Technology

Italy’s data privacy authority has ordered video sharing app TikTok to temporarily block the accounts of any users whose ages can’t be confirmed, Reuters reported. The order comes after the death of a 10-year-old girl in Palermo, whose parents told authorities their daughter was participating in a “blackout challenge” she saw on the app. The child died of asphyxiation, and authorities are investigating whether anyone invited her to try the challenge. The Italian Data Protection Authority ordered TikTok to block unverified users in Italy until at least February 15th. The company told The Guardian it had not found content on its platform which would have encouraged the child to participate in the challenge, but said it was cooperating with the investigation. “Privacy and safety are top prior...

Jimmy Choi’s TikTok page is filled with the typical videos of a high-level athlete: clips of himself doing one-armed pushups, climbing ropes, holding planks with weights on his back. If you look closely, though, you’ll notice that even before he begins his feats of strength and endurance, his hands are shaking. Choi has Parkinson’s disease, a central nervous system disorder that causes tremors, and he often posts about what it’s like to live with the disease. “People see the stuff that I post and they’re things that most average people can’t do,” Choi says. “I often show the other side of things, things that I struggle with on a daily basis.” He makes air quotes as he talks about the things “normal” people do easily — tying shoes, buttoning shirts, picking up pills — that he has trouble wi...

The year is kicking off with what’s becoming a loose tradition: a documentary about a renowned ‘90s athlete that aims to shade in a more complete picture. This time around, it’s Tiger, a two-part HBO Sports documentary about golf superstar Tiger Woods. Like The Last Dance, which chronicled Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls while reflecting on his entire career, Tiger attempts to complicate the prevailing narrative of a legend defined by his meteoric rise and equally steep fall. Even if you didn’t know golf, you probably knew about Tiger Woods. If you came of age in the ‘90s or early aughts, it was impossible to not know about the man who brought raucous, Michael Jordan-levels of celebrity to golf — a sport so traditionally restrained that Adam Sandler was able to make a ...

Longtime TV and radio host Larry King died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87. Ora Media, which King co-founded in 2012, confirmed the news in a tweet to the @KingsThings Twitter account. A cause of death was not immediately available Saturday, but he had reportedly been hospitalized recently with COVID-19. “Larry always viewed his interview subjects as the true stars of his programs,” the statement from Ora reads. “Whether he was interviewing a U.S. president, foreign leader, celebrity, scandal-ridden personage, or an everyman, Larry liked to ask short, direct, and uncomplicated questions.” King started his career in local radio in Florida in the 1950s, according to the New York Times obituary, and began a national radio call-in show in 1978. Between 1985 an...

In news that’s likely to be devastating to people who are looking for any and all reasons to upgrade their TV, CBS announced that Super Bowl LV won’t be broadcast in 4K HDR. The decision was made because of complications caused by the pandemic. This likely isn’t going over too well with all of the TV manufacturers that use the Super Bowl as the moment to clear out 2020 models at a big discount. But there are other reasons to seize these deals while they’re around. There’s more 4K content than ever, with HBO Max’s Wonder Woman 1984 being one of the big new releases to support 4K HDR. One of the TVs mentioned below has HDMI 2.1 ports, giving it the ability to display certain PS5 and Xbox Series X games at 4K resolution with up to 120 frames per second. If you’re not into TVs, though, we’ve i...

A year ago this week, The Verge published our first story about the virus. It was January 21. The first case had arrived in the US. We’d only heard of about 300 cases reported in China and six deaths. We still knew there was a chance it could get bad. “It’s bringing back SARS flashbacks for me,” coronavirus expert Timothy Sheahan told Verge reporter Nicole Wetsman at the time. The 2002 SARS outbreak taught researchers speed, but was only a deadly teaser to the still-unnamed pandemic that was about to begin. One year and almost 1,000 coronavirus-related articles later, we’ve passed more grim milestones than we ever should have. More than 97 million people have contracted the virus and 2.1 million people have died. In just one year, more people in the US have died than US soldiers did in fou...

Facebook says some users were logged out of their accounts unexpectedly Friday due to a “configuration change,” and the issue has been fixed as of Saturday morning. “On January 22, a configuration change caused some people to be logged out of their Facebook accounts. We investigated the issue and fixed it for everyone earlier today. We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” a Facebook company spokesperson said in an email to The Verge. So Facebook, heard it was a “configuration change”. to the engineers who fixed the issue and patiently tried to explain the cause to us to no avail. https://t.co/AUARhCZ7W2 — Facebook App (@facebookapp) January 23, 2021 The problems began late Friday ET, with users on the r/Facebook Reddit board reporting they were receiving “sign in” prompts from thei...

Microsoft has reversed its controversial Xbox Live price increase. The company announced a price hike on Friday that would have doubled the cost of a yearly subscription to the service, which is required to play games online on Xbox consoles, to $120 for many users. Now, though, Microsoft says the price will stay the same. Beyond that, Microsoft has decided to bring Xbox Live in line with Sony and Nintendo’s online services by dropping the subscription requirement for free-to-play games. Popular free-to-play titles like Fortnite are playable on PlayStation consoles and the Nintendo Switch without an online subscription, but you still need one for Xbox consoles; Microsoft says it’s “working hard to deliver this change as soon as possible in the coming months.” Here’s Microsoft’s full statem...

The European Parliament is being investigated by the European Data Protection Supervisor after allegations that its COVID testing website didn’t meet EU privacy standards. Six members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have worked with data watchdog group noyb to bring the complaint, saying that the site illegally sent data to the US and that its cookie banners were deceptive. The website was set up to help MEPs schedule COVID tests, and while it didn’t handle any health information itself, sending data to the US for processing would still be illegal. According to the complaint, the testing website made over 150 requests to third parties, including Google and Stripe. Under EU law, data can only be transferred to the US if “an adequate level of protection for the personal data [can] be ensur...

Adequate COVID-19 vaccine distribution still seems like the greatest obstacle to slowing the spread of the pandemic, but if you’re looking to worry about the other threat that’s still blocking progress — an unwillingness to take the vaccine at all — and the creative efforts on Facebook that are going into stopping it, you should go read this FiveThirtyEight report. Facebook’s taken steps to combat misinformation related to the pandemic, removing false claims about COVID-19 vaccines and banning ads that discourage vaccine use, but reporter Kaleigh Rogers highlights some of the more direct outreach that pro-vaccine activists are doing to combat misinformation. From “honeypot” Facebook groups designed to capture the anti-vax curious to direct outreach from groups like C.I.C.A.D.A. (Community ...

SpaceX is locked in a legal fight with a Texas oil company for a plot of land it wants to use to drill for natural gas, according to public records. The 806-acre site in southern Texas sits near SpaceX’s Starship facilities, a sprawling testing ground for its methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine. Tim George, an attorney for the SpaceX subsidiary fighting for the land, was quoted by Bloomberg News, which first reported the legal despute, as saying methane reserves from the land will be used “in connection with their rocket facility operations.” In filings with a Texas energy regulator, the SpaceX subsidiary Lone Star Mineral Development LLC demanded that Dallas Petroleum Group (DPG) LLC, which claims ownership to wells on the land, vacate the wells by the end of 2020. The filings allege that...

Vicarious Visions, the studio that developed Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and the remake for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, has been reassigned within Activision Blizzard, GamesIndustry.biz reports. Moving forward, the studio’s team of about 200 people will now be “fully dedicated to existing Blizzard games and initiatives.” That means for any games Vicarious Visions works on in the future, it will not serve as the lead development studio. “After collaborating with Vicarious Visions for some time and developing a great relationship, Blizzard realized there was an opportunity for [Vicarious Visions] to provide long-term support,” a Blizzard spokesperson told GamesIndustry.biz. The studio did not specify what projects Vicarious Visions is providing support for currently, as Blizzard Entert...