Technology

Possibly the most ambitious Pokémon game to date will be available early next year. Today Nintendo announced that Pokémon Legends: Arceus will be launching on the Nintendo Switch on January 28th, 2022. The game was first announced in February. Legends looks to be a big change for Pokémon, a franchise that’s become known for its slowly evolving roleplaying games. It’s an open-world RPG that takes place in a much older version of the Sinnoh region, before the time of pokémon trainers and organized competitions. In addition to the new setting, the experience also looks to be much more seamless compared to the main games, as Nintendo says players will be able to go out into the wild to “study the pokémon’s behaviors, sneak up to them, then throw poké balls.” Legends isn’t the only major Pokémo...

Waze has a new CEO: Neha Parikh, the president of Hotwire and a board member of Carvana. Parikh replaces Noam Bardin, who stepped down as CEO of the Google-owned navigation service last November after leading the company for 12 years. Parikh will join Waze as CEO starting in June, the company says. She is a veteran of online hospitality brand Expedia, having served in a variety of positions at two of the corporation’s subsidiaries: Hotels.com, where she ended as senior vice president for global brands and retails, and flight and hotel booking service Hotwire, where she is currently president. As Hotwire’s youngest and first female president, Parikh “led a return to growth by revamping the business model, reshaping the product, and rebuilding the team and culture,” Waze says. The aim is for...

In 2019, Sony quietly established a subsidiary dedicated to researching artificial intelligence. What exactly the company plans to do with this tech has always been a bit unclear, but a recent corporate strategy meeting offers a little more information. “Sony AI […] has begun a collaboration with PlayStation that will make game experiences even richer and more enjoyable,” say notes from a recent strategy presentation given by Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida. “By leveraging reinforcement learning, we are developing Game AI Agents that can be a player’s in-game opponent or collaboration partner.” This is pretty much what you’d expect from a partnership between PlayStation and Sony’s AI team, but it’s still good to have confirmation! Reinforcement learning, which relies on trial and error to...

Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp is suing India’s government over new internet rules it claims are unconstitutional and will “severely undermine the privacy” of its users, The New York Times reports. The Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, which was introduced in February and comes into effect today, contains a requirement that messaging apps identify the “first originator of information” when asked. But WhatsApp, which boasts nearly 400 million users in its largest market of India, argues that doing so would require it to trace every message sent on its service, violating users’ right to privacy. “Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to “trace” private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lea...

Hello again, it has come to my attention that Republican Senator Ted Cruz and I are in perfect alignment on one issue: if you enter your iPhone passcode on live TV, you need to change the passcode. This means you in particular, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal. “I recognize it’s happened before.” I honestly didn’t think anyone needed to explain this, particularly since Kanye West accidentally revealed his passcode (000000, in case you are curious) during a video with then-president Donald Trump in 2018. But here we are. If you are a member of the US federal government, you are a desirable target for all kinds of hackers, most of whom do not have your best interests at heart. Your phone stores a lot of sensitive data about where you go, who you talk to, and so on that can be used to ta...

Philo has become the latest live TV option for cord-cutters hoping to skirt cable contracts to get a price bump — but there’s a workaround for current subscribers. Beginning June 8th, Philo’s monthly subscription cost for incoming customers will hike to $25 from $20. But those who are subscribed to the service before that date will be able to keep their plans at the current cost with no change, Philo CEO Andrew McCollum said in a Tuesday announcement on the company’s blog. To offset the price increase, Philo will be increasing its unlimited DVR storage period to a full year, up from 30 days, and existing customers who’d like to upgrade their storage will be able to bump up to the new price tier if they so choose. McCollum cited an increase in contract fees with content partners as being be...

Amnesty International is teaming up with 38 other human rights groups and individuals to call for a halt to Google’s plans to set up an enterprise cloud business in Saudi Arabia because of concerns over the country’s human rights track record. The joint statement — signed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Media Matters for Democracy, among others — calls for Google to end its plans in Saudi Arabia until the company conducts a public human rights assessment and makes it clear what kinds of government requests for data it won’t honor. Even more important, the letter writers state, is conducting that investigation in the open, actually consulting with the people Google could inadvertently help Saudi Arabia to hurt, and speaking to groups in the country who can better understand the is...

The US has formally removed Xiaomi from its trading blacklist. The US District Court for the District of Columbia issued a final order yesterday that vacated the Department of Defense’s designation of Xiaomi as a “Communist Chinese military company” (CCMC), which would have prohibited Americans from investing in the Chinese consumer tech giant. “The Company is grateful for the trust and support of its global users, partners, employees and shareholders,” a Xiaomi spokesperson says in a statement to The Verge. “The Company reiterates that it is an open, transparent, publicly traded, independently operated and managed corporation. The Company will continue to provide reliable consumer electronics products and services to users, and to relentlessly build amazing products with honest prices to ...

Google finally has its first all-electric vehicle for capturing Street View. The tech giant and Jaguar Land Rover announced today that they have collaborated to rig up an all-electric I-Pace SUV with the equipment required to capture Street View imagery, and deployed the car in Dublin, Ireland. The I-Pace will also collect more general Google Maps data, and it will be outfitted with air quality sensors from Aclima — something Google has done with its Street View cars for the better part of the last decade. The I-Pace will collect “street-by-street air quality” data in Dublin, measuring nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide emissions, as well as fine particles. Google will make the data available to the Dublin City Council. Jaguar Land Rover and Google are no strangers. Sibling company Waymo ...

More than 500 Amazon employees have signed an internal letter to Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy calling for the company to acknowledge the plight of the Palestinian people. The move comes after Israeli airstrikes devastated Palestinians in Gaza, leaving 248 people dead. Hamas and Israel have since agreed to a ceasefire. “We ask Amazon leadership to acknowledge the continued assault upon Palestinians’ basic human rights under an illegal occupation… without using language that implies a power symmetry or situational equivalency, which minimizes and misrepresents the disruption, destruction, and death that has disproportionately been inflicted upon the Palestinians in recent days and over several decades,” employees wrote. “Amazon employs Palestinians in Tel Aviv and Haifa offices and around...

Owners of Amazon’s Eero 6 and Pro 6 routers will now be able to isolate their HomeKit IoT devices from the rest of their home network and the wider internet, thanks to a new integration with Apple’s HomeKit that’s now rolling out (via MacRumors). The new feature is coming as part of a firmware update, and makes the routers some of the first Wi-Fi 6 systems that support Apple’s integration. The added feature may be welcome, but it’s probably not a surprise for those who have been paying attention: Eero’s other, cheaper routers were updated to support it in February, 2020, and an Eero Support account mentioned in November that the router was going through Apple’s certification process. Setting up your Eero (or any other supported routers) with HomeKit lets you manage how much data your other...

Soon, the majority of portable PCs won’t need to be equipped with an ugly barrel jack and a proprietary power brick to charge. The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) has just announced (via CNET) that it’s more than doubling the amount of power you can send over a USB-C cable to 240 watts, which means you’ll eventually be able to plug in the same kind of multipurpose USB-C cable you currently use on lightweight laptops, tablets, and phones to charge all but the beefiest gaming laptops. Previously, the USB-C Power Delivery spec tops out at 100 watts, and it’s definitely held the industry back a tad — for example, while my own Dell XPS 15 can technically charge over USB-C, it needs 130W of power to charge and run at full bore simultaneously. Some manufacturers have sold off-spec USB-C adapters ...