Technology

For the past two days, photographers have been posting in a panic across Twitter, Reddit, and the Photoshop feedback forums. They’d downloaded Adobe’s latest update for Lightroom’s iOS app, and suddenly their photos and presets were gone. Adobe has now confirmed the issue, and it’s also said that the data is gone for good. “I’ve talked with customer service for 4+ hours over the past 2 days and just a minute ago they told me that the issue has no fix and that these lost photos are unrecoverable,” complained one Reddit user, who says they’ve lost over two years’ worth of photo edits. The complaints were spotted by PetaPixel. “This is literally the worst,” tweeted another customer, who said they’d lost not only 800 pictures but hundreds of dollars worth of paid presets. “These lost photos ar...

Apple CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto both seem pretty useful for drivers — simply plug in your phone to charge, and it’ll link up with your car’s bigger touchscreen to give you directions to your doctor’s appointment, play music from your Spotify playlist, or send a text. Google also has an easier version that lets you connect wirelessly to your car stereo without even taking your phone out of your pocket — but it was limited to Google and Samsung phones. Now, Google has quietly announced that any phone running Android 11 will be able to connect to Android Auto, cable-free. Google’s updated Android Auto support page now notes that “any smartphone with Android 11.0” will be able to connect to Android Auto wirelessly. It’s likely in addition to Google and Samsung, phones from manufacturer...

The Last Light, Magic Leap’s in-house mixed reality experience thought to be lost after nearly everyone who made it was laid off, got a surprise — and official — release this week. (We spotted the release thanks to a tweet from former Magic Leap employee Alexandria Heston.) In The Last Light, you follow along as a young woman, Kayah, moves through a story about her family that plays out on objects in the room in front of you. “It is not a game or a tech demo,” said former Magic leap employee Anastasia Devana on LinkedIn. “It’s essentially a short film that is best experienced alone, in a quiet area, and uninterrupted for around 35-40 minutes or so.” [embedded content] The Last Light was originally set to premiere at SXSW in March, but the festival was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic....

We already knew that Sarah Cooper, the comedian that has gone viral for her impersonations of Trump, is getting a comedy special on Netflix. And today, Cooper has inked a deal with CBS to adapt one of her books into a TV series, according to Deadline and Variety. CBS plans to develop a comedy show inspired by Cooper’s book How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings. The show will focus on three females working at a predominantly male company. As you might have guessed from the name of the book, the show will tackle today’s gender politics and their impact on the trio’s professional and personal lives. Cooper will also be involved in the series serving as a co-writer and executive producer. Sarah Cooper blew up on social just last year after pursuing full-time comedy since 2014 Coo...

A California appeals court judge blocked an order requiring Uber and Lyft to classify drivers as employees, averting an expected shutdown of the ride-sharing services in California at midnight tonight. The court granted Uber and Lyft a temporary stay while their appeals process play out. Lyft had already announced it was planning to temporarily cease operations in the state earlier today, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi had said the same about his company in an interview yesterday. But the companies won an 11th hour reprieve from the California Court of Appeals hours before the shutdown was expected to go into effect. Uber and Lyft will now have until October to convince the court to throw out the order that it employ its drivers. If they are unsuccessful, the companies will be back where t...

Google is making a change in Android 11 that will force apps that want to take photos or video to use the phone’s built-in camera app — even if you’ve made a different camera app, like OpenCamera, your default choice for photos. “[W]e believe it’s the right trade-off to protect the privacy and security of our users,” the Android engineering team wrote on August 17th, adding that apps that call on the camera would need to explicitly name each and every third-party camera app they’d like to support. Now, Google’s giving us the reason: it’s to keep bad actors from potentially harvesting your location. It’s not a drastic change; many camera features will still work exactly the way they used to. It also mirrors the way the camera works on the iPhone. Only this year did Apple allow alternative t...

Uber’s former security chief has been charged with obstruction of justice for trying to hide a data breach from the Federal Trade Commission and Uber management, according to a statement from the Department of Justice. Joseph Sullivan, who was Uber’s chief security officer from April 2015 to November 2017, allegedly concealed the hack that occurred in October 2016, which exposed confidential data of 57 million drivers and customers, including drivers’ license information. Uber paid the hackers $100,000 in bitcoin to delete the data, according to the Justice Department. (Sullivan was later fired.) In addition to obstruction of justice, Sullivan is charged with misprision of a felony, meaning he knew of the breach and took steps to conceal it. If convicted, he faces up to five years in priso...

Microsoft’s xCloud game streaming abilities will be officially integrated into the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription starting on September 15th, with support for more than 100 games. However, you don’t need to wait to try out the cloud gaming service, and it’s possible that you might already have all the necessary components to make it happen. Here’s what you’ll need to try it yourself: A subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, the Microsoft service that costs $14.99 per month and also provides a catalog of Game Pass games on both console and PC, as well as Xbox Live Gold for online multiplayer, and discounts on games. An Android phone or tablet that’s running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or later, and has Bluetooth 4.0 or greater. You’ll need such a device to download the app from the Goog...

President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon and three others were arrested and are charged with fraud over a crowdfunded wall along the US-Mexico border. The “We Build the Wall” campaign collected over $25 million to construct the border wall proposed by President Donald Trump. But prosecutors claim that Bannon, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage, and their associates Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars toward personal expenses. The recently unsealed case alleges that Bannon and others broke repeated promises to put “100 percent” of donations toward the wall. The group secretly arranged private payments through a nonprofit, giving Kolfage $100,000 within months of starting fundraising. While claiming the funds went toward social media ex...

Vitagene, a company that makes mail-in, saliva-based COVID-19 tests, is switching its shipping from the United States Postal Service to FedEx, its CEO told The Verge. “We’ve had problems with USPS recently, in terms of tracking packages and the delivery of packages,” says CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia. Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who took the position at the head of USPS in June, has instituted cost-cutting changes (like cutting overtime for postal workers) that have been criticized by lawmakers and the USPS workers union for slowing mail service. Vitagene started noticing the delays about three or four weeks ago, Maghsoodnia says. The number of customers calling the company to ask about the timing of their shipments because of those delays has ballooned to two or three times t...

In June this year, Reddit began a huge campaign to remove hateful content from its site, blocking communities that engaged in hate speech and harassment. In an update on its progress today, the company says it’s banned nearly 7,000 subreddits (including repeat offenders) resulting in an 18 percent drop in users posting hateful content. “While I would love that number to be 100 percent, I’m encouraged by the progress,” writes Reddit user u/worstnerd, a member of the company’s Safety team. “While I would love that number to be 100 percent, I’m encouraged by the progress.” The progress is part of a sea change at Reddit after the site introduced new policies that explicitly ban hate speech and promised to enforce them rigorously. Reddit has long been criticized for tolerating racist and misogy...

Lyft will suspend its ride-hailing operations in California at 11:59PM PT on August 20th, the company confirmed in a blog post. Along with Uber, the company was ordered by a state judge to employ its drivers rather than classify them as independent contractors. But Lyft is choosing to end its service in California rather than comply with that order — at least for now. “This is not something we wanted to do, as we know millions of Californians depend on Lyft for daily, essential trips,” the company writes. “We’re personally reaching out to riders and drivers to share more about why this is happening, what you can do about it, and to provide some transportation alternatives.” Uber has also said it will cease operations in California at the end of the day, though it has yet to officially conf...