Technology

samedi 13 août 2022

This customizable smart display is a fun desk accessory in need of a purpose

Part desk clock, part status board, all Nyan Cat

When the Tidbyt, which its creators describe as a “personal pixel display,” arrived at my house, I liked it before I even knew what to do with it. With its walnut paneling and its ultra-pixelated display, it kind of looks like what would happen if you asked someone in 1956 to design an Echo Show for Amazon. It’s 8.2 inches long, 4.4 inches tall, and two inches deep, which is a little big to put on your bedside table but nestles nicely into a bookshelf or on a larger desk. It’s an impressively well-made thing for a company’s first product.

But the thing about the $179 Tidbyt is that it never really becomes obvious what this device is for. It’s a clock but not an alarm clock. It’s a hilariously bad digital photo frame. It doesn’t do anything your phone can’t, and your phone definitely does all those things better. It’s an excellent delivery system for quick bits of ambient information, but if that doesn’t immediately mean anything to you, you don’t need a Tidbyt. Its charm is real and still hasn’t worn off on me, but it still feels a bit unfinished.

The team behind Tidbyt started working on this a couple of years ago and launched the product on Kickstarter in March 2021. A year and a half later, all the backers have received their Tidbyts, and the device is generally available. Sort of: co-founder Rohan Singh tells me the current supply is sold out, but “we have more units on the way in a couple of weeks.” Manufacturing is hard, but Singh is confident Tidbyt can stay on top of things.

There are plenty of hints that Tidbyt is still new at this, though. For starters, my device arrived with an Anker-branded charging cable in the box along with a black wall plug that clearly came out of a bin somewhere in a factory in China. Neither of those bothers me, really — and at least the cable is one of those nice braided ones — but an Apple-like unboxing experience this is not.

The screen is the whole point of Tidbyt, though, and it’s a very unusual one. It’s not a screen so much as a collection of individual LEDs — 64 across by 32 down, 2,048 of them in all — that can be lit up and controlled individually. You can control the display’s brightness, and it can get seriously bright; I kept the brightness level at about 15 out of 100, and at full strength, those 2,048 LEDs were bright enough that the Tidbyt lit my home office practically by itself.

*The Tidbyt’s screen is delightfully low-res, but it still works for most purposes.*

It’s incredibly low-res by design because it’s not meant to do very much. The Tidbyt’s makers aren’t trying to build a super immersive gadget but, rather, something that can keep you from needing to look at your phone every time you need a tiny bit of information. Singh says that he built the original prototype as a way to quickly find out when the subway was coming. “If I got on my phone to check,” he says, “then I would also check Twitter. And I would check Instagram and stuff, and then just be doing that for, like, half an hour.” Instead, he hacked together a thing that plugged into the New York City’s subway API and told him when the next G train was arriving. It looks like a subway status board because that’s exactly what it is.

There’s a whole genre of gadgets out there that all pitch themselves this way, of course. “This is the gadget that will free you from your phone” applies to everything from the Apple Watch and Alexa to the minimalist smartphones from Palm and others. Tidbyt just takes the idea to its extreme by not letting you interact with the device at all.

*All your interaction with the Tidbyt actually happens with the app on your phone.*

To set up the Tidbyt, you just plug it in. It turns on automatically and jumps into pairing mode. All the actual work happens in the Tidbyt app, which is available on Android and iOS: you connect to the Tidbyt via Bluetooth then log it into your Wi-Fi network and it’s up and running. The app is where you decide what the Tidbyt will do, how bright it gets, and everything else. It does defeat the whole “don’t use your phone” idea a bit, but once the Tidbyt is set up the way you like it, you don’t really need the app anymore.

As for getting stuff on the Tidbyt, that happens in the app as well. There’s a store with a few dozen different apps, all of them free, which you can install on your device in a couple of taps. Most are status boards of some kind: there are lots of different clocks, a bunch of weather apps, ways to track the stock market or the price of Bitcoin or the phase of the Moon, some sports score apps that scroll like the ESPN ticker, and plenty of ways to see when the next subway train is coming. There are a few silly apps, too, like a Nyan Cat animation or a recreation of the bouncing DVD logo that I am not ashamed to admit I watched for about 20 straight minutes just to see if it would ever hit the corner. (It did, and it was awesome.)

More apps are coming to Tidbyt all the time, but it’s still pretty basic. There’s no calendar app that works for Outlook or iCloud, for instance, nor is there a way to see most to-do lists other than from Todoist or Things. Building an app for Tidbyt is fairly straightforward — it’s just a bunch of lights, after all, and if you have access to Linux and basic Python knowledge, you can write your own pretty easily. And the Tidbyt team tells me they’d ultimately like the Tidbyt to work more like a no-code platform for anyone to create custom apps. That’s still a ways off, though, and for now, there are big holes in the app store.

It’s easy enough to add apps to your Tidbyt, but I wish I could do more to manage them. By default, the Tidbyt rotates through all the apps you’ve installed, displaying each one for 15 seconds at a time. You can drag the apps around to determine the order in which they show up, and you can shorten the switching time down to as little as five seconds, but you can’t make it any longer — and I want it to be longer. More than that, what I want is a way to freeze it on a single app, kind of like hitting “hold” on a thermostat to keep it at one temperature rather than running the normal schedule. You can technically schedule when apps do and don’t run, so you can kind of reverse engineer this setup, but it’s a lot more work than it should be.

Without this kind of control, you’ll really only want to add apps to the Tidbyt that you plan to use all the time. I ride the DC metro sometimes but not daily, and it got annoying constantly looking at the schedule on days I didn’t care. Nyan Cat was funny — but not enough to look at once a minute 24 hours a day.

In my whole time using the Tidbyt, I’ve vacillated constantly between appreciating how little it does and wishing it would do just a tiny bit more. It’s a great-looking desk clock and, with a speaker, would be a great alarm — but I don’t really want this thing shouting at me all day. It’d be nice to be able to scroll through my apps manually, but I also don’t want to turn my Tidbyt into a thing I have to walk over and interact with.

The Tidbyt’s hardware and software are both made to be tinkered with.

Here’s where I landed: a button. I wish the Tidbyt had one, single, customizable, smackable button on the top. That button could be totally programmable — both the hardware and the software are easy to pull apart and tinker with, which Singh told me is a key part of its purpose — but I’d use it just as a way to stop and start the Tidbyt’s app rotation: one smack to freeze it on whatever app is currently showing so I can just have the clock and forecast showing most of the time, another smack to start it cycling between everything I have installed.

I don’t think I’m getting my button anytime soon, but the Tidbyt team is working on some more controls for the software. “Right now, it’s definitely limited,” Singh says, “but it’s simple. It’s very predictable. There’s a lot of things we can do, like add scheduling, or allow you to hold an app or change the amount of time one app is displayed — the question is how to do that and give you a user experience that makes sense.” The whole point of the Tidbyt, he says, is that you don’t have to use it for it to be useful, and he doesn’t want to lose that.

The other thing missing from Tidbyt right now is multiuser support. For a device that’s likely to be placed around people’s homes, the fact that you can only control it from a single phone is a problem. The team says it’s working on that, too, as well as better controls for homes with multiple Tidbyts.

After a few days of playing around with all the Tidbyt apps, I ended up keeping just three: one shows the forecast; one shows the next event on my calendar; and one is a delightfully pixelated picture of my two dogs. The Tidbyt flips between them every 15 seconds.

As a result, my Tidbyt is basically a super-powered desk clock. $179 is an awful lot to pay for a super-powered desk clock, of course, and it doesn’t offer anything you can’t get with a quick glance at your phone. It also offers a lot less than you’d get from a smart display from Google or Amazon, many of which you can find much cheaper. But I like the idea of these light, ambient gadgets, which have information I need but don’t thrust it in my face with push notifications or try to lure me into doomscrolling every time I look. I like what the Tidbyt represents even more than I like the device itself. I don’t even want it to do more stuff! I just want to control it better.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge

Tinder for booklovers: the new app matching like-minded readers

Klerb is ideal for finding companions who share your taste in books, its developer says. Early signs are it will be a bestseller

When Tania O’Donnell was dating, she met a man online and went back to his place … where he proudly showed off his book collection.

“It was about 20 books on Nazi Germany and 10 Andy McNab novels,” says O’Donnell, an author. “I could feel my vulva constructing its own chastity belt.”

Tinder turns 10: what have we learned from a decade of dating apps? – podcast

Dating apps have opened up opportunities to meet more people, but what have they done to our psyche? Emily Witt looks at how they have shifted the way we understand modern love, sex and relationships

Over a decade ago, online dating existed through sites such as match.com and OKCupid. But they did not tend to attract younger users, and for many there was a stigma attached to using them. But apps such as Grindr, which launched in 2009, and Tinder, which launched in September 2012, have radically changed the landscape of online dating.

Emily Witt, the author of Future Sex, a book that examines sex in the internet age, tells Nosheen Iqbal about the origin story of Tinder, meeting the founders, and why it was such an instant success. Emily discusses her own experience of using it and the apps that followed in its wake.

The apps have grown in response to a culture where people are single for a lot longer, and also where there’s a changing sexual morality that’s open to different kinds of relationships, Emily believes. Apps have completely altered the way we think about relationships, sex and love.

Meditation app Calm sacks one-fifth of staff

Wellness tech company, which enjoyed a boom in custom during the Covid lockdown, has let 90 of its 400 staff go

The US-based meditation app Calm has laid off 20% of its workforce, becoming the latest US tech startup to announce job cuts.

The firm’s boss, David Ko, said the company, which has now axed about 90 people from its 400-person staff, was “not immune” to the economic climate. “In building out our strategic and financial plan, we revisited the investment thesis behind every project and it became clear that we need to make changes,” he said in a memo to staff.

Meta’s BlenderBot 3 wants to chat – but can you trust it?

Facebook’s parent company has created a bot capable of weighing in on almost any topic – from radicalisation to sending Mark Zuckerberg to jail

Last week, researchers at Facebook’s parent company Meta released BlenderBot 3, a “publicly available chatbot that improves its skills and safety over time”. The chatbot is built on top of Meta’s OPT-175B language model, effectively the company’s white-label version of the more famous GPT-3 AI. Like most state-of-the-art AIs these days, that was trained on a vast corpus of text scraped from the internet in questionable ways, and poured into a datacentre with thousands of expensive chips that turned the text into something approaching coherence.

But where OPT-175B is a general-purpose textbot, able to do anything from write fiction and answer questions to generate spam emails, BlenderBot 3 is a narrower project: it can have a conversation with you. That focus allows it to bring in other expertise, though, and one of Meta’s most significant successes is hooking the language model up to the broader internet. In other words: “BlenderBot 3 is capable of searching the internet to chat about virtually any topic.”

vendredi 12 août 2022

Samsung heir pardoned for crimes, just like his father

Samsung Electronics Jay Y. Lee Receives Presidential Pardon — *Samsung Electronics’ Jay Y. Lee receives presidential pardon.* | Image: Getty

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong — known in the West as Jay Y. Lee — has won a presidential pardon by South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, allowing the grandson of Samsung’s founder to resume leadership of the powerful conglomerate, Bloomberg reports. The pardon will be formalized on August 15th.

The presidential pardon is reminiscent of the two given to Lee’s father, Lee Kun-hee, who was convicted of corruption and tax evasion in 1996 and 2008.

“In a bid to overcome the economic crisis by revitalizing the economy, Samsung Electronics vice-chairman Lee Jae-yong, whose suspended prison term ended recently, will be reinstated,” the South Korean government said in a statement reported by the Financial Times.

The pardon is the latest turn in a bribery scandal that dates back to 2017, when Lee was accused of bribing then-president Park Geun-hye. The Samsung heir was initially sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of corruption, but served less than one year of his sentence before being released on appeal. He was subsequently re-imprisoned in January 2021 before being released again in August that year on parole. In total, he served a year and a half of his 30 month sentence.

A presidential pardon is important, because it opens the door to Lee retaking the helm of the tech giant founded by his grandfather Lee Byung-Chul. Under Korean law, convicted criminals are barred from holding formal positions at a company like Samsung for five years following their conviction. Bloomberg reports that Lee has continued to receive reports from the company without having an official title.

Samsung currently doesn’t have anyone serving as its chairman after Lee Kun-hee died in October 2020. But Bloomberg notes that the pardon opens for the door for Lee to return and push through major strategic decisions that are arguably necessary as the chaebol struggles with inflation, the instability caused by the war in Ukraine, supply chain problems created by China’s Covid lockdowns, and complications resulting from escalating US-China relations.

Lee’s formal return to the company is seen as a potential source of stability, not to mention a potentially politically popular one. As the Associated Press noted last year, around five million people in South Korea own shares in Samsung, leading to widespread support for Lee’s release from prison. But critics say that the pardon is endemic of a cozy relationship between Korea’s business and political elite that verges on the corrupt, the Financial Times notes.

“Thank you for giving me the opportunity to start anew. I am sorry for causing concern to many people,” Lee said in a statement. “I will try harder to give back to society and grow together.” But the businessman’s legal troubles are far from over, given he still faces separate stock manipulation charges in relation to a merge of two Samsung subsidiaries.

The Summer of NIMBY in Silicon Valley’s Poshest Town

The Summer of NIMBY in Silicon Valley’s Poshest Town Moguls and investors from the tech industry, which endorses housing relief, banded together to object to a plan for multifamily homes near their estates in Atherton, Calif.

For Electric Vehicle Makers, Winners and Losers in Climate Bill

For Electric Vehicle Makers, Winners and Losers in Climate Bill Carmakers may need several years to revamp their supply chains to meet new rules, but the legislation is still seen as a win for electric vehicles.

GMB calls for £15 an hour minimum pay at Amazon warehouses in UK

The company has offered only a 35p rise, and hundreds of workers stopped work last week in protest

The GMB union has submitted formal pay claims to Amazon seeking a minimum of £15 an hour for workers at its UK warehouses as unofficial protests continue to dog the online retailer.

Hundreds of workers in warehouses across the country, including Tilbury in Essex, Dartford in Kent, Belvedere in south-east London, Coventry, Avonmouth, near Bristol and Rugeley in Staffordshire, stopped work last week after Amazon offered workers a 35p an hour pay rise – equivalent to about 3% compared with the June inflation rate of 9.4%.

Google outage: tech giant apologises after software update causes search engine to go down

Users reported the search engine was down and problems with Gmail, Google maps and Google images

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Google has apologised for a software update issue that caused a major international outage on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the company said the team had “worked quickly” to address the fault and services were back running as normal.

jeudi 11 août 2022

MultiVersus season 1 kicks off next week following delay

*Shaggy in* MultiVersus. | Image: Warner Bros. Games

The first season of MultiVersus, Warner Bros.’ free-to-play take on a Super Smash Bros.-esque crossover fighter, will now begin on August 15th, developer Player First Games tweeted Thursday evening. The season had been scheduled to kick off on August 9th, but the studio announced last week that the launch had been delayed.

Alongside the news of the season start date, Player First Games announced that Morty from Rick and Morty will be joining the MultiVersus roster on August 23rd; his arrival had been pushed back last week as well. Player First Games also committed to adding “new modes and content” over the course of the season. Ahead of the season 1 delay, the Rick half of Rick and Morty was planned to be added sometime during the season, but it’s unclear if that’s still the case.

Quick Note: Everything we are bringing to you in Season 1 will not drop on the same day. New modes and content will be spread through the life of the Season. We'll continue to share dates on all the fun things to come!
— MultiVersus (@multiversus) August 12, 2022

MultiVersus launched in open beta in July. Rick and Morty will join an already packed roster that includes characters like Bugs Bunny, Harley Quinn, Arya Stark, the Iron Giant, and LeBron James. The game is available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.

Ring’s new TV show sounds like a dystopian America’s Funniest Home Videos

Ring, the Amazon-owned home security company that’ll sell you a camera just as swiftly as it will give law enforcement access to that same camera’s footage without a warrant, is producing a television show that sounds an invitation to participate in the surveillance state. You know, as a fun family activity.

Deadline reports that Wanda Sykes has signed on to host Ring Nation, a new America’s Funniest Home Videos-style clip show from MGM Television, Ring, and Big Fish Entertainment, the production company behind Live P.D. Described as a “daily dose of life’s unpredictable, heartwarming and hilarious viral videos” in a press release, Ring Nation will feature footage captured on people’s Ring cameras presented in a way that’s meant to be entertaining.

“Bringing the new community together is core to our mission at Ring, and Ring Nation gives friends and family a fun new way to enjoy time with one another,” Ring founder and Ring Nation executive producer Jamie Siminoff said in the press release. “We’re so excited to have Wanda Sykes join Ring Nation to share people’s memorable moments with viewers.”

As Deadline points out, Ring Nation’s a fairly transparent bit of corporate synergy for Amazon, which owns MGM Television, Big Fish, and Ring, and (obviously) has a vested interest in encouraging more people to outfit their homes with Ring technology. There are almost certainly Ring owners out there who are interested in participating in Ring Nation and will jump at the opportunity to have Wanda Sykes comment on whatever riveting footage they capture around their homes.

But as one of Ring’s most thinly-veiled attempts at normalizing the idea and practice of people constantly surveilling one another, Ring Nation may also be just the reminder some folks need to avoid that particular instance of our modern day panopticon.

Ring Nation is set to premiere in syndication on September 26th.

Twitter allows MBS aide implicated in spying plot to keep verified account

Saudi official Bader al-Asaker accused by US of recruiting employees to secretly report on dissidents’ anonymous accounts

Twitter has allowed a senior Saudi official and aide to Mohammed bin Salman to maintain a verified account with more than 2m followers despite allegations that the official recruited and paid Twitter employees to secretly report on dissidents’ anonymous accounts.

A US jury on Tuesday convicted one of the former Twitter employees, a US-Lebanese national named Ahmad Abouammo on charges that he used his position at the social media company to spy on Twitter users on behalf of the Saudi government. Two other named defendants, Saudi citizens Ali Alzabarah and Ahmed Almutairi, are on the FBI’s wanted list and are believed to be in Saudi Arabia. Both are accused of acting as unregistered agents of Saudi Arabia.

Best podcasts of the week: The truth about Emiliano Sala’s tragic plane crash

In this week’s newsletter: The BBC’s Kayley Thomas pieces together the Argentinian striker’s final hours in Transfer: The Emiliano Sala Story. Plus: five of the best podcasts about childhood memories

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Restless Natives
Widely available, episodes weekly
After 15 years of friendship, Line of Duty’s Martin Compston and broadcaster Gordon Smart have got big plans together: a whisky, a festival, a film. First up, it’s this rambling podcast, in which the pals chat about, well, pretty much everything from thoughts on becoming an envious “hairline pervert” in middle age to wild anecdotes on filming the day after partying and breaking chairs with Kasabian on a bus at T in the Park. Hollie Richardson

A two-part look at the dangers of monkeypox in Spotify’s myth-busting show Science Vs.

Björk, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and more compose the soundtracks to their lives in Listening.

Dive into mixes from the likes of Four Tet and Joy Orbison as music site Resident Advisor opens the vault with archive material from the RA Podcast.

mercredi 10 août 2022

Google Search will stop telling you when Snoopy assassinated Abe Lincoln

The team behind Google Search is tweaking its featured snippets — the text boxes that sometimes spread false information while trying to offer help. The company announced an update that’s supposed to make answers more accurate and avoid the problem of false premises, or questions where no definitive-sounding answer would make sense. It’s paired with an expansion in Google’s “about this result” option and warnings for low-quality data voids, as well as a new partnership on information literacy lesson plans for middle and high-school students.

Snippets appear under many searches, but because they appear to directly answer questions by quoting pages, they can backfire in ways that standard query responses don’t. In a presentation to reporters, Google offered some examples of these problems and how it’s trying to fix them. When you search for how long light takes to get from the Sun to Earth, for instance, Google at one point offered a snippet that highlighted the distance from Pluto instead.

The solution, according to Search VP Pandu Nayak, lies in finding consensus: facts that match across multiple top search results. In a call with reporters, Nayak clarified that this consensus check is sourced from pages Google has already designated as high-quality, something Google hopes can avoid a snippet equivalent of Google bombing. “It doesn’t establish something is trustworthy, it just looks around the top results,” says Nayak. But by looking at several pages that Google already trusts, then trying to find commonalities, it hopes it can avoid highlighting the wrong details.

A warning on a Google search for “how to get in touch with the Illuminati.”

A separate problem is the “false premise” issue, a phenomenon where Google tries to be a little too helpful with snippets. For years, if you’ve entered a leading question about something that never happened, Google has frequently offered snippets that seem to confirm its factuality, drawing out-of-context text fragments from a semi-related page. The Search team’s example, for instance, is “When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln,” which at one point offered the date of Lincoln’s death in a snippet. Google calls these cases “not very common,” but it says it’s been training its systems to get better at detecting them and not offering a featured snippet at all, and it promises it’s reduced the incidence of these inappropriate appearances by 40 percent.

This doesn’t necessarily solve every problem with snippets. Nayak acknowledged that neither system would help with an issue identified last year where Google offered the precise opposite of good advice on dealing with seizures, listing a series of “do not” proscriptions as guides on what to do. “That kind of thing really is about making sure that our underlying algorithms appropriately extract enough of the context,” says Nayak, who says Google is continuing to make improvements that could prevent similar problems.

But the goal is to make snippets go haywire less often and increase trust in Search results, something that’s emphasized by Google’s other changes. For about a year, Google has been placing warnings above unreliable search results that can happen in breaking news situations. It’s now expanding those to more general situations where it determines there aren’t high-quality results for a search, adding an advisory before letting people scroll down the page to see the results. It doesn’t stop anyone from seeing content, but it ideally helps manage expectations about the information’s reliability.

Google is also expanding “About this page,” which lets you see details about the website a given result comes from. The option has so far been available on Search, but it’s now launching in Google’s iOS app in English — you can swipe up while browsing any page through the app to learn more details about it, theoretically helping you gauge its trustworthiness. The system is launching on Android later this year and in other languages over the coming months.

Sonos has delayed the release of its next product — likely the Sub Mini

A 3D product rendering of the upcoming Sonos Sub Mini, as interpreted by The Verge — 3D product render by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

After reporting bumpy third quarter earnings on Wednesday, Sonos announced that it has decided to push back a product launch that was originally penciled in for the near future. The product in question is almost certainly the long-awaited Sub Mini, a more affordable subwoofer that would join the company’s home theater lineup alongside the existing $749 Sub.

The Sub Mini appeared at the FCC in June. If Sonos had followed its typical window of time between that filing and a consumer release, the product would’ve been arriving relatively soon. But Sonos says it’s now been delayed until the fiscal first quarter of 2023. “We always consider the kind of product that it is, and the timing,” CEO Patrick Spence said on the call. “We remain committed to two new product launches each year.”

Sonos spokesperson Erin Pategas confirmed the news to The Verge in an email, saying “I can confirm we decided to push an anticipated product launch from Q4 ’22 into Q1 ’23.” That would put its rescheduled arrival sometime between October and December.

Sonos’ Q3 earnings were well off the mark of the company’s revenue expectations. “We have seen the macroeconomic backdrop become significantly more challenging for us starting in June as the dollar’s appreciation and high inflation have adversely affected consumer sentiment globally, particularly in the categories in which we play,” Spence said in the company’s earnings release.

During a call on Wednesday afternoon, outgoing CFO Brittany Bagley said Sonos is currently holding onto more inventory than it would like and faces a “challenging Q4.” The company pointed to soft demand for the $279 Sonos Ray soundbar as one reason for its revenue miss. But Sonos partially blamed that on a slowdown in TV sales, and the company voiced optimism that the Ray will ultimately prove very successful as its entry-level soundbar on account of positive reviews and its appealing price.

Overwatch League player learns he was fired via Tweet

Image: Blizzard

Getting fired is never fun, but it’s even worse when you find out via Tweet. Sang-min “Myunb0ng” Seo, support player for New York’s Overwatch League team, found out he wasn’t going to be playing in this or any other week’s games when his organization bid farewell to him in a tweet. Roster changes in the OWL are usually announced via tweet, so this wasn’t out of the ordinary. Problem is, it seems like no one told Seo of his release beforehand. He responded to the farewell tweet with question marks, seemingly confused.

Screenshot from Twitter of two tweets with text as follows: From @NYExcelsior, Today we say goodbye to Myunbong. We want to thank Myunbong for his dedication and hard work over the past year on the team, and we wish him success in all his future endeavors. Reply: @OMyungbong, ????

He also quote-tweeted the announcement with another question mark, seemingly confirming the idea that he hadn’t known this was coming.

Screenshot from Twitter showing two tweets with text as follows. Quote Retweet from @Omyunbong: ? Tweet quoted from @NYExcelsior Today we say goodbye to Myunb0ng. We want to thank Myunb0ng for his dedication and hard work over the past year on the team, and we wish him success in all his future endeavors.

This particular revelation inspires a big ol’ “oof” because a couple of hours before tweeting about Seo’s release, the New York Excelsior tweeted a welcome for its newest support player, Soon-jae “Ansoonjae” Jae. So, ostensibly, Seo saw the announcement and was in the process of welcoming a support line comrade, unaware that said comrade would be taking his place. Damn.

New York Excelsior apologized on Wednesday for the situation. “Today, we posted an announcement thanking Myunb0ng for his time with us, however we failed to properly communicate with the team before this announcement was made,” the team wrote on Twitter. “We take full responsibility and there are no excuses. To Myunb0ng, we are deeply sorry for our miscommunication and putting you through this situation.”

pic.twitter.com/s3rfWkpube
— NY Excelsior (@NYExcelsior) August 10, 2022

Fans responded to Seo’s tweets with shock, hoping that this was not how a player truly found out about his release. But even if it were, Seo wouldn’t be in poor company. There are numerous stories in meat sports where players find out about being dropped or traded via tweet and a host of other unsavory ways. Still kinda stings, though.

Why Issey Miyake Was Steve Jobs’s Favorite Designer

Why Issey Miyake Was Steve Jobs’s Favorite Designer The real beginning of the fashion-technology love affair and its legacy lies with Issey Miyake, who died last week.

mardi 9 août 2022

Apple won’t even tell Ben Stiller how many of you are watching Severance

There’s no doubt that Severance is a hit — the show’s first season made our best entertainment of 2022 list even as it “paints the darkest possible portrait of how megacorporations think about and treat their employees.” For a real-life example of that treatment, all you have to ask is what happens when the people who make Severance ask Apple how big of a hit it really is.

In a bit of frustration that will feel familiar to anyone who has tried to figure out what Apple means when touting the performance of its custom ARM processors, it turns out that even Ben Stiller, the executive producer and director of Severance, couldn’t get hold of detailed data on how many people are watching. Here’s what he said in an interview with Decider:

“They don’t tell you the numbers. It’s really weird. So, you get these graphs and charts, like I said, that have like peaks and valleys. But you don’t know what the baseline is. I guess could be like, based on 100 people or could be like, 200 million people. We don’t know. They basically say, ‘Yeah, this is doing well.’ You’re trying to interpret what they’re saying.”

As he went on to mention, this is consistent with how other streamers, like Netflix and even Disney Plus, have frustrated their viewers, industry watchers, and at times the people who make their original content by refusing to cough up details on viewer data.

52 Emmy nominations and an award-hunting “special conversation” event are obviously a good sign, but I want to know: how does Severance stack up next to something like Better Call Saul? Can it beat NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 using real stats instead of some bizarre wattage-based power consumption comparison? Just like Apple’s M-series processor family, we know Severance’s performance is impressive, and having reasonable figures to help evaluate that could save everyone time and confusion.

Regardless of how many people watched the show, or what happens during the Emmy Awards on September 12th, season two of Severance is already in the works.

Microsoft celebrates 15 years of OneDrive with a redesign and new features

Microsoft’s marking OneDrive’s 15th anniversary with a new landing page, called OneDrive Home, and it should make it easier to keep tabs on your work. Instead of arriving on the My files tab when you first open OneDrive, you’ll find yourself on the new Home page that resembles that dashboard in the online version of Office.

Like the Office web app, OneDrive Home contains a list of your files, organized by how recently you accessed them. Above the list are filters that let you sort your documents by Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF file types.

*It’s easier to understand the new changes once you see them.*

There’s also a new “Activity” column to the right of the “Owner” file field that tells you when someone leaves a comment, @mentions another user, or assigns you a task within a shared document. On the left side of the Home view, Microsoft’s adding a new Quick access section, where (just like on Windows) you can find and pin your most frequently accessed spaces.

Unfortunately, these changes aren’t live right now — Microsoft says OneDrive Home will be available in “the coming months.” From what it looks like, though, the new Home page could serve as a central hub that should help you stay organized while collaborating remotely.

Aside from its OneDrive web app, Microsoft is also rolling out its photo story feature for the OneDrive mobile app (essentially OneDrive’s equivalent to Instagram stories) to users in Australia. The feature’s not reaching users in the US or other regions until later this year.

Dozens of Whole Foods stores will soon let you pay with just a scan of your palm

Amazon’s palm scanning technology is expanding to 65 Whole Foods locations across California. The checkout devices were introduced in 2020 as part of the Amazon One payment service, allowing customers to pay with a scan of their palm. This is the biggest rollout by the company yet, with the first new Whole Foods locations adding support today in Malibu, Montana Avenue, and Santa Monica.

Customers can set up Amazon One by registering their palm print using a kiosk or at a point of sale station at participating stores. To register, you need to provide a payment card and phone number, agree to Amazon’s terms of service, and share an image of your palms. Once completed, you can take items to checkout and not have to take out your wallet — or even your phone — a hover of your hand over the device is all that’s needed to pay and leave.

The Amazon One rollout is part of the company’s campaign to change how customers interact at retail stores and runs alongside its Just Walk Out-enabled stores with technologies that make it faster to pay. Amazon One is designed to identify you accurately and allow you to pay at Amazon-owned stores, but the company is looking to expand the technology to outside businesses as well.

Several Whole Foods locations have already been testing the palm-scanning tech in the LA area, as well in Austin, Seattle, and New York. It’s also been available at the company’s Amazon Style store in Glendale, and at select Amazon Go and Fresh stores.

Amazon states that the images taken on the kiosk aren’t stored locally, instead they are encrypted and then sent to a cloud server that is dedicated for Amazon One where an identifiable palm signature is generated. My colleague James Vincent wrote more about how the technology works and its concerns in 2020.

Amazon has found success in convincing millions of customers to provide them with data in exchange for a more convenient lifestyle. Things like online shopping, grocery shopping, using Alexa, Ring smart cameras, doorbells, and now room-mapping robot vacuum cleaners are all areas that Amazon collects data in, and that will continue to be a concern to privacy advocates.

Ex-Twitter employee convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia

Former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty of spying for the government of Saudi Arabia, according to a report from Bloomberg. The jury handed down its judgment in a San Francisco federal court on Tuesday, where Abouammo was also convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering, and falsifying records.

Abouammo previously worked at Twitter as a media partnerships manager, and helped prominent figures in the Middle East and North Africa promote their accounts. However, he leveraged his position to access the email addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates of users who were critical of the Saudi government. Abouammo then transmitted that information to Saudi officials between November 2014 and May 2015 and received gifts in return.

In 2019, the Department of Justice charged Abouammo and another former Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah, with espionage. The agency later expanded those charges in 2020 to include a third individual, Ahmed Almutairi, who allegedly coordinated the scheme. Both Almutairi and Alzabarah remain wanted by the US government. Last year, human rights activist Ali Al-Ahmed sued Twitter, claiming that the platform could’ve done more to protect his information.

According to Bloomberg, prosecutors accused Abouammo of working with an aide to Mohammed bin Salman, who now serves as Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, to suppress dissidents. Abouammo reportedly argued that he was just doing his job, and blames Twitter for not securing users’ data.

Abouammo faces 10 to 20 years in prison when sentenced. Twitter declined to comment.

Justice Dept. Said to Conduct New Interviews in Inquiry Into Google’s Ad Tech

Justice Dept. Said to Conduct New Interviews in Inquiry Into Google’s Ad Tech The Justice Department for more than a year has investigated whether Google abuses its dominance over the interlocking technologies that deliver ads online.

WhatsApp opens the door to silent exits from annoying groups

App spares users the embarrassment of a blanket notification as part of series of updates over coming month

WhatsApp users will soon be able to avoid social awkwardness by gracefully – and silently – leaving annoying groups, the company has announced.

Currently, if you leave a WhatsApp group, every member is notified, which can be embarrassing for smaller groups and irritating for larger ones.

Musk’s lawyers subpoena big banks for records on Twitter deal

Billionaire seeks material on how JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs advised platform during negotiations

Lawyers for Elon Musk have subpoenaed JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs for records relating to the billionaire’s plan to buy Twitter.

Musk has requested the banks turn over “documents and communications” relating to how they advised Twitter during negotiations, which Musk abruptly backed out of last month after offering to purchase the website for $44bn in April, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

lundi 8 août 2022

How to get your own book published: a step by step guide

Allow a budget of £4,000 to do-it-yourself, from the editing and design through to marketing

“A top-of-her-game literary agent tells us she receives about 3,000 submissions a year,” says Joe Sedgwick, the head of writing services at The Literary Consultancy. “Of those, she requests to see the full manuscripts of about 70. Of those writers, she will take on maybe five to 10.”

Faced with these odds, many people who dream of getting their writing into the hands of readers are turning to self-publishing.

Snapchat to let parents see who their kids are chatting with in app

As part of Snap’s child safety efforts, Snapchat is launching a new supervision tool on Tuesday that the company says mimics how parents and teenagers interact in the real world.

Snapchat’s new “Family Center” hub allows parents and guardians to keep tabs on who their teens message with on the app without disclosing what it is they’re saying to each other. Both the guardian and the child must accept the Family Center invite before the oversight tools can take effect. Once the invites are accepted, a guardian can see the entirety of their child’s friends list and a list of accounts they’ve interacted with over the last seven days and report concerning accounts to Snap’s Trust and Safety Team.

“Our goal was to create a set of tools designed to reflect the dynamics of real-world relationships and foster collaboration and trust between parents and teens,” Snap said in its Tuesday blog post. The feature is meant to copy real-life relationships, like when a parent lets a kid’s friends come over but doesn’t monitor everything they say.

Snap plans to roll out new Family Center features over the next few weeks, including tools allowing parents to view the new friends their children have added along with additional content controls.

*Snapchat’s Family Center allows parents to see who their children are talking to on the app.*

Snap’s new parental controls come as lawmakers continue their work to address children’s online safety. After Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents disclosing how Meta’s platforms can harm young users, some of the largest tech platforms were called in to testify before Congress. Among YouTube and TikTok was a representative from Snap before a Senate committee last October.

At last year’s hearing, Jennifer Stout, Snap’s vice president of global public policy, said, “Snapchat was built as an antidote to social media” — distinguishing how Snap is distancing itself from Facebook and other social media platforms.

Haugen’s disclosures and the following hearings led to the introduction of a number of bills to tackle children’s safety online. Late last month, a Senate panel approved two bills that would restrict how tech platforms can collect and use data from young users, according to The Washington Post.

One bill, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, would ban tech companies from collecting the data of users between 13 and 16 years old without parental consent. A second bill, the Kids Online Safety Act, would create an “eraser” button allowing for young users to easily delete their data from platforms. The measures were approved amid a growing movement of advocates who are calling for lawmakers to raise the age limits in federal law to cover the privacy of children between the ages of 13 and 18 years old, rather than simply children under the age of 13.

Following Snap’s October congressional hearing, the company announced that it was working on the Family Center tool it announced on Tuesday. In a statement to The Verge last year, a Snap spokesperson said, “Our overall goal is to help educate and empower young people to make the right choices to enhance their online safety and to help parents be partners with their kids in navigating the digital world.”

In January, Snap launched a feature limiting the number of friend suggestions teenagers see on its app, via its Quick Add menu. According to the company, kids between the ages of 13 to 17 only receive suggestions for accounts that “have a certain number of friends in common with that person.”

Snapchat Introduces Its First Parental Controls

Snapchat Introduces Its First Parental Controls The messaging app, which is popular with teenagers, has faced legal pressure to roll out tools so parents can keep an eye on their children’s social media activity.

Google hit by worldwide outage as users report search engine down

Users also reported problems with Gmail, Google maps and Google images

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Google experienced a major international internet outage on Tuesday, technology platforms reported.

The realtime online platform Downdetector reported users had registered problems with Google explorer, the world’s dominant search engine from 2.12am BST (9.12pm EST, 11.12AM AEST.

Snap is planning to lay off employees

Snap Inc. Hosts Virtual Snap Partner Summit — Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveiling the company’s pair of AR glasses last year. | Photo by Snap Partner Summit 2021 - Snap Inc/Getty Images for Snap Inc

Snap is in the early stages of planning layoffs, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The planned cuts come after the company recently delivered disappointing earnings results and didn't forecast earnings for the third quarter — news that sent its stock price cratering to near-all-time lows. It’s currently unclear how many of Snap’s more than 6,000 employees will be laid off, as managers across the company are still planning the full scope of the cuts for their teams.

Russ Caditz-Peck, a Snap spokesman, declined to comment.

Snap’s business has been hurt recently on two major fronts: The first is Apple’s introduction of the “Ask App Not to Track” prompt, which an estimated majority of iPhone owners have opted “Yes” to, making it harder for companies like Snap to as effectively target their ads. The second factor is the broader economic downturn that has especially punished the stock prices of Snap and other cash-burning companies. Snap has been profitable in only one quarter since it went public in 2017.

The last time Snap did layoffs was in 2018, when it was still reeling from the fallout of a poorly executed Snapchat redesign. Since then, its user base has grown to 347 million daily users, surpassing Twitter.

But the company has struggled to build a significant ads business. And its attempts at selling hardware, like a $230 selfie drone, haven’t gone anywhere. In late May, CEO Evan Spiegel told employees that the company would sharply pullback on hiring and “find additional cost savings.”

Snap’s isn’t alone in needing to make cuts: Twitter, TikTok, and a host of other tech firms have either announced layoffs or paused hiring in recent months. Even Snap’s much larger and profitable competitor in social media, Meta, has slowed hiring and warned employees about tough times ahead.

You now have two days to delete that embarrassing WhatsApp message

Sent a wildly inappropriate text meant for your boo to, I don’t know, your boss? Now you have some extra time to save face and delete it — well, if you’re using WhatsApp, at least.

WhatsApp users now have a little over two days after sending a message to delete it instead of just one hour, the company announced today.

To start using the new feature right now, open up the WhatsApp group or individual chat where you sent the message(s). Make sure to tap and hold the content you want to get rid of, click “Delete,” and then select either “Delete for everyone” or “Delete for me.”

Yet before you go off on a deleting spree, be aware there’s a (slight) catch: all recipients must be updated to the most recent version of WhatsApp in order for this to actually work — and you won’t actually receive a notification if the message didn’t delete.

Still, this could be a handy new feature that may help WhatsApp gain a slight advantage over Apple’s iMessage instant message service. Apple, after all, still doesn’t offer this capability and only will whenever the heck its new iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems are released, possibly this fall.

For now, however, the iOS 16 beta only gives users two minutes to pull the plug — and only so long as recipients have downloaded the beta version as well. Which, let’s face it, isn’t something you can count on.

dimanche 7 août 2022

LG‘s latest earbuds include head-tracking spatial audio

LG is today announcing two new sets of wireless earbuds. First up are the Tone Free T90 buds, which now become the company’s flagship pair. They still have the signature bacteria-killing UVnano charging case. And like the previous Tone Free FP9, the case can also double as a Bluetooth transmitter, letting you run an aux cable to devices that might lack wireless connectivity — like a treadmill — and still use the earbuds like normal.

According to LG’s press release, the noise-canceling T90s have “a new internal structure with larger drivers that helps generate deeper, more satisfying bass.” But what’s more interesting is that they support Dolby Head Tracking “across your favorite content and devices.” Here’s how LG describes that experience:

Dolby Head Tracking recalibrates the sound as users move their heads for a more natural sound experience. Listeners will feel like they are in the center of the scene and experience a whole new level of audio immersion whether they are listening to music, watching movies, enjoying favorite streaming series or playing video games.

*LG’s earbuds use hypoallergenic ear tips.*

LG claims that “the T90s are the first wireless earbuds to feature an audio virtualizer designed by Dolby specifically for earbuds” that makes for better immersion and dimensionality to the sound. Apple’s AirPods and Beats earbuds support head tracking spatial audio, as do Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Pro, Buds 2, and Buds Live. Google is planning to add the same feature on its Pixel Buds Pro later this year. In all cases, the audio changes as you move your head around. The T90 earbuds promise up to 9 hours of battery life (with adaptive ANC turned off), plus another 18 hours from the charging case.

*LG calls its stability fins “SwivelGrip.”*

The company is also making a play for the fitness crowd with its new Tone Free Fit (TF8) earbuds. Like other workout-focused buds, these have soft, silicone fins to help ensure they remain in your ears securely even during vigorous exercise. They’re rated IPX7 for water resistance, a step up from the IPX4 in the T90s, and include hybrid ANC. Battery life is also slightly higher, at up to 10 hours of continuous playback.

LG unfortunately hasn’t announced pricing for either pair of earbuds, but they’re both set for release in September.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II beta is coming in September

The beta for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is set to arrive next month, with PlayStation players getting access first, followed by those on Xbox and PC. Infinity Ward shared the news at its CDL Champs (Call of Duty League Championship) tournament. As with its previous betas, the dates are separated by console and whether you preordered the game or not.

The first early access beta kicks off on September 16th to 17th for PlayStation 4 and 5 players who preordered the game. This is followed by the open beta for all PlayStation players, which begins on September 18th and ends on the 20th.

The crossplay beta for players who preordered the game on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC will last from September 22nd to 23rd, while the open crossplay beta for all platforms starts on September 24th and ends on the 26th. Each session begins at 1PM ET.

Pre-Order now for early access to the #MWII Open BETA!

The #MWII @Playstation Early Access Beta starts September 16, with Early and Open access Betas to follow on all platforms. https://t.co/cLMlBb41mV pic.twitter.com/2GZ0laKE9C
— Call of Duty @ #CDLChamps (@CallofDuty) August 7, 2022

At CDL Champs, Infinity Ward also teased a new multiplayer map, Grand Prix, which will have you duking it out on a racetrack. This map will be available to play during the beta.

If you haven’t pre-ordered the game, Infinity Ward says you’ll have the chance to receive a beta code that’ll give you early access. While it already gave some away during the tournament today, there will likely be more chances to snag some from streamers and YouTubers leading up to the beta’s start date.

We got our first glimpse at Modern Warfare II in June, but Infinity Ward’s set to reveal a lot more about the upcoming game at its Call of Duty: Next event (including a full multiplayer reveal), which will take place on September 15th. Modern Warfare II launches on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, and PC (via Battle.net and Steam) on October 28th.

Hackers might have figured out your secret Twitter accounts

A security vulnerability on Twitter allowed a bad actor to find out the account names associated with certain email addresses and phone numbers (and yes, that could include your secret celebrity stan accounts), Twitter confirmed on Friday. Twitter initially patched the issue in January after receiving a report through its bug bounty program, but a hacker managed to exploit the flaw before Twitter even knew about it.

The vulnerability, which stemmed from an update the platform made to its code in June 2021, went unnoticed until earlier this year. This gave hackers several months to exploit the flaw, although Twitter said it “had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability” at the time of its discovery.

Last month’s report from Bleeping Computer suggested otherwise, and revealed that a hacker managed to exploit the vulnerability while it flew under Twitter’s radar. The hacker reportedly amassed a database of over 5.4 million accounts by taking advantage of the flaw, and then tried to sell the information on a hacker forum for $30,000. After analyzing the data posted to the forum, Twitter confirmed that its user data had been compromised.

It’s still unclear how many users have actually been affected though, and Twitter doesn’t seem to know, either. While Twitter says it plans on notifying affected users, it isn’t “able to confirm every account that was potentially impacted.” Twitter advises anyone concerned about their secret accounts to enable two-factor authentication, as well as to attach an email address or phone number that isn’t publicly known to the account they don’t want to be associated with.

Meta is shutting down one of its biggest VR games — but only for Quest 1 owners

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Around the same time Meta hiked up the price on its Quest 2 headsets, it also announced that it’s ending Quest 1 support for Population One, a popular battle-royale shooter set in virtual reality. BigBox VR, the Meta-owned developer behind the game, shared the update in a post on its blog, noting that Quest 1 owners will no longer be able to launch or play the game starting October 31st, 2022.

BigBox VR says the shutdown is necessary so it can focus on developing new experiences “that will push the boundaries of multiplayer VR.” Quest 1 players can still technically play the game if they have a VR-ready PC, however. The game supports cross-buy, which makes the PC version available via Air Link and Oculus Link. This should let you wirelessly play Population: One on your PC from your Quest 1 headset. Players using the Quest 2, Oculus Rift, and Oculus Rift S will still have access to the game.

While Meta’s offering Quest 1 owners a refund for Population: One, there’s a catch: you had to have purchased the game from the Quest Store within the past six months. The policy seems kind of unfair for a game that launched on the Quest nearly two years ago and will likely leave a number of players with a game that they can’t even play (unless, of course, they upgrade to the now-$399 Quest 2 or use Air Link, which requires a pricey VR-ready PC).

Population: One’s shutdown also raises the question of whether other developers will soon ax support for the three-year-old Quest 1. Meta spokesperson Caiti Sullivan said in a statement to The Verge that the company’s currently “working out the details of an ecosystem-wide end-of-support process,” and that “other developers who choose to end support for apps on Quest 1 will be able to do so.” Meta declined to comment further when asked whether any other games will end Quest 1 support in the near future.

I know that games can’t support every older system forever, but doling out a price increase, along with an announcement that will soon leave Quest 1 owners with one less game to play, is like a double punch to the gut. As my colleague Jay Peters points out, Meta could be raising the price of the Quest 2, and perhaps even pushing users towards it, to stem the the losses its virtual reality arm reported in both the first and second quarter of 2022.

Update August 7th, 2:27PM ET: Updated to add that Population: One supports cross-buy.

DeWalt gave my power tool battery the power of USB-C

A bridge between two charging worlds

Your leaf blower battery should be able to charge a laptop. Your drill battery should charge your phone. And while we’re at it, why shouldn’t our ever-more powerful USB-C power adapters be able to charge those power tool batteries as well?

Fundamentally, there’s not much difference between a battery bank you buy from Anker and a power tool battery from DeWalt — both generally contain the same 18650 lithium-ion cells. But to do all that, your power tool batteries would need a powerful USB-C port.

And that hasn’t really been a thing… till now.

@verge
Powering hours of play on your Steam Deck with a DeWalt battery? That’s now a thing #techtok #dewalttools #batterylife
♬ original sound - The Verge

The $100 DeWalt DCB094 USB Charging Kit lets you add that port to any DeWalt 20V power tool battery in a literal snap. Slide this quarter-pound adapter onto your battery pack, and you get a bi-directional 100W USB-C PD port. That means not only can you charge up to a MacBook Pro-sized laptop with a big enough DeWalt pack, you can charge those DeWalt packs with your laptop or phone’s USB-C charger as well.

The adapter supports everything from the cheap 1.3Ah packs that came with your loss-leader combo kit to the massive 15Ah FlexVolt packs you’d probably only stick in stationary tools. It’s the biggest gadget charging battery you’re liable to find outside of dedicated power stations.

As someone with a garage drawer full of DeWalt batteries, I couldn’t wait to put it to the test. But it’s also not quite the experience I was dreaming of.

How we rate and review devices

I’ve been testing the DeWalt DCB094 on and off for months, and here’s the good news: it totally works.

I turned DeWalt’s monster 15Ah pack into a USB-C external battery that was able to charge my wife’s 14-inch MacBook Pro (69.6Wh) three full times and still had gas in the tank. My Steam Deck? I charged up its 40.04Wh pack five full times — that’s 10 extra hours of Elden Ring right there. When I filmed a nearly three-hour timelapse Lego build with my iPhone, I plugged it into a 6Ah DeWalt pack knowing there was no way I’d run out of juice.

*You get one 100W USB-C PD port, and one 12W USB-A port. The USB-A port will do passthrough charging while you’re charging the DeWalt battery, too.*

Every DeWalt 20V battery I tried, new or old, large or small, worked with the adapter, too. That includes my two 1.5Ah packs, one 1.7Ah pack, the two 5Ah packs that came with my lawnmower, and the two 6Ah packs I bought about a year ago and rarely use. I clocked them all charging up to 100W in both directions over that USB-C port, enough to keep today’s (but not tomorrow’s) biggest USB-C PD laptops running just like they were plugged into the wall.

When it came time to recharge those power tool batteries, the 100W USB-C port sometimes let me do it faster than DeWalt’s AC adapters, too. While DeWalt unfortunately only ships the DCB094 with a 65W USB-C charger, even that should offer a faster charging rate than the company’s cheaper AC adapters that come with drill or driver kits. And when I added my own separately purchased 100W USB-C charger, I was able to shave off time over my 4A (80W) DeWalt AC adapter when charging the very biggest packs.

Here’s how fast I got these batteries to charge and roughly how much I got out of them:

The only issue I had was that if I fully drained a battery, and I mean fully drained it — ran it all the way down in a leaf blower or drill repeatedly until it would spin no more — sometimes the DeWalt adapter wouldn’t light up to charge when I popped it on. Sometimes I had to trick it by plugging it into a different battery or charger first. Oh, and you can’t charge one DeWalt battery with another DeWalt battery using two adapters. I tried.

So if it largely all works beautifully, why am I giving it this product a 6? Partly because The Verge just moved to a full 10-point scale for review scores to avoid score inflation — a 6 is still good! — but also partly because the DeWalt adapter’s advantages begin to recede when you’re not pairing it with a 15Ah battery that costs $389 all by itself.

Every battery I tried works — even a Chinese knockoff — but not all batteries are equal. I wouldn’t bother using a tiny 1.5Ah battery. Nor the knockoff, because the seller lied about its capacity.

With smaller batteries like my 1.5A, 1.7A and even 4Ah packs, they simply didn’t charge needy devices long enough to justify reaching for them over a traditional battery bank or charger.

Part of that’s likely due to transfer losses, which aren’t unique to DeWalt. You can’t fully charge a 100Wh laptop battery with a 100Wh battery pack like DeWalt’s DCB205 because some of that energy doesn’t make it across. (Some gets expended as heat, and I can attest that charging my 100Wh HyperJuice with the DeWalt adapter made the HyperJuice get uncomfortably hot to the touch.) In general, I saw losses of between 20 percent and 33 percent with my gadgets – for example, the 6Ah (120Wh) DCB206 only gave me 80Wh worth of Steam Deck battery life.

*You can even charge your DeWalt batteries super slowly with a 5V USB-A adapter in a pinch. It took 28.5 hours to top up this 6Ah DeWalt battery.*

But that 6Ah battery is also a 2.5-pound brick once you add the DeWalt adapter — twice the weight of my HyperJuice, even if we’re assuming I don’t have to buy the DeWalt battery because I already have one for my tools. DeWalt’s 5Ah battery is only a little lighter, but then I might only be looking at 66Wh of power for my gadgets, and so on.

When you consider the fact that DeWalt’s batteries are quite pricey and heavy for the capacity they typically offer, I can’t really recommend someone buy into the DeWalt ecosystem just for this feature, unless you really need rugged batteries that can charge your devices and power tools on the go.

But if you already have a garage full of sizeable DeWalt batteries that don’t get a lot of use? I could absolutely see myself spending $100 if I didn’t already have a capable power bank or two. Between the 5A charging speeds and the 100W output for gadgets, there’s a lot to like.

The A port does 5 volts at 2.4 amps, the C port does 5 to 15 volts at 3A or 20V at 5A. — *Zoom in for the charging specs.*

Now, though, what I really want is for DeWalt and company to take the obvious next step: stick the USB-C port on the battery itself, so we don’t need to mess with adapters at all. In January, DeWalt product manager Sean Fitzgibbons told me the DCB094 could be a bit of a test balloon: “If we get the interest that I expect we’re going to get, I think that would open the door a lot more to potentially adding that directly to batteries down the road.”

I think DeWalt should just do it. A lot of people would buy a USB-C native power tool battery who’d never consider a $100 adapter you’ve gotta take on and off every time.

Samsung launches its Android 13-based One UI 5 beta on Galaxy S22 phones

*New customization options in the One UI 5 beta.* | Image: Samsung

Samsung has officially started to roll out its One UI 5 open beta to Galaxy S22 owners in the US, Germany, and South Korea. The update comes only a few weeks ahead of Android 13’s expected release, and just a few days before Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event. Like the operating system it’s powered by, the One UI 5 beta looks like a relatively small update that adds some customization options, tweaks to notifications, as well as new accessibility and security settings.

One UI 5 builds off of Android 13’s theming options by offering up to 16 preset color themes based on your wallpaper and 12 additional color options for your home screen, icons, and quick panels. It also introduces a way to stack similarly-sized widgets on top of one another that’s supposed to help create a less cluttered look.

*The One UI 5 beta lets you stack widgets on top of each other.*

There are some new accessibility features as well, including a Magnifier tool that uses the phone’s camera to zoom in on real-life objects and text, as well as options to have your phone read your keyboard input aloud.

Samsung details several other features that One UI 5 has adopted from Android 13, such as new notification settings that require app developers to ask for your permission before sending you notifications. The One UI 5 beta also lets you set your preferred language on an app-by-app basis, and gives you access to a redesigned security dashboard that scans your phone for potential issues.

*One UI 5’s new security dashboard is adopted from Android 13.*

When Samsung released its One UI 4 beta last year, it highlighted how it’s getting updates out earlier each year. This time around, Samsung widened the gap between its previous update even more, beating its One UI 4 beta’s September 2021 launch date by a little over a month. As was the case with Samsung’s previous One UI betas, you can access the One UI 5 update by registering through the Samsung Members app.

While the One UI 5 beta is only available on S22 devices in the US, Germany, and South Korea right now, Samsung plans on rolling it out to more devices and regions in the near future. We might hear more about what One UI 5 has to offer at Samsung’s Unpacked event on August 10th, where Samsung’s rumored to launch a range of new devices, including the Galaxy Z Flip 4, Z Fold 4, Galaxy Watch 5, and Galaxy Buds Pro 2.

Siri or Skynet? How to separate AI fact from fiction

Determining the way artificial intelligence is used and governed will be one of the century’s key political battlegrounds. Here’s what everyone needs to know

“Google fires engineer who contended its AI technology was sentient.” “Chess robot grabs and breaks finger of seven-year-old opponent.” “DeepMind’s protein-folding AI cracks biology’s biggest problem.” A new discovery (or debacle) is reported practically every week, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes not. Should we be exultant? Terrified? Policymakers struggle to know what to make of AI and it’s hard for the lay reader to sort through all the headlines, much less to know what to be believe. Here are four things every reader should know.

First, AI is real and here to stay. And it matters. If you care about the world we live in, and how that world is likely to change in the coming years and decades, you should care as much about the trajectory of AI as you might about forthcoming elections or the science of climate breakdown. What happens next in AI, over the coming years and decades, will affect us all. Electricity, computers, the internet, smartphones and social networking have all changed our lives, radically, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, and AI will, too.