Technology

Gaming technology improves with every new generation of hardware, but that’s not always apparent on launch day. Typically, new consoles are coupled with a lackluster slate of launch games, with developers needing time to fully take advantage of the new hardware. While there are some standout launch titles that will always be remembered — Tetris on the Game Boy, Halo on the original Xbox, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch — very few consoles ever arrive with more than one or perhaps two games worthy of being called system-sellers. That’s looking to remain largely true with the launch of Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X / S next week, despite the excellent-looking Tetris Effect: Connected port, the all-new Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and the ...

We’re just days away from the next generation of console gaming with the upcoming release of the Xbox Series X / S and the PlayStation 5. And now that we’re so close to those launches, we have a pretty good idea of how both companies are approaching this next generation. Microsoft is building toward a future where the hardware you’re playing on almost doesn’t matter. If you want to play an Xbox game, Microsoft is trying to make that possible on many different devices. Sony, by contrast, is sticking with a more traditional approach with the PS5, where you can only play exclusive PS5 games on the console itself. But at launch, both companies are leaning heavily on the libraries of older generations to round out the first few months of their lineups. It should be an exciting new generation. H...

The excitement of getting a new phone is often tempered by nagging regret. A lot of times, it’s not like there was anything really wrong with the old phone (unless there was — a bulging battery or a shattered screen is always a bad look). If it was a breakup, the conversation with an old phone would start, “You’re terrific. It’s not you. It’s me. I just wanted a newer model.” Ashamed of yourself? Don’t be. There’s no need to stick the old phone into a drawer or use it as a doorstop or furniture shim. There are lots of ways you can put your older phone to work. After all, most older smartphones still have plenty of horsepower. Think of yours as a connected device that just doesn’t happen to have a SIM card anymore. Here are some suggestions for what to do with that extra, older phone. (All ...

After a night in which President Donald Trump falsely claimed victory in the presidential election, Facebook has added a notification at the top of Facebook and Instagram feeds saying there was — as yet — no winner. Earlier in the night, both Twitter and Facebook chose to label a message — identical on both platforms — from Trump reading, “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Twitter also placed sharing restrictions on the tweet. Twitter calls it “a potentially misleading claim about an election” Early returns were promising for the president, but a number of pivotal states are still counting votes, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This work does not involve additio...

Portland, Maine has passed a ballot initiative banning the use of facial recognition by police and city agencies. The Bangor Daily News is reporting that voters have passed a ballot initiative bolstering a ban on facial recognition by city agencies. The initiative follows a city council vote in August, which put a preliminary ban in place as an ordinance. Today’s vote replaces that ordinance with a stronger measure, which cannot be revoked for at least five years. The ordinance was placed on the ballot earlier this year by the Southern Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, as part of a raft of other progressive initiatives including a $15 minimum wage and new limits on rent increases. The new measure also adds concrete penalties, entitling private citizens to a minimum of ...

California voters approved Prop. 22, which would exempt companies such as Uber and Lyft from having to classify their workers as employees, according to The Associated Press. The $200 million campaign in support of the measure was the most expensive in state history. The ballot measure mandates that drivers for Uber, Lyft and DoorDash will receive new benefits, such as minimum hourly earnings. But drivers won’t get the full protections and benefits that come with employment, as they may have had to under another law, AB5 — which originally took aim at gig work. Labor groups, which opposed the law, raised only a tenth as much money. Uber and Lyft threatened to leave California — or drastically cut back service — if they were forced to classify drivers as employees. Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrows...

President Donald Trump prematurely claimed victory in the 2020 election early Wednesday morning, telling a live TV audience that he’d already won — while also threatening to take legal action against votes that have yet to be counted, even though many states are continuing to process legitimate mail-in ballots. “Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said, while also suggesting he would take legal action to keep further ballots from being counted. Initially, Trump stopped short of declaring a win, instead focusing on individual states where he’s done well. Even there, however, he appears to have lied about some of the details — prompting NBC News to cut him off and fact-check him in real time: NBC News cuts off Trump. Savannah Guthrie: “We’ve got to dip in here because there’ve been sev...

Natural Cycles, the first “digital birth control” to get sign-off from the Food and Drug Administration, is back. This time, it’s asking the agency to authorize integration with wearable devices like the Oura Ring. The feature could make it easier for users to use the app properly, but it doesn’t sidestep some of the existing issues with app-based birth control. The Natural Cycles app uses daily temperature measurements and period cycle tracking to predict the days someone is least likely to get pregnant. It falls under the broad category of fertility awareness birth control methods, where people track when they’d be ovulating and use that information to figure out when they’d have the best chance of conceiving. It tends to be conflated with the rhythm method, which is ineffective, but whe...

Today is Election Day and I am definitely anxious. But I have felt a physical sense of relaxation while watching this Twitch stream of people in the chat solving New York Times crossword puzzles together. The game is very cleverly done. The stream shows the crossword and the clues. Users type in responses to clues in the chat, and then the puzzle will select that clue and fill in the answer. For example, somebody typing “29d ark” essentially translates to “the answer to 29 down is ‘ark,’” and the game can select that clue and type out the answer in the crossword itself. And the whole thing is backed by an extremely chill instrumental soundtrack. Sam Von Ehren’s collaborative crossword puzzle-solving stream on Twitch.Image: Twitch The game isn’t bug-free — it has crashed a few times while I...

Physicists from Leiden University have 3D-printed a miniature version of an Intrepid-class starship from Star Trek (via PC Gamer). The idea of a tiny starship is probably something you haven’t considered outside of the plot of a Star Trek episode, but this microscopic model is actually part of a larger research experiment the physicists published in the scientific journal Soft Matter. The five micrometer long ship looks like the USS Voyager and was microprinted by the physicists for their microswimmer research. Unlike the impulse engines and warp drive of its TV counterpart, this Voyager is propelled through liquid by chemical reactions between its platinum coating and the hydrogen peroxide solution the physicists placed it in. Their article notes that these studies usually use sphere-shap...

The US will formally leave the landmark Paris climate agreement on November 4th, turning its back on the rest of the world as it comes together to stop climate change. How quickly the US takes on the planetary crisis will hinge on the results of today’s election. The Paris Agreement entered into force nearly four years ago today, on November 4th, 2016, after being adopted by every nation on Earth. (There are still a handful of countries that have yet to formally ratify the agreement). Donald Trump moved to remove the US from the accord soon after taking office, but the process took four years. That process comes to an end tomorrow, as voters wait to find out who the next US president will be. “The US will be an outlier.” If it’s Joe Biden, Americans can expect the US to rejoin the accord n...

In the last year, the number of streaming platforms has really gotten out of hand. There’s Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, CBS All Access (soon to be Paramount Plus), and Peacock — and each of them has different pricing tiers. If you scored free trials for Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus, like I did, you probably got to sample a healthy selection of them. Those trials, however, are starting to wind down. Which means it’s time to figure out what’s worth keeping and what’s worth ditching: with this many monthly bills, you should absolutely play favorites. I was surprised to learn mine was HBO Max. HBO Max isn’t particularly well-defined. (It’s HBO… and more?) It has baffling holes in its catalog thanks to licensing agreements, which made its original pitch of ...