Technology

Samsung Electronics has announced the death of its chairman, Lee Kun-hee. The company says he died on October 25th with family including his son, vice-chairman Lee Jae-yong, at his side. He was 78. A cause of death was not given, but Lee had been incapacitated for many years after suffering a heart attack in 2014, causing him to withdraw from public life. Lee Jae-yong, also known as Jay Y. Lee, had been widely assumed to take over upon his father’s passing and has been viewed as the de facto leader in recent years. “The motivating driver of the company’s vision” Lee Kun-hee was a controversial figure who played a huge part in pushing Samsung from a cheap TV and appliances maker to one of the most powerful technology brands in the world. He became the richest man in South Korea, with the Sa...

Food delivery platform DoorDash has partnered with a restaurant for the first time to build a new brick-and-mortar store, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Burma Bites, a spin off of Oakland, California-based Burma Superstar, was designed for delivery and takeout, and will offer versions of menu items from the parent restaurant as well as new items in environmentally-friendly to-go containers, DoorDash said. According to the Chronicle, all menu items are priced between $12 and $19. DoorDash did not disclose the amount of its investment in Burma Bites, but told The Verge in an email it has been working on the project for about a year. The restaurant was originally supposed to open in March, but that was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. Georgie Thomas, head of regional merchant partn...

Epic Games fired back against Apple yet again in a new court filing, saying the iPhone maker “has no rights to the fruits of Epic’s labor,” the latest salvo in the ongoing battle between the two companies. A quick recap: Back in August, Epic introduced a new direct-payment system in its wildly popular Fortnite game to bypass Apple’s 30 percent fee. Apple kicked Fortnite off the App Store for breaking its rules, and Epic responded with a civil lawsuit against Apple, alleging that Apple was violating antitrust law. Epic also revealed that Apple threatened to terminate the developer account used to support the company’s Unreal Engine platform, which would prevent Epic from developing future games for iOS or Mac. Earlier this month, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted an injunctio...

In its latest teardown video, iFixit took apart an iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, and found that the devices look pretty similar to each other on the inside. The displays are interchangeable, iFixit found, and so are the 10.78 Wh batteries. The iPhone 12 is on the left, the iPhone 12 Pro is on the right. iFixit When they removed the camera shield on the iPhone 12, iFixit found a plastic spacer where the iPhone 12 Pro has its telephoto lens and LiDAR sensor. Both devices have 12 MP wide and ultra-wide cameras. iFixit also examined an X-ray (courtesy of Creative Electron) of the insides of the phones, which show the MagSafe wireless charging array. The X-ray of the iPhone 12 Pro appears to have a black border, but it’s the stainless steel frame (the iPhone 12 has an aluminum frame). iPhone Pro...

Patreon has updated its policies and will no longer support creator accounts on its platform that “advance disinformation promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory,” the company announced in a blog post. A “small number of creators” on Patreon have supported QAnon with their work, the platform says, adding it’s taking action because “a number of other online platforms become overrun with pages and groups actively focused around QAnon disinformation.” QAnon-dedicated creators identified by Patreon’s policy and trust & safety teams will have their accounts removed, the blog post added. The policy update “applies only to creators engaged in spreading QAnon-supporting disinformation,” the company said; while just “mentioning, entertaining, reporting on, or debunking QAnon” will not be consider...

Dell G5 15 $1,200 $1,640 27% off Prices taken at time of publishing. Dell’s capable G5 15 usually costs $1,640, but it’s $1,200 right now. That’s a great deal for a gaming laptop with a six-core Intel Core i7-10750H processor, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, a 1080p display with a 144Hz refresh rate, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 with Max-Q graphics chip. You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenue.

In 1939, Alfred Hitchcock came to Hollywood. The English master of suspense would ply his trade in sunny California, and Rebecca, his first American film, would win him his first and only Oscar. Despite the acclaim, Hitchcock hated Rebecca, as it was his first encounter with American censors and their stodgy Production Code, which made it nearly impossible to accurately adapt the Daphne du Maurier book on which it was based. Still, Hitchcock found a way, and we remember Rebecca now as a classic. Like other classics, Rebecca has been reinvented many times. Director Ben Wheatley’s 2020 adaptation is the latest, and it’s new on Netflix this week. Being shot in the modern era, Wheatley’s film has significantly fewer hurdles to clear, given that we no longer have official arbiters dictating wha...

If you take the typical death toll in the United States in a typical year and add the population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or the population of St. Louis, Missouri, you’ll end up with the number of people who died this year. There were nearly 300,000 more deaths than there would have been during a normal year, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without a pandemic, that many more people would still be alive. Most of those deaths, about two-thirds, were from COVID-19. But around 100,000 people died as a consequence of the pandemic, even if the virus didn’t directly kill them. They may have died because they avoided a hospital, despite their symptoms of — for example — a stroke, because of a local COVID-19 outbreak. Or maybe they couldn’t get trea...

The Italian Data Protection Authority has started an investigation into the widespread use of bots that generate fake nude images on messaging app Telegram. The news follows an investigation by security firm Sensity, which found that as of July 2020 more than 100,000 faked images had been generated and shared in public Telegram channels. The bots can generate fake nudes that have watermarks or that show only partial nudity, and users pay to “reveal” the whole image. Users could submit a photo of a woman to the bot and receive a version of the photo back with clothing “removed” and no indication that the image had been altered. And according to Sensity, a limited number of the bot-generated images, most of which are pulled from social media accounts and then manipulated, are of victims who ...

After a hard-fought win over Korean team Gen.G, all five members of Europe’s G2 Esports stood at the edge of a pool of clear, glistening water to take a bow and celebrate their victory. Two members then picked up their star teammate, Rasmus “Caps” Borregaard Winther, and held him over the water, as if to throw him overboard. It’s a good thing they didn’t — despite how real the water may have looked to viewers, it was nothing but pixels. The annual League of Legends World Championship is currently underway in Shanghai, and like most major events, it has had to be re-envisioned in order to be possible in our new pandemic-dominated reality. Typically, the early stages of the tournament are something of a traveling road show, with different rounds taking place in different cities. In 2020, thi...

Fortnite kicked off its annual “Fortnitemares” Halloween event this week, and this year, you get to play as a killer ghost. In this year’s Fortnitemares mode, the Fortnite island is packed with spooky touches — a foreboding fog can hang over the island, houses have Halloween decorations, and I’ve even found a witch’s hut surrounded by rideable brooms. But the real twist in Fortnitemares happens when you die: after your untimely demise, you’re returned to the island as a ghost so you can hunt — and troll — the surviving humans. [embedded content] As a ghost, you can consume materials, health items, guns, and even the Marvel-themed superpowers littered around the map so that the humans can’t use them against you. If you stand still, your purple body disappears so you can hide in plain sight ...

Facebook wants a New York University research project to stop collecting data about the social platform’s political ad-targeting, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Ad Observatory, a project of NYU’s engineering school with more than 6,000 volunteers, uses its AdObserver browser extension to scrape data from political ads shown on Facebook. But Facebook says the program is violates its terms of service, which bar scraping. A Facebook official sent a letter to the Ad Observatory researchers October 16th, saying that “scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us.” The letter also threatened further enforcement action if the project did not shut down and delete the data it has collected, according to the WSJ. The company coul...