Technology

Well, we had another hearing with the platform CEOs. The dream with this sort of thing is that Congress shows up with a full command of the issues, and asks the CEOs good-faith questions about matters of policy and law. And then I’d come along at the end of the day to walk you through the more provocative questions and productive answers, and gesture at what likely policy outcomes we could expect from this exercise in representative democracy. But “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?,” a hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, was not that kind of exercise. The word “sham” got kicked around a lot, especially by the participants. “Stunt,” too. Some of the Democrats declined to ask any questions at all. It was not the first of ...

Sony’s PlayStation VR headset is four years old, but the company isn’t giving up on it when the PlayStation 5 console launches next month. The headset is compatible with the new system, but you will need a special adapter. And Sony on Wednesday launched the online request form you’ll need to fill out if you want to get your hands on one for free. The adapter is actually not for the headset itself but the PlayStation Camera accessory that’s required to perform tracking while you wear the PSVR headset, as the new PS5 HD camera accessory isn’t compatible with the headset. Beyond that, everything is supposed to work, meaning you should be able to plug your PSVR headset into the PS5 and use your existing PlayStation Move controllers to play all but two PSVR games, Sony confirmed earlier this ye...

With the PS5 launch roughly two weeks away, Sony has unveiled a redesign for its PlayStation App on iOS and Android, and it makes me very excited to try it out when the new console launches. Early adopters of the console will have the ability to remotely launch games, sign in to their PS5 directly from the app, and the app will even allow you to remotely manage storage on your console in case you need to make room for a new game to install. Previously, the PlayStation App would let you download games on the PS4, but the app now allows me to download and launch games, plus manage the storage on my PS5. Based on Sony’s blog post, it looks like PS5 owners will have a lot more freedom to manage their consoles without directly interacting with it. It was such a pain having to shuffle around bet...

T-Mobile has announced another expansion of its 2.5GHz midband 5G network, which is now available in dozens of new cities, nearly doubling the coverage of its last major midband rollout from the end of September. With today’s expansion announcement, T-Mobile says that it now has midband 5G support in nearly 410 cities and towns in the United States. The new expansion comes just after the launch of Apple’s new 5G-compatible iPhone 12 lineup, which is expected to vastly increase the number of 5G devices in the US. T-Mobile’s 5G network combines its widely available 600MHz low-band network (which offers coverage on a nationwide scale but not much in the way of speed improvements of LTE) with the faster 2.5GHz network (which it acquired from Sprint) along with its ultra-fast mmWave network (wh...

3Doodler’s 3D-printing pens cover a wide range of potential uses, from preschool art projects to high-end professional model making. With the Pro Plus, 3Doodler is attempting to refine that professional offering, changing up how you adjust settings while drawing in 3D and offering more materials in more shapes and sizes to work with. The Pro Plus is an upgraded version of the 3Doodler Pro, and it carries over a lot of its visual design. When we covered that last version, we noted its streamlined look and more granular controls but were still left skeptical that the company would escape the “toy” association it gained with its other pens. The Pro Plus keeps a lot of what worked with the previous Pro, while slimming down the device by 50 percent and providing improved performance. The dial c...

Sony has announced more details about how its PlayStation Plus Collection will work in a new blog post. The service will launch alongside the console in the US on November 12th, and it’ll offer PS5 owners over a dozen classic PS4 titles. The titles will be available for PS Plus subscribers at no additional cost, and they’ll remain accessible for as long as a subscription is active. The service’s launch date varies globally depending on when the console itself will be available. It’ll be available on November 12th in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, and on November 19th in Europe, the Middle East, South America, Asia, and South Africa. The collection is not available in China, Sony says, and it seems to only be available for PS5 customers. It’s not cle...

Like most shared scooter companies, Lime was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. “We saw a 95 percent drop in ridership,” Lime CEO Wayne Ting says in an interview. “We’re a mobility company. And one of the things with mobility companies, when communities shut down, riders shut down.” But while the world still remains in the grip of COVID-19, Lime’s scooter business has begun to rebound. In May, the company made a crucial investment deal with Uber and others for $170 million to take over the ride-hailing company’s bike and scooter business Jump. That deal also saw Ting, then Lime’s global operations head (and former chief of staff to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi), replace Brad Bao as CEO. Now, Ting says that Lime’s riders are coming back; the company just announced it has reached the milest...

The creators of Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most anticipated video games of the last few years, are having a rough go of it in the lead-up to launch, complicated by yet another delay announced yesterday to help the CD Projekt Red developers finish polishing the game before it launches across nine platforms on December 10th. Now, senior game designer Andrzej Zawadzki has taken to Twitter in the aftermath of the delay announcement to plead with fans to exercise some basic human decency by not continuing to send the Polish studio death threats. “I want to address one thing in regards of the @CyberpunkGame delay. I understand you’re feeling angry, disappointed and want to voice your opinion about it. However, sending death threats to the developers is absolutely unacceptable and just wrong. We ...

Say you’re a female employee working for a small tech company. You’re sitting in a meeting with your boss, the CEO. He’s — hypothetically — a 38-year-old white man with $1.2 million in the bank. You have student debt, a sick cat, whatever. Basically, you need this job. But your boss, he won’t stop hitting on you. Slack messages asking you to drinks, photos of the views from his weekend bike rides. Then, during the Wednesday morning meeting, he takes things even further. Puts a hand on your knee, says he wants to get to know you better. What do you do? You could go to HR, try to work things out internally. Maybe your company has a dedicated HR specialist, rather than an overworked recruiter who’s been given HR responsibilities and doubles as the office manager. And what if that doesn’t work...

Apple’s iPhone 12 lineup has the ability to wirelessly charge an external accessory, according to a series of newly unveiled FCC filings that just went public yesterday. The documents first spotted by VentureBeat’s Jeremy Horwitz say the phone “supports a built-in inductive charging transmitter and receiver.” Apple has not officially announced any such functionality that could be used to charge future AirPods or Apple’s long rumored Tile-competitor dubbed “AirTags.” “In addition to being able to be charged by a desktop WPT [wireless power transfer] charger (puck), 2020 iPhone models … also support WPT charging function at 360 kHz to charge accessories,” one of the documents reads. It lists a series of FCC IDs of iPhones with the new feature, which include the the iPhone 12 mini (BCG-E3539A...

The LG Wing is a smartphone unlike any other, with a wild rotating design that makes it stand out when compared to even the weirdest 2020 phones. It’s also the first phone in LG’s new Explorer Project brand, which looks to experiment with new ways to think about how we design and use our smartphones. The $999 Wing is a bold experiment, but it can’t translate that creativity into a phone that’s worth the added price. Verge Score 7 out of 10 Good Stuff Interesting design Excellent build quality Solid performance Bad Stuff Expensive Not enough use cases for the second screen No waterproofing or fast refresh rate The LG Wing looks cool, but it’s also expensive — at $999, it costs as much as a brand-new iPhone 12 Pro or Galaxy S20 and more than plenty of other fantastic phones. That’s a lot of ...

As far as pack-in games go, Astro’s Playroom may not seem all that exciting at first. It’s not an instant classic like a bundled Super Mario., nor something with the obvious appeal of Wii Sports. But Sony made a smart decision in giving Astro away to every PS5 owner: it might just be the ideal showcase for the console’s new DualSense controller. The game itself is a fairly simple 3D platformer, but one that exudes charm. Everything is bright and colorful, and there are lots of fun little animations. If you leave Astro alone for too long, he’ll pull out a PSVR and start playing games on his own. (If the adorable robotic character looks familiar, it’s because it also starred in the PSVR title Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, another game designed to showcase new hardware.) Everything takes place i...