Technology

WandaVision’s first season is just about to end, but Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Black Widow, Loki, Justice League, Suicide Squad, The Batman, GCPD, and Peacemaker are just around the corner — and that doesn’t account for other series outside of the main Marvel and DC Universes like MODOK, Titans, or Harley Quinn. There are more superhero TV series and films debuting in 2021 than seemingly ever before, and it might have some people wanting to dive into comics. WandaVision has led a few people on staff to dig into past Vision and Wanda Maximoff-centered storylines, for example. I’ve started reading Kieron Gillen’s Eternals run leading up to Marvel Studios’ film. Whatever reason people may have for wanting to begin reading comics, there are a few different ways to do so. Comics can be a c...

A federal judge on Friday gave final approval to a $650 million Facebook class action privacy settlement and ordered the 1.6 million members of the class in Illinois who submitted claims to be paid “as expeditiously as possible.” Chicago attorney Jay Edelson sued Facebook in Cook County Circuit Court back in 2015, alleging that the platform’s use of facial recognition tagging was not allowed under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The lawsuit claimed that Facebook’s Tag Suggestions tool, which scanned faces in users’ photos and offered suggestions about who the person might be, stored biometric data without users’ consent in violation of the Illinois law. The case became a class action lawsuit in 2018. In 2019, Facebook made facial recognition on the platform opt-in only. The...

Despite being an annoying hipster, I definitely did not see this one coming: Facebook is releasing an app that will let users post and share videos of them rapping over beats, which are provided by the app (via TechCrunch). The app is called Bars, and its main selling point is it provides the beats and lets you create 60-second rap videos over them. According to TechCrunch, you can then post the video to a TikTok-style feed, where people can watch it and mark it as “fire” (that is, of course, if your skills are up to par). The app also promises “studio quality vocal effects,” including actual, honest-to-goodness AutoTune. I hope there’s a slider that goes from “making my voice passable” to “T-Pain.” The app also promises an auto-rhyme dictionary for those who mark themselves as “beginners”...

Netflix is pairing up with renowned Japanese anime studio Production I.G for an animated TV series set in the Terminator universe. The company is billing the project as a team-up between Matt Tomlin, the writer of the Netflix superhero film Project Power, and the studio best known for producing TV adaptations of legendary manga Ghost in the Shell, though little else is known about the show or when in the complex Terminator timeline it may take place. This isn’t Netflix’s first time working with Production I.G. Beyond its Ghost in the Shell work, the studio is known as the animator of the Psycho-Pass series and the wildly popular sports anime Haikyu!! But with Netflix, Production I.G produced an original series called B: The Beginning (originally pitched under the name Perfect Bones), which...

A new report from The New York Times’ Andrew Jacobs digs into how mask policies on tech platforms that have allowed novelty masks like scrunchie masks to flourish while some mask-makers making high-filtration masks have had trouble selling their wares. Even if you’re vaccinated, wearing a mask is still recommended. It seems like a problem, then, that many masks widely advertised on Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon are novelty varieties that might be less safe than medical-grade N95s. Facebook and Amazon say they are following guidelines from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Facebook prevented mask sellers from advertising and selling masks to the masses early in the pandemic, when they were in short supply. The idea was to reserve N95s for medical professionals instead. That p...

An independent committee of vaccine experts has unanimously recommended that the Food and Drug Administration authorize the Johnson & Johnson one-shot COVID-19 vaccine for people 18 and older, taking it one step closer to use in the United States. The FDA is expected to authorize the vaccine within days. “I think it’s a relatively easy call,” said committee member Eric Rubin, an immunologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s nice to have a single-dose vaccine.” The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met today to discuss the data from clinical trials of this vaccine, which the FDA evaluated over the past three weeks. The FDA’s analysis, released earlier this week, showed that the vaccine was safe and 85 percent effective against se...

Atlus is a master of weird spinoffs. In the past, the developer has revamped its RPG series Persona as dungeon crawlers, brawlers, and rhythm games. Heroes have bounded through space and time for fanfiction-worthy team-ups, all in service of giving players a reason to see their favorite characters again. Persona 5 Strikers goes one step further, turning an action-heavy adventure into a road trip that feels right at home with the original game. Persona 5 Strikers is a direct sequel to Persona 5, set months after the Phantom Thieves hung up their masks. The gang reunites for a long-overdue vacation, only to have it interrupted by the appearance of Jails — warped versions of reality where one person rules, not unlike the Palaces they encountered in the original game. To solve the mystery of t...

What’s better than an ultra-high-tech, Mission: Impossible-style mask? The deepfake technology this TikToker is using to impersonate Tom Cruise, apparently (via The Daily Beast). The deeptomcruise account appears to feature someone who’s pretending to be the famous actor, and the impression isn’t just jaw-dropping because of how well the person replicates Cruise’s famous laugh. How can you tell it’s not actually Tom Cruise using some sort of strange Twitter name? First, his voice is close, but it’s not quite there, especially since the lip-syncing is a tiny bit off at some points. You can hear what the real Cruise sounds like in this video (unless, of course, James Corden also deepfaked him in). Second, while the tracking and lighting on the face are darn near immaculate — especially when ...

Earlier this month, Terraria co-creator Andrew Spinks announced that his studio Re-Logic would cancel a Google Stadia port. However, the developer announced today that the Stadia port is now back in development. ”As you may have noticed, we had a ton of issues to kick off the year stemming from the locking-down of Redigit’s entire Google account in early January,” Re-Logic said in a recent Terraria forum post. “After a month of pushing (and with the immense support of our fans), Google finally reached out and was able to provide a lot of transparency around the situation and to restore access to all of our accounts.” After publication, a Google spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that a Stadia port for Terraria was currently in development. On February 8th, Spinks fired off a series of twe...

Henrik Fisker has abandoned his electric vehicle startup’s effort to create a solid-state battery, the Fisker Inc. founder told The Verge in a recent interview. “It’s the kind of technology where, when you feel like you’re 90 percent there, you’re almost there, until you realize the last 10 percent is much more difficult than the first 90,” he said. “So we have completely dropped solid-state batteries at this point in time because we just don’t see it materializing.” Fisker spoke with The Verge in late January, though a lot has happened since then — most notably, the startup announced a partnership with iPhone-maker Foxconn. The two companies plan to make an electric vehicle that Fisker says will cost much less than the $37,500 base price tag of its first EV, the Ocean SUV. Fisker told The...

If you’re moving from LastPass (or another password manager you’re dissatisfied with), you may be tempted to simply go with the password manager that comes with your browser or operating system. It’s certainly an easy solution, and a reasonable one, depending on your point of view. Until recently, third-party password managers were known to be more secure, but Apple and Google have been working to make their built-in password managers more secure, while Microsoft is adding one to its authenticator app. So it could be a viable choice. One way, however, that these built-in password managers don’t stand up to their independent competitors is how tricky it can be to get preexisting passwords into their systems. If you tend to hang out in the Apple ecosystem, that means using Safari for your pa...