Technology

The League of Legends World Championship 2020 will be held in Shanghai | Riot Games Even though many esports tournaments this year have been postponed or canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, Riot Games announced that it will hold the League of Legends World Championship 2020 in Shanghai from September 25th to October 31st. The finals will be held in Pudong Soccer Stadium. The company says by hosting the event at one site rather than several different sites, they’ll be able to more closely control the show environment. At present the plans call for early stages of the tournament to have no in-person audiences. The company says it will rely on “local guidelines” to decide whether to allow an in-person audience for the finals. If so, details about tickets and any safety measures that nee...

This afternoon, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are scheduled to start their journey back to Earth inside SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon, bringing an end to their historic flight to the International Space Station. If all goes to plan, the two will splash down in the Crew Dragon off the western coast of Florida on Sunday afternoon. Getting back to Earth from orbit is no easy task, and the two astronauts have a long trip ahead of them before they’re back on solid ground. Once Behnken and Hurley undock from the space station, they’ll spend the next 18 hours in orbit, slowly distancing themselves from the ISS, before making the dive into Earth’s atmosphere. That begins a harrowing trip down to the surface, as the Crew Dragon experiences extreme temperatures reaching up to 3,500 degrees ...

With a rumored $349 price, OLED screen, Google’s great camera, and a good-enough processor, the upcoming Pixel 4A sounds like it’ll be a tough deal to beat for those who don’t need a premium phone. And it looks like the phone will finally be launching on August 3rd. Google has officially confirmed that a new Pixel phone is coming this Monday, and while there’s a slight possibility it could be a different phone, Google itself had also leaked a picture of a phone last month that matches up with everything else we’d heard. Now, more renders of the phone have been leaked that appear to confirm a lot of the earlier rumors. Ishan Agarwal posted an image of the phone similar to ones we’ve seen previously and apparent confirmation of the phone’s specs. Full Google Pixel 4a Specifications in this t...

GeForce Now users can sync their Steam libraries to their accounts with Nvidia’s new Game Sync feature. Compatible games will appear in the My Library section of Game Sync, Nvidia announced. The “bring your own game” cloud service, which launched its paid tier earlier this year, allows users to play games purchased through other platforms— including Steam, the Epic Games STore, Battle.net, and Uplay— in the cloud. But searching for games in your Steam library that were compatible with GeForce Now was a bit of a slog. The new feature will identify games in a user’s Steam library supported by GeForce Now and will add them to the “My Library” list within the app automatically, Nvidia says. To sync your Steam account with your GeForce Now library, go to Game Sync in Settings whenever you purch...

The Genki Covert Dock doesn’t look like a dock. It looks more like a wall brick that replicates the functionality of Nintendo’s much larger Switch Dock, but it’s small enough to stick into a pocket. It’s a great Switch accessory to have if you travel a lot and want to connect your console to a TV wherever you go. That’s part of what makes it great. Another reason is that, unlike the slew of third-party dock alternatives sold on Amazon, the Covert Dock was made to use the same power spec that Nintendo’s dock uses. So you won’t run the risk of damaging your Switch over the long-term — or worse, bricking it. This one pulls the right amount of power from the outlet with its retractable prongs. It even comes with three international adapters, which is a nice bonus to have when you get the chanc...

Vaccine trials have had a weird week. First, there was the exhilarating kickoff of two massive clinical trials for vaccines created by Moderna and Pfizer. Each company is hoping to recruit 30,000 volunteers to test whether its vaccine is effective and safe. This is normal. What’s not normal is a bunch of researchers in Boston who have decided to test a DIY coronavirus vaccine on themselves. At least 20 people have mixed together the vaccine and sprayed it up their noses as part of what they’re calling the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (Radvac), according to a truly wild MIT Technology Review story from editor Antonio Regalado. Among the people testing the vaccine is Harvard University geneticist George Church. You may know him from other efforts, including recoding the human genom...

Apple has acquired a startup with technology that could turn iPhones into mobile payment terminals, Bloomberg reported. Montreal-based Mobeewave has tech that requires only an NFC chip to work, allowing users to tap either their smartphone or a credit card to another phone for payment processing. NFC chips have been included in iPhones since the iPhone 6. And while Apple Pay lets shoppers tap their iPhones to pay at a retail store, adding Mobeewave could allow any iPhone to accept payments without extra hardware like a card reader. According to Bloomberg, Apple paid about $100 million for Mobeewave, and has retained its team of employees. Neither company would comment on the transaction. Rival phone manufacturer Samsung partnered with Mobeewave last year on a pilot point-of-sale program in...

TikTok parent company ByteDance has reportedly agreed to sell its American operations to prevent the Trump administration from banning it in the US, according to Reuters. It was not clear Saturday how the deal would involve Microsoft, or whether it would stave off a ban, but Reuters reported that Microsoft would be in charge of protecting US user data, and that the plan would allow another American company to take over TikTok in the US. The administration has threatened to ban the video-sharing app for several weeks; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on July 7th a ban was “something we’re looking at.” President Trump said Friday “we’re banning them from the United States,” but didn’t provide specifics other than he planned to take action as early as Saturday. TikTok US General Manager Va...

President Trump has told reporters he’s planning to ban TikTok from operating in the US. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday night. Bloomberg reports that Trump indicated he’s ready to sign a document to order the ban as early as today, either via an executive order or emergency economic powers. “I will sign the document tomorrow,” said Trump on Friday night, indicating that a ban could take effect “essentially immediately.” The threat of a TikTok ban has been lingering since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mentioned the possibility on July 7th, saying it was “something we’re looking at.” TikTok is a subsidiary of Beijing-based ByteDance, and critics have called out its privacy practices and potentia...

The Trump administration is apparently considering a ban on Chinese social media apps, including the popular video app TikTok. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mentioned the possibility on July 7th, saying it was “something we’re looking at” in a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham — and on July 31st, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he planned to personally ban the app using his own authority, instead of potentially forcing its Chinese owner to divest it. The comments could easily have been bluster. But Pompeo also compared TikTok to Huawei and ZTE, two companies that have suffered very real consequences after drawing US government ire. With tension rising between the US and China, Trump trying to ban TikTok isn’t out of the question — and while it’s not nearly as...

Early on July 31st, the FBI, IRS, US Secret Service, and Florida law enforcement placed 17-year-old Graham Clark of Tampa, Florida, under arrest. He’s accused of being the “mastermind” behind the biggest security and privacy breach in Twitter’s history, one that took over the accounts of President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple, and more to perpetrate a huge bitcoin scam on July 15th. Apparently, he wasn’t alone: shortly after the Tampa arrest was revealed and after we published this story, two more individuals were formally charged by the US Department of Justice: 22-year-old Nima Fazeli in Orlando and 19-year-old Mason Sheppard in the UK. They go by the hacker aliases “Rolex” and “Chaewon,” respectively, according to th...

In-flight Wi-Fi provider Gogo is laying off 143 people, or about 14 percent of its workforce, as people continue to avoid air travel during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company previously furloughed 600 workers and cut executive pay in April, and said Thursday that it will “continue certain furloughs and maintain the salary reductions that were previously implemented.” The cuts will come “predominantly from the Company’s Commercial Aviation business,” according to a press release issued Thursday. Gogo applied for CARES Act funding, but it’s unclear if it ever received any assistance. “Based on our current expectations of the scope and timing of a recovery in the industry and our Commercial Aviation business, reducing our workforce has become a necessary step,” Oakleigh Thorne, Gogo’s CEO sai...