Technology

Netflix is introducing a new button to help the streaming service curate your homepage with even better recommendations: Two Thumbs Up. The new feature will join the existing Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down controls that already help Netflix understand what to show individual subscribers. But Two Thumbs Up will allow users to indicate that they really liked something, and the company says that it’s been a highly requested feature within the experience. “Members have never had as many great entertainment options as they have right now,” Christine Doig-Cardet, director of product innovation and personalization experiences at Netflix, tells The Verge. “Being able to find the shows and movies that you’re going to love is really important. We want to continue to make Netflix the place where it’s easi...

Starting today, customers in the US can donate $1 to plant one tree by telling Alexa-enabled devices, “Alexa, grow a tree,” Amazon announced today. Customers will be able to keep track of how many trees they’ve planted in their Amazon Pay account. Amazon also said that it’s donating $1 million to the environmental charity it’s partnering with on the initiative, called One Tree Planted. It’s worth taking these kinds of efforts with a grain of salt The money will initially go towards four different projects in the US and India. In Centre County, Pennsylvania, the funds will help to reforest land that was razed for mining, logging and agriculture. In California, “hard-working foresters will dedicate time to promote improved vegetation planning and resource management” to prevent wildfires fro...

Some of us get excited about shopping for a new phone (New technology! Megapixels! Fancy screen!), but none of us enjoy shopping for a new phone plan. It’s always been a confusing experience, and things aren’t getting any easier to understand in the era of 5G. With more 5G spectrum coming online this year — and carriers inventing more words for it— understanding what a phone plan includes and picking the right one is difficult. While we can’t promise to make it an enjoyable experience, we can help you do a little homework ahead of time to make it less painful. If you prefer to cut right to the chase, we’ve got two recommendations from the major US carriers for you: T-Mobile’s Essentials if you’re looking for unlimited and Verizon’s 10GB Shared Data plan if you’d rather have a set amount of...

As part of a partnership with the California-based SpinLaunch, which dubs itself the world’s first kinetic space launch system, NASA will be testing what’s essentially a huge slingshot designed to jettison packages into outer space. The technology is an alternative launch system to rockets and has been in development since around 2015. The SpinLaunch infrastructure resembles a giant steel vacuum, measuring 300 feet (91 meters) in diameter. A package is attached to an arm and then spun around a projectile to gain momentum at a speed of 5,000 mph (8,047 km/h) before being released into a tube and thrown into the atmosphere. SpinLaunch says that its system could reduce fuel usage by four times and costs by ten times in comparison to the traditional method of using rockets. “SpinLaunch is offe...

On March 23rd, the Ronin blockchain network underlying the popular NFT-driven game Axie Infinity was hit with a hack that saw the attackers walk away with an eye-popping $625 million in cryptocurrency. The Ronin hack was the largest amount of money that had ever been stolen from the type of service called a “bridge,” which connects one blockchain to another so that value can be sent between them. Unfortunately, it was far from the only hack to hit a bridge: less than two months previously, another bridge platform called Wormhole was exploited for close to $325 million, and about six months before that, more than $600 million was stolen from another cross-chain bridge called Poly. (In a surprising twist, the hacker later returned Poly’s stolen funds.) In short, bridges are the weak point in...

TP-Link has a new “cheap” router. The Deco XE75 is a tri-band Wi-Fi 6E mesh router that should lower the cost barrier for the new 6GHz wireless technology standard. The new two-pack mesh whole home router is available now for $299.99. It’s certainly one of the first signs of Wi-Fi 6E technology reaching affordable pricing, and, best of all, the Deco XE75 seems to cut very few features. $200 cheaper than the Eero Pro 6E The Deco XE75 covers about 5,500 square feet with the pair and is $200 cheaper than a two-pack of the recently released Eero Pro 6E that covers just 4,000 square feet. And the Deco claims to have a very fast peak wireless network speed of 5.4 Gbps. Though that’s a bit slower than the Linksys Atlas Max 6E at 8.4 Gbps, the Deco still undercuts it by about $600. The savings mea...

Astra Fund, a venture fund that supports developers making “thinking games,” revealed the first batch of games it’s funding, including an unannounced title from Good Sudoku developer Zach Gage. Let’s first back up and discuss what a “thinking game” is. According to Astra, the term is defined as “cognitively challenging games whose systems and mechanics spark curiosity and require problem solving.” Astra looks for three main features, per its website: “thinky” mechanics, like in Baba Is You and Portal 2; “welcoming worlds,” like in Pikuniku and Thinkrolls; and “compelling narratives,” like in The Gardens Between and Outer Wilds. Here is the list of games: Rytmos, a “musical puzzle game where you create music by solving puzzles,” by Floppy Club Paper Trail, a “top-down puzzle adventure about...

Nintendo Switch Sports, the follow-up to the wildly popular Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort announced in February, is more imaginative than its boring name might imply. While those Wii titles served as tech demos, of sorts, for Nintendo’s at-the-time new motion controls and Mii characters, Switch Sports feels more like a full game, with more involved controls, better visuals, and a post-launch plan for online modes and in-game cosmetics. Each mini-game looks gorgeous, with detailed venues and more expressive avatars to play as (for those who are curious, you can still use the older Miis on your console, if you really want to get into that Wii Sports mindset). I got to play each of Nintendo Switch Sports six mini-games during my hour-long hands-on: bowling, soccer, badminton, tennis, volle...

At the beginning of the month, Elon Musk announced that he has purchased a major stake in Twitter. Musk is now the company’s largest shareholder taking on 9.2% of the company and spending approximately $3 billion USD. Following the announcement, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted that while the board has appointed Musk, he has declined the offer, “Elon’s appointment to the board was to become officially effective 4/9, but Elon shared that same morning that he will no longer be joining the board. I believe this is for the best. We have and will always value input from our shareholders whether they are on our Board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.” The news arrives a week after Twitter has filed plans to appoint the Tesla and SpaceX CEO to its boar...

YouTube Premium subscribers can no longer sign up to test YouTube’s picture-in-picture feature on iOS. PiP has disappeared from YouTube’s list of available experimental features, where it was previously listed with an April 8th expiry date. 9to5Google reports that some users are seeing a “The feature you’re trying has been turned off” banner notifying them that the test has ended, but both it and iMore add that the feature is still working on their accounts that previously signed up to the test. Picture-in-picture support is available for video services generally at a system level for both iPhones and iPads, but YouTube’s support for the feature has been spotty, requiring workarounds like watching it through a browser rather than via its native app. But YouTube’s Premium test made the feat...