Technology

A judge in San Francisco said Thursday she’s not likely to lift a temporary block on the US government’s attempts to ban WeChat. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler responded to the Trump administration’s request for a stay of her September 20th preliminary injunction, which prevents the government from halting new downloads of WeChat in the US and from blocking transactions related to the app. Beeler did not issue a ruling Thursday but said the government had not presented new evidence to persuade her that there were significant national security concerns with allowing WeChat to remain active in the US. Beeler said in her September 20th order that a group of WeChat users had shown “serious questions” about whether the ban would potentially violate their First Amendment rights, even consider...

Google detailed a host of new improvements at its “Search On” event that it will make to its foundational Google search service in the coming weeks and months. The changes are largely focused on using new AI and machine learning techniques to provide better search results for users. Chief among them: a new spell checking tool that Google promises will help identify even the most poorly spelled queries. According to Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s head of search, 15 percent of Google search queries each day are ones that Google has never seen before, meaning the company has to constantly work to improve its results. Part of that is because of poorly spelled queries. According to Cathy Edwards, VP engineering at Google, 1 in 10 search queries on Google are misspelled. Google has long tried to h...

On March 22nd, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott did something seemingly innocuous: he posted a picture of his boarding pass to Instagram. That post was the beginning of a convoluted six-month saga for hacker Alex Hope. In a blog post, Hope details how they were sent Abbott’s post by a friend and asked if it would be possible to “hack this man” with only the information on the boarding pass. Upon realizing they were indeed able to find personal information, most notably Abbott’s passport number, on the airline website, their task quickly devolved into a black hole of emails, phone calls, and frantic Google searches for definitions of cybercrimes. Hope, clearly a master of internet-age storytelling, divides each act with headings like “what have i done,” “calling 1300 CYBERONE,” ...

Two days ago, I received a giant heavy metal wedge from Sony. The largest side contained a camera, and a 15.6-inch 4K screen. I plugged it into a powerful gaming computer, and fired up the first demo. A tiny, intricately detailed Volkswagen Atlas materialized in front of my face — and when I pressed a button, it floated right up out of the screen. A couple minutes later, I was watching a 4-inch tall anime girl dance her heart out inside Sony’s contraption, tapping her feet atop a floor of hexagonal mirrors. It’s the magic of stereoscopic 3D. The wedge is Sony’s new Spatial Reality Display, and it’s not remotely a new idea — it’s just the industry’s latest attempt to build a so-called “holographic display” for the content creators of the world who’d like to see their digital objects and des...

Facebook says a “small number” of customers have been locked out of their new Oculus Quest 2 headsets, following a string of reports that buyers were unable to use the virtual reality headsets because their Facebook accounts were suspended. On Twitter, it urged users to contact Oculus if they had problems. As UploadVR reported yesterday, users complained that they had been suspended for unclear reasons while they were trying to set up the Quest 2. One poster on the Oculus subreddit, for instance, described getting banned after creating a Facebook page for the first time and merging it with an existing Oculus account. “I logged into Facebook’s website to lock down my profile, as I had no intention of using the social media site more than was needed, and within minutes of merging accounts an...

Amazon extended its work-from-home policy into 2021 for corporate employees, but call center workers in the Philippines contracted by the company’s Ring subsidiary continue to work in person with increased risk of COVID-19 infection, as detailed in a report for NBC News by Olivia Solon and April Glaser. Employees of Teleperformance — contracted by Ring in the Philippines — describe little to no support in making their workplace safer during the pandemic. The company is under increased scrutiny after photos of employees sleeping in its offices in Cebu City were released by the press. Solon and Glaser report that Teleperformance continues to downplay concerns even with new pressure to modify policies from worker organizations like BPO Industry Employees Network. Per Ring’s policies, workers ...

Twitter is experiencing an outage that began in the early evening on Thursday, with some users reporting problems sending tweets and refreshing their timelines starting shortly after 5:30PM ET. We have seen no new tweets cross our timelines since then, though we were able to find a tweet sent as late as 5:40PM ET using Twitter’s search tool. User-generated reports on Downdetector.com are skyrocketing as well, but there’s no communication from the company itself as to the nature of the outrage. Twitter’s last major outage, occurring in February of this year, still allowed users to circumvent that outage by scheduling tweets. This does not appear to be a useable workaround right now. Verge staffers are seeing the outage across the United States and in the UK, though we have been able to send...

Google Assistant is now available on newer Samsung smart TVs in the US, the companies announced. The AI helper will be available on Samsung 2020 smart TV models, including the 2020 8K and 4K QLED models, the 2020 Crystal UHD TVs, 2020 Frame and Serif sets, and 2020 Sero and Terrace models. The update will be available in the US first and roll out to more countries soon, according to Google. Pressing down on the TV’s remote control mic will activate Assistant, and users will be able to switch channels, open apps, and adjust the TV’s volume with voice commands. The TVs already had voice command settings available that could be controlled with the mic on the remote, but you’ll have to tell it you want to use Google Assistant rather than Samsung’s default Bixby assistant. And you can control o...

We knew that Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red’s highly anticipated sci-fi RPG, would be coming to Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service at some point. But it hasn’t been clear exactly when, beyond that it would arrive sometime this year after the game’s launch on PC and consoles. Stadia players got good news today, though, as CD Projekt Red confirmed in a video presentation that the game will be arriving on Stadia the same day it launches on other platforms: November 19th. Cyberpunk 2077 has been one of Stadia’s marquee releases for some time. Google announced the game was coming to Stadia all the way back in August 2019, but didn’t give a firmer release than “coming soon.” At that time, the game was set to launch on other platforms on April 16th, but it was delayed twice this year, to its cu...

Cruise, the self-driving company owned by General Motors, has been approved to test its driverless cars on public roads in California. The company says it plans to test vehicles without a human safety driver behind the wheel before the end of 2020. Cruise is the fifth to receive a driverless permit from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the others being Waymo, Nuro, Zoox, and AutoX. Currently, 60 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California. Dan Ammann, CEO of Cruise, said in a blog post that the company may not have been the first to receive a driverless permit, but it intends to be the first to test fully driverless cars in San Francisco. “Before the end of the year, we’ll be sending cars out onto the streets of SF — without gasol...

The Haunting of Bly Manor, which premiered last week on Netflix, makes me a little sad I’ve never seen a ghost. It’s the second series from The Haunting of Hill House creator Mike Flanagan. Like American Horror Story, the Haunting shows are anthology dramas, with each series telling a self-contained story. They’re not connected, in other words, other than by cast and aesthetic — each show is a drama first, horror show second, set largely in lush, spooky estates. Like Hill House, Bly Manor is based on a foundational horror text. For this go-round, Flanagan has chosen Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw. The original story is told in flashback by an unnamed narrator who spins a tale of a governess hired to take care of a wealthy man’s niece and nephew in the stately Bly Manor. In...

Apple is taking another try at building a smart home speaker with the new HomePod mini, a smaller, less expensive version of its original HomePod. The original HomePod was a product that focused more on being a great speaker, rather than being a great smart speaker. The HomePod mini takes the opposite approach: it’s not just another avenue for Apple to put Apple Music or Siri into your home. It’s a way for Apple to vastly expand its HomeKit ecosystem to a much wider audience than ever before. The cheapest gateway yet to Apple’s smart home setup Sure, the HomePod mini will probably sound good — given that it’s a $99 speaker going up against the likes of the new Nest Audio and fourth-generation Echo, it has to. And having more avenues to push its subscription services to customers is a nice ...