Technology

It sounds like something out of a children’s movie — after French police arrested three Polish thieves who attempted to steal toys in June 2020, specifically Lego sets. Now authorities are trying to address a growing trend of Lego robberies by warning business owners and parents, The Guardian reports. According to a report in Le Parisien, the thieves were part of a gang that would stay in hotels near Paris, drive around in an Audi, and “raid” toy stores for valuable Lego sets to resell in Poland. The thieves were caught robbing a PicWicToys toy store, after being spotted in 2019 and 2020 at two separate European toy stores, La Grande Récré and Maxi Toys. French police are reportedly “building a case” against the gang in response, The Guardian writes. The idea that plastic Lego bricks are w...

Atari, the corporate entity / brand of Theseus, has just made around $110,000 by selling —you guessed it — NFTs (shout out to Ars Technica for doing the math). The tokens in question are 3D models of the Atari 2600 game cartridge for Centipede — 10 of them black, 100 of them red. The NFTs are being sold as part of the Atari Capsule Collection — which is basically a bunch of Centipede and Pong-themed NFTs being sold by the company that now owns the Atari brand. The company and its intellectual property have been bought and sold so many times it’s almost hard to keep track, but the current incarnation of it is mainly known for trying to build hotels and struggling to make a game console. This NFT, labeled as version 1 of 30, sold for around $18,000 worth of Ether. As jaded as I am, I can adm...

Former President Donald Trump’s ban on guest worker visas has expired, allowing foreign workers to reapply for entry into the United States. The news is a win for tech companies including Apple, Twitter, and Google, each of which vocally opposed the policy. Former President Donald Trump said the ban was a response to rising unemployment in the United States, due to the coronavirus pandemic. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden pushed back on this claim, calling it an attempt to distract from the Trump Administration’s failure on the virus. The ban focused on H-1B visas, but impacted a broader range of workers, NPR reports. Executives at big corporations and students participating in work-study programs were also caught up in the fray. Workers already in the United States also had their lives u...

When Apple introduced its controversial MacBook Pro redesign in 2016, the company probably didn’t know it was setting itself up to get sued — but not only is a class-action lawsuit now underway for their infamous butterfly keyboards, it’s looking likely there’ll be a second one for their notoriously fragile display cables, too. Judge Edward Davila has decided to let the “flexgate” lawsuit go forward, ruling that Apple should have known that they would fail and yet kept selling them anyhow. “The court finds that the allegations of pre-release testing in combination with the allegations of substantial customer complaints are sufficient to show that Apple had exclusive knowledge of the alleged defect,” the judge wrote (via Law360 and 9to5Mac). You can read the full order at the bottom of this...

Fantasian, a new role-playing game from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, is available now for Apple Arcade. The game is playable on iOS, Mac, and Apple TV. Fantasian is the latest from Sakaguchi’s studio Mistwalker, which he founded in 2004; the developer has since released games such as The Last Story and Blue Dragon. Although Fantasian uses traditional RPG elements like turn-based battles, it’s been designed with handcrafted physical models — more than 150 dioramas in all. Fantasian features touch controls but, according to Sakaguchi, is intended to deliver a console-like experience on mobile devices. The game follows an amnesiac hero searching for a way to regain his lost memories. In a previous interview with The Verge, Sakaguchi said that replaying Final Fantasy IV made him w...

Sony has, in a very low-key way, just announced that its upcoming Xperia event will be on April 14th (via Droid Life). The news comes from the Xperia YouTube channel’s banner, where it lays out that there will be a new product announcement happening at 4:30PM Japan Standard Time — that’s 3:30AM EST, or 12:30AM PT (if you feel like burning the midnight oil to watch live). The banner gives no real hints as to what will be announced, but there have been a few rumors floating around — one about a new flagship, the Xperia 1 III, and one about the return of the Xperia Compact, which could end up being an Android answer to the iPhone Mini. Image: Sony It’s worth noting that there are other rumors that mention new versions of the Xperia 5 and 10, leaving out the Compact entirely. But pretty much e...

Over the past several months, Twitter has been working hard to bring its Clubhouse-like audio chat rooms feature, Spaces, to users on iOS and, as of last month, Android. A logical next place for Spaces to show up would be on the web, and unsurprisingly, Twitter is working on the feature for browsers, the company confirmed to The Verge. We decided to ask Twitter about Spaces on desktop after seeing this tweet from app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, which shows what Spaces preview cards could look like when viewed on the web. And Twitter itself hasn’t been entirely secret about developing the feature, either. A Twitter Spaces developer posted some designs of how a Space’s intro screen might look on the web last Friday. Given that Spaces is only available on mobile right now, bringing it to th...

Netflix just released the first good look at Yasuke, its upcoming anime based on the true story of a Black samurai who lived in Japan during the 16th century. Despite the real-life source material, the show takes a few liberties with the story, as you can see in the fantastical first trailer. Here’s the basic synopsis from Netflix: In a war-torn feudal Japan filled with mechs and magic, the greatest ronin never known, Yasuke, struggles to maintain a peaceful existence after a past life of violence. But when a local village becomes the center of social upheaval between warring daimyo, Yasuke must take up his sword and transport a mysterious child who is the target of dark forces and bloodthirsty warlords. The story of Yasuke, the first African samurai who actually served the legendary Oda N...

Ava DuVernay’s New Gods and James Wan’s The Trench are no longer being developed at Warner Bros., according to The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and Variety. The two films, set to explore two of the more unusual parts of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU), seemed like they could have been interesting diversions from the tone and style established in films like Justice League and Batman v Superman. But in the turbulent world of DC film adaptations, nothing is certain. James Wan made a pivot to superhero movies with Aquaman in 2018, bringing an action-packed, slightly more goofy energy to a cinematic universe that was sorely needing something fun. As a spin-off, The Trench was Wan returning to the horror roots he established with Saw and The Conjuring. The film was supposed to focus on the cree...

Myanmar’s acting military leadership has shut down broadband internet service indefinitely in response to ongoing protests, according to a report from The Washington Post on Thursday. The move comes two months after a military junta staged a coup to depose the country’s democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. The shutdown applies to wireless broadband service, while a separate order banning mobile internet at night remains in effect, Reuters reports. The orders were given to state telecoms, though no official reason has been given. IMPORTANT⛔️ Fixed wireless will not be turned on in morning. Confirmed. No Ananda/MMNet/Ooreddoo/etc. With mobile data already off, only fixed-line will remain. Order is temporary but open-ended. Everyone should be making whatever plans ar...

Duolingo, the popular language learning app, offers a wide variety of languages in its list of courses. While it’s known for teaching well-known tongues such as French, Spanish, and Chinese, it has also added courses in languages that are less widely used, such as Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Hawaiian — and now, as of April 6th, its 40th language: Yiddish. While Yiddish in the US is known more for some of the words that have entered the popular lexicon (“He’s such a schmuck!”), it is actually a full-scale language. An amalgamation of High German, Hebrew, and Aramaic, with a smattering of Slavic languages (and more recently, English), before World War II, it was widely spoken by Jewish communities living throughout Central and Eastern Europe. These days, Yiddish as a day-to-day language tends to...

Samsung announced its Galaxy SmartTag line of item trackers in January, and at the time, it said the premium SmartTag Plus, which has ultra-wideband (UWB) technology that enables more precise tracking of an item in relationship to you than Bluetooth does, would be releasing later this year. Now, though, there are some clues that the SmartTag Plus could be coming out soon, possibly as early as April 12th. Perhaps the most telling hint pointing to the SmartTag Plus’ imminent arrival is that retailer B&H Photo already has the black model of the device available for preorder, with an “expected availability” of April 12th. Here’s a link to the B&H listing if you want to try to preorder a SmartTag Plus for yourself. But since Samsung hasn’t shared this date itself just yet, it’s possible...