Technology

A jury has ordered conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones to pay $4.1 million to the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The decision followed a trial that saw Jones and his counsel break courtroom protocol and — at one point — accidentally send copies of Jones’ phone records to the opposing legal team. The fine marks one of the first concrete legal consequences for Jones’ false claims that the shooting was a staged “false flag,” which led to years of harassment for parents. But it represents only a fraction of the money Jones has made in the years since. Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, whose son Jesse Lewis was one of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook, had requested $150 million in compensation for Jones’ statements about Sandy Hook. As The New York ...

Vampire Survivors’ new 0.10.0 update adds a cheats menu, and after using it to unlock some things I had been stuck on, I dearly wish that more games included one. Vampire Survivors, if you haven’t heard of it, is a delightful game about leveling up and destroying literally thousands of monsters in a single run. I’d describe it as roguelike-ish; you pick a starting character with certain attributes and a specific weapon, and you’ll level up that weapon, other weapons, and other items as you collect gems by defeating enemies. Your weapons fire automatically, so you mostly just have to worry about picking up experience and items while avoiding baddies. The game launched in Early Access on Steam late last year, and has received regular updates that add things like new characters, weapons, powe...

Streaming company SoundCloud is cutting about 20 percent of its global workforce. Billboard reported on August 3rd that SoundCloud CEO Michael Weissman told the staff in a company memo that the change is mostly due to the current economic climate. Employees affected would be notified over the next several days. “Today’s change positions SoundCloud for the long run and puts us on a path to sustained profitability,” Weissman wrote in the memo. “We have already begun to make prudent financial decisions across the company and that now extends to a reduction to our team.” In a statement to Billboard, a SoundCloud representative confirmed the news, and said: “During this difficult time, we are focused on providing the support and resources to those transitioning while reinforcing our commitment ...

You may remember our friends at AMC, the theater chain with the pantless CEO, who’ve leaned all the way in on the meme stock thing. Hordes of enthusiastic retail investors maybe rescued AMC from crushing debt. Now AMC is hoping to tap them again to create more shares of the company. This quarter, AMC announced a dividend for shareholders: AMC Preferred Equity units, which will trade as APE on the New York Stock Exchange. One of these babies will exist for every common share, and can be converted to common stock if the company and investors vote for that to happen. That “if” is kind of sticky though. See, AMC wanted to sell more shares and was shot down by investors. Maybe those investors didn’t want to be further diluted — AMC sold a lot of shares during the pandemic. Maybe something else ...

HBO Max isn’t dead…yet. But come the summer of 2023 it will be, and there will be a new service replacing both HBO Max and Discovery Plus, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav said on an earnings call today. “HBO Max has a competitive feature set, but it has had performance and customer issues,” Zaslav said, being much more polite than I would be about the app, which regularly struggles to stream when people tune in for big appointment shows like Euphoria and Succession. He went on to claim Discovery Plus has a better tech stack and would become the core of the new service which will combine the content of HBO Max with the content and tech of Discovery Plus. “We think that product is going to be superb,” Zaslav said later in the call, after assuring listeners that the company would...

So I don’t know entirely what’s in Elon Musk’s counterclaims against Twitter — they are still under seal — but I did get an inkling today, when Twitter dropped its response. It’s spicy! Rather than let Musk get his complaints out first, Twitter went ahead and released a blow-by-blow response, the better with which to dunk on Elon along the way. I do love this: The Counterclaims are a made-for-litigation tale that is contradicted by the evidence and common sense Usually legal documents have arcane, passive-aggressive digs at the other party in them. Twitter’s lawyers, however, came out swinging in their reply to Musk’s counterclaims. Maybe that’s because they know how many people will read these documents; maybe it’s just because they’re interpersonally mean. We picked our favorite passages...

Did you know you can search for an exact word or phrase on Google by putting quotation marks around it? It’s a great way to get specific about something you’re looking for. And on Thursday, Google announced what I think will be a nice improvement: the small snippets underneath a search result link will now be created based on where the quoted term appears on the page. Google’s blog post about the change has a good image that illustrates how this will work in practice, which I’ve included below. Google googled “google search,” and the two snippets shown in the example both include the bolded phrase “Google Search.” The Google search results for “google search.”Image: Google Previously, Google would show you results that included the quoted word or phrase, but the small snippet under a link...

After two years of COVID-19, the conversation around monkeypox testing gives off an unnerving sense of deja-vu. The similarities are right there: painful swabs, the struggle to even find a test, bottlenecks, and a long wait for results. But the diseases are different enough that experience with COVID-19 didn’t give researchers much of a leg up in their efforts to improve the monkeypox testing process. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts bemoaned the lack of investment in rapid, at-home testing for various diseases in the United States. The thought was that if the infrastructure had been in place before the coronavirus emerged, it would have been easier to scale up testing — and maybe help control the pandemic. Eventually, that scale-up happened anyway. Money and resources f...

Other than “turning up the heat a little bit” on Meta employees who shouldn’t be there and hitting the metaverse runway, Mark Zuckerberg is highlighting Instagram’s expanded NFT support. The founder and CEO took the opportunity of announcing expanded NFT support on Instagram to tell everyone he’s turning his 1992 Little League baseball card into an NFT soon. Why is that important? I couldn’t possibly tell you, but I do know that at age eight, Zuckerberg hit for .920 as a right-handed infielder in Dobbs Ferry, New York. And soon, that information will be backed up with a blockchain entry. This comes at an interesting time for Meta. Its main cash cow, Facebook, just reported its first-ever decline in revenue for the second quarter. Instagram is already in a state of confusion, rolling back t...

Microsoft is starting to test an Xbox Game Pass family plan that will allow subscribers to share their benefits with other people. A preview of this Xbox Game Pass family plan is available in Colombia and Ireland today, and testers will be able to add up to four people to their subscription as long as they’re in the same country. “Starting today in Colombia and Ireland, Xbox Insiders can begin to preview a plan that allows multiple people to share Game Pass Ultimate benefits,” explains Tyler Mittleider, a senior technical program manager at Microsoft. “This makes it even easier to play the best Game Pass games with friends and family across console, PC, and cloud by enabling you to add up to four people to your subscription, all with their own unique access to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate games...

The first-generation Nissan Leaf was a car that only an owner could love. It had bug eyes for headlights, the body of a Bulbasaur, a toy-like startup sound, and a large plastic nub in the center console that you moved like an air hockey paddle to put the Leaf in drive or reverse. I was one of those owners, and while I swooned at the 2018 redesign, I still only had eyes for my first-gen Leaf. Like many first-time EV owners, it was my first real all-electric car, the one that changed how I thought about each journey and how to get there without depleting the battery. It’s the one that helped me discover what it’s like to have a gas station in your own home. The Leaf was one of the best cars I’ve ever owned And most importantly, it was a hint of the revolution to come. The EV is here and so i...

Sony’s 27-inch InZone M9 gaming monitor is practically a high-end 4K Bravia TV with a few features (and more than a few inches) chopped off. It can’t serve your channels or streaming apps, but this monitor can deliver full array local dimming for more accurate backlighting, which is something few TVs and even fewer monitors can do. It’s a great monitor if you watch a lot of HDR content on your computer — the matte panel looks bright, detailed, and gorgeous. It’s like watching a really good TV that’s not actually a TV. But the main reason to spend $899.99 on the M9 is to play games, and it ticks a long list of boxes that many PC and PS5 gamers have been waiting a long time to see. In addition to stocking a great 4K (3840 x 2140) panel, it has two HDMI 2.1 ports, Nvidia G-Sync compatibility ...