Technology

An FCC listing confirms that Samsung’s S Pen stylus can be used with the company’s upcoming flagship Galaxy S21 Ultra phone. The confirmation, first discovered by Android Authority, comes in a test report for model number SMG998B. The discovery lends clarity to recent statements from Samsung mobile president TM Roh, who said that some of the “most well-loved features” of the Galaxy Note will be coming to other Samsung devices in 2021. The FCC test report explicitly describes an EUT (Equipment Under Test) device that can be used with an S Pen in both hover and click modes. “The EUT can also used with a stylus device (S Pen). The EUT operates with the S Pen in two different inductive coupling modes of S Pen motion detection (Hover and Click) operating in the range of 0.53 –0.6MHz.” The relev...

Under new proposed regulations from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, it may become much easier for the government to track bitcoin transactions. And while there’s currently a 15-day comment period open, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are calling foul because that period includes Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day. The proposed regulations in question, which were filed at 4:20PM ET on December 18th, are about private wallets. Let’s say I am a famous and fancy cryptocurrency investor, and I do some trading on Coinbase. If I have my own private wallet that I want to transfer my money to, I will have to identify myself as the wallet’s owner if I’m sending more than $3,000 in a transaction. And if I want to do busin...

Sony Pictures saw a “bit of a boom” in interest from Hollywood creatives who want to work with a studio committed to theatrical releases, according to the company’s CEO. The uptick in interest comes just after WarnerMedia announced its 17 movies planned for 2021 will premiere on HBO Max the same day they hit theaters. For WarnerMedia executives trying to figure out how to bolster subscribers for its new streaming service and release films in an era when the return to theaters is uncertain, the move makes sense. Plus, WarnerMedia executives will tell you they’re still committed to theatrical releases, pointing to Tenet’s release. Others in the industry will point to Tenet as a reason for the HBO Max move. While Sony could sell a title to a streamer — the company sold Tom Hanks’ Greyhound to...

Substack plans to take a “hands-off approach” to determining who can use its newsletter platform and “resist public pressure” to remove writers seen by some as “unacceptable.” In a blog post this afternoon, the company outlined a relatively lax content moderation policy designed to let writers know they won’t be removed from the platform as long as they comply with basic rules. While it does have a short list of prohibitions, Substack says that “readers and writers are in charge.” The idea is that readers don’t have to pay for or subscribe to writers who they don’t agree with, and writers can leave — and take their mailing lists with them — if they don’t like the platform. “We just disagree with those who would seek to tightly constrain the bounds of acceptable discourse,” the platform’s c...

Ripple, its former CEO and founder Christian Larsen, and its current CEO Bradley Garlinghouse are being sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC says that they raised more than $1.3 billion through an unregistered securities offering. The suit claims that Ripple violated securities laws by selling XRP, which The Wall Street Journal calls “the third-largest cryptocurrency by market value,” over a seven-year period starting in 2013. According to the complaint, the “illegal securities offering” created an information asymmetry that let Larsen and Garlinghouse sell XRP to investors who only knew what Larsen and Garlinghouse chose to tell them. At the heart of the suit is a basic question about XRP: is it a security or a currency? According to the SEC’s suit, it’s a security, ...

The yearly Spotify Wrapped is a rather upbeat affair, which doesn’t doesn’t quite match everyone’s mood this year. For the more sullen among us, there’s another option: a bot from The Pudding that will judge us for our crimes of listening to terrible music. If you want to be judged, you open a page titled “How Bad is Your Spotify” and you log in with your Spotify account. (It might take a couple refreshes on the “Loading your music library” page.) This absolute jerk of an AI then drags you mercilessly while it pulls your playlists and top tracks. It asks you questions before it shows any results, in phrasing that gives the plain text the same aura as the girls who bullied me in middle school. Did you really listen to Clementine by Sarah Jaffe? (Yes) Like ironically? (No…) The final judgeme...

With roughly half a billion people reportedly playing it in November, Among Us has had the most monthly players for a mobile game ever, beating giants like Pokémon GO and Candy Crush Saga. According to Nielsen’s SuperData, the game is “by far the most popular game ever in terms of monthly players.” The success is even more remarkable because InnerSloth — the company that makes Among Us — only has four employees. That’s roughly 125 million players per person who works on the game. It’s proven to be so popular that the studio decided to cancel a sequel that was in the works and just put all its effort into improving the original. It even caught the attention of sitting congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who livestreamed herself playing it to try to encourage people to vote, with an audi...

Steam’s annual winter sale is live. If you’ve been meaning to buy some games, either for yourself or as a gift for upcoming holidays, now’s the time to take a look around. There are thousands of games up for sale in the Steam Store (and you can vote for the 2020 Steam Awards while you’re there). While you’re browsing, the Epic Games store is also in the midst of its holiday sale. In addition to discounts of up to 75 percent, the sale provides endless $10 coupons — that is, you can apply one to a purchase (on “eligible games” priced at $14.99 and up), apply another to your next purchase, and so on. And the store will be giving away games for free until December 31st. As of this writing, the current freebie is Metro: 2033 Redux (usually $19.99). Here are some of the best deals you can get fr...

Nickelback has created a parody version of its own song “Photograph” for a new Google Photos ad, and it’s a lot more entertaining than you might suspect. In the ad, Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger mercilessly makes fun of himself, fully leaning into the “Photograph” meme and its usefulness in explaining all sorts of graphs and in illustrating framed copies of other memes, as Kroeger instructs viewers to “look at them” in his unmistakable, raspy voice. The ad’s lyrics and photos touch on Kroeger’s “noodle hair” and his passion for photographing dessert. That it manages to both be a nice example of Google Photos’ features and a cute use of the old meme makes it worth a watch. “Photograph” is 15 years old, and the meme connected to it has been around for at least five, so seeing the ad is...

Verizon’s new nationwide 5G network is reportedly slower than its LTE network, to the point that users are apparently better off just disabling 5G entirely unless they’re near a mmWave network. The results come from testing done by PC Magazine’s Sascha Sagan, who points to Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, or DSS, as the culprit. The tech lets carriers run LTE and 5G networks side by side, which is useful if, like Verizon, you don’t yet have enough dedicated 5G spectrum. While the carrier has largely focused on its mmWave network until recently, it also has begun rolling out a mid-band nationwide 5G network, which promises to avoid mmWave’s range issues by using DSS. The only catch is that, with Verizon, it seems like this tech leads to worse performance in most cases for phones running in 5G mode...

OnePlus will finally be making a smartwatch in 2021, CEO Pete Lau has announced on Twitter, marking the first foray into wearable devices for the smartphone company. There’s not many details yet on the upcoming device, including what smartwatch OS it’ll run, a price, or even a firm release date — Lau only notes that it’ll be “released early next year.” The idea of a OnePlus smartwatch isn’t a new one; the company had reportedly designed a Wear OS (then still called Android Wear) smartwatch a few years ago. OnePlus ultimately nixed that product, though” “We had completed the design but we still decided to scrap it,” Lau said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We have to be focused.” Many of you said you wanted a watch, and as you might have heard over the weekend—we’re mak...

If you’ve ever wondered how profanity actually became profane, Nicolas Cage is here to help you out. The actor is no stranger to swearing, but in Netflix’s upcoming show History of Swear Words he’ll be doing it in a more educational way. Though, if the trailer’s indicative of what the show is going to be like, it’ll still be very entertaining. It opens with Cage standing up and just screaming “fuck,” likely a reference to him doing pretty much the exact same thing in Deadfall. It only gets better from there, explaining that apparently the word is an acronym (standing for Fornication Under Consent of the King), and delving into how swear words are understood by the people using and hearing them. The show will include celebrity interviews and, of course, a lot of swearing As someone who’s al...