Technology

As part of a coordinated effort, K-pop fans and teenage TikTok users scooped up tickets to President Trump’s Saturday rally in Tulsa, potentially leaving at least hundreds of empty seats, The New York Times reported. A tweet from the Trump campaign June 11th urged people to use their phones to register for the free tickets. The K-pop fans shared the information and encouraged their followers to get tickets, and then not show up for the rally. The plan quickly caught on on TikTok, where people followed the K-pop fans’ lead. CNN credited Iowa grandmother Mary Jo Laupp with leading part of the charge on the video platform. She posted a TikTok video last week encouraging people to “go reserve tickets now and leave him standing alone there on the stage.” YouTuber Elijah Daniel told the Times th...

Snap’s vice president of diversity and inclusion apologized this weekend for the distribution of a Juneteeth filter that many people found offensive and offered new details about the how it was created. In an email distributed to the company, Oona King said the filter released Friday was a collaboration between black and white employees — and pushed back against criticism that the company had been culturally insensitive. The filter — Snap calls them “lenses” — asked users to “smile and break the chains” of slavery. King, who is black, said that “in hindsight, we should have developed a more appropriate lens.” “Speaking on behalf of my team, clearly we failed to recognize the gravity of the ‘smile’ trigger,” King wrote in a letter to the company. “That is a failure I fully own. We reviewed ...

Samsung Blu-ray players appear to be malfunctioning for hundreds of users, and no one is sure what the issue is, ZDNet reported. Some users report their Blu-ray players get stuck in an endless reboot loop when they’re switched on, others reported hearing a buzzing noise as if the device is trying to read a disk, but in many cases there’s no disk in the machine. Some machines are shutting down soon after turning on, and still other users report their devices have become unresponsive to commands and pressing buttons. The issues don’t appear to be confined to one particular model. [embedded content] On Samsung’s community support message board, some users posited the problems started with a firmware update, but ZDNet says this doesn’t appear to be the case, suggesting the likely culprit was a...

Neighborhood social networking app Nextdoor says it is discontinuing its Forward to Police feature which let users send message board posts directly to local police, Bloomberg CityLab reported. The site has been under increasing scrutiny for how it handles communications with law enforcement, and for how it handles racism among members on its app. “As part of our anti-racism work and our efforts to make Nextdoor a place where all neighbors feel welcome, we have been examining all aspects of our product,” the company announced in a blog post. “After speaking with members and public agency partners, it is clear that the Forward to Police feature does not meet the needs of our members and only a small percentage of law enforcement agencies chose to use the tool.” Black Nextdoor users have tol...

Google is ending the trial program of a service that sent users algorithm-selected prints from their Google Photos libraries, Droid Life reported. The subscription-based service launched in the US in February with a monthly fee of $7.99 that got you 10 4×6 prints from the previous 30 days. The printing service allowed users to choose which themes the service should prioritize in selecting the prints, offering “people and pets,” “landscapes,” and “a little bit of everything” as options. Users were able to edit the selections before the photos were printed. Google sent a notice to subscribers that the service would not be available after June 30th, according to Droid Life: Thank you for your invaluable feedback these last several months. You have provided us with a lot of helpful inform...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Friday that the company’s “Battery Day” event and its shareholders meeting, which was slated for July 7th, will both be delayed until sometime after July 4th. The Battery Day event, where Tesla is expected to reveal details about its “million mile” battery, was originally planned for April but was bumped back to July due to the coronavirus pandemic. In response to a question on Twitter about whether its cyber truck would be at the shareholders meeting, Musk said Tesla “will have to postpone annual shareholder meeting, as still no large gatherings allowed by July 7th. Not sure of new date, but am guessing maybe a month or so later.” Probably good to combine them, since they are converging in time. I’m hopeful we can announce a date after the July 4th week. — Elon Mu...

Comcast will continue to offer free access to its 1.5 million public Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots through the end of 2020, the company announced. “We saw a huge jump in usage after we opened up our public hotspots, and we’re excited to keep them open through the end of the year as the nation begins taking steps to reopen,” the company said in a statement. Comcast is also extending its offer for 60 days of free internet service to new customers on its Internet Essentials tier, which is designed for low-income customers. That offer was set to expire June 30th but also will continue through the end of the year.. Comcast was one of several broadband internet providers to commit to the Federal Communications Commission’s Keep Americans Connected pledge back in March, as the coronavirus kept people ho...

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote is happening on Monday, June 22nd, but in a very different form than usual, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The show must go on, so Apple will be presenting the entire conference in a new, digital-only format. The company is still expected to unveil the first look at the future of iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS — the various suites of software that power all of Apple’s hardware. The first look at the next generation of Apple’s software The company may also be making an even bigger announcement than just the annual software updates: Apple is reportedly going to be using WWDC to announce a shift from Intel-based processors to custom-designed ARM chips for its Mac desktops and laptops. This would be a fundamental shift for Apple’s com...

I watched Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods over the weekend, and it’s just such a good reminder of the kind of film it sometimes feels like only he can make — where a bunch of people just speak their mind about the world, often more to the camera than to each other, because that conversation essentially is the film. Da 5 Bloods is a complicated one, dealing with America’s legacy of destruction and violence and how it impacted both the black soldiers sent to fight in Vietnam (who represented a disproportionate number of US soldiers, as the film points out) and the people in Vietnam who suffered from their attacks. The film shows the pain that remains decades and generations later. I don’t know that every beat in the film worked for me (or even made sense moment to moment), but the broad strokes that...

Guinness World Records has reversed its 2018 decision to strip Billy Mitchell of his Pac-Man and Donkey Kong world records, according to Ars Technica, in what is the latest twist in a long story about the notorious arcade game master at the center of documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. This means that, according to Guinness, Mitchell is once again the first to achieve a perfect score on Pac-Man (totaling 3,333,360 points) and the first to reach 1 million points on Donkey Kong. The controversy around Mitchell’s records has a long history But Guinness stands alone in recognizing Mitchell’s scores, as Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard — an organization that also audits and awards records — is sticking with its decision to not recognize them. Mitchell set the Pac-Man scor...

Google is expanding its .new browser shortcuts to Google Meet, its video conferencing service that the company has heavily expanded in recent months due to a huge influx of users looking to stay connected in COVID-19 quarantines, via 9to5Google. Like the company’s docs.new, sheets.new, or slide.new shortcuts, typing “meet.new” into your browser will automatically open a new Google Meet session. It’s a small addition, but a useful one for anyone who uses the tool a lot. Additionally, like with the Google Docs shortcuts, users can append numbers to designate between multiple accounts, so you could create a menubar bookmark of “meet.new/1” for your personal account, and “meet.new/2” for work. Google first launches its .new shortcuts back in 2018 for its G Suite tools; last year, the company a...

Disney Plus has appeared to have quietly stopped offering new subscribers a free seven-day trial of the streaming service, as spotted by French pop culture site Numerama. It the free trial offer seems to be no longer available in the United States — there’s no mention of it anymore on the streaming site, and attempting to sign up for a new account will simply direct users to begin payments immediately for the service. “We continue to test and evaluate different marketing, offers, and promotions to grow Disney+. The service was set at an attractive price-to-value proposition that we believe delivers a compelling entertainment offering on its own,” said a Disney Plus spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. It’s not clear when Disney removed the ability to try out Disney Plus for free, but ...