Technology

It’s going to be your best look at Middle Earth yet — The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are finally getting a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release, with preorders now available and shipping starting from December 1st in the US. That’s just in time for the holidays. The news was shared by none other than Samwise Gamgee himself via fansite TheOneRing, with actor Sean Astin announcing the remaster in the video below. “Now, because it’s in 4K UHD you know it’s going to be the most incredible home-viewing experience possible,” said Astin. “Peter Jackson oversaw the remastering himself, and I can say that working with Peter was the adventure of a lifetime, and the friendships that I made will last forever. Enjoy.” The Lord of the Rings is going to be particularly delightful to see in 4K UHD,...

Global TV shipments hit a “historical high” in the third quarter of this year, according to a new report from TrendForce. 62.05 million units were shipped over the course of the quarter, a 12.9 percent increase over the same period last year, and 38.8 percent increase from the previous quarter. Both Samsung and LG, the two largest TV manufacturers, said today that they’re expecting profits to increase this quarter compared to last year. TrendForce gave a couple of different factors for the historic high. It said that in North America, TV demand increased by 20 percent as people spent more time at home due to the pandemic. The quarterly spike also accounts for TV shipment that were delayed from the first half of the year, according to the supply-chain analytics company. TrendForce’s report ...

Einride, the Swedish autonomous trucking startup, unveiled a new vehicle type that the company hopes to have on the road delivering freight starting in 2021. The vehicles, dubbed Autonomous Electric Transport (AET), came in four different variations. And much like Einride’s previous prototypes, they come without steering wheels, pedals, windshields, and, in general, no cab at all. Einride has been in the business of releasing interesting, eye-catching prototype vehicles since it was founded in 2016. There was the cab-less T-Pod, released in 2017, four of which are operating on public roads hauling freight for Oatly, the Swedish food producer. A year later, the company unveiled the T-Log, built to be more powerful than its predecessor for the job of (you guessed it) hauling tons of giant tr...

Netflix has been indicted in Texas on charges that the film Cuties contains lewd depictions of children. The indictment follows controversial backlash from conservative groups over certain scenes in the film where young girls dance provocatively. A grand jury in Tyler County, Texas, is charging Netflix with “Promotion Of Lewd Visual Material Depicting A Child,” a criminal act in Texas that was introduced into state law in 2018, Reuters reported. The charge alleges that Cuties, a movie about a group of young girls who form a dance troupe, “depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was created,” according to the indictment filing. The filing also states that said conte...

Fortnite creator Epic Games is partnering with carmakers, starting with General Motors, to use its Unreal Engine game development platform to build in-car software in what Epic is calling its “human-machine interface” (HMI) initiative. The first car to use Unreal Engine, which is the primary software toolset with which developers make Fortnite and countless other big-budget video games, will be GMC’s upcoming Hummer EV, set to be unveiled on October 20th. The logic is simple: modern cars are primarily designed using software, and assembled cars carry scores of onboard computers and rely on touchscreens and digital interfaces to power infotainment centers and other sources of information displayed to drivers. And Unreal Engine is a great platform for building software, which Epic thinks mak...

Three years after the computer industry promised to double the speed of the world’s computer memory with the DDR5 spec, it’s finally nearly almost here. SK Hynix has officially announced the world’s first DDR5 memory modules. The company tells The Verge it expected to start selling them in Q3 2021, but they’re ready whenever systems can support them. Here they are: Currently, we’re looking at 32 or 64GB to a stick.Image: SK Hynix SK Hynix claims this DRAM offers up to 5,600Mbps of raw bandwidth — not quite the maximum 6,400Mbps the DDR5 spec allows, but a full 1.8 times faster than standard DDR4, and all at a lower voltage of 1.1V instead of 1.2V, for what SK Hynix claims will be a 20 percent power savings. (Power consumption is measured in watts, not volts, in case you’re wondering about ...

If you’ve got pokémon on the brain with the imminent release of Pokémon Sword and Shield’s next expansion, Hori’s got lots of good-looking accessories on the way to help you deck out your Nintendo Switch with the beloved pocket monsters, including carrying cases, skins for your Switch Lite, and even themed versions of Hori’s Split Pad Pro grip controller. Here’s a picture of all of them in one place, as shared by Hori on Twitter: Unfortunately, if you’ve now set your heart on buying some of the new accessories, you can’t actually do that just yet. Hori’s tweet says that pre-orders are coming “holiday 2020,” so hopefully that means they’ll kick off soon. If you want to start planning which fit your budget now, Hori’s online storefront does at least list prices. If you absolutely must buy so...

With the proclamation that “a new journey begins,” AMD is announcing its new lineup of Ryzen 5000 processors for desktops, featuring its new Zen 3 architecture. The new chips are, if you go by AMD’s website, going to be focused specifically on gaming and content creation and could be a powerful new competitor to Intel’s 10th gen desktop lineup. (Intel’s 11th gen desktop chips won’t arrive till 2021.) While we can’t give you much more information about AMD’s new chips yet, gamers and creators can definitely look forward to an interesting look at what could be your next processor. Want to find out more? You can attend yourself: WHEN DOES AMD’s EVENT START? It starts tomorrow, October 8th, at 12PM ET / 9AM PT / 5PM BST. WHERE CAN I WATCH AMD’s EVENT? We will have the live stream video embedde...

Streamers seem to have flocked to Twitch from Mixer after the Microsoft-owned live-streaming service announced plans to shut down in June. A new report shows that Twitch’s share of hours broadcast on major live-streaming platforms jumped up by over 14 percentage points this quarter, taking away the nearly identical just over 14 percent market share that Mixer previously held. With Mixer out of the picture, Twitch ended up with 91.1 percent of all hours spent streaming on these platforms between July and September, according to a new report from Streamlabs & Stream Hatchet that looked at streaming activity on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook Gaming. Facebook Gaming grew slightly during that time period, to 3.4 percent from 2.4 percent, and YouTube shrunk slightly, to 5.5 percent from 6.7 p...

Facebook will ban US-based political ads indefinitely after the presidential election, attempting to forestall confusion over its results. “While ads are an important way to express voice, we plan to temporarily stop running all social issue, electoral, or political ads in the US after the polls close on November 3rd, to reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse,” the company says. Facebook is responding to widespread concern that social media could muddle election results. The company is also taking steps to stop candidates from prematurely declaring victory. When the polls close, it will add an information box at the top of Facebook and Instagram’s apps, noting whether major media outlets like Reuters have declared a winner. It already labels some election-related posts with a link to ...

Instagram has rolled out an update to the Threads app, and it’s a pretty big change. While Threads previously only allowed you to message close friends (that is, accounts you’d added to your “Close Friends” list on Instagram), you can now use it to message any Instagram user. As planet Earth’s only user of Threads, I am sad. Okay, so I exaggerated. I’m not the only user of Threads — some 220,000 people were using Instagram’s Threads app as of last year. But that’s less than 0.1 percent of Instagram’s monthly active users, which number more than one billion. And it’s not hard to see why Threads isn’t that popular — it essentially takes some stuff you can already do with Instagram and asks you to do it on a different app. But I use Threads because it just feels intimate. It’s the only messag...

Ten years ago today, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released Instagram into the world. Less than a year and a half later, Facebook acquired it, in what is widely regarded as one of the shrewdest acquisitions in the history of the tech industry. It is now one of the most popular apps in the world and has thrived during the pandemic. But regulators and competitors continue to nip at its heels — TikTok has reportedly now surpassed it as the second-most popular app for teens, after Snapchat — and there’s no telling what it might look like another decade from now. That’s one reason why the company is investing heavily in messaging features at the moment, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told me last week: they make the app sticky. The company also brought back some of its classic app icons as a bir...