Technology

There’s a great site-wide deal happening for a limited time at eBay on, well, a lot of things. The offer code PICKSUMMER15 is active through May 16th (ending 11:59PM PT) and knocks 15 percent off your purchase total when applied (via Android Police). The code will automatically show up at checkout when you have eligible products in your cart, but you’ll need to check the box to activate it. The terms state that you can use it two times, which is impressive. To receive the maximum $100 discount, you’ll need to spend more than $666. With that in mind, purchasing a 4K TV with this deal seems like a smart idea. We scoured eBay’s various pages to find which products are eligible for discounts, and the TVs on offer were better than expected. In fact, we found a few models included in news editor...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says the new “EUV” version of the 2022 Chevy Bolt will travel an average of 247 miles on a full battery pack — three miles shy of the estimate General Motors provided when the vehicle was announced in February. The updated version of the existing Bolt, meanwhile, will top out at 259 miles, which is exactly what GM had predicted. The EUV (which stands for “electric utility vehicle”) is basically a Bolt with a more traditional compact SUV shape. It’s about six inches longer and slightly roomier than the standard Bolt, and as such it weighs nearly 100 pounds more. That it can make fewer miles on the same 65kWh battery pack is not surprising, but it’s helpful to finally have an EPA rating in order to benchmark it against the competition. Those ratings ...

TikTok launched a new feature today that combines the existing duet and green screen formats, letting people use other TikToks as the background for their own. “Green Screen Duet” now appears as an option in the duet layout menu. Like all duets, the creator of the original video is tagged in the caption of the new one. This could be great news or a portent of even more sensory overload in the app, depending on your sensibilities. The green screen option among duet layouts.Image: TikTok The new feature will likely be a useful tool for people who already use TikTok’s “green screen” to put images in the background of their videos, or edit videos to create a similar effect. It also might make TikToks that are reactions to other TikToks more visually cohesive than Duets (where videos are tiled ...

Best Buy is hosting a one-day flash sale on a few items, and its small assortment of gaming laptops stood out from the rest. The Razer Blade 15 Base seems like a good midrange laptop with its hexa-core Intel Core i7-10750H processor, Nvidia’s GTX 1660 Ti graphics chip, and 16GB of RAM. This model costs $1,100 today only, down from $1,500. In terms of other noteworthy specs, it has a 1080p display with a 120Hz refresh rate and Thunderbolt 3 for fast data transfer, or to connect to the company’s own external GPU enclosure. It’s a bit disappointing that it comes with a paltry 256GB of storage, though it has an extra M.2 slot available to stick in another NVMe or SATA M.2 SSD. You can check out Razer’s page for more detailed specs of this specific laptop model right here, which lists it at $20...

The past year, a lot of people were laid off or otherwise unable to pay for basic necessities. So the stimulus package passed by Congress in December included a provision to pay for broadband and other basic tech for those who, because of job loss or other financial difficulties, can’t afford to pay for it on their own. And starting this week, if you qualify, you can take advantage of it. The Emergency Broadband Benefit Program is being administered by the FCC and offers a temporary discount on monthly broadband bills — up to $50 a month (or $75 if your household is on qualifying Tribal lands). If your income qualifies, you can also get a one-time discount of up to $100 for a computer or a tablet. It’s not a lot, considering how much tech costs these days, but every little bit helps. And a...

In the future, our vehicles and homes will be in constant conversation with the power grid. Smart thermostats will send information about how much energy the home is using or potentially wasting to heat or cool itself. Solar panels will say how much energy they have on hand, while electric vehicles will share information about when and where they’re charging and how much juice they need for their travels. Solar and EV batteries might even offer up the energy they’re storing in case it’s needed elsewhere. “You just plug it in, and somehow it automatically talks to its nearest neighbors,” explains Ben Kroposki, a director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “[It] says, ‘Hey, I just want to let you know I’m out here. I can provide these kinds of services back.’” That conversation is ...

We’re nearly six months into the life of the PlayStation 5, but exclusive games that really showcase the power of the hardware are still relatively rare. That’s part of what made last month’s Returnal so exciting. It’s also a big reason why the upcoming Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is so highly anticipated. Ratchet has always been an incredible-looking franchise — just look at the 2016 reboot on the PS4, which was reminiscent of an animated movie — and the latest promises to offer new features only possible on Sony’s new console. It’s still a goofy shooter-platformer filled with weird gadgets, but Rift Apart also features incredibly detailed sci-fi worlds to explore and the titular “rifts” which let players instantly jump into new areas without any loading. (To see some of that in actio...

The US has agreed not to put Xiaomi on a blacklist blocking investment in the Chinese tech company, undoing a move made in the last week of the Trump administration. Xiaomi sued the US government over the designation, but just filed a joint status report with the Department of Defense saying the two parties “have agreed upon a path forward that would resolve this litigation without the need for contested briefing.” The DoD had decided to designate Xiaomi as a “Chinese Communist Military Company,” which could have forced any American investors to divest their holdings in Xiaomi by November this year. After Xiaomi sued the government in response, a district judge issued a preliminary injunction to block the blacklisting, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.” Judge described blacklisting as ...

Judges from the European Union’s second-highest court have rejected a €250 million ($300 million) tax bill lodged against Amazon in 2017 as part the bloc’s ongoing fight against US tech giants. The case was one of a number spearheaded by Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, in which sweetheart tax deals given to powerful corporations were framed as a form of illegal state subsidy. The most notable of these was a 2016 case in which Apple was ordered to pay Ireland €13 billion ($14.9 billion) in back taxes. This decision was annulled in 2020 by the same court involved in today’s ruling. The Amazon case can be traced back to 2006, when the e-commerce giant established a labyrinthine tax structure in Europe that allowed it to funnel revenue from all EU sales through a...

Volkswagen will start testing its new autonomous vehicles in Germany this summer, the company announced Wednesday. The German automaker’s electric ID Buzz vans will use hardware and software developed by Argo AI, a Pittsburgh-based startup that is backed by Ford and VW. The aim is to launch a commercial delivery and micro-transit service in Germany by 2025. Executives from VW and Argo convened a press conference this week to provide an update on their partnership, which was first announced in 2019 as an extension of VW’s “global alliance” with Ford. And while much of what they discussed was already known, it did provide a closer look at the timeline for launching a revenue-generating service using VW’s vehicles and Argo’s autonomous technology. Argo, which has been testing its vehicles in ...

Some Destiny 2 players have been able to play with people on other platforms after developer Bungie inadvertently switched the feature on. Bungie previously said that crossplay would be coming in fall 2021 for every platform that the game is available on, including PC, PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Google Stadia. The Verge’s Tom Warren spotted that the crossplay feature went live and was able to load up a game with players on both PC and Stadia. Bungie community manager Cozmo, however, confirmed that crossplay was not supposed to have launched yet. “We are seeing reports that some players are able to get a sneak peek at Crossplay,” he wrote in a tweet. “This isn’t meant to be live yet and is not representative of the full experience. We will be implementing a fix to remove public a...