Technology

Tesla is now creating what it calls “the largest distributed battery in the world” in partnership with the state of California. The new plan to create a virtual power plant comes following a beta program last July when the tech company teamed up with PG&E, and now builds on Tesla’s customers who have installed Powerwalls in their homes. In any emergencies when the region loses power or gets hit with blackouts, Powerwall owners who have signed onto the initiative will be able to earn $2 USD with every kilowatt-hour of power they feed into the grid during these outages. For any PG&E customers in California who wish to join the virtual power plant, all you’ll need is a Powerwall and the Tesla app. You can sign up through the latter in the option named Emergency Load Reduction Program ...

While Instagram‘s official age for sign-up has long been 13 years old, the Meta-owned platform has done little to verify the age of its account holders over the years. A decade following the app’s creation, the app is now testing a verification AI tool built by third-party software company, Yoti. The tool will first be used to verify new account holders who claim to be 18 or older. In addition to the old method of uploading an ID card, users can now also either confirm their account via social vouching or a face scan. For social vouching, three of your followers over 18 must confirm your age, meanwhile, for the face scan, users must send a video selfie which will be verified via AI estimation courtesy of Yoti — a digital ID app currently used in post offices, Payzone stores, and convenienc...

If you’re sick of receiving spam messages on your phone, you’re not alone. According to research firm RoboKiller, the U.S. received almost 12 billion spam and scam text messages in the month of May alone, rounding to roughly 43 per person in the country. Luckily, Apple is now hoping to help combat the influx with a new reporting feature on the upcoming iOS 16. Launched for the operating system’s beta version, the new feature allows iPhone users to directly report spam SMS messages to Apple as well as the user’s service provider, which will then investigate and flag the number for future spam prevention. The feature was previously available in older generations of iOS but only worked with iMessages, so increasing coverage to SMS messages will be helpful. Notably, however, reporting the numb...

The phone previously known as the Osom OV1, built by a team consisting of former engineers and designers from Essential, is being renamed and repurposed today, and it’s all in the name of crypto. This afternoon in New York City, blockchain company Solana announced its own mobile phone, called the Saga, made in collaboration with Osom. It’s priced at $1,000, and preorders open today. A $100 deposit is required, and Solana says the Saga will ship in the first quarter of 2023. The phone will have a 6.67-inch 120Hz OLED display, 512GB of storage, and 12GB of RAM. It’ll be powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chip and is outfitted with a 50-megapixel primary camera, plus a 12-megapixel ultra-wide shooter. But more than the standard hardware specs that most gadget nerds are inter...

On Wednesday, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) found a surprising way to develop her upcoming cryptocurrency regulation bill: she put it on GitHub. “As promised, you can now contribute comments on my bill establishing a framework for digital assets with [Sen. Gillibrand],” Lummis wrote in a tweet sharing the news. “Civil comments and criticisms welcome. Please share widely. We want to get this right. Help us iterate publicly on policy.” Best known as a repository for open-source code, GitHub includes a number of tools for that could be useful in developing public proposals — particularly the ability to publicly comment on, revise, and fork the text into different versions. As of press time, Github users have commented on 24 issues in the bill and made eight pull requests – some of which have pro...

One thing researchers have used to track the spread of viral stories on Facebook — including ones that spread misinformation — is a tool that Meta owns called CrowdTangle. Based on anonymous sources, Bloomberg reports what many have suspected — that Facebook has largely removed development support from CrowdTangle and is making plans to shut the tool down. Removing CrowdTangle would pull access that people like Kevin Roose have used to surface data showing high engagement with right-wing news sources on Facebook, listing results that sometimes appear to be at odds with Facebook’s curated official reports. In an article last July for The New York Times, Roose described internal “data wars” about how much information the company should release, with CrowdTangle founder and CEO Brandon Silver...

I know it’s been nine months, but I’m honestly still reeling from the announcement that Chris Pratt will be voicing Mario in the upcoming Mario movie. What on earth is that going to sound like??? Pratt, at least, seems to think it’s going to be something special. “I worked really closely with the directors and trying out a few things and landed on something that I’m really proud of and can’t wait for people to see and hear,” Pratt said in an interview with Variety. “It’s an animated voiceover narrative. It’s not a live-action movie. I’m not gonna be wearing a plumber suit running all over. I’m providing a voice for an animated character, and it is updated and unlike anything you’ve heard in the Mario world before.” Nintendo, please, release a trailer That last sentence appears to mean that...

Twitter has announced that a button to toggle captions for its video player is now available for everyone on iOS and Android. The button, which shows up in the top-right corner of the video if it has captions available, lets you choose whether you want to see written descriptions. Twitter started testing this feature in April, but it was only available to a limited number of iPhone users. For years, whether subtitles show up or not on your mobile device has been determined by a variety of factors, like if you’ve turned closed captions on in your phone’s accessibility settings, or if you’re watching the video with your sound off. While those are still taken into account, now you can easily turn them on or off whenever you want, just like you already could on Twitter’s website and many other...

It seems like Keanu Reeves may have had a change of heart around NFTs. In December, the actor was sent into peels of laughter after my colleague Alex Heath asked him about the idea of digital scarcity and digital collectibles. Reeves commented that digital items are easily reproduced. Now, though, he’s joined a project from Non-Fungible Labs, acting as an advisor for a program called the Futureverse Foundation, which aims to improve “the digital and physical worlds through the support of diverse artists and creative communities.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, that involves introducing traditional artists to NFTs and funding their efforts. Reeves, reacting to a question about NFTs. The art connection here isn’t exactly a surprise — Reeves’ partner, Alexandra Grant, is a prolific arti...

Tesla and California utility PG&E launched a new program that will pay eligible Powerwall owners to send extra electricity to the grid when it’s vulnerable to blackouts. Working together, the Powerwalls create a “virtual power plant” that can help keep the lights on during emergencies or energy shortages. By signing up, Powerwall owners will receive $2 for every additional kilowatt-hour they feed to the grid during designated “events” when the grid is under a lot of stress. That includes any time the California grid operator, CAISO, issues an energy alert, warning or emergency. Tesla started a similar beta program with PG&E and a couple of other utilities last July, but that was a voluntary program with no payouts. Now, with a monetary incentive to entice participants, the program ...