Technology

Sports betting company DraftKings and the Drone Racing League (DRL) will now allow betting on drone races in some states, the two companies announced. DRL, which CNBC describes as a first-person view racing league, allows pilots to compete for prizes by flying their drones through courses. Residents of Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Tennessee, and West Virginia will be able to bet on the races via their phones, and regulatory approval is pending for betting on drone races in other states, the companies said. The terms of the deal and the amounts of the prize money weren’t disclosed, but drone racers in a 2017 tournament competed for $100,000. “The sky is now the limit for DRL fans to get skin in the game, and we’re thrilled to partner with DraftKings to transform our high-speed race ...

One of the best features of the Oculus Quest 2 is it can be manually linked via USB to your gaming PC to play more demanding VR games you couldn’t otherwise run natively on the headset. That’s great if you want a way to play games like Half-Life: Alyx, but the obvious downside is that you’re now physically tethered to a PC — so much for the wireless freedom that the Quest 2 advertises. Thankfully, developers have already figured out the seemingly impossible: how to run system-intensive titles on your PC and stream the visual feed to your VR device while syncing all of your movements over Wi-Fi. It gives you the best of both worlds: letting you play the games you want without being attached by a cable to your computer. Doing this isn’t as simple as installing an app through the Oculus store...

Amazon has updated Alexa in the last month with a modified version of its popular reminders skill. You can now ask Alexa to “Tell me when” an event happens and your device will give you background information and notify you when it actually occurs. You’ve been able to set a reminder for an event or task at a specific time for a while, and requesting Alexa to tell you when an event occurs can pull up relevant information. “Tell me when” is sort of a synthesis of the two tasks. Amazon provided a few examples: you could ask Alexa to “Tell me when the next Seahawks game is” and Alexa could tell you the time of the game and set a reminder to watch. Another interesting use is for email, you can now ask Alexa to tell you when an email arrives from a specific person, and Alexa can announce the ema...

The US experienced a record number of billion-dollar disasters in 2020. Twenty-two disasters cost the US a cumulative $95 billion last year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That smashes previous records set in 2011 and 2017, when 16 disasters caused at least a billion dollars of damage. Climate change is hitting the US hard in the pocketbook NOAA’s announcement is the latest signal that climate change is hitting the US hard in the pocketbook. It follows the release of another report by insurance company Munich Re that also tallied 2020 disaster costs and found they had nearly doubled in the US since 2019. “Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,” Ernst Rauch, Munich Re chief climate scientist, told The New York Times. Heatwaves a...

More than 300 Twitter employees have signed an internal petition calling for President Donald Trump to be permanently banned from the platform following a raid on the US Capitol on January 6th. Roughly an hour and a half after we published this story, Twitter apparently agreed — President Donald Trump has been permanently banned from Twitter. The letter said that the employees are “disturbed” by the attack and that Twitter must “permanently suspend” Trump because of his involvement, according to a copy of the letter seen by The Verge. The Washington Post first reported on the letter’s circulation. “We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection. Those acts jeopardize the wellbeing of the United States, our company, and our employees,” the...

Consumers should not buy or use individual 18650 lithium-ion battery cells due to possible fire risk, according to a warning just issued by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The commission says it is working with e-commerce sites like eBay to remove listings of loose 18650 cells, which are sometimes used in vapes, e-cigarettes, flashlights, and toys. “[T]hese battery cells may have exposed metal positive and negative terminals that can short-circuit when they come into contact with metal objects, such as keys or loose change in a pocket,” the agency wrote Friday. “Once shorted, loose cells can overheat and experience thermal runaway, igniting the cell’s internal materials and forcibly expelling burning contents, resulting in fires, explosions, serious injuries and even death.”...

Twitter has suspended prominent backers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, citing a potential for “offline harm.” NBC News reporter Ben Collins reported the ban of former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, and former 8kun administrator Ron Watkins. Other major QAnon accounts have apparently been banned as well. Twitter told NBC News that the accounts were suspended under Twitter’s “coordinated harmful activity” ban. “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm, and given the renewed potential for violence surrounding this type of behavior in the coming days, we will permanently suspend accounts that are solely dedicated to sharing QAnon content,” a spokes...

Twitter permanently banned Donald Trump today. For a brief moment, he managed to tweet anyhow — not from @realDonaldTrump, his suspended account, but rather the official @POTUS account reserved for the current President of the United States, one that will be handed over to Joe Biden on January 20th. His message, before it was deleted, cryptically suggested that he will “have a big announcement soon” and that he was looking “at the possibilities of building out our own platform.” Trump is currently deplatformed from most social media. As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the...

Earlier today, Sony announced that it would be releasing two new speakers compatible with 360 Reality Audio, its spatial audio technology that replicates the feel of live music by placing different sounds and vocals in a virtual sphere around you. It said its plan is to release them this spring, but it didn’t share what the speakers would look like. We didn’t have to wait to learn more about them, though, as Sony’s UK website now has full product pages for the upcoming SRS-RA5000 and SRS-RA3000 speakers. The higher-end SRS-RA5000, pictured at the top of this post, will have three up-firing speakers, three side speakers, and a woofer. It’s also certified for High-Resolution Audio. The SRS-RA3000, pictured below, has two tweeters, two passive radiators, and a full-range driver. Sony’s SRS-RA...

Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump on Friday, days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol leaving five dead. “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said in a statement Friday. The ban comes after the president incited a mob that broke into the US Capitol building, disrupting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden as the President Elect. Twitter initially put a 12-hour ban on Trump’s account for “repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy” after he posted messages repeating lies that the election was stolen. At the time, Twitter said Trump would be banned permanently if he continued to violate i...

Discord has banned a server called “The Donald,” a pro-Trump community linked to banned subreddit r/The_Donald and TheDonald.win. The news was first reported by Platformer writer (and Verge contributor) Casey Newton. The ban comes two days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol, encouraged by President Trump, though Discord says that it has no evidence that the server was used to organize the riots. In STILL OTHER news, @Discord says it has banned server The Donald, which was connected to TheDonald dot Win and the Donald subreddit. Made decision “due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence and plan an armed insurrection,” spox says. — Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) January 8, 2021 “We have a zero-tolerance policy against hate and violence of any kind on ...