Technology

Pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson will pay $230 million to settle an opioid lawsuit with the state of New York, the state’s attorney general said Saturday. According to a release from New York AG Letitia James, Johnson & Johnson “has committed to ending the manufacture and sale of all opioids and opioid products for distribution in the state of New York, as well as to no longer ship these products anywhere within the United States.” The company said in a statement Saturday that it “made the business decision in 2020 to discontinue all of its prescription pain medications in the United States.” The settlement removes Johnson & Johnson from a trial scheduled to begin in New York on Tuesday, but not from other cases across the US, where local governments, states, and Native...

Volkswagen plans to stop selling combustion engines in Europe by 2035, a board member told German newspaper Muenchner Merkur (via Reuters). Klaus Zellmer, Volkswagen’s board member for sales, told the newspaper that the company would “exit the business with internal combustion engine cars in Europe between 2033 and 2035.” But, he added, it would take longer to stop selling combustion engines in the US and China— that will come “somewhate later,” he said— and in South America and Africa, where he said “it will take a good deal longer.” Zellmer said the automaker’s entire fleet will be carbon neutral by 2050 at the latest. He wants to see electric vehicles to account for 70 percent of the company’s total sales in Europe by 2030. Volkswagen’s carbon-neutral targets are close to several compet...

Messaging chat app Telegram has added group video chat to its mobile and desktop apps at last, something it promised was coming back in April 2020. Voice chats in any group on the platform can be turned into video calls by tapping the camera icon to turn on your device’s video. Telegram says an unlimited number of users can participate in an audio call, but group video calls will be limited to the first 30 people who join a voice chat. The company plans to increase that limit “soon,” it said in its announcement. Users can also share their screens during a video call. Telegram Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said in January that the company had reached 500 million active users, many of whom came to the platform after the Facebook-owned rival chat platform WhatsApp bungled the introduction of a new...

Prime Day is officially behind us — well, sort of. The annual two-day shopping blitz saw an abundance of terrific discounts, from noise-canceling headphones to brilliant OLED TVs, some of which have stuck around for the remainder of the week. Retailers are already moving on, however, and we’re already seeing an influx of deals ahead of Independence Day, including a sizable discount on one of our favorite pairs of noise-canceling headphones, the Bose 700. But eBay isn’t the only one offering discounts this weekend. Right now, you can also save on Apple’s luxe Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro, the perfect summer speaker, and the white whale that is Microsoft’s Xbox Series S. While we don’t always recommend picking up pre-owned gear, it’s hard to ignore a 15 percent discount on products that a...

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was among the big 2020 movies that saw its release date delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. After being moved to October 1st, Dune’s release has been pushed back yet again, this time to October 22nd, Variety reports. The move was one of several releases Warner Bros. rescheduled, with the Clint Eastwood-directed Cry Macho moved to September 17th, and The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel to The Sopranos, moved to October 1st. The adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert sci-fi classic has an all-star cast that includes Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Stellan Skarsgård, Zendaya, Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, and Javier Bardem. Dune is slated to be the first of two movies based on the book. The movie coming out in October (at this point, an...

Tesla has had a run of bad publicity in China so far this year, with officials raising concerns over security risks, and protests about how the US automaker handles customer complaints in the country. On Saturday the stretch of bad news continued, as The Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla is recalling more than 285,000 vehicles in China—most of which were made locally— over a safety risk with the vehicles’ cruise control, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said Saturday that the recall includes 249,855 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles that were made in Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai, and 35,655 Model 3 vehicles which were imported, all produced between December 2019 and June 2021, the WSJ reported. According to the regulator the vehicles’ cruise control systems could be a...

Despite Apple’s efforts to keep anyone from finding out what it’s working on, leaks have continued to give the world early previews of new iPhones, Macs and more. Its campaign to plug the holes is apparently extending to threats of legal action, as the leaker known as “Kang” posted to Weibo this week about a notice he received from the company (via MacRumors). Kang currently holds the number one spot on the AppleTrack leaderboard, which attempts to compare the reliability of the information various leakers share, and AppleTrack indicates that other leakers have received similar messages. Prior to the iPhone 12 launch, Kang posted about all four models that Apple had prepared, revealing their prices, colors and planned release dates. According to Kang, the letter from a law firm claimed tha...

Microsoft’s Windows operating system has been a major presence in the computer industry for decades. Currently, PCs loaded with Windows 10 are being manufactured and sold by a variety of companies in an even wider variety of models. Come the 2021 holiday season, we can expect that PCs will be shipping with Microsoft’s new Windows 11 — and if your current system is compatible, you will be able to upgrade to the new free OS. This abundance of choice has its advantages and disadvantages. While on the one hand, it means you can get a system that is exactly tailored to your needs, it also means you need to do some research before deciding on which Windows device is right for you. And while the operating system’s flexibility is an advantage, especially if you are tech-savvy or business-oriented,...

Microsoft has updated its PC Health Check App to show more information about why your computer won’t be able to run Windows 11, to help deal with some of the confusion that’s sprung up around compatibility. If you’ve already downloaded the app, it should auto-update when you go to run it again, and if you haven’t downloaded it yet you can get it here. There’s been a bit of confusion about what Windows 11 will and won’t run on, and the previous version of the tool didn’t necessarily help clear any of it up, mainly showing users a pass/fail message with no details. Now, it should at least give some clue as to why your computer isn’t compatible, be it an issue with storage, secure boot compatibility, or your processor. As some have pointed out, the messages the tool gives out are still light ...

Microsoft says some of its customer support tools were accessed by the hacking group Nobelium, which was also connected to the SolarWinds attacks, due to a Microsoft customer service agent’s computer being compromised. Microsoft told Reuters that the agent had limited access, and was able to see things like what services customers used, and their billing contact information. According to Microsoft, the hackers used the info gleaned from the tools to start “highly targeted” attacks on specific Microsoft customers. The attacks, Microsoft says, were part of a larger Nobelium campaign largely focused on IT companies and governments throughout the world. The company says it’s reached out to the customers who were impacted by the hacking group’s use of the tools, and that Nobelium no longer has ...

At one point in Windows 10’s lifetime, you could have had Internet Explorer, the legacy version of Microsoft Edge, and the new Chromium-powered Edge all installed. This trio of browsers was the perfect illustration of Microsoft’s struggles with the web over the past decade, but now that Internet Explorer is being laid to rest in 2022, it’s disappearing from Windows 11, too. Microsoft revealed yesterday that Internet Explorer will be “disabled” in Windows 11. At first, I was worried that it meant Internet Explorer might hang around ahead of the final nail in its coffin on June 15th, 2022, but it’s actually fully disappearing from Windows 11. “The Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will not be available on Windows 11. Microsoft Edge is the default browser for Windows 11,” explains a Mi...

Smartphones helped popularize the modern gig economy, and a new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests some companies like Premise have found a new way to take advantage of workers trying to make extra money — turning them into unwitting spies for corporate and military clients. As Journal reporter Byron Tau writes, Premise was originally started “to register prices in the developing world and help its customers better understand the needs of the population.” But the company reportedly found even more success having contributors perform TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk-esque work like completing surveys, taking photos of locations, and walking specific paths, while occasionally scooping up information about nearby Wi-Fi networks and cell towers. That might not immediately send up the b...