Technology

Gogo, the in-flight internet provider, has found a buyer for its commercial airline business. Intelsat, the world’s second largest satellite operator by revenue, has agreed to purchase Gogo’s Wi-Fi business for $400 million in cash, the companies announced Tuesday. It’s an unlikely pairing, mostly because Intelsat filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May. The bankruptcy was seen as a means for Intelsat to begin paying down its nearly $15 billion debt load while positioning itself to participate in a Federal Communications Commission spectrum clearing program, the company has said. The FCC is clearing out the C-band (4-8 GHz) to make space for 5G customers, and Intelsat is participating in the program that could net the company nearly $5 billion by selling airwave licenses it currently owns. ...

Amazon has deleted two job listings posted to its corporate employment website detailing “intelligence analyst” roles that involved, among other duties, monitoring “labor organizing threats” within the company. The listings, which were posted days ago, first began circulating on Twitter earlier today, before Amazon removed them in response to widespread outcry on social media. The company now claims the listings were not accurate representations of the roles, according to CNBC. “The job post was not an accurate description of the role — it was made in error and has since been corrected,” an Amazon representative said in a statement, although Amazon does not appear to be offering any information as to how the listings were inaccurate. The job listings were for positions within Amazon’s glob...

Apple on Tuesday released iOS 13.7, adding support for a new exposure notification system for powering COVID-19 tracking. The system is an extension of the existing coronavirus contact tracing efforts, but it removes the burden on states of having to build a dedicated app. News of the new software framework was first announced earlier today in a joint statement from Apple and Google. This native support was expected, as it was announced when the exposure notification API — developed collaboratively between Apple and Google — was revealed in April. But at the time, we didn’t know exactly when it would arrive. Here’s how it will work, from The Verge’s report on the announcement: Under the new system, participating health departments will assemble a configuration file, allowing them to set th...

OnlyFans confirmed new rule changes to The Verge today that could impact how much money creators make on the platform, as well as how quickly they get paid. The new rules include a $100 cap on paid private messages, compared to $200 before, and a $50 cap on pay-per-view posts for creators who don’t charge a subscription, compared to $200 previously. There’s also a new maximum tip price of $100 for the first four months a creator is active on the site. After that point, it increases to $200, which was the standard for all creators up until this point. OnlyFans is also lengthening the pending payout period from seven to 21 days for creators in 14 countries, including India, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Venezuela. OnlyFans says the changes reflect an “evolving process” that’s m...

Vlambeer, the indie studio behind beloved games such as Super Crate Box, Nuclear Throne, and Ridiculous Fishing, is shutting down. The developer, which celebrates its 10th anniversary today, announced the news on Twitter. “We had a beautiful run, made incredible games, and worked with amazing people, but it is time for new things,” the developer said. “So we’re announcing the end of Vlambeer.” The Dutch studio was founded in 2010 by Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail and has been a stalwart of the indie community. Vlambeer has been especially vocal on issues of game clones; Ismail is a well-known advocate within the community for topics like diversity and independent development. “It’s not a sad day for us, but the happy conclusion to a whirlwind decade filled with screenshake,” the develop...

If you’re on the hunt for a gaming laptop to help you run your games at reasonably fast frame rates that will also serve as a great all-around machine for non-gaming tasks, the Razer Blade 15 is a solid option. You can get this machine at Amazon for $400 off its original price, which brings it down to $1,400. It comes with Intel’s competent six-core Core i7-10750H processor, Nvidia’s RTX 2060 graphics chip, 16GB of RAM, and a fast 512GB SSD. Its 15.6-inch 1080p display has a 144Hz refresh rate, raising the ceiling of how smoothly games can run on the laptop. This feature also allows for fluid scrolling outside of games. Razer’s Blade 15 costs more than many other 15.6-inch gaming laptops, but it’s worth considering if you want stellar build quality and a Thunderbolt 3 port, which can be us...

Netflix on Tuesday announced that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the showrunners of HBO’s Game of Thrones, are working on an adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy as their first major project since signing exclusive contracts with the streaming service last year. “Liu Cixin’s trilogy is the most ambitious science-fiction series we’ve read, taking readers on a journey from the 1960s until the end of time, from life on our pale blue dot to the distant fringes of the universe. We look forward to spending the next years of our lives bringing this to life for audiences around the world,” reads the duo’s joint statement. “We look forward to spending the next years of our lives bringing this to life for audiences around the world.” Known formally a...

Update September 1st, 10:43AM ET: The following article has been updated following Apple’s termination of Epic Games’ developer account. That action made it impossible to reinstall all Epic apps associated with that account, including Fortnite and the Inifinity Blade trilogy. The headline has been updated to reflect this fact. Fortnite disappeared from the App Store earlier this month as part of developer Epic Games’ big legal and regulatory showdown with Apple, but the battle royale hit was not gone entirely — at least not for a little while. Apple terminated Epic’s developer account last week, making it impossible to reinstall iOS versions of Epic’s apps, but there was a short period of time during which iPhone and iPad owners were still able to get their hands on Fortnite using a lesser...

The difficulty of staying focused in an age of distractions is one of those annoyingly accurate cliches. (I checked my phone three times just writing this paragraph.) But a startup named Auctify has what it claims is the solution: smart glasses that use AI to monitor what you’re looking at and nudge you to pay attention. Depending on your worldview, it’s the product of your dreams or a productivity-hacking nightmare. The glasses are called Specs, and they launch today on Indiegogo. The premise is simple: a camera built into the frame of Specs uses machine learning to identify what you’re looking at, whether that’s a laptop, book, or a fellow human being. It records this data and sends it to a connected app where users can take action in a number of ways. Machine learning tracks how you spe...

Dead by Daylight is coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X this year, and not just as a technicality: developer Behaviour Interactive says the next-gen console versions will not only run at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, but that it’s aiming to create a “remastered edition of the game” as well. Players who purchased the game on current-gen will receive a free next-gen upgrade The PS5 and Series X ports won’t be the only ones to receive a graphical update, Behavior promises. Every version of the game will get updated animations, lighting, visual effects, modeling, and textures with the intent to “improve the immersion tenfold, making the environments as realistic as a scary, disturbing nightmare,” the company says. Behaviour Interactive is also promising that players who purchas...

Today let’s talk about the controversy around a militia organizing on Facebook, the violence that followed, and where that leaves the company heading into this week’s planned visit by the president to Kenosha, WI, threatening to stoke more unrest. Kenosha police shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back last week, leading to protests in the city. Two people were killed and a third was injured in a shooting during one of the protests, and a 17-year-old has been charged in connection with the shootings. The afternoon before the murders, a 3,000-member Facebook group calling themselves the Kenosha Guard had advertised an event on Facebook encouraging an armed response to the unrest. It was taken down after the shooting. My colleague Russell Brandom broke the news at The Verge: In a post Tuesda...

A newly awarded patent suggests that Sonos is still hard at work on its debut pair of wireless headphones, and gives us a look at their possible design and functionality, Protocol reports. The patent shows a couple of designs that look similar to other over-ear headphones from the likes of Sony and Sennheiser. It also mentions support for multiple voice assistants via wake words, as well as Sonos-specific features like integrating with an existing multi-room speaker setup. There have been reports that Sonos is working on a pair of headphones for over a year now. In early 2019 Bloomberg was first to report on their existence, and said that the audio company was working on a pair of headphones that would cost over $300 and would include support for multiple voice assistants. Sonos speakers s...