Technology

Cybersecurity researcher Daylam Tayari has found evidence in Twitch’s internal API that the site plans to implement something called a “brand safety score” for its streamers. That score would depend on a number of criteria: the streamer’s age, a rating given by Twitch staff, their ban history, the relationship the streamer has with Twitch, their automod settings, their partnership status, the ESRB rating of the game being played, and whether the stream is set to mature. Twitch has added an automatic Brand Safety Score which grades how brand friendly every streamer is based on things like chat behavior, ban history, manual ratings by Twitch staff, games played, age, automod and more (See below).1/5 pic.twitter.com/VBl4HjGv7t — Daylam ‘tayari’ Tayari (@tayariCS) March 9, 2021 Twi...

Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey now plans to convert the proceeds from the NFT auction of his first tweet to bitcoin and donate them to charity. The highest bid for the tweet is currently $2.5 million. The auction will end on March 21st, and he plans to donate the bitcoin to Give Directly, a nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to people living in poverty. He’ll be giving the bitcoin to Give Directly’s Africa Response fund for COVID-19 relief. Dorsey put up his famous first tweet as an NFT (which stands for “non-fungible token”) on Friday evening, and bids quickly poured in, even though Dorsey hadn’t announced when the auction would end or that proceeds would be going to charity. The current highest bid was made Saturday evening. The winner will get a “digital certificate ...

Google is marking 10 years of Chromebooks by unveiling new features for Chrome OS today. The biggest addition is a new Phone Hub feature that connects an Android phone to a Chromebook. It allows Chrome OS users to respond to texts, check a phone’s battery life, enable its Wi-Fi hotspot, and locate a device easily. Phone Hub is packed into a taskbar widget that even expands to show you recent Chrome tabs that you have been browsing on your phone. It looks like it will be a super useful feature for Android and Chromebook owners. Google is also enabling its Wi-Fi Sync feature on more devices, allowing you to connect to Wi-Fi networks you’ve already configured and used on your Android phone and other Chrome OS devices. Chrome OS gets an AirDrop competitor.Image: Google Another significant addi...

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a bold shift for Sega’s long-running series, doing away with beloved protagonist Kazuma Kiryu and shifting to turn-based RPG-style combat. In Kiryu’s place is the wild-haired Ichiban Kasuga, who finds himself homeless in Yokohama after doing 18 years’ hard time for a murder he didn’t commit. The PlayStation 5 version of Like a Dragon was just released last week, a few months after the PS4, Xbox One, PC, and next-gen Xbox versions. Since then, I’ve played several dozens of hours of Like a Dragon on the Xbox Series X, and it’s become one of my favorite games in the series. I took the opportunity to ask Masayoshi Yokoyama, Sega’s chief producer and writer on the game, some questions about how the team approached Kasuga as a character and his story from beginning to en...

Jacob Pustilnik built his first electric bike when he was 17 because he was tired of showing up at school drenched in sweat. Texas is notoriously humid, but Pustilnik only lived a few miles from his school in Houston and was reluctant to abandon his trusty Trek mountain bike. At first, he thought putting a milk crate on the rear rack for his backpack would be enough to eliminate the dreaded back sweat, but it was only a half measure. Eventually he settled on a much more challenging solution: converting his whole bike to run on an electric motor. “I think I just knew about the idea of an electric bike, but not very much — just that they existed,” he said. Jacob Pustilnik on his e-bike that he built from a kit.Photo by Mary Kang for The Verge After mulling it over for a couple of months, Pus...

At 26.5 grams and the size of my thumb, Insta360’s latest action camera, the Go 2, looks like an oversized Tic Tac with an eyeball. It’s the second generation in the Go lineup, which is Insta360’s only non-360-degree camera line. Where the first-generation Go left a lot to be desired, particularly in the image quality department, the $299 Go 2 comes with a new charging case, larger sensor, and improved image quality, making a strong case for a mobile-first action camera. The case has a 1/4-inch thread for support mounting and a USB-C port for charging. The most noticeable changes to this tiny camera come in the hardware department. The Go 2’s camera component has a new removable lens cover and less slippery matte plastic housing. The case plays a more active role in the use of the camera, ...

Fitbit has introduced the third iteration of its Ace activity and sleep tracker for kids. The Fitbit Ace 3, designed for kids ages six and up, adds new animated clock faces, customizable accessories, and claims eight days of battery life in a “swim-proof” design with new color options, too. In addition to improved battery life, the Ace 3 has a 20 percent brighter screen and includes do not disturb and sleep modes. The new animated clock faces — including a bunny, a cat, a Martian, and spaceship designs — change and grow as kids make progress toward their fitness goals. Fitbit Ace 3 tracker for kids.Image: Fitbit The Fitbit Ace was designed to help kids build healthy habits and increase physical activity. It also allows parents to track a kid’s activity levels and how many hours they sleep....

Twitter recently announced that it’s going to be building a lot of new things into its product: there’s Twitter Spaces, which is a live audio feature very similar to the red-hot Clubhouse app. There are Twitter Fleets, which look like Snap and Instagram Stories. Twitter just acquired Revue, which is a newsletter product similar to Substack. And it also announced something called Super Follows, which will let people pay creators on Twitter for special content. It’s a lot, especially after Twitter spent so long seemingly not adding any features at all. On today’s episode of Decoder, I talk with Kayvon Beykpour, the head of consumer product at Twitter. He’s responsible for deciding what tools Twitter actually builds for people to express themselves. Twitter’s product is incredibly important —...

On Friday, cybersecurity journalists Brian Krebs and Andy Greenberg reported that as many as 30,000 organizations had been compromised in an unprecedented email server hack, believed to have originated from a state-sponsored Chinese hacking group known as Hafnium. Over the weekend, that estimate has doubled to 60,000 Microsoft Exchange Server customers hacked around the world, with the European Banking Authority now admitting that it’s one of the victims — and it looks like Microsoft may have taken a little too long to realize the severity and patch it. Krebs has now put together a basic timeline of the massive Exchange Server hack, and he says Microsoft has confirmed it was made aware of the vulnerabilities in early January. That’s nearly two months before Microsoft issued its first set o...

In 2019, an article in The Washington Post by Geoffrey Fowler described the author’s shock when he discovered just how many of his iPhone apps were collecting and uploading information about his usage while he slept. As we all know by now, data is a huge commodity these days. If you use a phone, laptop, or any type of computing device (unless you’re a security expert or a high-end hacker with access to sophisticated blocking tools), you’re paying for your apps by contributing marketing and other info to the companies that supply them. As Fowler’s article demonstrated, iPhone users are not immune to this. Since his article was published, Apple has made some laudable changes to its privacy policies. But it’s still a good idea to take charge of your own data. There are some simple ways to min...

Verizon 4G appears to be getting even better than its nationwide 5G network, according to new tests conducted by PCMag’s Sascha Segan. After last week’s tweet suggesting that users turn off their phone’s 5G to conserve battery life, there seems to be a multitude of reasons for Verizon customers to stick with 4G right now. Additional spectrum is making the difference for Verizon 4G right now, and not the C-band spectrum that’s been in the news recently. This is CBRS, a set of frequencies that sits near C-band. Verizon bid $1.89 billion on CBRS licenses last year and has been putting the newly acquired spectrum to work for its 4G service in certain locations (there are likely technical reasons, which Segan explains in his post, why Verizon isn’t using this spectrum for 5G just yet). Segan fo...

The Aya Neo — a Nintendo Switch-style handheld gaming PC that promises to offer a full-fledged PC gaming experience in the palm of your hands — is now available to back on Indiegogo, starting at $6,120 HKD (~$789 USD) for the 500GB model. This version of the Neo is technically the second, following the limited, sold-out run of the “Founder’s Edition” that Aya offered back in January. The new, broader release promises several improvements over that initial version, including: An improved operating system Reduced weight The option to toggle rumble Better buttons Better power consumption and performance presets Improvements to issues that caused resolution scaling problems or blurry screens The company also showed off a new optional $47 dock that adds two USB 3.2 Gen 1 type-A ports, one HDMI ...