Technology

Tesla must tell CEO Elon Musk to delete an anti-union tweet from 2018, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decided Thursday. The order came as part of Tesla’s appeal of a 2019 ruling by an administrative judge in a years-long legal battle between the company and the United Auto Workers union. Below is Musk’s tweet in question, which is included as a screen instead of a Twitter embed in case the tweet is deleted. This is the direct link to the tweet, which was in response to this tweet, if you want to see the conversation in context on Twitter. Tesla will also have to post a notice at its factories nationwide addressing the “unlawful tweet.” This is actually a change from the decision from the 2019 ruling, where Musk or someone with the labor board would have been required to read a n...

There’s a giant cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal. I’m sure you’ve heard, but in case you haven’t, welcome to the first major spectacle the internet has collectively rubbernecked to this degree since those llamas cavorted around an Arizona town in… 2015? Really? Woof. Anyway, the whole internet loves the stuck boat, especially since it also appears to have charted a very phallic course into the canal before it drifted into its current position. Sure, it’s causing hundreds of other ships to bottleneck, and sure, that will probably inevitably cause some headaches for an already-strained global supply chain. Yes, oil prices are up, and there may be another run on toilet paper as a result, but for now, let us just have this moment, okay? Stuck boat memes abound, but if you want to keep ...

Amazon is trying a new tactic in its endless PR battle against stories of its exhausting and exploitative working conditions: outright denial. It’s not working. When replying to a tweet from Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) complaining about the company’s union-busting tactics and the fact that some of its workers are forced to “urinate in water bottles,” Amazon’s official Twitter account responded: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.” But people do believe these stories and for a very simple reason: there are numerous accounts of it happening, documented by employees and journalists around the world. Indeed, after Amazon sent out its ill-judged tweet, reporters who cover the company’s labor practices practically lined up to soa...

YouTuber Shane Luis has tweeted some amazing photos of a new-in-box game development kit for the Nintendo 64’s Disk Drive (64DD), a very rare peripheral never released outside of Japan that played games off proprietary floppy disks. You can (and should!) read look through the whole thread starting with this tweet, but I’m going to share some of the photos here in this article. Here’s what the box looks like — nothing flashy. I was asked to verify and photograph a Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (64DD) Development Kit from a private video game collector. The system was new in box and needed to be carefully documented. This is what it looks like to unbox one. pic.twitter.com/X2PflhtemW — Shane Luis (@RerezTV) March 24, 2021 Inside that dark blue box on the top right were five 64DD Development Disks, ...

Porsche is adding its all-electric Taycan sports car to its subscription service. For as little as $2,500 a month, you can burn rubber in a 522-horsepower, 390-kW Taycan 4S with rear-wheel drive. The 4S normally retails for around $103,800. The German automaker’s subscription service, Porsche Drive, first launched in October 2017 as a pilot program in Atlanta, Georgia. It has since grown to eight other cities, including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Monterrey, Irvine, Houston, and Phoenix. As a subscriber, you can get access to up to seven different models for a month-to-month subscription or for as little as a day. “Think of Porsche Drive as sports car-as-a-service, a convenient digital way to access the Porsche experience,” said Kjell Gruner, president and CEO of Porsche Cars Nor...

I usually prefer to highlight the best deals you can get on new tech, but sometimes a refurbished deal is good enough to make the grade. Sony’s 1000XM4 noise-canceling headphones haven’t slipped below $278 new (down from their usual $349 price), but a well-rated eBay seller is offering them in “like-new” condition with all original accessories included for $208. And with eBay’s offer code PICKCR5 used at checkout, you can knock an extra 5 percent off, totaling $198 before tax. If you’re in the US, buying refurbished tech from eBay isn’t such a bad idea, as the retailer backs it with a two-year warranty through Allstate. If you encounter a problem with your purchase outside of the seller’s return window or warranty, you can file a claim to get a repair or a replacement if repair isn’t possi...

Qualcomm has announced its latest 7-series processor, the Snapdragon 780G, which trickles down features from the company’s flagship Snapdragon 888 chipset, while still offering manufacturers (and, by extension, consumers) a more affordable phone. The 780G takes the new top slot in the 7-series lineup, replacing the 765G / 768G (the latter being largely a frequency-boosted version of the former). Obviously, there’s the usual boost in performance: the 780G features Qualcomm’s Kryo 670 CPU, which the company says offers a 40 percent boost in performance, and a new Adreno 642 GPU for up to 50 percent faster graphics compared to the 765 model. But the 780G also enables some new functionality, like the Spectra 570 triple ISP (image signal processor), which, like the Snapdragon 888, allows for ph...

Motorola has added support for two new indigenous languages spoken in the Amazon as part of a larger effort to make technology more accessible. Beginning today, Kaingang and Nheengatu will be among the language options available on Motorola Android devices. Any Motorola phone updated to Android 11 will be able to access the new language options, not just its most expensive models. “We believe that this initiative will raise awareness towards language revitalization, not only will impact the communities that we’re working directly with, but right now we’re in the process of open sourcing all that language data from Android into Unicode,” Janine Oliveira, Motorola’s executive director for globalization software, said in an interview with The Verge. “And by doing that we believe that we’re go...

The oft-forgotten Final Fantasy VIII has made its way to smartphones, just a few decades after it originally debuted. Today, Square Enix launched the classic roleplaying game on both iOS and Android; it’s available for $16.99 right now, but that price will jump to $20.99 starting on April 5th. Final Fantasy VIII first launched on the original PlayStation back in 1999, though this version is the more recent remaster, which hit consoles like the Xbox One, PS4, and Switch in 2019. The game is also available on Steam. In addition to improved visuals, the remaster includes some quality-of-life tweaks, like the option to speed up combat and world exploration. “We decided to take on the challenge to focus on ‘love’” And while Final Fantasy VII tends to garner much of the franchise’s nostalgia — a...

Bang & Olufsen’s latest pair of headphones are the Beoplay HX. They’re over-ear, noise canceling, and offer up to a truly impressive 35 hours of battery life. The headphones launch in black today for $499 (£499 / €499), but there’s a white model coming at the end of April, to be followed by a white and brown version in May. At $499, the Beoplay HX are among the more expensive wireless noise-canceling headphones available. But this isn’t unfamiliar territory for Bang & Olufsen: the previous Beoplay H9 headphones cost exactly the same — and this is the company that also sells an $800 pair of Bluetooth headphones. Thirty-five hours of battery life beats pretty much all competitors (and it rises up to 40 hours if you turn ANC off). The $549 AirPods Max are rated at just 20 hours with A...

A new, detailed shot of a black hole reveals spiraling lines of mysterious magnetic forces that give astronomers an unprecedented look at how these cosmic monsters behave. It’s an intimate portrait of the black hole at the center of the gigantic M87 galaxy, which lies some 55 million light-years away from Earth. Black holes are scattered across the universe and exist in almost every galaxy, but their behavior remains one of the most intriguing mysteries in astronomy. The image helps depict how the black hole violently swallows matter and shoots energetic jets back out from its core. Those jets can extend thousands of lightyears into space. Today’s photo is from the same international team of radio astronomers who shot the first photo of a black hole, ever, in 2019. In the two years since t...

As it prepares to go public, Coinbase is still struggling to provide support to customers who have issues with funds being available, or their accounts being hacked or locked, according to a report by the New York Times. The exchange is often considered to be one of the safer bets for those looking to invest in crypto, but the story shows that users who run into trouble could be left out in the cold. The Times tells the story of dozens of customers who have had money stolen from their accounts, or who have had their accounts locked (which seems to be a frequent complaint), and their difficulties getting in touch with a real person at Coinbase. The company’s vice president of customer experience says that it faces “a unique set of customer experience challenges” due to the fact that crypto ...