Technology

Over the last few weeks, the Fetterman and Oz campaigns have been locked in an online tit for tat as the midterm election cycle continues to heat up in Pennsylvania. The Oz campaign has repeatedly slammed “radical liberal” John Fetterman over Twitter for his 2016 Bernie Sanders endorsement and “crazier than you think” policy platform. But rather than distancing Fetterman from the criticism, his campaign has embraced the attacks as content inspiration. The standoff burst into full view on Wednesday when Dr. Mehmet Oz posted a photoshopped image of Sanders and Fetterman styled as a 1980s department store glamour shot, taken from the film Step Brothers. The Fetterman campaign replied with an image reading, “graphic design is my passion,” mocking the meme’s crummy editing job. Joe Calvello, th...

Google has internally announced a hiring freeze that will remain in place for two weeks. According to a report from The Information, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, sent out an email to inform workers about the decision. This follows Google’s announcement of a hiring slowdown that will last until the end of this year. “We’ll use this time to review our headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized Staffing Requests for the next three months,” Raghavan writes. As noted by The Information, Google says that the hiring freeze won’t affect existing job offers, but the company will no longer extend any new ones to applicants. In his message to employees earlier this month about the slowdown, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that the company added 10,000 workers in the ...

Minecraft developer Mojang Studios is taking a strong stance against NFTs. In a blog post titled “Minecraft and NFTs,” the studio, which is owned by Microsoft, wrote that “integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow.” “To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset,” Mojang said. According to Mojang, some companies have created “NFT implementations that are associated with Minecraft world files and skin packs.” The studio also suggests that there could theoretically b...

What had once been a warning of dark times to come is now a reality. Square Enix has finally announced its NFT (or non-fungible token) project after threatening us with the company’s embrace of the controversial and largely reviled-by-gamers blockchain technology. To facilitate this extraordinary waste of fans’ good-will, Square Enix has partnered with Enjin, an NFT company that will store Square Enix’s tokens on its Efinity blockchain. Starting today, consumers will be able to pre-order a physical action figure that comes with a code redeemable for a digital NFT. There will also be physical trading cards that similarly have a digital NFT component available for pre-order later this year. If you’re wondering which of its many franchises Square Enix is pulling these NFTs from, well, that’s ...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the company hopes to start delivering the Cybertruck, its battery-powered electric pickup, in the “middle of next year” during a call for investors. This is a more specific timeline than Musk has provided before — in last quarter’s earnings call, he said that the truck would be coming “hopefully next year.” Tesla originally announced the truck in 2019, with a goal of starting production in late 2021. In August 2021, the company announced a delay until 2022, and Musk pushed that prediction further back until “hopefully” next year during the company’s Q4 earnings call in January. In the meantime, competitors like Ford and Rivian have launched their own electric pickups, with Ford saying that it plans to make 150,000 F-150 Lightnings in 2023. One of the defin...

Tesla already reported vehicle shipment numbers for the second quarter, and now its full Q2 2022 financial report (pdf) reveals it’s dealing with inflation and the overall economic downturn, combined with a plunge in prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In the letter to investors, Tesla execs reveal the company has sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin holdings, adding $936 million in cash to its balance sheet. Last year, Tesla made a $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin and announced that it would accept Bitcoin as payment. Tesla started accepting Bitcoin in late March, then abruptly reversed itself in May, just 49 days later. In the latest report, Tesla says the value of its remaining “digital assets” is $218 million, which it had reported at around $1.2 billion in previous quarters. Las...

Samsung is gearing up the hype machine for the release of its next foldables once again, and ahead of the next Unpacked event on August 10th, mobile president TM Roh has published another blog post making the case that the time for foldables is now — and that more people are picking up foldable phones. “Three years ago, Galaxy foldables could be summed up in a single word: radical,” Roh wrote. “Very quickly, however, it became clear that this groundbreaking, flexible design fit perfectly into modern lifestyles. As a result, what was once a novelty three years ago is now the preferred choice for millions.” Samsung says that nearly 10 million foldable smartphones shipped worldwide in 2021 In the post, Roh says that the industry shipped almost 10 million foldable smartphones worldwide in 2021...

160 hours into Elden Ring, I’m sure of one thing: the single most annoying thing about my Steam Deck is its whiny fan. And now, I’m so happy to report there’s a way to fix it. It takes roughly 15 minutes and $30 — depending on where you live — to install a replacement fan from iFixit. Five days ago, the repair company finally got a large shipment of those fans, and I bought one right away. Now, my Steam Deck’s tiny screech is gone. Is the fan still loud? Yes, yes it is, but it’s a whoosh instead of a whine. I like to think of it as the sound of air escaping the Deck’s vents, but mostly, I don’t think about it at all. I can easily tune out the new whoosh, whereas the whine always managed to get my attention even after Valve tweaked its software to bring the fan noise down. <div class=&qu...

Google Calendar’s new “known senders” option is supposed to make it easier to keep spam from clogging up your schedule. Toggling on the setting prevents invites from people you don’t know from automatically appearing in your Calendar. This way, Google Calendar will only automatically add invites from people in your contacts list, anyone you’ve interacted with through Workspace, and users in your company or organization. If you’re familiar with Google Calendar, you’ll know that Google automatically adds events to your schedule based on the emailed invites you receive. Letting the floodgates open by allowing Google Calendar to add events received by “everyone” could mean having a calendar infested with fake and annoying events. While there’s technically a workaround for this, Google has made...

As we use our phones year after year or transfer everything over to a new device, many of us have accumulated a catalog of apps that we downloaded at one point but haven’t actually used in months (or possibly years). Whether it’s a failed social network, the companion app for the smart device you threw in the trash or just Duolingo shaming you for giving up on learning Spanish, all these apps can take up valuable space on our phone’s storage, clutter up our home screens, and, in worst case scenarios, even drain our batteries. In this article, I’ll go over some quick and easy ways to get rid of apps you no longer use and to make apps that you don’t use very often a little more efficient. Note: the screenshots in this article were taken using iOS 16, which is currently in beta. Screens may a...

The new Google Wallet app is available to all customers shortly after people in 39 countries started seeing it available on their phones Monday. Google Wallet’s official rollout is the latest step in the long history of Google’s payment app variations. The company combined Google Wallet and Android Pay in 2018 to create Google Pay, a single app that included tap-to-pay, tickets, and loyalty programs under one umbrella that worked across Android and Google Chrome. In 2020, Google Pay had a big app refresh to pull in peer-to-peer payments, deals, and other services. Now Google announced Wallet’s comeback at its Google I/O event in May, splitting things up again to create a dedicated home for payment cards, airplane tickets, government IDs, vaccination proof, and even car keys. Users will be ...

Remember when Facebook’s News Feed was chock full of apps like Zynga’s FarmVille? This era in the early 2010s was Mark Zuckerberg’s first big attempt at making Facebook much bigger than just a social network and more like a platform for developers akin to Windows. It was a formative period for the internet, when mobile phones and the app economy were just taking off. For Facebook, it was the “Move Fast and Break Things” era — an early motto of the company —when it grew to hundreds of millions of users and made decisions that still haunt it to this day. What did Zuckerberg get right in this period that set Facebook up for dominance, and what did he get wrong along the way? That’s a tease of what you can expect in the second episode of the new season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast ...