Million

Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt — for the wrong person

Photo by Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Image ‘We make this sort of heinous crime impossible to escape from’ As wildfires raged through Southern California last weekend, an app called Citizen offered an unorthodox bounty over livestream and in push alerts to local residents: “hunt down” the alleged arsonist, and we’ll give… Read more

YouTube pulled its community captions feature, so now more creators are making their own

Jack Edwards doesn’t want to be praised for doing what he considers the bare minimum: making his videos accessible to his deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Edwards began making book and lifestyle videos on YouTube five years ago, but he only started captioning all of his videos in January. “It was one of my… Read more

Spotify and YouTube Music offline listening coming to Google Wear watches

Talk of a possible Spotify HiFi launch hit the headlines this week, but it seems the music streaming giant wants to focus on a new feature for Google Wear devices: offline listening. In a keynote speech at the recent Google I/O developer conference, Spotify’s product lead for cars and wearables revealed plans to allow the… Read more

One of the US’s largest insurance companies reportedly paid $40 million to ransomware hackers

CNA Financial, one of the largest US insurance companies, paid $40 million to free itself from a ransomware attack that occurred in March, according to a report from Bloomberg. The hackers reportedly demanded $60 million when negotiations started about a week after some of CNA’s systems were encrypted, and the insurance company paid the lower… Read more

Iran Reveals Simorgh Supercomputer, Says Another Is Imminent

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock) Iran announced this week that its new supercomputer, Simorgh, has debuted with a peak performance of 0.56 petaflops and plans to reach 1 petaflop in two months. Al Jazeera reported that Simorgh was “said to be wholly designed and built by a team of Iranian engineers, who developed the country’s… Read more

Snap’s new Spectacles let you see the world in augmented reality

Snap’s new Spectacles glasses are its most ambitious yet. But there’s a big catch: you can’t buy them. On Thursday, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled the company’s first true augmented reality glasses, technology that he and rivals like Facebook think will one day be as ubiquitous as mobile phones. A demo showed virtual butterflies fluttering… Read more

People are bidding millions for the first ride on Blue Origin’s suborbital crew capsule

Rich people are jockeying for a seat on Blue Origin’s first crewed New Shepard mission, bidding as high as $2.8 million for a ten-minute experience at the edge of space. A single seat aboard the New Shepard crew capsule, dubbed the RSS First Step Crew Capsule, went up for auction earlier this month, starting with… Read more

Deezer

Our Verdict Its ambition is to be applauded, but Deezer falls between the two stools of Spotify and Tidal and struggles to justify itself over either For Vast catalogue and device support CD-quality HiFi tier Envelope-pushing 3D audio Against No hi-res streaming Spotify does discovery better Tidal does hi-fi better Deezer appears to be stuck… Read more

The 10.3-inch Kobo Elipsa brings back super-sized e-readers

Kobo has a new e-reader out, and its the company’s biggest yet: the Kobo Elipsa, which features a 10.3-inch, 1404 x 1872 resolution (227 ppi) E Ink display, a bundled stylus, and the ability to not just read books, but to annotate, underline, and mark them up just like a real paper book. Gigantic e-readers,… Read more

Colonial Pipeline CEO confirms company paid $4.4 million ransom it wasn’t supposed to pay

Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount has confirmed that his company did in fact pay $4.4 million to the hackers responsible for the ransomware attack on the pipeline system that transports around 45 percent of fuel used on the East Coast, The Wall Street Journal writes. Earlier reporting estimated Colonial Pipeline paid a ransom of nearly… Read more

HBO Max launching ad-supported tier for $9.99 a month in June

HBO Max will launch an ad-supported tier in June for $9.99 per month, offering a cheaper option than the full $14.99-per-month ad-free subscription. The news was announced during a WarnerMedia presentation for advertisers today. The price and launch date were rumored last month. The streaming service, which has 64 million subscribers, has been planning an… Read more

Spotify enters the virtual concert business, starts selling $15 tickets to events

Spotify is entering the virtual concert business, just as in-person concerts are becoming more of a possibility. The company announced today that people can now buy tickets to five different concert streams, which will air throughout May and June. Initial artists include The Black Keys, Jack Antonoff of Bleachers, and Leon Bridges. The streams all… Read more

Spotify and YouTube Music will bring much needed offline tunes to Google’s Wear watches

Spotify’s product lead for cars and wearables teased an exciting new feature coming to Wear devices during Google’s Developer Keynote on Tuesday: the ability for the streaming services’ 356 million users to download music directly to their watch, and listen to it at times when they don’t want to carry their phone (via XDA Developers)…. Read more

Google Maps’ Live View feature now offers more useful information about restaurants and businesses

Google announced a bunch of new features for Google Maps at its 2021 I/O developer conference today, including upgrades to its handy Live View tool, which helps you navigate the world through augmented reality. Live View launched in beta in 2019, projecting walking directions through your camera’s viewfinder, and was rolled out to airports, transit… Read more

Android 12 will turn your Pixel phone into a car key — assuming automakers bother

Nearly a year after Apple announced the iPhone would become your digital car key, Google is doing the same. Android 12 will officially let “select Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones” natively double as a car key later this year, the company just announced at its Google I/O 2021 developer conference today. It’s not like Google… Read more