Technology

Google is adding its Advanced Protection Program to Nest devices, the company announced in a blog post Monday, giving added security to its smart home devices. Previously, a user could use their Google account for either the Advanced Protection Program or for Nest, but now they can use both with the same Google account at the same time. “Since we launched, one of our goals has been to bring Advanced Protection’s features to other Google products,” Shuvo Chatterjee, product manager for Advanced Protection Program, wrote in a blog post. “We want as many users as possible to benefit from the additional levels of security that the Program provides.” The Advanced Protection program is designed for people at risk of targeted attacks online, such as activists, business leaders, politicians, and j...

Dozens of Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout on Monday in protest of the company’s decision not to take action against incendiary posts by President Donald Trump last week, according to The New York Times. The virtual walkout comes on the heels of a decision from Facebook not to take any action against a series of controversial posts from Trump last week, including one that seemed to threaten violence against protestors by saying, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter determined that the same message violated its rules against the glorification of violence last week, limiting the ability to view, like, reply, and retweet the post on its platform. According to the Times, employees took the day off to support protests across the country and are leaving behind autom...

Four major book publishers have filed suit against the Internet Archive for copyright violations relating to the Open Library project, setting the stage for a major legal fight over one of the internet’s longest-running ebook archives. Launched in 2006, Internet Archive’s Open Library allows users to borrow ebooks scanned from physical copies, according to a theory called “controlled digital lending” (or CDL) that limits how many times a single scan can be borrowed at once. The project expanded in March with the launch of the National Emergency Library, which suspended waitlists in response to the global pandemic, making all scanned books immediately accessible to anyone with an account. Crucially, the project circumvents the typical licensing restrictions used by conventional libraries. O...

Sony is postponing its PlayStation 5 event that was scheduled for June 4th due to ongoing protests. “While we understand gamers worldwide are excited to see PS5 games, we do not feel that right now is a time for celebration,” says Sony in a Twitter message. “And for now, we want to stand back and allow more important voices to be heard.” Sony is clearly referencing the response to the death of George Floyd in Minnesota, and the resulting protests we’ve seen take place in the US and around the world. Sony had been planning to use Thursday’s event to showcase PS5 games, promising an hour-long event with a first look at some of the games people will be playing when the PlayStation 5 launches this holiday season. Sony’s postponement comes amid widespread protests Widespread protests have taken...

Nearly two hours after NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first astronauts launched to space on a privately-owned rocket, they also became the first to pilot a spaceship using only touchscreen controls. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon eschews the famous maze of manual controls and switches found on retired spacecraft like the Space Shuttle or the Apollo command modules. Instead, Crew Dragon pilots have just three large touchscreen panels in front of them and a few spare buttons below. So during the few times that they have to manually control the spacecraft, they do so using a video game-style interface on those screens. Behnken and Hurley got to take that interface for a brief test ride Saturday afternoon when SpaceX had them manually operate the Crew Dragon to make sure everythi...

Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley had some company on their historic flight to space today: a stuffed dinosaur tucked into one of the seats on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. The toy was spotted during preparations for launch on Wednesday and Saturday, and geophysicist Mika McKinnon quickly identified it on Twitter as seeming to be a TY Flippables Tremor Dinosaur. On Saturday shortly after the astronauts entered orbit, SpaceX’s store featured a new item called a ‘Demo 2 Dinosaur Plush Toy’ for $25. This particular toy’s backstory hasn’t been revealed yet, but toys like this have flown with astronauts and cosmonauts for years. When the toy starts floating, it indicates to the buckled-in passengers that they’ve reached zero-g and are experiencing weightlessness. A plush Earth flew on the uncrewed...

After nearly two decades of effort, Elon Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, successfully launched its first two people into orbit, ushering in a new age of human spaceflight in the United States. The flight marked the first time astronauts have launched into orbit from American soil in nearly a decade, and SpaceX is now the first company to send passengers to orbit on a privately made vehicle. The two astronauts — veteran NASA fliers Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley — rode into space inside SpaceX’s new automated spacecraft called the Crew Dragon, a capsule designed to take people to and from the International Space Station. Strapped inside the sleek, gumdrop-shaped capsule, the duo lifted off on top of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:22PM ET on Saturday...

Memorial Day deals are a tough act to follow, and we’ve definitely seen the frequency of sales this week slow down a bit. Nevertheless, there are plenty of places where you can save on tech, video games, and more. We’ve put those below, and we’ll be back next week with more deals. If you’ve been thinking about buying a smart display, but you don’t need an abundance of extra features, like YouTube support or a built-in camera, the small Lenovo Smart Clock seen above might be a good choice. Best Buy is offering the Smart Clock for $40, and this 50 percent discount is the best price that we’ve seen yet. In addition to having Google Assistant voice support and being able to show off your Google Photos catalog, it works with Spotify and other music streaming apps. The JBL Link isn’t like most o...

Zoom will add stronger encryption to its paid customers’ video calls, but isn’t planning to offer the enhanced security to all accounts, Reuters reported. A security consultant with the company told Reuters that it still wasn’t clear whether some accounts, such as nonprofit users, might qualify for the more secure calls. “Zoom’s approach to end-to-end encryption is very much a work in progress – everything from our draft cryptographic design, which was just published last week, to our continued discussions around which customers it would apply to,” a company spokesperson said in an email to The Verge. The videoconferencing platform has boomed in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic, but has been plagued by myriad security issues. Those include Zoombombing, where an uninvited gu...

With less than 20 minutes to go before SpaceX’s first crewed flight, weather conditions remained miserable, forcing meteorologists at the Air Force’s 45th Weather Squadron to deliver bad news to NASA and SpaceX. “It definitely hurts, especially when we have those hard requirements that when something hits, there’s nothing we can do about it,” Capt. Jason Fontenot, the space lift weather operations flight commander at the 45th Weather Squadron, said during a press call. “And we just kind of have to pass on the information, saying, ‘Even though we’re not at the launch window yet, this is very unlikely that we will see this take off today.’” Military personnel who work at the Squadron in Cape Canaveral, Florida are used to being the ones to call off the show. Fontenot and his team at Patrick ...

Microsoft is laying off dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. The layoffs are part of a bigger push by Microsoft to rely on artificial intelligence to pick news and content that’s presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft’s Edge browser, and in the company’s various Microsoft News apps. Many of the affected workers are part of Microsoft’s SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division, and are contracted as human editors to help pick stories. “Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.” While Microsoft says the layoffs ...

If you’re anything like us, over the past couple of months you’ve probably finished every “must watch” TV series on Netflix, cleaned your apartment from top to bottom, and completed every video game in your backlog. We get it: social distancing can get pretty boring. So if you’re finding yourself with a lot of time to kill, why not spend it on learning something completely new? With some basic supplies and online resources, it’s possible to learn a lot of cool and sometimes downright useful skills, like knitting, calligraphy, or even taking care of a bicycle. We’re a tech site (obviously) so we’re not claiming to be experts in all of the hobbies we’re recommending below. But what we are good at is locating a lot of very specific and nerdy information online, so where possible we’ve tried t...