

Amazon is pushing back against Lina Khan, the newly confirmed chair of the Federal Trade Commission, by filing a recusal motion against the longtime antitrust advocate, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The petition asks Khan to restrict herself from any proceedings involving Amazon on the basis of her past statements about the company, including claims that Amazon is a monopoly and should be broken up. “[Federal ethics rules] require recusal when a new Commissioner previously has expressed views that go beyond general policy commentary and has made statements about specific factual and legal issues relating to a particular company,” the petition reads. “Chair Khan has made numerous and highly detailed public pronouncements regarding Amazon, including on market definition, spec...

Like so many beautiful internet creations, Racer Trash started off as a joke. Last May, editor Alex T. Jacobs caught a double feature of Two-Lane Blacktop and Speed Racer on Ariel Gardner’s Twitch stream. He typed in chat that he’d always wanted a vaporwave cut of Speed Racer, but that it would probably never happen. Forty-eight hours later, on Jacobs’ birthday, his wish came true in the form of Speed Vapor, the first Racer Trash movie. He and Gardner were in a group chat for filmmakers, mostly friends from industry circles in LA, who had gathered around the communal streaming hearth to watch movies in the pandemic. Jacobs’ dream idea quickly struck a chord with the group. Someone suggested dividing up the film and assigning segments (or “segs,” in racer-speak) to different people; several...

Virgin Orbit is in the middle of its debut commercial mission from Southern California, five months after the company first reached orbit during a January test flight. Seven satellites from three different countries are loaded onto a rocket that blasted off in midair from Virgin Orbit’s modified Boeing 747 less than an hour after the plane departed the Mojave Air and Space Port. The carrier aircraft, a modified Boeing 747 named Cosmic Girl, took off at 9:53AM ET. Less than an hour later at 10:47AM, a 70-foot-long two-stage rocket called LauncherOne dropped from the plane’s left wing and ignited its single engine to zoom toward the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. The rocket is carrying the Netherlands’ first military satellite, four tiny satellites from a Defense Department test program, and th...

Wing, the drone delivery arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has launched a free app in the US to help pilots fly their drones legally. OpenSky has been available in Australia since 2019 but is now available for both commercial and recreational pilots in the US to use for anything from conducting commercial surveys to filming and photography. It’s available now on both iOS and Android. OpenSky is based on Google Maps, Wing tells DroneLife, and it’s color-coded to show areas where pilots can and can’t fly. Green areas are a-okay, but pilots need to exercise caution in yellow areas, and shouldn’t fly at all in red areas. Perhaps its most useful feature is that it lets pilots submit requests to fly in controlled airspace and receive “near real-time authorizations.” The approval process w...

Does anybody else remember Excalibur? You know, Excalibur: the British TV show that ran for two seasons in the mid-1970s, mixing Arthurian legend with Aleister Crowley mysticism, interplanetary exploration, an undead (sorry, spoilers!) villain named Poseidon, and a deeply troubled production history? If so, that’s a little weird because it never existed — but if enough people remember it, maybe that could change. Excalibur is, in fact, an interactive fiction project made by J. J. Guest, G. C. Baccaris, and Duncan Bowsman. It’s a detailed “fan wiki” for the eponymous (and fictitious) BBC series, and clicking through it reveals layers of in-show plot summaries, behind-the-scenes cast and crew drama, and a running conflict between the wiki’s contributors themselves. Exploring the wiki will sl...

LG’s new range of Mini LED TVs, which it’s branding “QNED,” are releasing worldwide starting next month, the company has announced. The lineup consists of three sets, the 8K QNED99 and QNED95, and the 4K QNED90, ranging in size from 65- to 86-inches. LG says the TVs will launch first in North America, with additional regions following “in the weeks ahead.” Mini LED is a relatively new kind of display technology which uses an array of thousands of tiny LEDs as a screen’s backlight. Because there are so many (up to 30,000 in the case of the 86-inch QNED99), they can create a sharper contrast between light and dark areas of an image. LG says the technology, which has previously been used on some TVs from TCL as well as Apple’s latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro, allows for “10 times better contrast ra...

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has revealed near-total lack of accountability from federal agencies using facial recognition built by private companies, like Clearview AI. Of the 14 federal agencies that said they used privately built facial recognition for criminal investigations, only Immigration and Customs Enforcement was in the process of implementing a list of approved facial recognition vendors and a log sheet for the technology’s use. The rest of the agencies, including Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, had no process in place to track the use of private facial recognition. This GAO report greatly expands the public’s knowledge of how the federal government uses facial recogniti...