Technology

This morning, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, confirmed that its mission to return samples of an asteroid to Earth did indeed bring home some space rocks. Engineers at the agency found black sand they believe to be from an asteroid inside the mission’s sample container. It’s great news for the mission, known as Hayabusa2, which launched to space in 2014. The mission sent a spacecraft to an asteroid named Ryugu to collect samples of rocks from the object’s surface and then bring them back to our planet for study. Hayabusa2 wound up scooping up materials from Ryugu twice before heading back to Earth. The vehicle arrived this month, jettisoning a canister filled with the asteroid samples, which then landed in Australia with the help of a parachute on December 5th. Up until...

Apple is offering two-hour delivery for just $5 on “eligible in-stock items” from its retail stores. If you need to get a gift for an Apple-loving person in your life this holiday season, that $5 shipping could be a handy way to get that gift in a pinch. The company says it offers scheduled courier delivery of eligible items “in most metros.” That low $5 fee won’t last forever, though — in the fine print on Apple’s website, the company says it’s a limited time offer. And you can’t use it on customized Macs, engraved products, or orders paid with financing or by bank transfer. If you don’t need your purchase within two hours, Apple says it offers free next-day delivery on any in-stock Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, or Apple Watch, and free two-day delivery on “almost everything else.” The com...

Apple is making good on its promise to provide more transparency around iOS app data collection with the launch of new privacy labels on the App Store. The company first announced its intention to provide these so-called “nutrition label” privacy disclosures back in June during WWDC, and last month Apple disclosed that developers would have to provide this information by December 8th or risk losing the ability to update their apps. Now, following that deadline, Apple is launching the feature officially for all iOS device owners running the latest version of iOS 14. Apple says the new labels will be required for apps on all of its platforms — that includes iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS — and they will have to be up to date and accurate every time a developer submits a new update. Ap...

Apple’s iOS 14.3 has arrived, giving iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max owners the ProRAW feature that was promised when the devices were announced. Other features in this update include search improvements for the Apple TV app, support for Fitness Plus — Apple’s new subscription-based workout service — and the recently announced AirPods Max headphones. iPhones have long been able to capture RAW images, but doing so has meant giving up the benefits of all the computational magic that happens when shooting a standard image with the native camera app. ProRAW is designed to address that: it’s a format that combines the computational benefits of Apple’s image processing with the post-processing flexibility of a RAW file. In iOS 14.3, Apple is flipping the ProRAW “on” switch for iPhone 12 Pro and 12 ...

Today, Snapchat is getting a new original game called Bitmoji Paint. As the name suggests, the game involves Bitmoji — those cutely grotesque customizable avatars — and painting. It’s Snap Inc.’s second title from its internal games studio, which began putting out games last year. “Our goal with Bitmoji has always been to be the world’s avatar, to give people a digital version of themselves that represents them and lets them be themselves online,” says Ba Blackstock, co-founder of Bitmoji. “And so now with games, it’s also letting people play together in a really new and fun and exciting way.” Bitmoji Paint places players on a gigantic, pixelated grid, and lets them paint those squares as a shared canvas. Zoom out, and you get pixel art. You get there by pressing the rocket icon or through...

Multiple Google services and websites including YouTube, Gmail, Google Assistant, and Google Docs were down for around an hour on Monday morning after being hit with a widespread outage. Google acknowledged the issues with Gmail, affecting both its business and personal services, at 6:55AM ET, and said the problem was fixed for the “vast majority” of users at 7:52AM ET. Identical notices were posted across the status pages for the rest of Google’s services. Reports quickly mounted on Twitter after users couldn’t access Google’s basic services, causing the hashtag “#YouTubeDOWN” to trend. At its peak, the status page for Google’s services was a sea of red, to indicate they were all suffering an outage. All services are now green indicating that they’re fully operational. All of Google’s ser...

Pornhub is removing all videos uploaded to its site by unverified users, millions of videos in total, as part of a crackdown on user-uploaded content after two major payment processors suspended service. The decision, first reported by Motherboard, stems from a New York Times report that found the site was hosting videos of people who are underage and videos showing children being assaulted. The site announced last Tuesday that it would begin limiting uploads to verified users only. Uploads now have to come from official content partners or members of Pornhub’s “Model Program,” which requires age verification to sign up. Motherboard reports that all previously uploaded videos are now being pulled “pending verification and review” beginning in 2021. More than 8 million videos have been wipe...

I nearly gave up on Demon’s Souls. I should have known what I was getting into. I bought the Demon’s Souls remake for the PlayStation 5 as my opportunity to finally play a “Soulsborne” game. After hearing about the genre for more than a decade, I knew that the game would be extremely hard, that I’d die multiple times, and that the challenge was all part of the process of learning about and enjoying the game. But I wasn’t too worried — I like hard games. I loved the early hours of Hollow Knight. Beating Celeste’s grueling DLC chapter was a thrill. I figured that since I had gotten through those, and because I knew Demon’s Souls would be a challenge going in, I would be able to stick with it no matter what. My resolve was tested immediately That resolve was tested immediately. I died about a...

Electronic Arts has agreed to buy out UK developer Codemasters in a move that could see the US publishing giant wrest control of the racing video game genre. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next year for £6.04 (~$7.98) a share, valuing Codemasters at around $1.2 billion. Sky News first reported EA’s interest in Codemasters over the weekend, saying that the British company had previously agreed a $970 million deal with Rockstar Games and 2K Sports owner Take-Two Interactive. EA confirmed the agreement early Monday morning. Codemasters is one of the oldest British game developers, having been founded in the ‘80s and producing early hits like Dizzy for systems that were popular in the UK like the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64. In recent decades it’s been best known fo...

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has acknowledged the performance issues plaguing the game on base last-gen consoles, and has apologized for not showing the game running on the original PS4 and Xbox One prior to its release. “We should have paid more attention to making it play better on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One,” it said in a notice published on Twitter. The developer said it is hoping to fix the “most prominent problems” with a series of patches to be released over the coming months, but added that anyone who doesn’t want to wait will be able to return their copy of the game. The statement follows numerous ports about how poorly the game runs on the older machines. Players have reported choppy frame rates, weird physics, texture pop-in, and screen tearing. Its performance has qu...

The same Russian government hacking group responsible for a security breach at FireEye compromised the Treasury and Commerce departments and other US government agencies, The Washington Post reported. The group, known as APT29, or Cozy Bear, was responsible for hacking the US State Department and the White House during the Obama administration, according to the Post, and is the group that officials believe targeted COVID-19 vaccine research over the summer. Reuters reported that in addition to hacking Treasury and the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the hackers may have breached other US government entities. Government officials considered the hack dire enough that the National Security Council held an emergency meeting at the White ...

Software giant Oracle moved the company headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas, Bloomberg reported, the latest tech firm to depart Silicon Valley for the Lone Star State. Oracle did not immediately reply to a request for comment Sunday, but told CNBC that it was putting into place “a more flexible employee work location policy,” and that the move to Austin would “best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work.” Oracle, founded in 1977, is one of the older Valley tech firms, and is a staple of the area; the San Francisco Giants play at Oracle Park, and the company’s Redwood City campus features its well-known cylindrical buildings. It already has a campus in Austin, which it opened in 2018. Texas Gov. Greg A...