Technology

Following the recent crash of Luna, news has come out from Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) that Binance had originally invested $3 million USD into Luna, which at its height, was valued at $1.6 billion USD. The shocking revelation is that the total investment is now only worth roughly $2,400 USD. Despite the turn of events, the Binance CEO has stated that during the whole ordeal, the exchange has never moved nor sold any of its position in Luna. His next steps are to put pressure on Terra to help with compensating the retail investors that lost the most, and to “protect users.” 2/ Binance received 15,000,000 LUNA (at peak worth $1.6 billion USD, now not much) as part of the original ($3m) invest. 560x return at peak. It still sits on the address we received at ?. Never moved or sold. A...

In an unexpected twist, Elon Musk appears to want to negotiate a lower sale price for Twitter due to the most recent events regarding the accuracy in bot count. Bloomberg reported that Musk hinted at the renegotiating at a recent Miami conference where he explained that a lower would not be “out of the question.” The decision to want a lower sale price comes as a surprise since Musk initially agreed to pay a 38% premium for the platform in his $44 billion USD deal. At the conference said, “Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots. It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul.” The news comes after Musk announced that he is temporarily placing a hold on the buyout. Musk expressed concerns that the number of bots on the platform exceeds his knowledge...

The US Postal Service has updated its free at-home COVID-19 test webpage, indicating that citizens can now place an order for a third round of government-provided rapid tests (h / t Alexander Tin and DrAltGov on Twitter). Compared to previous rounds, you’ll be sent double the number of tests — eight instead of four. The procedure is largely the same as it was when the US launched COVIDTests.gov in January; you go to the site, fill in your name and address, and the tests will show up in your mailbox. According to the USPS, though, because you’re getting eight tests this time, they’ll be shipped in two separate packages. You’ll receive a tracking number for each. Test often The order confirmation page notes that if you skipped any of the rounds (as in, you didn’t order tests in January and /...

Google hired a former Food and Drug Administration leader as its new senior director of global digital health strategy. Bakul Patel spent over a decade at the FDA and most recently was the chief digital health officer of global strategy and innovation. “I am looking forward to learning from the teams in health across Google and Alphabet and helping build a unified digital health and regulatory strategy,” he wrote in a Linkedin post Monday announcing the move. Like all big tech companies, Google has pushed further into health and healthcare over the past few years, with mixed results. Its ambitions range from mining big data for algorithms to developing disease-detecting tools to pumping wearables full of health features. But its strategy has gone through some upheaval: the company dissolve...

On May 14th, social media platforms found themselves scrambling to deal with a livestream video of a white supremacist terror attack. Yet the man who has been the nation’s loudest commentator on content moderation had nothing to say. Under Elon Musk’s view of content moderation, any restriction on speech beyond what the law proscribes is censorship. And by that standard, the video of the attack in Buffalo — however graphic — should have remained on the platform since videos of graphic violence are not illegal speech. In practice, platforms were criticized for being too slow to remove them, and Musk found no need to weigh in on the debate. The details of the Buffalo, New York shooting are widely known and still painful to report. Ten people were killed on a Saturday afternoon in a supermark...

New leaks suggest that DJI is working on a new FPV (first-person view) drone that you can fly indoors (via Gizmodo). Reliable tipsters @DealsDrone and @OsitaLV have come forward with leaked images and details about a smaller, more compact drone that may be arriving between July and August. The drone, supposedly called Avata, will weigh 500 grams, which means users will have to register it with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) if they choose to fly it outside (drones that weigh more than 250 grams must be registered with the FAA). Renders from @DealsDrone show that the Avata could come with ducted propellers to help prevent any damage to the device when it (inevitably) runs into something during an indoor flight. It features a camera that @DealsDrones expects to be just as good as ...

Meta has been on a multiyear push with Messenger’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) features, and it’s now starting to test E2EE messaging with its Quest VR quest headsets. With the new v40 software update, Meta is testing optional E2EE for one-on-one messages and calls in VR, according to a blog post, though it’s unclear how many people are included in the test or how to turn on the feature if you are. The test arrives alongside a bunch of other notable new features in the v40 update. There are new audio accessibility options, including the ability to tweak the audio balance of the left and right audio channels and a mono audio feature that lets you hear the same audio on the left and right speakers. You’ll also now be able to lock individual apps behind a pattern, which could be a useful way...

Miami, host city of the Bitcoin 2022 event we recently visited, doesn’t own or manage the MiamiCoin cryptocurrency, although the coin has enjoyed the support of Mayor Francis Suarez, who at one point suggested it raised “the possibility of being able to run a government without the citizens having to pay taxes.” Now Quartz reports that since launching on August 3rd, MiamiCoin’s value has dropped by as much as 95 percent. The CityCoin plan requires miners to acquire tokens on the Stacks (STX) blockchain that they can use to bid for MiamiCoin. The winning bidder receives 70 percent of their investment in MiamiCoin, while the city receives the other 30 percent in STX tokens. I’m so excited to announce that the @CityofMiami has received its first-ever disbursement from @mineCityCoins totaling ...

The alleged gunman behind the attack in Buffalo, New York that left 10 dead and three injured on Saturday used Discord to discuss and share plans ahead of the assault, according to Bloomberg. As far back as December, the suspect is reported to have used a private server on the popular chat service to describe his intentions to carry out an attack. He later shared links to Discord logs describing his attack plan and white supremacist views, according to Bloomberg. The report says that the suspect mentioned the terrorist who attacked a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand more than 30 times and used racist slurs and extremist phrases while in the app. Discord wanted to ensure “another event like Charlottesville isn’t planned on our platform” “As soon as we became aware of it we took action ag...

Apple has updated its App Store rules to make it so subscriptions can auto-renew without your explicit permission, even if the developer has raised the monthly or annual price. Before the rule change, users would have to manually opt-into a subscription renewal if it came with a price bump; now, that won’t necessarily be the case, though you’ll still be notified about the price change before it happens. Apple says it’s making the change to help avoid the situation where users unintentionally lose access to a subscription because they missed an opt-in message. According to Apple’s Monday evening post, there are specific conditions that developers will have to follow if they want to offer what the company is calling “an auto-renewable subscription price increase.” For starters, it can only b...

Artists may soon be able to showcase NFTs on their Spotify pages. The streaming service confirmed to Music Ally that it’s testing out a new feature that allows artists to promote and sell their own NFTs in the app. The feature is available to a select group of users based in the United States. Those within that group can scroll past the songs section of the page and tap on an NFT, which will pull up a larger image of it. A “See More” icon will bring the user to the NFT marketplace OpenSea, where they can purchase it. Right now, Spotify isn’t taking any cut of artists’ NFT sales. Steve Aoki and The Wombats are among those currently displaying NFTs on their artist pages, the publication reported. “Spotify is running a test in which it will help a small group of artists promote their existing...

In the wake of the sudden collapse of TerraUSD, several other stablecoins’ values (whose values are supposedly pegged to the dollar) have started facing issues. Deus Finance’s DEI coin is currently trading at around 66 cents and has been fluctuating since Sunday, reaching a low of around 52 cents early Monday morning. Unlike other major stablecoins like USD Coin and Tether, which (allegedly) have actual dollars or assets backing them, DEI’s values are controlled by algorithms making trades. It’s not that there’s no collateral — as CoinTelegraph points out, there’s a DEUS token that you can use to get new DEI tokens and that you can receive if you redeemed DEI. Unlike with Terra, where the value of the corresponding coin crashed, the value of DEUS seems to be holding up okay. The Terra coin...