Technology

An intelligence agency has just confirmed that the US government does indeed buy location data collected by its citizens’ smartphones. In a memo sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and obtained by The New York Times, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) admitted that it buys location data from brokers — and that the data isn’t separated by whether a person lives in the US or outside of it. Data brokers are companies that, as the name implies, collect and sell people’s information. The companies collect people’s location information (and much more) by paying app makers and websites for it. Once the broker has the information, they can aggregate it and sell it to whoever’s willing to pay for it — including the US government. In the memo, the DIA says that its “personnel can only query the US loca...

Trading in stock of video game retailer GameStop (GME) was halted briefly Friday, as it soared more than 70 percent, due partly to the enthusiastic support of a group of Reddit day traders. The stock is up more than 250 percent year to date, rising sharply last week after GameStop announced Chewy CEO Ryan Cohen was joining its board, CNBC reported. Short-seller Citron Research predicted the price would drop, but members of the Reddit board r/wallstreetbets, who had been generating interest in the stock, criticized Citron on the Reddit message board and continued praising the stock on social media. GameStop is the most-shorted stock in the market The hype generated by r/wallstreetbets helped create what’s known as a “short squeeze” on GameStop’s stock. A short squeeze works like this: some ...

Cyberpunk 2077’s first big update is available now, and it’s packed with bug fixes for the notoriously buggy game. In a tweet, developer CD Projekt Red also said that the update “lays the groundwork” for future patches. The 1.1 patch arrives more than a month after Cyberpunk 2077’s rocky launch. The game has been plagued with bugs and issues, particularly on older consoles, though CD Projekt Red has released three hotfixes to try to shore up some of the problems. Sony yanked the game from the PlayStation Store and began offering full refunds on December 17th, but the game still hasn’t returned to the store. CD Projekt Red has already announced another major patch would follow this one, and the studio described it as a “larger, more significant update” that will arrive “in the weeks after” ...

Microsoft spent most of 2020 building up goodwill for its Xbox Game Pass service and next-gen consoles, but a new Xbox Live Gold price hike risks wiping all of that out. The Xbox maker announced a number of changes to Xbox Live Gold pricing today — you should read our full post for details — and the bottom line is that it’s moving from $60 a year to $120 for most people. That’s a huge jump and a badly timed one: it’s happening in the middle of a pandemic, just as Microsoft has reported big boosts to its gaming revenue throughout 2020. The reason for the move is obvious — get people on Xbox Game Pass — but Microsoft has done it in a clumsy and poorly timed way. Xbox fans are understandably angry. Microsoft stands alone in being the only major platform holder to force players of Fortnite, Ca...

The Federal Trade Commission issued multimillion-dollar fines against three bot-powered ticket scalping operations. The FTC says these organizations bought over 150,000 event tickets over the past four years, nabbing them with automated tools that evaded online purchasing limits. After reselling these tickets for an estimated $26.1 million, they’ve been accused of breaking a 2016 anti-bot law — the first time this law has been applied. Regulators reached a proposed settlement with the ticket selling groups, including $31.6 million in fines. However, most of these fines were suspended because of an inability to pay. The three groups will pay a total of $3.7 million instead, and they’ll have to maintain records demonstrating their future compliance with the law. The settlement must still be ...

Google is redesigning how search results look on mobile, the company announced in a blog on Friday. “We wanted to take a step back to simplify a bit so people could find what they’re looking for faster and more easily,” Aileen Cheng, who led the redesign, said in the blog. The redesign will have larger and bolder text that’s intended to be easier to scan quickly, and you’ll see more of Google’s font in results. Search results will also take up more of the width of your screen, thanks in part to reduced shadows. Google also says the redesign will use color “more intentionally” to help highlight important information without being distracting. To get an idea of how the redesign differs from the current experience, compare this render of the redesign with a screenshot of the current search ex...

Amazon is trying to delay a union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, appealing a US labor board decision to allow 6,000 warehouse workers to vote by mail on unionization. The company is arguing for the election to be held in person, according to documents filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Thursday. Amazon’s argument is that mail-in voting decreases voter turnout. It says the NLRB looked at the wrong COVID-19 infection data when determining how to hold the vote, using the positivity rate in Jefferson County, where the warehouse is located, rather than the positivity rate at the warehouse itself. Workers in Bessemer are set to vote on whether to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union starting on February 8th. Ballots must be mailed in by March 29th, and th...

Image: CD Projekt Red If you’ve already nabbed a next-gen PlayStation or Xbox — or are willing to give developer CD Projekt the benefit of the doubt that it’ll eventually work on your current-gen machine — you can now pick up the standard disc edition of Cyberpunk 2077 for half-price at Amazon and Best Buy. It’s $30, instead of $60. To be clear, that’s the price for the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game, which work on PS5 and Xbox Series X far, far better than they do on current-gen consoles. (There’s no PS5 or Xbox Series X-specific version of the game so far, but the disc will include a free upgrade.) Amazon also has the PC version for $40; compare to its normal price of $60. Sony actually took the unprecedented step of removing Cyberpunk 2077 from… Continue reading… You...

On Sunday, The New York Times published an article about the risks of sky-rocketing teenage device usage during quarantine — and as you might expect, they went straight for the guilty-parent touchstones. There are maudlin photos of a family ruined by gaming, and the quote “I’ve failed you as a father” comes in the second sentence. There are also curious comparisons to drug addiction (“There will be a period of epic withdrawal” after quarantine, one addiction expert warns) and vague claims about the impressionable nature of young brains. Before you rush to cut off junior’s Playstation Plus subscription, it’s worth putting things in perspective. We’re in the middle of a worldwide crisis, and the last ten months have been hard on everyone. We’ve seen historic jumps in depression and substance...

One year ago at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Alienware made waves with a modular gaming PC that worked like a Nintendo Switch, with a pair of gamepads flanking a powerful Windows 10 tablet. Sadly, Alienware’s UFO was just a concept, as was Lenovo’s take on the idea this year — but two companies are now taking up the torch with a pair of crowdfunded gadgets you might actually see in your lifetime. They look seriously legit. The 5.5-inch GPD Win 3 and the 7-inch Aya Neo aren’t going about it in quite the same way; while the Ava tries to closely match Nintendo’s console in shape, size, and with strictly gaming controls on board, the GPD sticks to its palmtop computer roots with a slide-up screen that reveals a tiny backlit keyboard. There’s also a fingerprint sensor, a microSD slot and an optional ...

Amid rising political tensions in the United States, Telegram founder Pavel Durov says his chat service has taken down hundreds of public calls for violence, in accordance with the platform’s terms of service. In a public Telegram post on Monday, Durov emphasized the service’s commitment to banning speech that actively incites violence. “Telegram welcomes peaceful debate and protest, but our Terms of Service explicitly prohibit distributing public calls to violence,” he wrote. “Сivil movements all over the world rely on Telegram in order to stand up for human rights without resorting to inflicting harm.” Notably, the post does not address Telegram’s encrypted chat feature, which protects conversations from outside access and thus is not subject to centralized moderation. Telegram has moder...

In 2016, a team of modders released a game they developed a game in their spare time to nigh-universal acclaim — a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that they called Enderal, with its own 30+ hour quest with gobs of original dialogue and professional voice acting. “[It’s the most fun I’ve had in an Elder Scrolls game in years,” wrote our sister site Polygon. It’s the top-rated Skyrim mod of all time at ModDB, has nearly 500,000 downloads at NexusMods and its own Steam page filled with glowing reviews. Now, its developers are setting off to build a game of their own. On Sunday, the team at SureAI released its final patch for Enderal, explaining that they no longer had as much free time to keep up development — because they’re working on “a new, commercial project which will hopefully be a...