Technology

Sent a wildly inappropriate text meant for your boo to, I don’t know, your boss? Now you have some extra time to save face and delete it — well, if you’re using WhatsApp, at least. WhatsApp users now have a little over two days after sending a message to delete it instead of just one hour, the company announced today. To start using the new feature right now, open up the WhatsApp group or individual chat where you sent the message(s). Make sure to tap and hold the content you want to get rid of, click “Delete,” and then select either “Delete for everyone” or “Delete for me.” Yet before you go off on a deleting spree, be aware there’s a (slight) catch: all recipients must be updated to the most recent version of WhatsApp in order for this to actually work — and you won’t actually receive a ...

Snap is in the early stages of planning layoffs, according to two people familiar with the plans. The planned cuts come after the company recently delivered disappointing earnings results and didn’t forecast earnings for the third quarter — news that sent its stock price cratering to near-all-time lows. It’s currently unclear how many of Snap’s more than 6,000 employees will be laid off, as managers across the company are still planning the full scope of the cuts for their teams. Russ Caditz-Peck, a Snap spokesman, declined to comment. Developing…

Digital communication platform Twilio was hacked after a phishing campaign tricked its employees into revealing their login credentials (via TechCrunch). The company disclosed the data breach in a post on its blog, noting that only “a limited number” of customer accounts were affected by the attack. Twilio allows web services to send SMS messages and place voice calls over telephone networks and is used by companies including Uber, Twitter, and Airbnb. The hack occurred on August 4th and involved a bad actor sending SMS messages to Twilio employees that asked them to reset their password or alerted them to a change in their schedule. Each message included a link with keywords, like “Twilio,” “SSO” (single sign-on), and “Okta,” the name of the user authentication service used by many compan...

With iOS 14, Apple introduced the ability to set your sleep schedules in the Health app. The feature itself isn’t too complicated. You figure out how many hours you ideally want to get every night, then set a scheduled bedtime and wake time that suits that goal. Of course, you could always just set up a one-time or repeating alarm within the Clock app. The main reason why you’d opt for a sleep schedule instead is that it allows you to set a specific goal and more easily automate a sleep routine. For example, you can automatically launch the Sleep Focus mode at your scheduled bedtime and set up sleep reminders. If you use an Apple Watch or another sleep tracker / sleep app, you can also get notified whenever you meet or exceed your sleep goal. You’re not limited to just one sleep schedule, ...

Polio is back, monkeypox isn’t slowing down, COVID-19 is still around — and now there’s more not-so-good news on the infection front: over 200 human diseases could get worse because of climate change, according to a new study. Researchers have known for a long time that the changing climate affects disease. Warmer temperatures can make regions newly hospitable to disease-carrying mosquitoes, while floods from more frequent storms can carry bacteria in their surges of water. Most research, though, only focused on a handful of threats or one disease at a time. The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, built a comprehensive map of all of the ways various climate hazards could interact with 375 documented human infectious diseases. The authors reviewed over 77,000 scientific articles ...

BioWare games have developed a reputation for producing some of the finest player-driven romances in video games. In service to that reputation, the BioWare store is filled with all sorts of bits and bobs designed to entice players to buy things that’ll display their love for a certain character. In its latest merchandise drop, the brilliant bastards at BioWare are capitalizing on that devotion in a genius way with a “Romance bundle” dedicated to Dragon Age Origins’ cheese-loving heartthrob Grey Warden, Alistair Theirin. The bundle is a beautiful wooden box carved with Alistair’s portrait that contains a necklace; a recreation of the one you can give him to increase his approval of you. The bundle also comes with, according to the item’s description, “a little worn-edged love letter tucked...

Nvidia’s Q2 earnings won’t come out for another two weeks, but the company has dropped its preliminary numbers today and the results are not looking particularly good for its gaming business. Its gaming revenue is reported at $2.04 billion, a staggering 33.33 percent decrease from the previous year’s $3.06 billion. The shortfall mirrors other gaming hardware companies, including Logitech, which reported a 12 percent drop compared to the same quarter last year, reflecting peak pandemic changes where consumers are done investing in all kinds of home equipment for work, play, and even exercise. And gaming sales as a whole have dropped 13 percent in Q2 to $12.35 billion compared to last year, according to market research firm NPD. One anomaly for this period is AMD, which actually increased it...

Congress is poised to approve newly expanded tax credits for electric vehicles, but the rules are written in such a way as to effectively disqualify every EV that’s currently on the market today. That’s because most EVs run on lithium-ion batteries that are mostly made in China. The nation has a lock on some 76 percent of the battery market today (the US only represents 8 percent). And to get a deal passed in a deadlocked Senate, Democrats agreed to provisions that would require eligible vehicles to use batteries that are made in North America. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which passed the Senate this weekend in a party-line vote, would require batteries to have at least 40 percent of materials sourced from North America or a US trading partner by 2024 in order to be eligible for a...

Intel is launching its Arc Pro series of GPUs today, designed primarily for powerful desktop workstations and laptops. The Intel Arc Pro A40 and A50 will both be available for workstations, while the A30M will be available in pro-focused laptops. All three GPUs are capable of hardware-based ray tracing and AV1 hardware acceleration — and are designed with AI tasks and creator apps like Adobe Premiere Pro in mind. The Intel Arc Pro A40 will ship in a small single-slot form factor with 3.5 teraflops of graphical power, eight ray-tracing cores, and 6GB of GDDR6 memory. Intel is targeting this GPU at slimline workstations or small form factor PCs. The larger A50 steps up to a dual-slot form factor, 4.8 teraflops of graphical power, eight ray-tracing cores, and 6GB of GDDR6 memory. Due to its d...

Two Fridays ago, just before I left for a week-long vacation to Florida, I went through my pretrip digital routine. I set my Slack status to “Vacationing” with a palm tree emoji and paused notifications until further notice. I turned on Gmail’s auto-responder. I deleted a bunch of apps from my phone that would only serve to distract me from poolside bliss. The last thing I did was pick up my iPhone and create a new Focus mode. Focus, in case you didn’t know, is a new-ish iOS feature designed to let you quickly switch your phone from one context to another. You can set it to shut up your work apps on the weekends, turn off notifications while you’re reading or sleeping, or only alert you to new emails from 9AM to 5PM and not a moment after. It’s really just an extension of Do Not Disturb, b...

In a new development in the ongoing legal dispute between Elon Musk and Twitter, the Tesla CEO has now filed a counterclaim against the social media platform alleging fraudulent behavior for concealing the real number of fake accounts registered. According to Musk’s legal team, a machine learning algorithm developed by Indiana University called Botometer has found a much higher percentage of fake accounts on Twitter than the 5% reported by the latter. “Twitter was miscounting the number of false and spam accounts on its platform, as part of its scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects,” the new filing writes. “Twitter’s disclosures have slowly unraveled, with Twitter frantically closing the gates on information in a desperate bid to prevent the Musk parties from uncovering...

It’s 2013, and tonight my friends and I are getting together to wish on falling stars during a meteor shower. Like many young teens meeting up with their pals, I want to show off my sense of style, so I spend a solid amount of time trying on different skirts, dresses, and accessories in order to find the cutest look. Luckily, I don’t have to worry about how comfortable the outfit will be or whether the fabric will chafe against my skin since the clothes aren’t going on my physical body but, rather, on my villager in the world of Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS. In real life, I’m a tall, slightly chubby, pubescent boy with the acne and self-esteem to match. Even though I go to a fairly liberal high school and have been publicly out as gay for nearly a year, there’s no way I c...