Technology

It looks like we’ll be spoiled for choice when it comes to movies about the WallStreetBets / GameStop saga: Deadline is reporting that both MGM and Netflix have plans to make one, before the dust has even settled (via Kotaku and Polygon). If you weren’t paying attention to the stock-spikes, short squeezes, and diamond hands that were going on last week, we have an explainer that should get you caught up on the big picture. MGM’s version of the movie is set to based as a book that hasn’t yet been written. The author of that book is Ben Mezrich, who wrote The Accidental Billionaires, which was the basis for David Fincher’s 2010 movie The Social Network. Mezrich was apparently inspired by Fincher’s title, as he’s calling his new book The Antisocial Network. Netflix is trying to get Mark...

Google has agreed to pay $2.5 million to more than 5,500 employees and job applicants impacted by alleged systematic pay and hiring discrimination. The US Department of Labor found that female software engineers were being underpaid. It also identified “hiring rate differences that disadvantaged female and Asian applicants” for Google engineering positions. As part of the settlement, Google will hand over $1,353,052 in back pay and interest to 2,565 female engineers. It will also pay $1,232,000 in back pay and interest to 1,757 female engineering applicants and 1,219 Asian engineering applicants for “engineering positions not hired.” The alleged disparities impacted employees at Google offices in Mountain View, Seattle, and Kirkland, Washington. Google will also set aside $1,250,000 for pa...

After fourteen months, Google has decided it doesn’t want to be a game company anymore. Where once it had its own cloud-based console, controller, and the promise of homegrown triple-A games, it no longer wants to build its own games as of today. And though a Google spokesperson emphasizes that the company continues to “remain committed to Stadia as a platform,” it’s looking increasingly likely that platform won’t be a service where you sign up with Google to buy and rent cloud games. Stadia boss Phil Harrison announced that Google was shutting down the company’s game studios in a memo today, and I think the exact wording of that memo is extremely telling. Go read it for yourself. I’ll wait. Back? Good. Did you see the part about how Stadia is now a platform for Google’s partners? It’s pre...

Hey, did you hear Elon Musk went on Clubhouse? The media and venture capital worlds were abuzz this weekend in advance of, during, and after Musk’s appearance on the not-quite-year-old audio social network. Musk is not exactly a recluse — he gives interviews more or less regularly to a variety of mainstream outlets, and will sit down with NBC tomorrow — but his arrival on Clubhouse served as validation for the company and the idea of live, interactive audio streaming more generally. Despite beginning at 1AM ET on Monday, Musk’s room quickly hit the Clubhouse cap of 5,000 concurrent listeners — as did one overflow room hosting a broadcast of his appearance, and then another overflow room after that. All day long, hustlers and hucksters sought to get in on the action, hosting pre-show discus...

If you’ve been following recent news about Resident Evil Village, the next game in the hit horror video game franchise, you may have heard about Lady Dimitrescu, a very tall woman / probably-vampire who has become very popular. Seriously, she’s tall — just look at this GIF from Sony. Lady Dimitrescu towers over the other women / probably-vampires in this scene. A lot of people have wondered exactly how tall Lady Dimitrescu is, apparently, and Kotaku’s Ash Parrish even went to great lengths to estimate that Lady Dimitrescu is 96 inches tall (8 feet). On Monday evening, though, the official Resident Evil Twitter account revealed that Parrish wasn’t even close. If you include her hat and high heels, Lady Dimitrescu officially stands at a giant 2.9 meters tall, which equates to a height of app...

Writer-director Ryan Coogler is making a new Marvel TV show for Disney Plus that will be set in the Kingdom of Wakanda as part of a five-year TV exclusivity deal with Coogler’s production banner, Proximity Media (which includes principals Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian, Ludwig Göransson, Archie Davis, and Peter Nicks alongside Coogler himself). Coogler — who directed and co-wrote Black Panther, and is set to write and direct a sequel Black Panther II for release on July 8th, 2022 — will develop the new Wakanda Disney Plus series as his first project under the new deal, Deadline reports. The deal with Proximity Media also includes the option to create shows for other parts of the Disney banner, not just Marvel Studios. According to Coogler, “We’re already in the mix on some projects that we can...

Classic iPods have their fans, but they’re not built for the modern age of music streaming — except for this one, which has been turned into a Spotify player by tinkerer Guy Dupont. While it may look like an iPod from the outside, inside, it’s got a Raspberry Pi loaded with software custom-built by Dupont to interface with Spotify, while still keeping the classic iPod style. He calls it the sPot. In a video showing off the project and the process behind it, Dupont says he was inspired when his mother-in-law gifted him the old iPod. In a Hackaday post, he says he “had forgotten how good it feels to hold and use one of these things,” but he wanted to update it with some modern features, including (obviously) Spotify streaming, Bluetooth audio, and search. That’s right, the device can search ...

A new report finds that claims of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms are not only untrue but serve as a form of disinformation. The report from NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights says not only is there no empirical finding that social media companies systematically suppress conservatives, but even reports of anecdotal instances tend to fall apart under close scrutiny. And in an effort to appear unbiased, platforms actually bend over backward to try to appease conservative critics. “The contention that social media as an industry censors conservatives is now, as we speak, becoming part of an even broader disinformation campaign from the right, that conservatives are being silenced all across American society,” the report’s lead researcher Paul Barrett said in an ...

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning to send its first “all-civilian” crew to space at the end of 2021 in a charity-focused mission commanded by tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. The company said in a press release it’ll pick three people to ride alongside Isaacman to orbit aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule. Isaacman, a trained pilot and the chief executive of Shift4 Payments, donated $100 million to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, he said in a press release. He also plans to donate the other three Crew Dragon seats for the trip to people “who will be selected to represent the mission pillars of leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity.” SpaceX in a separate statement said the seats will go “to individuals from the general public who will be announced in the weeks ahead.” The mission...

Demand for Microsoft’s latest Xbox Series X console is high, but supply isn’t likely to keep up until at least through June now. In an interview with The New York Times, Microsoft’s head of investor relations, Mike Spencer, revealed supply of its new Xbox consoles will be constrained at least through June. Microsoft had warned that the Xbox Series X would be in short supply until at least April or beyond, and it’s now clear the wait for stock is going to continue for longer. The difficult supply situation does mean that Microsoft sold every Xbox unit it had last quarter, during a quarter it hit $5 billion in gaming revenue for the first time ever. It’s been incredibly difficult to buy an Xbox Series X, PS5, or even the latest AMD and Nvidia GPUs in recent months. These shortages look set t...

Google is updating its search results with a major new feature: an “about this result” menu that will let you pull up information from Wikipedia about a website in your search results, making it easier to vet sites that you’re not familiar with. To see the new information boxes, just tap on the three-dot icon on the top right of the result’s card, which will pull up a short snippet on the article. Google says “these descriptions will provide the most up-to-date verified and sourced information available on Wikipedia.” Additionally, the new search information box will show more detailed information on the result like whether it’s an organic search result or a paid ad, or if the site uses a secure HTTPS connection. Google says the new result information is designed to help provide additional...

One of the things I’m excited to do on Decoder is talk to people who are shaking up industries and trying new things. My guest on today’s episode is known for that: Arlan Hamilton is the founder and managing partner of venture capital firm Backstage Capital. Arlan came to the VC world in a unique way: she started Backstage without formal education or experience in investing, and her firm focuses on funding startups run by people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community. Backstage has done 160 deals so far, with investments in everything from online beauty retailers to satellite internet companies. I’m especially excited to talk to Arlan on Decoder because, as of today, Backstage is going even broader: it’s opening a new fund that anyone can invest in to allow more regular people access to ...