Technology

Whenever we talk about password managers, especially ones that sync their data to the cloud, there’s always discussion about whether or not your information is secure and what happens if the servers go down. The second thing is exactly what 1Password users in the US experienced earlier today, as a problem affecting 1Password.com kept mobile, desktop, and browser clients from syncing. A status page first noted the problem at 10:42AM ET and listed it as stabilized, with clients able to connect again by 2:42PM ET. During the outage, the status page noted that the issue didn’t affect any offline data stored in clients, and other domains like 1password.ca, 1password.eu, or ent.1password.com were operational. Before I knew there was an outage, I saw it on my own account when I tried to save a pa...

Twitter’s prospective new owner Elon Musk still has some restrictions on his tweets that most of us do not. They’re as a result of a 2018 settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over his infamous “funding secured” tweet about taking Tesla private. Even considering Musk’s complaints that he was coerced into taking the deal and contempt for the “bastards” at the SEC, earlier today, US District Judge Lewis Liman ruled against Musk, letting the agreement stand as originally written (via Reuters). One of the things Musk wanted — but didn’t get — was for the court to stop a subpoena from the SEC for information to determine if a tweet last fall with a poll about selling 10 percent of his stock had been vetted first, per the consent agreement he is under. Musk complained of a...

Mark Zuckerberg told the world last October that he was all in on the metaverse, and that the endeavor that would only get more expensive over time. Now that his company’s stock price has been hammered in recent months, he is dialing back that rhetoric. Meta will “slow the pace of some of our investments” due to “our current business growth levels,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday. Meta’s profits for the first quarter were $7.5 billion, down 21 percent from the year-ago period. Revenue rose 7 percent to $27.9 billion, the slowest growth rate since the company went public a decade ago. Its target expense range for 2022 was lowered by $3 billion. Make no mistake: Zuckerberg is still spending billions a year on building devices and software for the m...

Boeing’s CEO, Dave Calhoun, says that the company’s deal with Trump to build Air Force One was a risk the company “probably shouldn’t have taken.” The comment was made on Wednesday during a conference call to discuss the company’s Q1 results for 2022, which show that the Air Force One program went $660 million over its expected budget in the past few months. In a financial filing (PDF), Boeing reports that it’s now lost $1.1 billion on the contract. “Air Force One I’m just gonna call a very unique moment, a very unique negotiation, a very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn’t have taken, but we are where we are and we’re going to deliver great airplanes. And we’re gonna recognize the cost associated with it,” says Calhoun. Q1 was a “messy quarter” when it came to Boeing’s defe...

The first Avatar sequel will be called Avatar: The Way of Water, Disney announced Wednesday at CinemaCon, perhaps the biggest indication yet that the long–delayed movie is actually going to be released on December 16th. And we might have even more potential proof soon, as the first teaser trailer is set to debut alongside Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which premieres on May 6th. Here is Disney’s synopsis of the film, which is quite vague: Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, Avatar: The Way of Water begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure. I would like to call your att...

While CNN Plus already accelerated through the Go90 Scale of Doomed Streaming Services in record time, it has somehow managed to shave another two days off of its lifespan. Warner Bros. Discovery originally announced that the streaming video news service would close on April 30th, but Digital Trends reports that subscribers have received an email confirming the actual end date is April 28th. That’s confirmed by this support page, and it appears to line up so that subscriptions, which started as early as March 28th before CNN Plus launched the next day, don’t run over a month and charge anyone a second time. This seems like something executives could’ve checked before announcing the end of CNN Plus, but these are unprecedented times. The email and FAQ also explain that subscribers will be r...

Google says it’s expanding the types of personal information that it’ll remove from search results to cover things like your physical address, phone number, and passwords. Before now, the feature mostly covered info that would let someone steal your identity or money — now, you can ask Google to stop showing certain URLs that point to info that could lead someone to your house or give them access to your accounts. According to a blog post, Google’s giving people the new options because “the internet is always evolving” and its search engine giving out your phone number or home address can be both jarring and dangerous. Here’s a list of what kinds of info Google may remove, with the new additions in bold (h/t to the Wayback Machine for making the old list accessible): Confidential governmen...

Between his lack of superpowers and proper fighting skills, the Kite Man of HBO Max’s Harley Quinn series is barely anyone in Gotham’s idea of a real supervillain, but that isn’t stopping him from starring in his own spinoff show. Ahead of Harley Quinn’s upcoming third season, HBO Max announced today that Kite Man (Matt Oberg) will soon also feature in Noonan’s, a new 10-episode comedy from Justin Halpern, Patrick Schumacker, and Dean Lorey about Gotham’s seediest dive bar. Noonan’s will focus on Kite Man as he partners up with the villainous Golden Glider to make a new name for himself in the time after Poison Ivy dumps him for Harley. In a press release about the show, Warner Bros. Animation executive vice president of alternative programming Peter Girardi intoned that while Kite Man wil...

Apple’s $1,599 Studio Display arrived last month with big promises about its webcam, which features a 12-megapixel sensor, an f2.4 ultra-wide lens, and the same A13 chip running the whole thing as found in the iPhone 11. Unfortunately, it shipped with buggy software that made everything look bad. Apple told us that it wasn’t “behaving as expected” and promised us a software update. That update is now here, sort of. You have to update your Mac to the public beta of macOS Monterey 12.4, which comes with a further update to the Studio Display. (Once the Studio Display is updated, the improvements are available when connected to any other Mac, though.) I updated my review unit last night, and, basically, the changes are what Apple said we’d see: the noise reduction is improved, contrast is bet...

Oh boy. Look, people have wanted Apple to sell the 5K display from the now-discontinued 27-inch iMac as a standalone product for years now. When that first 27-inch 5K iMac came out in 2014, the display was so far ahead of the competition that buying one for the screen alone represented a bargain — that there was an entire computer attached to it was almost a bonus. So now Apple’s gone and discontinued the 27-inch iMac and essentially replaced it with the new Mac Studio and the new 27-inch Studio Display. If the Mac Studio represents the fulfillment of a 20-year-old Mac power user’s dream, the Studio Display should be the fulfillment of a similar dream that’s been around since 2014: just give us the iMac’s 27-inch 5K display. Unfortunately, a lot of things have happened since 2014. And so f...

The Windows XP startup sound is forever engrained in my mind, those tinkling chimes bringing back memories of AIM, Civilization III, and endless hours spent trying to download music through Napster and Kazaa followed by endless hours spent trying to remove the viruses I accidentally downloaded through Napster and Kazaa. The sounds of Windows are as much a part of computing history as anything else you’ll find, and the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast is doing a two-part series on the history of the startup jingle. It begins before computers were even able to have startup sounds, and it traces their evolution through composers like Brian Eno and musicians like Robert Fripp and the Seattle Symphony. The first episode is out now, and it’s both a good listen and a funny time capsule. You’ll know ...

Saturday Night Live star and almost space tourist Pete Davidson will soon star in a Peacock series based on his own life. Called Bupkis, the half-hour comedy series is described as a “heightened, fictionalized version of Pete Davidson’s real life” that “will combine grounded storytelling with absurd elements from the unfiltered and completely original worldview for which Pete is well known.” Dave Sirus and Judah Miller, who previously worked with Davidson on The King of Staten Island, will join the star as writers on the show. There isn’t much other info about Bupkis, such as when it’ll debut or how many episodes to expect. But it looks to be a notable win for the streamer, which says that “the series was acquired in a highly competitive situation.” Despite a few notable original series, P...