Technology

Earlier this month, an unannounced pair of Beats wireless earbuds, apparently called the Beats Studio Buds, showed up in beta releases of iOS and tvOS. While those betas were a good start, a flood of new leaks — including actual photos of mystery earbuds from superstar athlete LeBron James — suggest that they could be available very soon. Here’s what we already knew: on May 17th, people digging into the iOS and tvOS 14.6 betas found evidence of the new headphones, with perhaps the clearest look at them coming from animations in the OS shared by MacRumors contributor Steve Moser (he has a whole thread of them here): This week, the Beats Studio Buds appeared under that name in FCC filings, a sign that the product has been cleared for sale in the US. Diagrams in these filings also give us a c...

Facebook won’t remove claims that COVID-19 was man-made anymore, according to a report from Politico that cites a Facebook spokesperson. The company altered its policy because of a renewed focus on the origins of the virus, including an order from President Joe Biden to his intelligence agencies to investigate the so-called lab-leak hypothesis. Facebook’s policy change was made “in consultation with public health experts,” that spokesperson told Politico. The social network’s policy mandates that false claims and conspiracy theories about the virus be removed. The company has been trying to stem the tide of misinformation Misinformation has often circulated on Facebook, including during the Ebola crisis in 2014. The company is under pressure from lawmakers to clean up its act. Early in the...

Fossil fuel companies are having a big reckoning with climate change this week. Shareholders for Exxon and Chevron voted for measures that could force them to take more responsibility for their emissions, while a Dutch court is forcing Shell to slash its pollution. Taken altogether, the actions reflect a growing push for the energy sector to phase out fossil fuels. Major oil companies had already taken some steps to at least appear to address climate change, but activists are pushing for more action on a faster timeline to meet the scale of the climate crisis. A growing push for the energy sector to phase out fossil fuels Climate activist Bill McKibben called it a “watershed day,” adding that the ruling against Shell could be “game-changing.” Exxon shareholders, during an annual meeting to...

Clubhouse has hired Justin Uberti, creator of the WebRTC standard and the Google Duo video chat app. He leaves Google after nearly 15 years at the company, where he was most recently the engineering lead for Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service and led the team that made the Stadia iOS web app. “Justin is a phenomenal engineering leader and one of the original inventors of WebRTC, on top of which Clubhouse is built,” Clubhouse co-founder and CTO Rohan Seth said in a statement. “There’s so much that goes into crafting a fantastic audio experience — the quality, the latency, the ability to use spatial distance when multiple speakers are talking. This will be a critical area of investment for us as we open Clubhouse to the whole world, and among other things, Justin will be helping lead that ...

Western Digital, owner of the SanDisk brand, has announced a new product called the Pro-Dock 4, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted in a card reading solution: it lets you mix and match four card reading modules, which can all be read simultaneously, and connect them all to your computer using a single Thunderbolt 3 cable. This dock not only fills the hole that was left in my heart by Lexar’s Workflow hub, but it makes me completely forget it existed: the Workflow didn’t have Thunderbolt daisy-chaining or a 260W power supply for charging devices and accessories (though I will admit that Lexar’s SSD modules were kind of neat). SanDisk says it’ll be making modules for the dock that support CFast, CFexpress, Red’s Mini-Mags, CF, microSD, and SD formats. SanDisk’s readers, which work independently o...

Uber has finally recognized a union of its own drivers. Allow yourself that single moment of elation before we get to the rest of the details. GMB trade union in the UK (it’s not really an acronym for anything, as it was shortened from General, Municipal, Boilermakers’ and Allied Trade Union some 40 years ago) managed to clinch union recognition from the jaws of the famously labor-hostile app company today. As The Guardian reported, “GMB will have access to drivers’ meeting hubs […] It will also be able to represent drivers if they lose access to the Uber app, and it will meet quarterly with management to discuss driver issues and concerns.” It’s not clear whether this arrangement hews closer to traditional union representation as we envision it in the US, or if this more so resemble...

The future of search is a conversation — at least, according to Google. It’s a pitch the company has been making for years, and it was the centerpiece of last week’s I/O developer conference. There, the company demoed two “groundbreaking” AI systems — LaMDA and MUM — that it hopes, one day, to integrate into all its products. To show off its potential, Google had LaMDA speak as the dwarf planet Pluto, answering questions about the celestial body’s environment and its flyby from the New Horizons probe. Google’s dream is to speak and the machine will answer As this tech is adopted, users will be able to “talk to Google”: using natural language to retrieve information from the web or their personal archives of messages, calendar appointments, photos, and more. This is more than just marketing...

If you use 1Password in your browser, it’s getting a big upgrade: support for biometrics — like Touch ID or Windows Hello (and even some Linux biometrics systems) — dark mode, and a new password-saving and updating UI. The biometric support will require the desktop version of the app to be installed, but the UI updates, along with the list of other improvements featured in 1Password’s blog post, should be coming even if you’re browser-only. (This also includes a welcome language change, where the term “Master Password” has been replaced with just “password.”) It’s beautiful.GIF: 1Password If you’ve been reading this and thinking, “I’ve had most of these features for a long time,” that could be because you’re a Safari user: 1Password for Safari seems to be a different extension from the one...

BlizzCon, Blizzard’s annual fan convention, has been canceled this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, like it was last year. However, the company plans to host a “global event” set for “the early part of next year,” the company announced on Wednesday. “Building an in-person BlizzCon is an epic and complex affair that takes many months of preparation—not just for us, but also for the many talented production partners, esports pros, hosts, entertainers, artists, and other collaborators we team up with locally and globally to put all of the pieces together,” Saralyn Smith, BlizzCon’s executive producer, said in a statement. “The ongoing complexities and uncertainties of the pandemic have impacted our ability to properly move forward on many of these fronts, and ultimately we’re now past the p...

Andy Jassy will officially become the CEO of Amazon on July 5th, the company announced at a shareholder meeting on Wednesday. The company picked that date because it marks 27 years to the day that Amazon was incorporated, according to reporters who transcribed remarks from outgoing CEO Jeff Bezos. Amazon announced that Jassy, who currently is CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), would replace Bezos as CEO of the entire company in February. Bezos will become executive chair of Amazon’s board. “As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions,” Bezos said in a statement in February. “I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about r...

You can now hide like counts on Instagram and Facebook. After years of testing on both platforms, Facebook and Instagram have settled on an opt-in experience for hiding like counts to allow people to disable seeing them across all posts and an option to hide their own public like counts from others. Instagram is enabling this feature after years of tests and pressure from experts to make changes to its platform. The service was ranked as “the most detrimental to young people’s mental health and wellbeing” in a 2017 study by the Royal Society for Public Health UK. Experts have argued that removing a like button or like counts could help reduce anxiety and social pressures for some Facebook and Instagram users. “We tested hiding like counts to see if it might depressurize people’s experience...

I spent the entire run of Disney’s Cruella torn between delight and horror. Rarely has a film so neatly emotionally vivisected me as this one about a villain best known for wanting to skin puppies to make a coat. Only Cruella isn’t about that character really. It’s not about her war with the fur industry or PETA. It’s definitely not about a collection of Dalmatian dogs fleeing her furrier desires. It’s a colorful and pulpy tale of a woman with profound narcissistic tendencies getting vengeance on a murderer and becoming a London fashion icon. I’m sorry if you ever thought, “I could never have anything but camp-fueled affection for Disney’s puppy killer” because this gal is a delight. This is more Wicked than Joker in that it reimagines a notorious villain as a misunderstood hero besmirched...