Technology

Goldman Sachs’ credit card policies were called into question when Basecamp designer David Heinemeier Hansson and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak claimed that their female partners received lower Apple Card credit limits simply for being women. But a recently concluded New York State Department of Financial Services investigation has found Apple’s banking partner did not discriminate based on sex (via Bloomberg). NYSDFS investigators conducted a statistical analysis of almost 400,000 New York applicants that showed that the models and algorithms Goldman Sachs uses to filter applicants “did not consider prohibited characteristics of applicants and would not produce disparate impacts”. The regulator also stressed that the idea that spouses with shared finances would receive the same credit te...

Netflix has announced that it will be experimenting with the release schedules of two reality TV shows, The Circle and Too Hot to Handle (via The Hollywood Reporter). Instead of releasing all of the episodes at once, it will release them over the course of a month, with each show having a batch of episodes released on Wednesdays, then releasing the finale by itself at the end of the run. This means you won’t be able to binge all of the episodes in a single weekend… and that may be a good thing. These shows aren’t the first time Netflix has broken away from the binge model it popularized, in which all of the episodes of a show are released at once. It has released episodes of cooking competition The Great British Baking Show and music contest Rhythm + Flow on a weekly basis. With The ...

Zoom has released a new SDK (software development kit) to help developers build Zoom into their software. According to the company, you can now build your own “video-based applications and websites” on top of Zoom’s platform and can more easily incorporate Zoom’s video and audio features directly into your apps. The company envisions developers utilizing Zoom’s chat functions in a number of different settings, from social media and gaming platforms to virtual retail apps. “Using our Video SDK, developers can drive customer engagement and provide new opportunities for revenue without being tied to the Zoom Meetings user interface,” writes Zoom product marketing manager Natalie Mullin in a company blog post. The SDK is part of a broader push to get Zoom’s tools into developers’ hands. The co...

Amazon has named Salesforce executive Adam Selipsky as the replacement for Andy Jassy, the longtime chief of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the company’s next CEO when founder Jeff Bezos steps down later this year. Selipsky worked at AWS for more than 10 years before running the startup Tableau, which is now part of Salesforce. The news was first reported by CNBC, which published the memo Jassy sent to Amazon employees on Wednesday. “Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team. And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well,” Jassy wrote in the memo. Selipsky joined Salesforce when the cloud computing giant acquired Tableau in a monstrou...

Intel has a new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, and he’s not wasting any time to make some big changes. At the company’s “Engineering the Future” announcement today, Gelsinger announced plans to outsource more of Intel’s chip production to third-party foundries, a $20 billion investment into two new fabs in Arizona, and a new branch of the company called Intel Foundry Services, which will see Intel’s foundries produce chips for other companies. The new announcements are part of a new “IDM 2.0” strategy for Intel’s design and manufacturing, which is made up of three parts. First, Intel’s own in-house manufacturing, which will continue to serve a key part of Intel’s design and production of chips. Second is an expanded use of external foundries, including TSMC, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries, including fo...

YouTube says the platform will not remove a controversial live-streamed video of a mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, despite criticism of the streamer’s tactics and commentary. “Following yesterday’s tragic shooting, bystander video of the incident was detected by our teams. While violent content intended to shock or disgust viewers is not allowed on YouTube, we do allow videos with enough news or documentary context,” YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez told The Verge. “We applied an age restriction to the content and will continue to monitor the situation.” The live stream was broadcast from around the King Soopers supermarket in Boulder; according to Vice, it reached a live audience that peaked at around 30,000 people and has since been viewed around 585,000 times. The streamer, Dean...

Warner Bros. will return to releasing its theatrical films exclusively in theaters next year, Deadline reports. The decision ends the studio’s 2021 experiment of releasing major films like Wonder Woman 1984, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, The Suicide Squad, Dune, and The Matrix 4 simultaneously on its HBO Max streaming service and in theaters for the first 30 days they’re released. The news comes as part of an announcement from Warner Bros. of a new deal with Regal cinemas owner Cineworld, the second largest theater chain in the world. After over six months of shutdowns, Regal’s theaters will reopen in April, and they’ll begin showing Warner Bros. films like Kong vs. Godzilla and Mortal Kombat alongside their HBO Max debuts. When Warner Bros. films come back to theaters in 2022, Regal t...

Apple’s long-rumored mixed reality headset could weigh less than 150 grams, which would make it much lighter than many other headsets on the market, according to a new research note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo seen by 9to5Mac. That lighter weight might mean Apple’s headset could be easier to wear for long periods of time. A weight of 150 grams would make Apple’s headset lighter than the Oculus Quest 2 (503 grams), Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 (645 grams), and the Valve Index (809 grams). It would be lighter than Google’s Daydream View, a fabric VR headset designed to hold your phone, which weighed 220 grams. The headset could even be lighter than your iPhone, given that the standard iPhone 12 weighs 164 grams. As attractively light as this headset sounds, though, it might be a while until we...

If you’ve watched even just an episode of The Mandalorian, you know this: Grogu is always hungry. The little guy, previously known as Baby Yoda, is constantly snacking, whether it’s on endangered frog eggs or newly spawned spider monsters. Sometimes, he just needs a nice cup of bone broth to tide him over. And soon there will be an animatronic toy to match his appetite. Today, Hasbro announced Galactic Snackin’ Grogu — that’s the product’s actual name — which will release in October for $79.99. You can feed him with a spoon, let him munch on some strange blue cookies, or just give him a bowl of live squid. Given his propensity to eat anything, even if it gets him in trouble, the limited options are probably a good thing. Hasbro says that lil’ Grogu will let you know when he likes something...

A startup called Spatial is unveiling its first suite of products today, focused on creating audio experiences that are immersive, interactive, and automatically generated. The products themselves are a little complicated to explain, but the result is simple: ambient and interactive audio for public spaces that’s easy to create and more dynamic than the usual tracks. Although Spatial has a consumer offering, the most likely customers are going to be businesses. Think hotels that want a different audio experience in their lobby, theme parks that want to develop audio for their spaces faster, brand activations, or AR experiences (National Geographic is an investor). Think about how corny the canned audio at the zoo often is; Spatial wants to fix that. In one demo a couple of weeks ago, I sat...

You might have heard there’s a global semiconductor shortage going on, and that PC graphics cards in particular are nearly impossible to find. What you probably haven’t heard is that the situation has steadily been growing worse — to the point some GPUs are worth triple their MSRP. Above, you’ll see a photo of two graphics cards, the $499 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and the $579 AMD Radeon RX 6800. In December, I calculated that the true street price of these cards had reached $819 and $841, respectively, or $1,660 for the pair. That very same photo now contains $2,570 worth of GPUs. That’s not the asking price, mind you; people are actually paying over $1,200 on the open market, on average, for each of these graphics cards. And that isn’t even as bad as it gets. This past week, I ran the PS5,...