Technology

Yesterday and today, the enthusiasm for joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin overwhelmed Robinhood, leading to “sporadic crypto order failures and delayed notifications for some customers,” Robinhood wrote in a blog post. “These interruptions aren’t acceptable to us,” Robinhood wrote in its post. “We believe we’re the most intuitive crypto platform for Dogecoin traders and we’re proud to be a top choice for this community.” Robinhood has a history of exactly this kind of whoopsie. In March 2020, there were three huge outages which Robinhood has said were due to “stress on our infrastructure.” And infamously, in January, Robinhood limited trades on GameStop, pissing off the entire internet and getting itself hauled in front of Congress in the process because it hadn’t planned for anything approachi...

Peak Design has announced it is delaying shipment of products in its Kickstarter campaign for Mobile, a broad range of phone accessories designed to make it easy to mount your phone on everything from a motorcycle handlebar to a simple dock on your desk. It is meant to be compatible with iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones. Originally targeted for May, the company now expects to be able to begin shipping in August, though some products will also come later. To make up for it, Peak is offering either full refunds for cancellations or discounts on other Peak Design products. Peak Design has used Kickstarter to launch everything from camera-focused backpacks to tripods and its original product, an innovative camera mounting clip. But this new project is on a different scale of ambition: it’s mu...

Today, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s NFT sold for about $5.4 million, or 2,224 ETH. The NFT is of an artwork that shows an image of Snowden’s face made from pages of a US appeals court decision that ruled the mass surveillance program Snowden exposed had violated US law. The image is called “Stay Free.” The profits won’t go to America’s most famous exiled whistleblower, however. Instead, the sale is meant to benefit the Freedom of the Press Foundation, where Snowden is the president. Its board includes actor John Cusack, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and the writer Glenn Greenwald. We have a winner, internet friends. I want to extend a very special thanks to everyone who followed this over the last 24 hours, and the deepest gratitude from EVERYONE at our @FreedomofPress to those who ...

Have you ever wanted to watch a wolf hunt freshwater fish? Thanks to the Voyageurs Wolf Project from the University of Minnesota, you can see it on YouTube any time you like. The researchers with the project trapped V089, a lone wolf, sedated him, and then strapped on the Vectronic-Aerospace camera collar. The collar recorded video in 30 second bursts during daylight hours, for a total of 7 minutes a day. The wolf is a regular neckbeard, it turns out The footage is very cool, though some of it is obscured by V089’s fur. (“The wolf’s beard needed a little trim… lesson learned,” one video caption says.) They found that V089 was clever enough to hunt near a beaver dam, going after fish that were trapped by the obstacle. “Up until recently, wolves hunting and killing freshwater fish is s...

Peloton is resisting a request from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to recall its Tread Plus treadmill, which was involved with the death of a child last month, the Washington Post is reporting tonight. At the time of the incident, the CPSC issued a statement that it was investigating. The agency is reportedly planning on issuing a consumer alert about the Tread Plus and may do so as early as Saturday, according to officials who spoke to the Post. One official added that “this doesn’t happen with other treadmills.” The Post’s sources tell the paper that the CPSC is aware of “‘dozens’ of incidents involving Peloton’s treadmills, some involving pets or exercise balls and many of them resulting in serious injuries.” Bloomberg notes this this past February the CPSC received a rep...

A real estate broker named Shane Dulgeroff decided to take advantage of the NFT hype. He’s selling a house at 221 Dryden Street, in Thousand Oaks, California along with an NFT of a psychedelic-flavored video of the house. The artwork and house are up for auction on OpenSea, with a minimum bid of 48 ETH, or almost $117,000. No one has bid yet, and the auction closes in seven days. The house previously sold at $746,000, according to real-estate platform Zillow. “It’s less about the significance of the art as it is the significance of us using a platform like this to sell a home,” Dulgeroff told Fast Company. “The significance that the art will carry, it’s going to be stored in your digital wallet forever as living proof that you purchased the first home ever that was done through any kind of...

Google appears to be preparing to add a feature to Android devices that has long been a part of more traditional desktop operating systems: a trash bin (or, if you prefer the way Windows names it, a recycle bin). XDA-Developers has been digging into the code for Android 12 to uncover features that Google hasn’t officially announced yet, and the latest is a line in the main Settings app for “Trash.” When you tap “Trash,” Android 12 should pop up a dialog box telling you how much storage deleted files are taking up on your system and giving you the option to empty it. It looks like it should work just like it does on Windows or a Mac, but in practice it’s likely to be much more complicated for a variety of reasons. Android actually got a trash API in Android 11 that apps could use to hide fi...

Internet should become a lot more affordable in New York after Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that requires all Internet Service Providers operating in New York state to offer a $15 a month broadband option for low-income consumers. According to NY Assembly member Amy Paulin (via Bloomberg), the average price of broadband in New York is currently $50. This new bill caps the price at $15 for regular broadband and $20 for high-speed broadband, but only for those who qualify as low income. That’s still over 7 million people in 2.7 million households according to a press release from Cuomo’s office. This is a remarkable move toward making broadband internet the affordable utility most people treat it as. Cuomo’s office told The Verge that for $15 a month ISPs must provide the greater of t...

SpaceX’s new Starlink satellite internet service is in a very limited beta testing period right now, but the company is already thinking ahead: as first noted by CNBC, SpaceX has filed an application with the FCC for Starlink components that would allow the service to work on moving vehicles. Big moving vehicles, that is — Elon Musk tweeted that the existing Starlink terminals are too big for Tesla’s vehicles, and the idea is targeted at planes, RVs, trucks, and ships. Not connecting Tesla cars to Starlink, as our terminal is much too big. This is for aircraft, ships, large trucks & RVs. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 8, 2021 This would be a big change for Starlink, which right now does not even allow customers to move the existing hardware from address to address — if you can get in th...

After pausing its review of emoji submissions, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is back with tips for successful submissions, chair Jennifer Daniel announced. Anything you submit now could come to phones as soon as 2023 — but if you want to fine-tune your emoji, she’s got some suggestions. A good emoji has multiple uses, can be used with other emoji to create an emoji phrase, represents something new, and is distinct from existing emoji, Daniel writes. We won’t get new emoji this year; the Unicode Consortium — that’s the panel in charge of emoji releases — delayed the version release. The delay was because Unicode relies on volunteers, and last year, the pandemic overwhelmed them. The next planned release is in 2022. Our own Jay Peters has contributed to your emoji vocabulary with a yawn and...

Google is going it alone with its proposed advertising technology to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it’s unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web. A couple of weeks ago, Google announced it was beginning to test a new ad technology inside Google Chrome called the Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. It uses an algorithm to look at your browser history and place you in a group of people with similar browsing histories so that advertisers can target you. It’s more private than cookies, but it’s also complicated and has some potential privacy implications of its own if it’s not implemented right. Google Chrome is built on an open source project, and so FLoC was implemented a...

As Vergecast listeners know, I am a sucker for car phone mounts and chargers. They are a perfect gadget for the modern age — a design problem with no perfect solution, price points that usually land at the higher end of the impulse-buy zone, and completely well-suited for targeted Instagram ads. “People who have bought a Qi-based car mount in the last year,” the marketing director of a tiny accessory company sternly instructs the Facebook ad-targeting system. “Find them and relentlessly pressure them into buying our product which is at best marginally better than the one they have.” Reader, it works. All of this means I was very excited when Apple added MagSafe charging to the new iPhone 12 line. A series of magnets aligns a wireless charger to the back of the phone, and has enough attachm...