Technology

The Department of Justice is preparing to file antitrust charges against Google’s parent company Alphabet possibly as early as this month, The New York Times reported. Attorney General William Barr is moving forward with the case despite the objections of Justice Department lawyers who say they need more time to prepare their case and worry that pushing to file charges this month could weaken the case, according to the Times. The Justice Department opened its probe into Google last June, reportedly with a focus on its massive search business and other parts of the company. The Justice Department also opened another, broader probe last July to investigate whether big technology firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google were stifling competition. The department said the review would “consider ...

If you’re curious what kind of data Twitter stores on you — and what those hackers could have stolen during their big bitcoin scam — you can now find out once again. Twitter has reenabled the ability to download archives of “Your Twitter Data,” nearly two months after shutting off the feature as a precaution against further hacking. To access it, go to Settings > Account > Your Twitter data and you should see a screen like the one below, where you’ll need to type in your password to start the transfer. If you’re using a phone app, it may shove you over to the mobile website instead. It also might take a while before the archive is ready: I pressed the button an hour ago, and I’m still waiting for the in-app notification so I can actually download it. Twitter had a pretty good reason ...

Logitech G has announced a new esports training program for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive called Playmaster, which is designed to help assess your skills and help you practice specific techniques, like tracking players, moving, and (of course) shooting. The company is taking this seriously, too. It’s built custom maps and levels within CS:GO to help both assess players’ current skill levels and for practice. It’s also worked with the Lero Esports Science Research Lab at the University of Limerick to develop the software — as the company proudly boasts in the announcement, Playmaster is “backed by science.” To start, players take a roughly 30-minute skill test that will allow the software to get a baseline reading for where you’re at now and your specific strengths and weaknesses. You’ll...

On September 8th, CBS All Access is holding an all-day streaming event to commemorate the 54th anniversary of the premiere of the original Star Trek television show. I’ll admit I skimmed the email announcement until I found what I was looking for: yes, Patrick Stewart aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard will be part of the Star Trek panel discussions and will even reunite with Jonathan Frakes aka William Riker aka Number One aka Ensign Babyface. You can tell I am a) respectful of Star Trek because I didn’t go with a cheap “boldly go” or “engage!” pun in my lede, and b) I have a somewhat limited scope of interest in the Star Trek universe. But I think that’s OK! Unlike that other space-related franchise, you can fully enjoy one aspect of the Star Trek dynasty and it doesn’t mean you’re any less of ...

We weren’t huge fans of the LG Velvet, the design-first, specs-second flagship smartphone the company released this summer. The sleek phone felt stuttery in our review. But what if I told you the T-Mobile variant comes with a different chip? Today, T-Mobile announced it’s brought an LG Velvet to the United States with a MediaTek Dimensity 1000C processor inside, instead of the mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 and 765G it usually employs. It’s one of the first times in recent memory we’ve seen a MediaTek chip in a US flagship phone, so it’s a significant milestone for a company that generally plays second-fiddle to Qualcomm, if nothing else. The question is whether T-Mobile is now giving you a faster chip than the existing LG Velvet can get you, and that’s not clear yet. At first glance, i...

Gigabyte has announced the Aorus 15P, a portable laptop tailored to professional gaming. It’s available now on Gigabyte’s online store, starting at $1,599.99. The company says it worked with esports teams, including G2 Esports, to design the new laptop. It weighs 4.4 pounds (2kg) — which is portable so far as gaming laptops go — and it’s 0.9 inches thick. Gigabyte says the chassis passed “a series of pressure tests” for durability. Gigabyte is promising up to eight hours of battery life, which is certainly an optimistic prediction for a gaming rig (and this one has a per-key RGB keyboard, which might draw some extra power). The Aorus 15P under the Prime95 and Furmark stress tests. Gigabyte says the unit’s temperature is 32 degrees Celsius.Image: Gigabyte Specs-wise, the 15P comes with a 14...

In 2011, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe became an unstoppable box office and cultural force, THQ Studio Australia was hard at work on a video game tie-in for an upcoming movie called The Avengers. Not the Destiny-esque Marvel’s Avengers game that’s being released tomorrow — an Avengers game that never saw the light of day. A first-person superhero brawler, instead of the traditional behind-the-character perspective. A game on a deadline so stressful that one developer beat up his filing cabinet with an umbrella, and another decided to repeatedly stab his desk with a giant kitchen knife. Today I am featured in an article about a game I worked on that never came out. It includes dev quotes like: “Just put the knife down. We’ll go outside and figure this out.”https://t...

Vivo is developing one of the coolest looking phones I’ve ever seen. In a video posted to Weibo (and spotted by Android Authority), the company confirms that its new phone, which doesn’t yet have a name or release date, can change its rear case’s color with the press of a button. The company claims to be using electrochromic glass to achieve this dazzling effect, the same tech that OnePlus employed in its Concept One phone to obscure its rear camera from view when it wasn’t being used. In OnePlus’ proof of concept, shown at CES 2020, an electric signal caused the glass to switch between being tinted or transparent. Vivo’s implementation takes it further by using the tech to change the color of the phone’s glass rear, which is an even more fun party trick. A mobile phone brand is developing...

A man yells in a bus full of people that he browsed eight sites for divorce lawyers. A woman blithely tells her log in information to strangers in a movie house. A pair of coworkers has an unflattering conversation out loud about a nearby colleague (including verbal descriptions of “puke emoji”) and a woman uses a megaphone to broadcast her credit card information to anyone within earshot. Some of them are embarrassing, some are potential privacy violations, but they’re among the examples in Apple’s new Over Sharing ad, which re-emphasizes the company’s focus — or at least its image — of being a protector of online privacy. The ad’s tagline, shown at the end, reads “Some things shouldn’t be shared. iPhone helps keep it that way.” It doesn’t mention any of its tech rivals who have made head...

Production of Warner Bros.’ The Batman has been delayed yet again, this time because star Robert Pattison has tested positive for COVID-19, Vanity Fair reported. The highly-anticipated retelling of the story of the caped crusader with the Twilight star in the title role had just resumed shooting a few days ago in London. “A member of The Batman production has tested positive for Covid-19, and is isolating in accordance with established protocols. Filming is temporarily paused,” Warner Bros. told VF in a statement. The studio did not confirm who the infected person was. The film already had been delayed several months back in March, due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the studio reshuffled its lineup of upcoming movies. It was to hit theaters in June 2021, but was pushed back to October 20...

Small satellite launcher Rocket Lab says it has successfully flown one of its own satellites, demonstrating that the spacecraft’s design holds up in Earth orbit. It’s the first time the company has flown its in-house cylindrical spacecraft, known as the Photon, which Rocket Lab hopes to sell to customers for use in ambitious deep-space missions. The satellite was secretly a part of Rocket Lab’s most recent launch. On August 30th, the company’s Electron rocket took off from Rocket Lab’s primary launch site in New Zealand, lofting a single satellite for the company Capella Space. But once the satellite had separated from the rocket, part of the Electron actually turned into a satellite and remained in orbit around Earth. The satellite was Electron’s kick stage — a small platform that sits on...

MSI is best known for its gaming laptops, but today, it’s announcing a new business line for remote professionals. The line includes the Summit E series and the Summit B series, each with 14- and 15-inch models, along with the 13-inch convertible E13 Flip. There’s no word on pricing or availability for the Summit line yet, but they certainly look like high-end models. The chassis are aluminum, with thin bezels and what MSI calls “military-grade durability.” Image: MSI Both series have some other nice features as well. The big news is that they’re powered by Intel’s new 11th Gen “Tiger Lake” processors and support the company’s new Thunderbolt 4 standard as well. The E series looks to be geared more toward creative work. Its models include discrete graphics up to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650Ti...