Technology

Another Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event has come and gone, leaving behind a flurry of announcements pertaining to foldable phones, wireless earbuds, and the beastly Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. Thankfully, there are still plenty of ways to take advantage of Samsung’s ongoing preorder promotions — ahem, see here, here, and here — all of which will be available until the latest batch of Galaxy devices arrive on August 26th. If flagship-level foldables and newfangled Android smartwatches aren’t your thing, though, we’ve got you covered with a smattering of deals. First up is the iRobot Roomba i3 EVO, which is currently on sale on eBay in refurbished condition for $179.99 ($170 off) with a two-year manufacturer’s warranty from iRobot. Although the robovac doesn’t come with an auto-empty base like the pri...

With Ray-Ban Stories, the sunglasses and glasses purveyor is ushering in a new era of hands-free connection that allows wearers to engage with the world around them. Available in the Ray-Ban’s baseline iconic frames for $299 USD, with options to add Polarized lenses, Transition lenses or prescription lenses, Ray-Ban Stories are designed for anyone who wants to capture content in a new, seamless way. Partnering with Meta, these smart glasses bring advanced photo and video capabilities to a variety of classic Ray-Ban styles. The Ray-Ban Stories are activated by a slim power switch at the inside corner of the frames, which can easily be accessed at concerts, one-in-a-lifetime experiences or exciting moments from daily life. Apart from dual 5MP cameras on the front of the frames, the smart gla...

NVIDIA has long been working on artificial intelligence and digital avatars, previously unveiling technology that can turn a 2D image into 3D objects or environments in a matter of milliseconds. Now, the company has unveiled its Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine, designed to make creating digital avatars much easier than before. According to the tech giant, the new engine can produce high-quality digital avatars with minimal computing power, and they’ll eventually even be able to pass the Turing test. The program uses a series of existing technologies from NVIDIA, including Merlin with recommenders, Metropolis for vision-based tasks such as object recognition, Riva for speech and NeMo Megatron for natural language understanding. The goal is to eventually implement the engine to create interact...

Google Fiber, the Alphabet division focused on offering high-speed internet access in the US, has ambitious plans to expand its fiber services in the next three to five years, the company announced in a blog post. It wants to launch fiber services in five new states, which include previously announced plans to enter Arizona and Colorado, as well as Nebraska, Nevada, and Idaho. In total, Reuters reports that Google Fiber hopes to expand to 22 metro areas, from 17 today. It’s a big turnaround from 2016, when the business reportedly layed off 9 percent of its workforce and paused plans to launch services in over half a dozen cities. In subsequent years, reports emerged that the company was canceling hundreds of installations in existing metro areas like Kansas City, and left Louisville, Kentu...

Hackers, fraudsters, and others laundered at least $540 million through the cryptocurrency bridge network RenBridge since 2020, according to blockchain analysis group Elliptic. Elliptic researchers published the report today, citing RenBridge as an example of the risks of decentralized cross-chain networks. RenBridge is pitched as a way to easily convert virtual currencies like ZCash and Bitcoin to the Ethereum network and then to other blockchains. But “as well as a legitimate tool, cross-chain bridges have also emerged as a key facilitator of money laundering,” letting users avoid regulations and move money easily across networks, the report says. That includes the proceeds of ransomware operations and theft from other chains. Cryptocurrency isn’t as untraceable as some users expect, but...

The team behind Google Search is tweaking its featured snippets — the text boxes that sometimes spread false information while trying to offer help. The company announced an update that’s supposed to make answers more accurate and avoid the problem of false premises, or questions where no definitive-sounding answer would make sense. It’s paired with an expansion in Google’s “about this result” option and warnings for low-quality data voids, as well as a new partnership on information literacy lesson plans for middle and high-school students. Snippets appear under many searches, but because they appear to directly answer questions by quoting pages, they can backfire in ways that standard query responses don’t. In a presentation to reporters, Google offered some examples of these problems an...

After reporting a Q2 loss of $197 million USD, Spotify has been looking to expand its growth even further and maintain a high number of Premium users. In their latest updates, the music streaming app has launched a new website so that fans can now purchase concert tickets directly through Spotify. The current website is a test launch at the moment and is is currently used to sell pre-sale tickets for only a limited number of Spotify artists’ upcoming concerts. Some of the artists with ticket sales on the debut site include Limbeck, Annie DiRusso, Dirty Honey, Crows, TOKiMONSTA, Four Year Strong and Osees. As of writing, Spotify is now selling tickets online and the tickets will come from the artists’ pre-allocations for their upcoming events. This is Spotify’s most recent effort to streaml...

Disney has announced that it’s raising the price of Disney Plus to $10.99 / month, up from its current price of $7.99 / month, starting December 8th in the US. The move comes as the company is looking to restructure its pricing options, which will soon include a $7.99 / month ad-supported tier. Disney’s also raising the price of its Hulu subscription. The ad-free tier will jump from $12.99 / month to $14.99, while the ad-supported version will cost $7.99 / month, up from $6.99. The new pricing goes into effect on October 10th. A price hike for unbundled ESPN Plus streaming was announced in July, taking the monthly price from $6.99 to $9.99 / month. The updated pricing across Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus.Image: Disney The price increases affect bundled plans as well. Users with an ad-fr...

Disney’s ad-supported tier of Disney Plus will cost $7.99 per month — the current cost of the ad-free plan — and will be available beginning December 8th, the company announced on Wednesday. That same day, there will be a price hike for the ad-free plan, which will cost $10.99 per month. The ad-supported plan doesn’t come as a surprise; Disney had said earlier this year that the plan would be arriving in late 2022. Netflix is also planning to launch its own ad-supported tier, though the company isn’t expecting to launch it until early 2023. When Netflix’s tier is available, it won’t have everything at launch. We don’t know yet if there will be similar restrictions if you opt for Disney Plus’ ad tier. When the ad tier launches, it will have a “lower ad load and frequency to ensure a great e...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected Starlink’s application for $885 million in federal subsidies that it would use to provide satellite internet to broadband customers in rural areas. The FCC cites the SpaceX-owned company’s $600 dish and states that Starlink “failed to demonstrate” that it “could deliver the promised service.” The funding is part of the broader $9.2 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund that provides an incentive for telecom companies to extend internet service to rural and underserved locations. In 2020, Starlink won an initial $885.5 million subsidy as part of a Phase 1 rollout of the program. The FCC also rejected LTD Broadband’s bid for the funding after it initially received $1.3 billion in 2020. “Starlink’s technology has real promise,” FCC cha...

The Flip and Fold turned a corner last year. Previous versions of Samsung’s folding phones were more tech demos than anything — awkward, very expensive, and too fragile for just anyone to consider against a garden-variety slab-style phone. That started to change in August 2021 when Samsung figured out how to waterproof folding phones. This year, Samsung has made some key upgrades that bring even more parity to the foldable line versus the S-series flagships. Picking a Z Fold 4 over the S22 Plus doesn’t require you to make as many sacrifices as it did in the past (except for, you know, an extra $800 or so). But there’s still a lot to prove if foldables are really going to go mainstream. A cracked folding screen could cost you as little as $29 For starters, screen repairs for the Flip and Fo...

I still remember the hush that fell over the audience when Sony revealed the first trailer for Final Fantasy VII Remake — and the cheers. Fans couldn’t wait to see these characters again in HD. But there may now be an even more immersive way to thrust yourself into the world of Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and Aerith: a virtual reality mod by Luke Ross for the PC version of the game. Ross is the modder we profiled last month whose day job is unofficially bringing games to VR; you pay $10 a month to support his work and get access to his mods. The last time we left him, he’d just been slapped with a DMCA takedown notice seemingly over his popular mods for Red Dead Redemption 2, Grand Theft Auto V, and Mafia: Definitive Edition. While neither game publisher Take-Two nor Patreon told him what exactly...