Technology

What’s the cruelest prank you can make on employees who are struggling during a global pandemic when millions of people have lost their jobs or lives? GoDaddy — a web domain registrar once best known for its sexist advertisements — tried to find out when it sent employees a fake email informing them they’d receive a $650 holiday bonus. As The Copper Courier originally reported, GoDaddy sent an email phishing “test” to its employees promising much-needed money; “2020 has been a record year for GoDaddy, thanks to you!”, it said. “Though we cannot celebrate together during our annual Holiday Party, we want to show our appreciation and share a $650 one—time Holiday bonus!” The employees who clicked the link then reportedly received an email two days later telling them they failed the test. Ins...

The story Tony Robbins told on his podcast was harrowing — if also a little convoluted. One of his staff members had come down with a fever of 102 when she started watching the news and freaking out. She went to the hospital, presumably with COVID-19, and began to hyperventilate. The doctors put her on a ventilator — then in a medically induced coma. “The doctor said … ‘If she doesn’t wake up in three weeks, we’ll declare her dead,’” Robbins recounted. The self-help guru had been researching coronavirus treatments and decided pressure from ventilators could damage the lungs. “I’m not saying these people are trying to harm. I think they’re all trying to help, but the research is now showing a very different component there,” he said on the Tony Robbins Podcast. So Robbins asked a physician ...

Happy holidays! Here is our gift to you: over an hour of audio content exclusively dedicated to HDMI. If you’re lucky this holiday season, you may be opening up a new PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, or Xbox Series S. And with that, a brand-new HDMI 2.1 cable — ready to game in 4K at 120Hz. HDMI 2.1 is an updated HDMI standard that expands the bandwidth of HDMI up to 48Gbps, allowing the ability for multiple features like variable refresh rate (VRR), auto low latency mode (ALLM), and enhanced audio return channel (eARC). It also supports high resolution and refresh rates like 8K60 and 4K120, and all of these features can upgrade your console gaming significantly. Both your TV and HDMI cable need to support HDMI 2.1 to unlock these features. This holiday season, it’s still a bit confusing to t...

December 25th is going to be a big deal for streaming, with blockbusters like Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul debuting on HBO Max and Disney Plus, respectively, alongside hyped streaming shows like Netflix’s Bridgerton and We Can Be Heroes. If you’re planning a big Christmas Day marathon, here’s when each of those pieces of content will debut, so you can plan ahead. Wonder Woman 1984 will be the last to debut, arriving at 12PM ET on Christmas Day. That means you should have some time to unwrap and set up any new streaming or A/V gear before it debuts on HBO Max. Given the usual 3AM or midnight release times for streaming shows, it’s worth taking note of the noon ET drop here when making your movie marathon plans. Soul will arrive on Disney Plus at 3AM ET on December 25th. If you’re willing to s...

I did not expect to like the Amazon Echo Frames as much as I do. The concept is relatively simple: they’re a pair of eyeglasses with tiny little speakers and microphones embedded in the stems so you can listen to music and command Alexa. They run $249 and come with basic plastic lenses, but you can take them to an optometrist and get prescription lenses. It’s a much smarter strategy than the failed smart glasses that tried to add a display into the mix. Maybe that’s in the works, but as with many of its products, Amazon starts with a minimum viable product and iterates. That’s doubly true for these Echo Frames, which are now widely available for anybody to buy in a version two of the product that makes some tweaks to the internal hardware and battery life. Amazon isn’t alone in this catego...

More details of Samsung’s unannounced Galaxy Buds Pro wireless earbuds with active noise cancelation have leaked, including the price. According to slides shared on Twitter by WalkingCat, the Galaxy Buds Pro will cost $199 at launch making them $80 cheaper than the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds, our noise-canceling champions. Samsung’s pro buds will feature strong IPX7 durability against dust and water, and up to 8 hours of listening time which can be extended to 28 hours with the charging case. WalkingCat provides this handy chart to compare specs across all of Samsung’s wireless buds. Samsung Buds comparison chart.Image: WalkingCat WalkingCat also shared a slide showing an exploded view of the new active noise canceling buds, revealing an 11-mm woofer and 6.5-mm tweeter. The slide also suppo...

It’s nearly the holidays, which means that in the long-standing tradition of the internet, it’s also time for novelty, themed Yule log videos. And this year brings an excellent new entry: a roaring fireplace in the House of Hades, from Supergiant Games’ Hades. The video is in crisp 4K, showing off the lovely art of the game (one of our favorites this year): the fireplace is decked out in gilded skulls and opulent marble, while creeping pomegranates add a dash of color to the proceedings. There are also the essential sounds of any good Yule log: the roar of a fireplace, with the crisp, crackling sound of the logs. (There’s a Hades spin, with murmurs and echoes from deeper within the House whispering just at the edge of hearing.) The Yule log pairs perfectly with Hades itself, which is on sa...

Today I learned that the iPhone’s built-in calculator app has a scientific mode — and all you have to do to access it is turn your phone on its side. If you’re the type of person who keeps your phone permanently in portrait lock (like me), this might come as a surprise to you, as it did to many of us here at The Verge. This unlocks all sorts of functionality, like adding numbers to memory, parentheses, exponents, and all those trig functions from back in high school. The feature isn’t exactly new, or hidden: It was introduced in iOS 2.0 back in 2008, and there’s actually even a screenshot of it on the App Store page for the calculator app. It was hiding in plain sight. To be fair, most people probably never see that App Store page, as the app comes pre-installed on every phone. It’s not th...

Fans of Daft Punk’s incredible Tron: Legacy score will receive a pretty good holiday gift this year: an extended version that’s now available on Spotify and Apple Music. Tron: Legacy The Complete Edition adds nine tracks that weren’t available on the original score, according to Polygon. Here’s the catch: these aren’t new songs. Some are iTunes exclusives; others are tracks that were only available on vinyl. There’s also an Amazon MP3 bonus track and — get this — a Nokia Music Store bonus track. The Complete Edition simply marks the first time it’s all been collected in one place. Even though the tracks aren’t new, I’m excited about having an extended, complete version of the score available on Spotify. I love Tron: Legacy and adore the score. I play it almost every single day while I work...

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has filed paperwork to run for mayor of New York. NBC 4 New York first reported the news, citing confirmation from the city’s Campaign Finance Board. Yang will be running to replace current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is term-limited. A longtime New York resident, Yang first drew attention as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, focusing his campaign on the promise of a universal basic income. Yang was also outspoken about the threats posed by automation, and how its economic consequences were driving forward the opioid epidemic and a broader social dislocation. While Yang’s campaign was successful in cultivating a dedicated following, he failed to attract broader support and withdrew from the race in February after ...

Google has added a layer of scrutiny for research papers on sensitive topics including gender, race, and political ideology. A senior manager also instructed researchers to “strike a positive tone” in a paper this summer. The news was first reported by Reuters. “Advances in technology and the growing complexity of our external environment are increasingly leading to situations where seemingly inoffensive projects raise ethical, reputational, regulatory or legal issues,” the policy read. Three employees told Reuters the rule started in June. The company has also asked employees to “refrain from casting its technology in a negative light” on multiple occasions, Reuters says. Employees working on a paper on recommendation AI, which is used to personalize content on platforms like YouTube, wer...

Elon Musk thinks it’s a “good idea” to create a holding company above Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company — at least, that’s what the billionaire CEO said in response to the idea on Twitter. Such a holding company could be simply known as “X,” longtime Tesla shareholder Dave Lee suggested, in a nod to Musk’s ownership of “X.com” from his PayPal days. Musk notoriously entertains changes, big and small, to his companies in Twitter’s public square. In 2018 he even suggested one so large (and largely baseless) — taking Tesla private using “funding secured” from Saudi Arabia — that he wound up in court. It was only five years ago that Google surprise-announced a similar shakeup But the idea here isn’t so far outside the realm of possibility. It was only five years ago that Google s...