Цены на три стандартные конфигурации остаются прежними.

Пользователи смогут сохранить подписку в новом сервисе.

С помощью машинного обучения и ИИ стартап пытается выяснить причины старения человека.

Обещание Google не использовать данные с фитнес-трекеров для рекламы не помогло.

За внимание пользователей могут побороться преемник Vine, «клон TikTok» от Instagram и не очень известный Thriller, который делает ставку на знаменитостей.

Пандемия сильно ударила по турбизнесу, заявил глава компании Гленн Фогель.

Индия переживает взрывной рост онлайн-образования на фоне закрытых школ из-за пандемии, отмечает агентство.

В частности, компания будет повторно использовать оборудование своих дата-центров.

Они пробыли там три дня, пока призыв о помощи не увидели спасатели.

Хуан Карлос «бежал» из страны, чтобы не портить имидж монархии и не мешать правлению короля Филиппа, но всё стало только хуже.

До этого времени пользователи могут успеть перенести туда свои коллекции.

До этого в компьютеры Mac устанавливали веб-камеры с разрешением 720p.

what looks like fireworks.

don't quote me on anything and I'm no expert in this.

it looks like there were fireworks already there and they blew off with the explosion https://t.co/3d3O2at2vQ

Когда я работал в офисе, я не очень понимал, зачем мне нужен хабр. Все больные для разрабов темы мы обсуждали в курилке, все сложные технические проблемы я изучал по доке, а ответы на простые вопросы искал на стековерфлоу. Когда я стал удаленщиком, ежедневное чтение хабра стало важным ритуалом. В офисе вокруг меня было две сотни разрабов, а тут только трое коллег, с которыми не особо и охота созваниваться. Но потребность знать, что вообще происходит в индустрии есть. Хочется знать, что происходит, кого и что волнует, что люди думают о новых технологиях, и какой вообще сейчас дух у сообщества. Вот здесь Хабр и заменил мне тусовку в офисе. И новости, и исследования, и мнения, и сотни коммента…

Европейская комиссия начала антимонопольное расследование для оценки предполагаемого приобретения компании Google.

Корпорация намерена купить производителя умных часов и фитнес браслетов Fitbit за $2,1 млрд.

Об этом сообщает пресс-служба Еврокомиссии.

Комиссия обеспокоена тем, что предлагаемая сделка значительно укрепит позиции Google на рынках онлайн-рекламы.

После приобретения у Google может появиться доступ к еще большему количеству данных, которые компания будет использовать для персонализации своей рекламы, говорится в сообщении.

Компания Rocket Lab сможет возобновить вывод спутников на орбиту с использованием ракет-носителей Electron.

Агентство FAA снова дало ей разрешение на запуски Electron, когда удалось выяснить, почему 13-й старт закончился неудачей.

Выделяющееся тепло расплавило компоненты, в результате чего произошел полный разрыв соединения, что и привело к остановке двигателя через несколько минут после отделения второй ступени.

По словам компании Rocket Lab, ей удалось собрать все необходимые данные, поскольку ракета продолжала передавать информацию о своем состоянии.

Выявить проблему до полета не представлялось возможным, потому что электрическое соединение оставалось надежным на протяжении всего тестиро…

Смартфон Samsung Galaxy M51 может стать одним из самых интересных среднебюджетных аппаратов для многих потенциальных покупателей.

Причём данные о зарядке — это не слухи.

Они взяты из базы FCC, так что сомнений быть не может.

Дата выхода смартфона пока неизвестна.

Ранее были слухи про перенос его анонса, но ещё ранее и вовсе говорили про отмену данной модели, так что пока не стоит делать выводы на этот счёт.

Вчера компания Google представила смартфон Pixel 4a, а также подтвердила, что готовится выпустить Pixel 4a 5G и Pixel 5.

При этом от выпуска модели Pixel 4a XL поисковый гигант отказался, как якобы и от Pixel 5 XL.

Что это значит?

Во-вторых, это будет самый крупный смартфон за всю историю аппаратов Google.

То есть либо это будет Pixel 5 XL, либо какая-то совершенно отдельная модель, хотя второй вариант видится маловероятным.

Для представленного вчера смартфона Google Pixel 4a производитель подготовил и фирменные чехлы.

Внешне они такие же, как и для других моделей Pixel, то есть выполнены из пластика и покрыты тканью.

Однако чехлы для Pixel 4a кое в чём уникальны.

Дело в том, что их можно стирать в стиральной машинке.

Google уточняет, что при стирке нельзя добавлять отбеливающие средства, нужно выставлять режим деликатной стирки и стирать в холодной воде.

Источники утверждают, что Apple выразила «серьёзную заинтересованность» в приобретении сервиса, хотя, конечно, и неофициально.

Более того, представитель Apple официально опроверг слухи, но на самом деле это ни о чём не говорит.

Кроме того, к покупке TikTok якобы присматриваются Google и Facebook, однако в случае этих компаний преградой могут стать антимонопольные органы.

К слову, если бы Apple приобрела TikTok, это было бы её крупнейшей сделкой, так как ByteDance оценивает своё детище более чем в 50 млрд долларов.

Напомним, сделка должна состояться до 15 сентября, иначе президент США Дональд Трамп подпишет указ о запрете сервиса на территории своей страны.

Герман Хаузер (Hermann Hauser), соучредитель Arm, в интервью BBC прокомментировал новость о том, что Nvidia ведет переговоры с SoftBank о приобретении Arm.

«Одно из фундаментальных положений бизнес-модели компании Arm заключается в тои, что она может продавать [лицензировать свои разработки] каждому, — сказал Хаузер.

— Единственное преимущество Softbank заключалось в том, что это не компания по производству микросхем, и она сохранила нейтралитет Arm.

Если Arm станет частью Nvidia, большинство лицензиатов, которые являются конкурентами Nvidia, конечно, будут искать альтернативу Arm».

Напомним, разработки Arm лицензируют Intel, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, TSMC, Samsung и другие компании.

Apple только представила обновлённый 27-дюймовый iMac, но также внесла незначительное, но приятное для покупателей изменение в актуальную модель iMac Pro.

Теперь базовая версия оснащается 10-ядерным CPU Intel Xeon W, а не восьмиядерным.

Теперь за дополнительные 800 долларов можно получить 14-ядерный CPU, а за 1600 долларов — топовый 18-ядерный.

Самый большой вопрос на данный момент заключается в том, когда Apple выпустит полноценную замену текущему iMac Pro, дебютировавшему ещё три года назад.

Дело в том, что действительно новых процессоров в этом сегменте у Intel нет, а собственные CPU с аналогичной производительностью Apple, возможно, ещё попросту не создала.

Компания Xiaomi выпустила новую версию своего приложения для носимых устройств Mi Sports App (Mi Fit) до версии 4.4.0, в результате чего недавно поступивший в продажу фитнес-браслет Mi Band 5 обрел новую функцию.

Эта функция — определение движений.

За счет нее, как пишет китайский источник, устройство сможет сопоставлять режим тренировки из памяти с тем, которым в данный момент времени занимается пользователь.

Также есть пара менее значительных улучшений, которые реализованы как в Mi Band 4, так и в Mi Band 5.

Компания Sigma анонсировала онлайн-мероприятие «SIGMA STAGE Online», в ходе которого будет представлены новые сменные объективы серии DN.

Производитель уточнил, что эти объективы будут предназначены для беззеркальных камер.

Какие именно модели будут представлены или хотя бы их число компания не сообщила.

Трансляцию мероприятия можно будет смотреть по адресу https://youtu.be/nSiRhlH8Twc.

По неофициальным данным, среди объективов, которые будут представлены 6 августа, будут модели Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 FE и Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art.

Новый 27-дюймовый iMac, а речь именно о такой модели, получил дисплей разрешением 5120 х 2880 пикселей и поддержкой True Tone, причём опционально можно заказать нанотекстурное покрытие, которое обойдётся в немалые 500 долларов.

Оперативной памяти может быть минимум 8 ГБ, а максимум — 128 ГБ.

Младшая версия оснащается SSD объёмом 256 ГБ, и в конфигураторе выбрать другой накопитель нельзя.

Средняя получила 512 ГБ, а максимум для неё — 2 ТБ.

В первых двух случаях объём памяти составляет 8 ГБ, в последнем — 16 ГБ.

База данных позволила сравнить результаты производительности двух процессоров: перспективного Intel Core i7-1165G7 семейства Tiger Lake и нынешнего AMD Ryzen 7 4800U.

Core i7-1165G7 оформил лидерство в однопоточном тесте: он набрал 3273 балла против 2631 балла у Ryzen 7 4800U.

Тут в пользу синего процессора более высокая тактовая частота: 2,8-4,7 ГГц против 1,8-4,2 ГГц у Ryzen 7 4800U.

А вот в многопоточном тесте лучшим уже оказался Ryzen 7 4800U, причем разница тут даже чуточку больше: 17552 балла против 13372 баллов.

Высокий результат Ryzen продемонстрировал за счет вдвое большего количества ядер и потоков: 8 и 16 соответственно против 4 и 8.

Уже завтра Samsung представит смартфоны линейки Galaxy Note20, о которых мы знаем уже почти всё.

Итак, Galaxy Note20 получит основную 12-мегапиксельную камеру с объективом с диафрагмой F/1.8, сверхширокоугольную с тем же разрешением и диафрагмой F/2.2 и телекамеру разрешением 64 Мп и диафрагмой F/2.0.

У Galaxy Note20 Ultra из перечисленного сохранится лишь «ширик».

Основная камера будет 108-мегапиксельной с диафрагмой F/1.8, а перископный «телевик» будет характеризоваться разрешением 12 Мп и получит объектив с диафрагмой F/3.0.

То есть у Galaxy Note20, судя по всему, будет ровно такая же камера, как у Galaxy S20, а вот камера Note20 Ultra будет частично взята у S20 Ultra за исключением «тел…

В ближайшее время компания Sigma представит объектив с фокусным расстоянием 85 мм и максимальной диафрагмой f/1,4, оснащенный креплением Sony E. Говоря точнее, анонс ожидается 6 августа, но источник уже опубликовал предварительные технические характеристики и даже цену этого изделия.

Оптическая схема объектива Sigma 85mm F1.4 DG DN будет включать 15 элементов в 11 группах, в том числе — асферический элемент и 5 элементов SLD .

Объектив будет рассчитан на фильтры диаметром 77мм.

Для автоматической фокусировки в нем используется шаговый двигатель.

Если верить источнику, объектив будет стоить 1199 долларов.

Дело в том, что в Сеть попала статистка, позволяющая в определённой степени оценить надёжность современных видеокарт с разными GPU и от разных производителей.

Неизвестно, за какой срок были собраны данные, но они охватывают более 120 000 видеокарт, то есть на эту статистику вполне можно ориентироваться.

Данных много, и каждый может оценить то, что ему интересно.

Во-первых, видеокарты с GPU AMD возвращают чуть чаще: в 3,29% случаев против 2,11% у карт с GPU Nvidia.

Во-вторых, чаще всего среди всех видеокарт возвращали Power Color RX 5700 Red Devil — в 13% случаев эти адаптеры выходили из строя, и это очень высокий показатель.

Пользователи смартфонов iPhone в будущем смогут принимать платежи по кредитным картам от других людей без использования какого-либо дополнительного оборудования.

По сообщению Bloomberg, компания Apple приобрела молодую компанию Mobeewave, которая разработала соответствующую технологию.

Пользователю нужно ввести сумму транзакции в приложение, после чего прикоснуться к карте или другому смартфону своим устройством.

По данным Bloomberg, компания Samsung в прошлом году сотрудничала с Mobeewave, чтобы превратить некоторые из своих телефонов в платежные терминалы для малого бизнеса.

Представитель Apple не подтвердил сделку, объяснив это тем, что компания обычно «не обсуждает свои цели и планы».

То то, например, спецслужбы никогда никого не внедряют, чтобы разваливать изнутри.

3.20 , geov ( ok ), 11:46, 04/08/2020 [^] [^^] [^^^] [ответить] –1 + / – И таки уходят на всякие BSD.

И я посмотрю как вы запоете, когда все свалят на свои операционки и забьют на Linux, Ой простите... на GNU/Linux.

), 11:43, 04/08/2020 [^] [^^] [^^^] [ответить] +2 + / – Я напомню, уважаемый анонимус, что есть куча операционных систем у которых "полностью свободная лицензия".

), 11:54, 04/08/2020 [^] [^^] [^^^] [ответить] +1 + / – >если бы была полностью свободная лицензия>а так, они просто разворачиваются и уходят из линукса вообще То ли дело в бзде.

Организация Linux Foundation объявила о формировании нового совместного проекта OpenSSF (Open Source Security Foundation), призванного объединить работу ведущих представителей индустрии в области повышения безопасности открытого ПО. OpenSSF продолжит развитие таких инициатив, как Infrastructure Initiative и Open Source Security Coalition, а также объединит и другие связанные с безопасностью работы, предпринимаемые участниками проекта.

This is a view of Magnasanti, the metropolis that pushes SimCity to its population limits.

Magnasanti’s water and power needs are supplied by neighboring cities, eliminating the need for much of the related infrastructure.

Every person living in Magnasanti spends his life working and residing in one small, massively efficient block of space, until death around age 50.

Magnasanti is, first and foremost, a study in how to game SimCity to a maximum-population win condition.

As Oscala explained in an interview with Viceland, Magnasanti represents a “cage” in which he has imprisoned six million “economic slaves”.

Cupertino, California — Apple today announced that Phil Schiller will become an Apple Fellow, continuing a storied career that began at Apple in 1987.

In this role, which reports to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Schiller will continue to lead the App Store and Apple Events.

Greg (Joz) Joswiak, a longtime leader within the Product Marketing organization, will join the executive team as senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

“Phil has helped make Apple the company it is today and his contributions are broad, vast, and run deep.

He most recently led the effort to plan and execute Apple’s first-ever virtual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Why the Brotli file format Our initial research into Brotli was promising, and we identified 4 key advantages.

File size : Brotli can use unicode or binary context bytes to dynamically select Huffman tables during runtime, which makes a multi-percent difference in final file size.

Broccoli requirements We codenamed the Brotli compressor in Rust “Broccoli” because of the capability to make Brotli files concatenate with one another (brot-cat-li).

The area of the bar indicates how much space it occupies in Dropbox’s network pipes after applying each of the three illustrated Broccoli compression quality options.

Appendix: Broccoli protocolRecap: Brotli data representation Brotli compressed data…

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

The action you just performed triggered the security solution.

There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked.

Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

Twitter is facing a Federal Trade Commission probe and believes it will likely owe a fine of up to $250 million after being caught using phone numbers intended for two-factor authentication for advertising purposes.

The complaint alleges that Twitter is in violation of its 2011 settlement with the FTC over the company's "failure to safeguard personal information."

In October 2019, however, Twitter admitted that phone numbers and email addresses users provided it with for the purpose of securing their accounts were also used "inadvertently" for advertising purposes between 2013 and 2019.

A common problemTwitter is not the first social media firm to be investigated for exploiting personal inf…

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it “unintentionally” used phone numbers and email addresses for advertising purposes even though the information was provided by users for two-factor authentication.

According to Twitter, no personal data was shared with the company’s third-party partners, and the “issue that allowed this to occur” has been addressed.

As of September 17th, phone numbers and email addresses are now only collected for security purposes, Twitter said.

“We cannot say with certainty how many people were impacted by this,” Twitter said in a blog post disclosing the security mishap.

Just last month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account was compromised after hackers were able to twee…

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Let's build a Full-Text Search engineFull-Text Search is one of those tools people use every day without realizing it.

Our implementation splits the text on a word boundary and removes punctuation marks: func tokenize ( text string ) [] string { return strings .

cAt, Cat and caT are normalized to cat.

func lowercaseFilter ( tokens [] string ) [] string { r := make ([] string , len ( tokens )) for i , token := range tokens { r [ i ] = strings .

Putting the analyzer together # func analyze ( text string ) [] string { tokens := tokenize ( text ) tokens = lowercaseFilter ( tokens ) tokens = stopwordFilter ( tokens ) tokens = stemmerFilter ( tokens ) return tokens } The tokenizer and filters con…

For the past 10 years, Httparchive.org has recorded page load times for 6 million popular websites.

But it seems like huge increases in network speed should make it at least somewhat faster to browse the web.

2010: A Mozilla experiment which found that reducing the page load time by 2 seconds led to 15% higher conversion.

2018: BBC found that for every extra second of page load time, 10% of users will leave.

Subsecond load times would be ideal; realistically, this target is incredibly difficult to achieve while also delivering rich and engaging content.

There he was, smiling on the cover of Forbes Africa magazine, dollar bills raining like confetti.

Turns out, Okeke had been involved in a string of sophisticated online scams since at least 2015 — including when he was gracing that glossy Forbes Africa cover.

Okeke’s rapid ascent as a supposedly successful entrepreneur — and his subsequent defenestration — reflects a growing trend in online scamming known as business email compromise (BEC).

BEC involves a high degree of sophistication and collaboration between masterminds and co-conspirators, who provide services like designing fake landing pages for hijacking email accounts and harvesting passwords.

The Unatrac CFO’s email account was also…

Planning for my kidnappingMon 03 August 2020 in in lifeImagine tomorrow you go shopping and, for whatever reason, you never come back.

Maybe be someone killed you, maybe someone kidnapped you, maybe you had an accident ... Now imagine you are travelling alone in Thailand and you die.

if you are being kidnaped how the police will do to find you, if you got lost how people will find you ?

And if 6 hours later I've still haven't changed of activity then a mail is sent to my parents.

Last step : What to put inside the notificationSo my parents will receive an email after 30 hours of inactivity.

Apple isn’t the only one accused of kicking out competitive solutions from its App Store. Google did the same — for over a month at least — or so alleges parental control app maker Boomerang. The company’s product competes with Google’s own Family Link solution for controlling screen time and children’s use of mobile devices. […]

After more than three decades climbing Apple’s ranks, marketing chief Phil Schiller is taking a step back at the company, being replaced by a long-time product marketing leader inside Apple. Schiller is taking on a new role as an Apple Fellow where he will continue to lead the App Store and the company’s events, a […]

Plus: how to monitor and fix Facebook/Instagram ad fatigue, and using mobile app ads to drive landing page conversions.

Qualified, a startup co-founded by former Salesforce executives Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. Swensrud (Qualified’s CEO) said the startup is meant to solve a problem that he faced back when he was CMO at Salesforce. Apparently he’d complaining about being “blind,” because he knew so little about […]

A 17-year-old Florida teenager is accused of perpetrating one of the year’s biggest and most high-profile hacks: Twitter. A federal 30-count indictment filed in Tampa said Graham Ivan Clark used a phone spearphishing attack to pivot through multiple layers of Twitter’s security and bypassed its two-factor authentication to gain access to an internal “admin” tool […]

Rocket Lab has managed to engineer a significant payload capacity bump into its existing Electron space launch vehicle, the company revealed today. Electron can now fly as much as 300 kg (660 lbs) to low Earth orbit (or around 440 lbs to a higher, sun synchronous orbit), and that’s mostly due to battery technology advances, […]

Microsoft’s venture capital fund, M12 Ventures has led a slew of strategic corporate investors backing a new chip developer out of Southern California called Syntiant, which makes semiconductors for voice recognition and speech-based applications. “We started out to build a new type of processor for machine learning, and voice is our first application,” says Syntiant […]

Rigetti Computing, the quantum computing startup that is challenging industry heavyweights like IBM, Microsoft and D-Wave, today announced that it has closed a $79 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Alumni Ventures Group, DCVC, EDBI, Morpheus Ventures and Northgate Capital. Bessemer’s Tomer Diari […]

In a typical security team, engineers write one-off scripts to track a particular problem on a cloud vendor such as an unauthorized user on your GitHub account, and while engineers are capable of writing such scripts, it’s not exactly an efficient or scalable way to deal with the range of security problems these pros need […]

All AV all disengagement reports have one thing in common: their usefulness is ubiquitously criticized by those who have to submit them.

Ford Motor CEO Jim Hackett is retiring, leaving the company three years after being tapped to transform the automaker into a leaner, more competitive and profitable company while investing in technology and shifting towards electrification, automation and connectivity. Jim Farley, who many believed was being groomed for the position, has been named president and CEO. […]

You have just four days left to access the complete Disrupt 2020 experience for best possible price. You can save up to $300 with early bird pricing, but that’s a fleeting opportunity. Get it in gear and buy the Disrupt pass of your choice before the deadline expires August 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). We’re […]

In a set-back for Google’s plan to acquire health wearable company Fitbit, the European Commission has announced it’s opening an investigation to dig into a range of competition concerns being attached to the proposal from multiple quarters. This means the deal is on ice for a period of time that could last until early December. […]

Apple Apple's Phil Schiller discussing new iPhones on stage at one of the events he will continue to oversee.

Apple Apple's Phil Schiller discussing new iPhones on stage at one of the events he will continue to oversee.

Apple His successor Greg Joswiak has appeared at Apple's events too.

In addition to announcing new iMac models this morning, Apple took to its newsroom PR blog today to announce that prominent executive Phil Schiller will step down from his role as VP of Worldwide Marketing.

However, he will continue on as an "Apple Fellow," and Schiller will still oversee various aspects of the App Store and Apple's events.

Regulators in the European Union are launching a deep investigation into Google's proposed acquisition of wearables maker Fitbit after expressing concerns that giving Google access to Fitbit's user data could "distort competition."

Google announced its plan to acquire Fitbit back in November in a transaction valued at $2.1 billion.

European merger reviews take place in two phases.

If the preliminary investigation does reveal the potential for harms, however, then regulators move to a phase two probe.

The DOJ issued such a second request to Google and Fitbit in April, and it's currently reviewing the deal.

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a new low on Apple's AirPods and Qi wireless charging case combo, which is currently available for $140 on Amazon.

This deal price is about $60 off Apple's MSRP and roughly $30 off the usual going rate for this model on Amazon.

We've written about similar deals in the past, and in general, the AirPods remain one of the few wireless headphones that need little introduction.

If you're an iPhone owner that already makes use of a Qi wireless charger, this SKU becomes a better deal, since the case here usually retails for $65 on its own.

Dealmaster: An Ars newsletter The Dealmaster has launched its very own newsletter!

Twitter is facing a Federal Trade Commission probe and believes it will likely owe a fine of up to $250 million after being caught using phone numbers intended for two-factor authentication for advertising purposes.

The complaint alleges that Twitter is in violation of its 2011 settlement with the FTC over the company's "failure to safeguard personal information."

In October 2019, however, Twitter admitted that phone numbers and email addresses users provided it with for the purpose of securing their accounts were also used "inadvertently" for advertising purposes between 2013 and 2019.

A common problemTwitter is not the first social media firm to be investigated for exploiting personal inf…

The White House yesterday withdrew its re-nomination of Federal Communications Commission member Michael O'Rielly, a Republican who has not supported President Trump's attempt to punish social media websites for alleged anti-conservative bias.

Trump had nominated O'Rielly to another five-year FCC term in March, and the nomination was awaiting Senate approval.

But the White House unexpectedly withdrew O'Rielly's nomination, "announc[ing] the action Monday in a notice sent to the Senate, which confirms nominees," Bloomberg reported.

A White House spokesperson declined comment when contacted by Ars.

O'Rielly's comments "drew attention of some White House and industry officials," Reuters wrote …

The main message from today's blog post is "back up your music now," as Google says it will wipe out all Google Music collections in December 2020.

The Google Music Manager is a Windows and Mac application that can upload music or download your entire music collection with a few clicks, but like Google said, it will stop working soon.

Google Music has been neglected for years, though, and like the company often does, Google decided to make a second, competing music streaming service instead of maintaining the first service.

It's a big downgrade from Google Music, which offered more functionality to people who purchased music.

In 2018, Google told Google Music users "nothing will change" reg…

"We're definitely announcing pricing on a title by title basis," CEO Strauss Zelnick said in an earnings call Monday evening.

Despite those pressures, though, Zelnick was unwilling on the call to set $70 as his company's new de facto standard pricing.

"We're applying this price point in the case where we think the quality not only supports it, but demands it," he said.

While it's still early in the console transition cycle, no other publisher has yet publicly followed Take-Two onto the $70 game pricing limb, even as a trial balloon.

Microsoft's Phil Spencer dodged the question of $70 game pricing a bit in a recent interview with The Washington Post, offering no comment on the company's own …

Apple The 27-inch iMac.

Apple The 27-inch iMac.

The 27-inch iMac still has a 5K display, and its chassis is the same.

The new 27-inch iMac is equipped with AMD's new Radeon Pro 5000 series graphics.

Entry-level configurations feature the Radeon Pro 5300, while the top standard config has the Radeon Pro 5500XT.

Since the early days of Mortal Kombat, the series has had a wonderfully B-movie-like approach to universe building.

Why were there screaming trees in the background of Mortal Kombat 2?

The Mortal Kombat team has developed a fanatical devotion to building out their game world over the decades.

This time around we're going beyond the fan wikis and straight to the source to really see how deep the Mortal Kombat rabbit hole goes.

For an assist, we even reached out to the Mortal Kombat subreddit, and boy did they deliver.

Microsoft has said it wants to buy the US arm of TikTok, the Chinese viral short-video app that is in the crosshairs of regulators and the White House.

How to value TikTok’s US business unit, which includes Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is tricky.

It also faces increasing competition, including from Facebook, which plans to launch a rival service, Instagram Reels, as early as this week.

It remains unclear exactly what Microsoft would buy and how TikTok’s US business can be separated from its global operations.

“Microsoft could be seen as a white knight,” said a former Microsoft China executive who still does business with the company.

At least 36 crew members and five passengers of the Norwegian cruise ship, MS Roald Amundsen, have tested positive for COVID-19.

Four of the infected crew members have been hospitalized and hundreds of passengers are in quarantine, awaiting test results.

“At Hurtigruten, safety always has been, and always will be, our number one priority,” the company says on a COVID-19 safety page on its website.

Norway’s government has also banned cruise ships carrying more than 100 people from disembarking passengers at its ports for 14 days.

The CDC has issued a “No Sail Order” for cruise ships that is set to last until September 30, unless it is rescinded or extended.

In June, Schiller directed Apple’s virtual Worldwide Developers Conference, which went off without a hitch.

He’s one of the most public-facing people from Apple’s Steve Jobs era through today.

Joswiak is taking over Schiller’s role amid turmoil at the App Store.

There, he had to justify the App Store’s revenue-sharing model and potential monopoly on the iOS platform.

Developers have been vocal about critical issues with transparency and equality on the App Store, and the time for an overhaul is nigh.

T-Mobile has switched on the first standalone nationwide 5G network in the US.

So far in building out their 5G networks, other carriers have done so on top of LTE infrastructure, but this isn’t dependent on existing tech.

With this rollout, T-Mobile says its 5G network is now 30 percent larger and is available in 2,000 more towns and cities across the US.

The network currently covers 1.3 million square miles across more than 7,500 cities and towns.

The company claims its engineers have seen up to 40 percent improvement in latency during tests in standalone 5G areas.

These AirPods differ from Apple’s standard ones only by their wireless charging case, which makes them easier to power up using a Qi-compatible wireless pad.

We gave them a score of 84 for their improved wireless performance thanks in part to Apple’s H1 chip and their solid 5+ hour battery life.

This is a great deal if you’ve been holding out for the AirPods with wireless charging case.

We saw these drop to $140 once before at Micro Center, but the price was only available to those that picked up the AirPods in store.

Now through Amazon, you can get them at their lowest price ever and have them shipped right to your door.

It’s a faster-paced version of the main battle royale mode with fewer players and shorter games — it includes only the typical events from the first and last five minutes of a regular battle royale match.

In addition, there are weapon updates and tracks from Modern Warfare you can listen to while you’re in a vehicle.

A free trial of Modern Warzone multiplayer starts this Friday too, at 1PM ET, and will run until the same time next Wednesday.

Season five of Modern Warfare and Warzone will go live on August 5th, likely at 2AM ET.

On PC, the patch will be 54.2GB if you own Modern Warfare and 47.4GB if you’re a Warzone-only player.

Motorola is bringing its One Fusion+ to North America tomorrow.

The $399 phone was previously only available in India and Latin America, and the company hadn’t announced plans to introduce it elsewhere.

A few things make the One Fusion+ standout.

Not only does it have a quad-camera set up — with a 64 megapixel high-resolution sensor, an eight megapixel ultra-wide angle lens, five megapixel Macro Vision camera and two megapixel depth sensor — it also has a 16 megapixel pop-up selfie camera.

Thothub did reportedly remove images of Waidhofer after Motherboard contacted the site to verify Waidhofer’s requests.

The lawsuit hopes internet infrastructure company Cloudflare and Chaturbate and BangBros, sites that advertise on Thothub, might help identify who runs Thothub.

This suit goes beyond Thothub, Cloudflare, Chaturbate and BangBros, though.

It could set a precedent for content harvesters outside of adult content.

YouTube has tried to make it easier for creators to address copyright claims, but even that system isn’t perfect, and there are plenty of other sites scraping content without creators’ permission or knowledge.

One of the concerns around a nearby sharing feature is that it opens you up to being sent random garbage from pranksters in the area.

Nearby Share has privacy settings that should prevent that by letting you choose from staying “hidden,” visible to “some contacts” or to “all contacts.” You can also share files anonymously if you wish, saving you the need for exchanging identifying contact information if you prefer not to.

GoogleNearby Share will also work with Chromebooks in the coming months and enable easy transfers between your laptop and smartphone.

A version of Nearby Share has existed for Android devices for years — whether it’s through the recently retired Beam feature (which worked …

Using an image recognition AI and Single Shot Detector, Pepper can scan the faces of up to five people at once.

On Pepper’s tablet, a green circle will appear around an image of anyone wearing a mask, and a red circle will appear around the image of anyone without a mask.

Pepper can thank people for wearing masks or remind someone to put a face covering on.

Pepper will provide daily analytics, like the percentage of people complying with mask requirements.

While Pepper’s previous tasks have been somewhat cutesy, helping businesses enforce face mask rules could give the robot a new level of responsibility.

If you read Engadget often, you'll know that we're big fans of Alto's Adventure and Alto's Odyssey.

Now, Team Alto is preparing to launch both as The Alto Collection on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and the Epic Games Store.

But Alto's Odyssey has never been available on PC, and it's been impossible to play either title on consoles until now.

The dual-game pack will hit the Epic Games Store, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on August 13th for $9.99.

"It will soon follow on the Nintendo eShop for the Nintendo Switch," the team promised in a press release today.

I stared down my life, past, present, and future—thanks to The Endless Doomscroller.

AdvertisementYou may not call it doomscrolling, but if you own a smartphone, you’ve probably done it.

The Endless Doomscroller website, created by artist Benjamin Grosser, is what it sounds like: A page where you can s croll on and on in purgatory, skimming terrifying phrases, beneath The Endless Doomscroller masthead in a New York Times-esque font.

Per the project’s description, The Endless Doomscroller is intended to shuck social platforms’ addiction-driving embellishments down to the naked content.

What if news was less like a flat circle and more like a flat bulletin, The Doomscroller asks?

Photo : Andrew Liszewski/GizmodoJust five months ago I called the original Retro Game 350 the best portable retro gaming machine you could buy.

AdvertisementNote: A sample of the Retro Game 350P was provided to Gizmodo by online retailer Retromimi.

It’s the second follow-up to the original RG350, and by actually listening to users and incorporating their feedback (what a concept!)

AdvertisementOther Gadgets Other Gadgets Anbernic Retro Game 350P Anbernic Retro Game 350P WHAT IS IT?

The mini HDMI port now works right out of the box, but the RG350P makes retro games look downright ugly on modern TVs.

AdvertisementRevisiting The Next Generation’s seventh season to see “Lower Decks” in the wake of, well, Lower Decks, is in equal parts surprising and re-affirming.

But “Lower Decks” isn’t... really that memory we have of it?

In the end, that’s what “Lower Decks” is about, that earnest, sincere passion for what these people do, even when it’s bittersweet.

But if beyond that humor Lower Decks can capture what makes “Lower Decks” so compelling after all these years—and express that earnest passion for what Starfleet is to these people with a heart that’s already clear in its self-aware jokes—we’re in for a treat.

Lower Decks is set to premiere this Thursday, August 6 on CBS All Access, where y…

Image : WhatsAppWhatsApp is piloting a new feature meant to support fact-checking of in-app messages by searching their contents on the web, the company announced this week.

AdvertisementBeginning Monday, the Facebook-owned messaging app began testing a tool that will stamp a magnifying glass next to forwarded messages, which also bear the previously introduced double arrow indicator.

The double-arrow forwarding icon appears on messages that have been shared through a series of five or more chats.

But this issue is particularly bad on WhatsApp, whose forwarding functionality has been abused for misinformation and propaganda campaigns.

WhatsApp says its “search the web” tool is currently bei…

The new research suggests ancient Mars wasn’t as warm and wet as we thought, but an expert we spoke to remains unconvinced.

Ancient Mars, the new research suggests, was likely cold and icy, and not the temperate wet planet it’s often presumed to be.

Computer simulations of ancient Mars suggest the Red Planet was cold and covered with ice some 3.8 billion years ago.

He was also unimpressed with the relatively small sample size of 66, given the authors’ declaration that “hundreds” of valley networks exist on Mars.

It’s becoming increasingly clear, however, that ancient Mars was a complex and dynamic place.

Smart Home Smart Home Ecobee SmartThermostat Ecobee SmartThermostat What is it?

So think of the Ecobee as a Nest, but a little uglier, works with more stuff, and potentially manages privacy better.

Photo : Alex Cranz/GizmodoInstalling the Ecobee SmartThermostat (not to be confused with 2017's Ecobee 4, which lacks the built-in Alexa) was...easy.

The Ecobee requires dedicated power wire from your central air system in order to run, and the Nest does not.

From afar, the Ecobee thermostat doesn’t look bad.

Gif : GoogleWith the launch of Android 10, Google quietly removed Android’s previous local file sharing feature when it dropped support for Android Beam.

But starting today, Google is finally ready to release Android Beam’s replacement: Nearby Sharing.

AdvertisementSimilar to Apple’s AirDrop, Nearby Sharing allows Android devices to quickly share things like files and photos without needing to resort to dedicated apps like Google Drive or messaging apps like WhatsApp.

Photo : GoogleAdvertisementFollowing the release of Nearby Sharing on Android devices, Google says that in the coming months it’s planning to bring Nearby Share to Chromebooks, giving Chromebook users the same set of file shar…

Photo : UnsplashFeatured Deal: Halo: The Master Chief Collection | $20 | AmazonThe best Xbox One game and accessory deals for August 2020 are here.

AdvertisementBelow you’ll find several killer deals on top Xbox One games, not to mention affordable accessories that’ll keep you gaming without hassle or hurdles.

And it’s just $20 right now!

It’s billed the series’ best to date, and right now it’s $40 off the original list price.

And this one is optimized for the new Xbox Series X console, too, so it’ll run even better on that one if you decide to pick that up this coming holiday season too.

On top of beefier graphics, Apple is adding a Retina 5K display that features its True Tone color technology.

The T2 chip will also support the camera by bringing “tone mapping, exposure control, and face detection.”AdvertisementPhoto : AppleThe 21.5-inch iMac and iMac Pro are also getting updates.

Both desktops will now come standard with SSDs, and the 21.5-inch iMac can also be configured with a Fusion drive.

The iMac Pro will come standard with a 10-core Intel Xeon chip.

The base configuration of the new 27-inch iMac starts at $1,800, while the refreshed 21.5-inch iMac and iMac Pro will start at $1,100 and $5,000, respectively.

Homelander realizing how much of a threat Stormfront’s going to be.

Screenshot : Amazon StudiosIn the upcoming second season of Amazon’s The Boys, Stormfront, one of the original comics’ most terrifying characters, is set to make her arrival as a newly minted member of the Seven, the series’ twisted answer to DC’s Justice Justice League and Marvel’s Avengers.

But they are, unbeknownst to the public, all engaged in various kinds of depravity when they’re not in the spotlight.

AdvertisementThe Boys season two premieres on September 4.

For more, make sure you’re following us on our Instagram @io9dotcom.

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (Platinum) Graphic : Quentyn KennemerMicrosoft Surface Pro 7 (Platinum) | $600 | Best BuyOther retailers are selling the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (Platinum) with 128GB of storage and Intel’s 10th-generation Core i3 processor for around $800, but Best Buy has it down to $600 in an insane steal today.

It’s a full-featured Windows tablet on the go, and you can just slap the included Type Cover on when it’s time to get to work.

Here’s everything under the hood for this perfect back-to-school model:12.3-inch PixelSense display (2736x1824)Intel Core i3-1005G1, Iris Plus 940 Graphics128GB SSD, 4GB LPDDR4X RAM1 USB Type C, 1 USB Type A, MicroSDXC reader, Surface Connect, 3.5m…

Graphic : Gabe CareyA Best Buy back-to-school sale on Intel laptops, an array of Samsung Galaxy Active smartwatches, a SteelSeries Arctis 1 gaming headset, a Dyson V6 Absolute cordless vacuum, a Hardside carry-on spinner, and a discounted copy of Batman: The Complete Animated Series lead Tuesday’s best deals.

AdvertisementPromoted Deal: Save up to $300 on Select Laptops Powered by Intel® | Best Buy | SponsoredNo more pencils, no more books.

AdvertisementHead on over to the Best Buy store page to get a little shopping in before the bell rings.

There are four options on sale now at Best Buy saving you $30.

Better yet, Best Buy can help you activate the device in-store with safety precautions …

Photo : Dan Kitwood ( Getty Images )Following months of deliberation and delays, the city of Portland in Southern Maine became the thirteenth city to issue a blanket ban prohibiting its city officials—including local police—from using facial recognition technology.

At the time, some officials were reportedly hesitant over putting down their vote, since a ban on facial recognition technology would cut off the city’s local airport from tapping into this tech the same way we’ve been seeing with airports across the country.

Others saw the ban as being superfluous, since city staffers aren’t known to be using the tech right now, and pretty much all agreed that they had no immediate plans to tack…

This single outbreak at a summer camp in northern Georgia is a case in point showing how rapidly the infection can spread among kids once they’ve been returned to any sort of typical social network.

In mid-June, about 250 counselors, staff, and trainees arrived at YMCA Camp High Harbour, on the shores of Lake Burton.

A two-hour drive from Atlanta, the camp typically hosts about 4,000 school-age kids every summer, offering both day-long and overnight programs.

For those who tested positive, 51 were between the ages of 6 and 10; 180 were ages 11 to 17; and the remaining 29 were adults.

CDC scientists calculated the attack rate—the percentage of camp attendees who tested positive out of total …

By modeling how much power various hypothetical high-wattage IoT botnets could draw, and crunching the market data, the researchers devised two types of potential attacks that would alter energy pricing.

Unlike regular IoT botnets that are ubiquitous and available for hire on criminal forums, high-wattage botnets are not as practical to amass.

Meanwhile, the idea of energy market manipulation in general is not far-fetched.

Additionally, in mid-May attackers breached the IT systems of Elexon, the platform used to run the United Kingdom's energy market.

In contrast, many current criminal IoT botnets contain millions of bots.

Apple is refreshing its 27-inch iMac, though you'll need a keen eye to spot the differences.

Apple says these improvements should offer up to a 65 percent CPU performance increase over last year's refreshed 27-inch iMacs.

That means Apple's entire iMac line now uses SSDs, including the 21.5-inch iMacs, which should mean dramatically faster read and write speeds.

You're stuck with the same thick bezels as the iMacs from several years ago, but there are two notable changes to the screen.

The webcam is getting a bump to 1080p (thankfully), and Apple says it has made some tweaks to improve low-light performance.

The act of being “full of shit” and producing bullshit has since undergone a Cambrian explosion.

The book draws on several influences, including intellectual cross-examinations of bullshit from philosophers like G. A. Cohen and Harry Frankfurt (whose 1986 essay “On Bullshit” gave birth to bullshit studies).

More directly, Calling Bullshit is a descendant of a popular undergraduate course of the same name that Bergstrom and West have taught at the University of Washington since 2017.

The authors then draw lessons straight from the Calling Bullshit course, providing a reasonably technical survey of statistical laziness, ignorance, and malfeasance.

The authors bring their full selves to Callin…

Face it, none of us get enough sleep.

A good sound machine (also called a white-noise machine or a sleep machine) is just one tool in an arsenal of gadgets that can help you get your recommended number of z's.

I've filled my house with sleeping sound machines, to block the battles of The Witcher in the living room while my children snooze, or to let my husband sneak into the bedroom if he's been working late.

These are my favorite machines for getting a good night's rest—and those can be hard to come by lately.

Be sure to check out our many other buying guides, such as the Best Mattress and the Best Sunrise Alarm Clocks.

In these uncertain times, it's tougher than usual to justify spending as much as a fully loaded Dell XPS 15 costs.

It's the Microsoft Windows 10 equivalent of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, and as such, if you prefer to skip the future drama surrounding Apple's chip migration, and just want a big, powerful laptop today, the Dell XPS 15 delivers.

The biggest issue in my view is the added weight: The XPS 15 feels heavy (it weighs 4-4.5 pounds, depending on your configuration).

Especially when the XPS 15 is already here and won't be jumping chip ships any time soon.

The XPS 15 can handle whatever you throw at it, and even during a pandemic, that's sometimes worth paying for—if you can still afford i…

Or consider pollution: Countries like Sweden have begun to tax carbon to fight climate change—basically, you pollute, you pay.

And now another grand naughtiness may get hit with its own tax: single-use plastic.

The concept of a plastic tax is quite similar to a carbon tax.

(Since British Columbia implemented a carbon tax in 2008, regional emissions have fallen by up to 15 percent.)

And a plastic tax is a sort of sin tax, only on a global scale.

But another project at Defcon's Aerospace Village this week should have at least as much impact and a potentially much broader reach: an open source satellite communication tool made from about a hundred bucks worth of hardware.

The goal is to make low-earth orbit satellite communication technology much more accessible and swap out the massive, specialized transmitters, antennas, and radio dishes that go into satellite "ground stations" for open source software and an affordable hardware kit.

NyanSat ground stations aren't refined or powerful enough to replace the real deal, but their strength lies in their potential ubiquity.

Out of the box (so to speak), a NyanSat ground station knows its…

Every time Congress holds a hearing about Silicon Valley companies, people mock the legislators for being out of their depth.

We don’t insist that everyone in Congress understand how the B2 Spirit “stealth” bomber works, or how serotonin reuptake inhibitors help manage depression, or even how the internal combustion engine works.

I play a tech expert on TV every once in a while.

They both disappointed their immigrant parents by giving up the opportunity to be pre-medicine at Harvard and instead rebelled to become computer science students at Stanford.

Much later, while in graduate school in American Studies, I realized that computer science was a method of understanding much like many other…

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The action you just performed triggered the security solution.

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TL;DR: Students can get a pair of Jabra Elite 65t wireless earbuds for just $20 at Best Buy with the purchase of qualifying Chromebooks over $299, as of Aug. 4.

Students or parents/guardians of students get a pair of Jabra Elite 65t wireless earbuds for just $20 when they buy a qualifying Chromebook over $299.

The Jabra Elite 65t normally retail for $119.99, so you save $99.99 in total on these lightweight headphones.

And for this particular deal, just add any of the listed Chromebooks to your cart along with the Jabra Elite 65t earbuds to get the deal.

It's not every day you can get a pair of wireless earbuds that offer passive noise cancellation for only $20.

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

Please form a single file and wait for your turn to be made uncomfortable in a...jazzy way?

In the first trailer for Netflix's Ratched, a new series from the team behind American Horror Story, lead Sarah Paulson appears as the iconic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest villain, Nurse Ratched.

It's as Ryan Murphy as a Ryan Murphy project can get.

Along the way, we see supporting glimpses from Sharon Stone, Cynthia Nixon, Judy Davis, Finn Wittrock, Charlie Carver, Vincent D'Onofrio, Corey Stoll, and Jon Jon Briones.

TL;DR: Jump into the programming world with the Complete Computer Networking E-Book and Video Course bundle for $32.98, a 95% savings as of Aug. 4.

If you want to land your dream role as a network architect, the Complete Computer Networking E-Book and Video Course Bundle is a great tool to help you get started.

The Hands-On Network Programming with C teaches you how to utilize network sockets, implement internet protocols, design IoT devices, and more.

The AWS Certified Advanced Networking: Specialty Exam Guide will show you how to develop the technical skills and expertise needed to automate AWS networking tasks and advanced skill sets to build effective AWS networking solutions of your ow…

Did you spring for Adobe Photoshop?

From basic lessons on Adobe Photoshop to instruction on how to create a stack of standout business cards in Adobe InDesign, this bundle goes a long way.

Dive into IllustratorOnce you learn the ins and outs of Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator should be next on your list.

Study up on InDesignNext, you can explore a total of 32 lectures on Adobe InDesign, which is a software that takes images and text and lays them across pages.

Finish with Adobe SparkLast, but not least, there's an entire course on Adobe Spark Post, Adobe Spark Page, and Adobe Spark Video.

Five-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky started the #gotmilkchallenge on TikTok after swimming the length of a pool with a glass of chocolate milk on her head.

Needless to say, TikTok gave its collective best to one up her.

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

TL;DR: As of Aug. 4, students and parents/guardians of students can get up to $100 in free Domino’s gift cards with the purchase of certain Samsung 4K UHD smart TVs at Best Buy.

Conveniently, students and parents or guardians of students can score anywhere from $20 to $100 in free Domino's Pizza gift cards with the purchase of select Samsung 4K UHD smart TVs at Best Buy.

(Just be sure you're signed up for Best Buy's Student Deals program with a My Best Buy account when you do so — otherwise, the latter will appear as full…

Another day, another fresh song parody from a high school principal.

As states debate whether or not schools should resume in-person classes in September, Dr. Quentin J. Lee, the principal at Childersburg High School in Alabama, dropped a parody music video set to MC Hammer's 1990 jam, "U Can't Touch This."

Remember the good old days when high school principals used to make snow day videos or create lighthearted parodies to "Uptown Funk" or Rebecca Black's "Friday?"

In a recent interview with Alabama News Center, Lee explained that he wrote the coronavirus rap in just 15 minutes.

At the time of writing, Lee's "U Can't Touch This" parody had more than 3 million views on YouTube, and the lyri…

Whatever, Apple made a new iMac and you can get it now.

Specifically, Apple issued an almost entirely internal update to the 27-inch iMac.

The company's signature desktop computer now comes with a Retina 5K display, 1080p webcam, and faster 10th-generation Intel processor across all three new configurations.

The processor, memory, and display upgrades come with the aforementioned 1080p webcam and "studio-quality" microphones for all that teleconferencing you may be doing right now.

Apple didn't change the physical build of the computer at all, instead opting for more of an incremental upgrade.

President Donald Trump isn't the best reader.

He's also not very good at typing, spelling, and often writes in ALL CAPS using a Sharpie marker.

In a poetic sentence he clearly did not write, Trump started listing off some of America's most famous National Parks.

It, naturally, has prompted a lot of riffing on Twitter, with people making various version of the same "Yo, Semites!"

This is probably the least shocking thing Trump will do today.

Samsung’s next midrange phone to get 5G connectivity is the Galaxy A51.

But the new 5G version of the A51 will go for $500 and work on T-Mobile and Verizon’s 5G networks, Samsung says.

Samsung originally announced that its Galaxy A-series lineup would get 5G back in April, and the A51 is the second device after the A71, which costs $600, to get the faster network treatment.

Samsung says the A51 5G will come to T-Mobile, which just today announced an expansion of its 5G network by 30 percent, on August 7th.

Starting August 13th, the A51 5G UW version will be available on Verizon and its 5G millimeter-wave network, which also supports the 5G variant of the Samsung Galaxy S20.

In an interview with The Verge, Wyden — one of the coauthors of Section 230 — said the move called the agency’s independence into question.

Unless we have a law that has some teeth in it, these data brokers are going to get away with it indefinitely.

Beyond the fact that this is a colossal Constitutional mess, I don’t think even Donald Trump believes he’s going to be able to get away with this.

A: I think Donald Trump knows he isn’t going to be able to get this.

We are seeing the president blocking the nomination of a Republican FCC commissioner who expressed First Amendment-based hesitation around the FCC regulating social networks.

Honda is recalling 608,000 vans and SUVs because of faulty software that can, among other things, cause the backup camera to fail and the driver display to malfunction or reboot.

The malfunctioning software can also prevent the backup camera feed from showing up.

This is not the first time Honda has had trouble with software tripping up its rear camera systems.

Honda also announced two other recalls on Tuesday for some of these vehicles.

Some 2019-2020 Odysseys were outfitted with faulty backup cameras that have developed distorted images over time, while 2018-2020 Odysseys may have a problem with the sliding door latching.

“We’re definitely announcing pricing on a title by title basis,” Zelnick said in an earnings call Monday evening (via Ars Technica).

Take-Two has been the most vocal, but even then, it only said it would raise the price of one game, and only for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions.

Nintendo hardly ever comments on pricing, and Sony hasn’t even greenlit preorders for next-gen third-party launch titles for the PS5.

Take-Two, which owns Rockstar and other popular subsidiary studios, can certainly get away with being the trailblazer here if it wants.

But it seems like even Zelnick is a bit wary of a full-throated commitment to the $70 video game.

Motherboard staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai profiled Mohamed “GamerDoc” Al-Sharifi, a 24-year-old who has spent a significant amount of time and energy hunting down cheaters in both Overwatch and Valorant.

Al-Sharifi says he despises cheaters and feels games are “ruined” by people who unfairly want an upper hand.

He’s become infamous in the cheating community as “an asshole who sends cheat loaders to Riot,” one cheat developer told Motherboard.

As described by Motherboard, here’s Al-Sharifi’s process for tracking and finding cheats and the cheaters who make them:In order to find cheats and cheaters, GamerDoc also lurks on cheaters’ forums and Discord channels, “gathering intellig…

Share All sharing options for: TikTok’s future in the US: all of the news about Microsoft’s deal and Trump’s ban threatsTikTok’s future in the US is up in the air, and there’s a lot of news about what may happen next with the massively popular Chinese-owned video-sharing service.

It all started with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mentioning the possibility of a ban on July 6th, which escalated to President Trump saying he would ban the app from operating in the US the weekend of July 31st.

But over that weekend, reports indicated Microsoft was potentially in talks to buy TikTok, which Microsoft later confirmed in a blog post published on August 2nd.

In its blog post, Microsoft said it would…

Apple’s longtime marketing chief, Phil Schiller, is stepping into a somewhat smaller role after decades with the company.

Schiller is dropping his role as senior vice president of worldwide marketing, but he’ll remain in charge of the App Store and Apple Events.

Greg Joswiak, previously the head of product marketing, will take over Schiller’s former position as Apple’s overall marketing leader.

As Apple puts it, the marketing division is “responsible for Apple’s product management and product marketing, developer relations, market research, business management, as well as education, enterprise, and international marketing.” Joswiak has been in Apple leadership roles for more than two decade…

Microsoft isn’t bidding for TikTok; it’s bidding for the portion of TikTok in four countries: the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

No one has ever split up a social network along regional lines, much less under threat of a national ban from the president.

Trump, ByteDance, and Microsoft have a lot to hash out over the next six weeks, but if they can’t solve that central problem, then none of it matters.

No one has ever acquired a regional section of a social network before, and peeling away the Microsoft-owned portion of TikTok will be harder than it looks.

As Tom Warren laid out yesterday, there would be lots of advantages for Microsoft in owning a social network, even a small, regi…

Today, Google shared a detailed timeline for Google Play Music’s shutdown.

Google is making these big moves now that its YouTube Music service is in full swing as its replacement.

Google promised that it would give plenty of notice in advance of Play Music shutting down, so it’s making good on that.

You can continue to use the service until it shuts down, though if you get a new device with Android 10 loaded on, you’ll find YouTube Music pre-installed in place of Google Play Music.

As my colleague Chris Welch wrote in May when Google announced the transfer tool for YouTube Music:

Motorola announced today that it’s bringing the previously international-only One Fusion Plus to the US, where the pop-up camera smartphone will cost $399 starting on August 5th.

The US version of the One Fusion Plus is identical to the international model.

Motorola has also announced a cheaper, less powerful version of the One Fusion Plus, the Motorola One Fusion, which ditches the pop-up camera for a teardrop-style notch, drops the processor down to a Snapdragon 710, and has a lower-quality 48-megapixel main camera.

The regular One Fusion is only set to be released in Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates for now.

The Motorola One Fusion Plus will be sold unlocked from…

It will finally be slightly easier to share files, images, links, and other content between Android devices.

Google is launching a new Android feature called “Nearby Share” that enables direct sharing between any device running Android 6 and up.

As with AirDrop, you can set your preferred visibility for Nearby Share to different levels of contacts: all, some, or stay hidden.

Nearby Share works between Android phones and will work with Chromebooks “in the coming months,” but it can’t share to iOS devices, Macs, or Windows machines.

Hopefully that won’t be a problem with Nearby Share.

On August 5th, Samsung is expected to unveil its latest Galaxy Note smartphone at a new Unpacked event.

Specifically, it looks like Samsung is getting ready to announce a successor to the Galaxy Fold called the Galaxy Z Fold 2, the Galaxy Watch 3 smartwatch, the Galaxy Tab S7 tablet, and a new pair of true wireless earbuds called the Galaxy Buds Live.

There’s also the Galaxy Note 20, which, is widely expected to come in two variants.

Its last event in February took place before the pandemic upended the old way of doing things.

Read on below for all of the important updates from Samsung’s latest smartphone launch.

T-Mobile says that it has officially switched on “the world’s first standalone 5G network,” allowing the company to maximize the use of its 600MHz 5G spectrum.

In all, the standalone launch brings 5G “to nearly 2,000 additional cities and towns.”That’s a decent bump for day one, but T-Mobile says standalone 5G is really about the future.

Some existing 5G smartphones on T-Mobile will work with the standalone 5G network.

T-Mobile’s competitors eventually plan to launch their own standalone 5G networks, though for now, they’re still on non-standalone (NSA).

Dish Network’s eventual 5G network will also be standalone since it has no existing 4G network to lean on.

A typical NLP pipeline involves gathering corpora, processing them into text, identifying language elements, training models, and using these models to answer specific questions.

The degree to which some languages are underrepresented in data sets is well-recognized, but the ways in which the effect is magnified throughout the NLP toolchain is less discussed, the researchers say.

But the single-language models retain performance advantages over the multilingual models, with both English and Chinese monolingual models performing 3% better than the combined English-Chinese model.

For example, there are approximately:1.12 million Wikipedia articles in Chinese for a total of 0.94 articles per 1…

Today, Apple announced that longtime marketing VP Greg Joswiak will replace Schiller in the role, and Schiller will become an Apple Fellow, leading the company’s events and App Store for “as long as they will have me.”It’s hard to overstate Schiller’s importance to Apple during the eras of CEOs Jobs and Tim Cook, both behind the scenes and in front of cameras.

As contrasted with operational wizard Cook, Schiller evoked a Jobs-like sense of California cool, and is credited by Apple with guiding both products and marketing for the past 30 years.

In 2015, he took over responsibility for the App Store from iCloud chief Eddy Cue in an apparent effort to address developer concerns over the iPhone…

Call of Duty: Warzone Season Five features gameplay changes such as a major change to the center of the map, as players will now be able to play inside the map’s stadium.

Players will now be able to fight and maneuver inside the stadium in the first major change to the map since the battle royale debuted in March.

Aided by shelter-in-place rules, Warzone was downloaded more than 60 million times in its first two months.

The multiplayer maps include the Petrov Oil Rig, where you fight on the oil rig in a 6-versus-6 multiplayer battle.

The Mini Royale mode reduces the number of players (from a max of 150) but quickens the battle royale fight.

In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, Micorosft researchers propose an AI technique they call domain-specific language model pretraining for biomedical natural language processing (NLP).

In specialized domains like biomedicine, when training an NLP model, previous studies have shown domain-specific data sets can deliver accuracy gains.

Building on this, they show domain-specific pretraining of a biomedical NLP model outperforms the pretraining of generic language models, demonstrating that mixed-domain pretraining isn’t always the right approach.

To facilitate their work, the researchers conducted comparisons of modeling for pretraining and task-specific fine-tuning by thei…

Microsoft today announced it has paid out $13.7 million in bug bounties to 327 security researchers in the past year.

Microsoft noted that it launched six new bug bounty programs and two new research grants this year.

Rewarding security researchers with bounties costs a business peanuts compared to paying for a serious security snafu.

Over the past 12 months, Microsoft received 1,226 eligible vulnerability reports across its 15 bug bounty programs.

Google, which is well known for its bug bounty programs, has paid $21 million over nine years — the company started paying bug bounties in November 2010.

Kite, which suggests code snippets for developers in real time, today debuted integration with JupyterLab and support for teams using JupyterHub.

Data scientists can now get code completions powered by Kite’s deep learning, which is trained on over 25 million open-source Python files, as they type in Jupyter notebooks.

JupyterLabJupyterLab already offers native code completions, but they are sorted alphabetically and have no documentation.

Kite taps into Jupyter kernel completions so they show up automatically as you type.

The startup says it contributed to the Jupyter completions API and completions interface via four pull requests and 87 commits, making it easier to build plugins for Jupy…

Product Manager, Uber Eats.

As a Product Manager for Uber Eats Subscriptions, you’ll play a key role in better engaging and retaining eaters over time.

How can you ensure that Uber Eats is their food delivery platform of choice?

How can Uber Rides and Uber Eats build long term loyalty together?

As the product manager for this team, you’ll work with your Engineering, Data Science, and Design counterparts to transform your strategy into a subscriptions product scaled across the globe.

Apple has, however, introduced a matte glass option for the new iMac using nano-textured glass — a feature debuted in the Pro Display XDR last year.

The new 27-inch iMac also improves upon its predecessor’s performance.

For $1,999, users can get a 6-core 3.3GHz Intel Core i5 version with a peak single-core speed of 4.8GHz, while a $1,799 model has a 3.1GHz 6-core Intel Core i5 with 4.5GHz turbo speed, upgradeable to the 10-core i9 for $500.

The new 27-inch iMacs are available to order from Apple’s online store today.

Slightly tweaked 21.5-inch iMacs and iMac Pros can also be ordered today, but with delivery dates in mid to late August.

(Reuters) — Alphabet unit Googles bid to take on Apple and Samsung in the wearable technology market by buying Fitbit hit a hurdle today as EU antitrust regulators launched an investigation into the $2.1 billion deal.

The move by the European Commission came despite Google pledging last month not to use the fitness tracker’s data for advertising purposes in a bid to address competition concerns.

The EU antitrust enforcer said the deal would further entrench Google’s dominance in online advertising and that Google’s data pledge was insufficient to allay its worries.

“The data collected via wrist-worn wearable devices appears, at this stage of the Commission’s review of the transaction, to be…

Amazon is launching Starfinder, an interactive Alexa game featuring the voice actors Laura Bailey (of The Last of Us Part II) and Nathan Fillion.

The first three episodes of Starfinder are available starting today on any Alexa-enabled device, including Amazon Echo, Fire TV, and the Alexa mobile app.

In the game, a deserted mining ship emerges from hyperspace at Absalom Station, towing a mysterious asteroid behind it.

You can get started by simply saying “Alexa, play the Starfinder game.” I know that because I tried to say, “Alexa, Starfinder game” and it wouldn’t start.

But you don’t have to know that to play the Alexa game.

The Game Developers Conference got derailed as a physical event in March because of the pandemic, but the virtual version will happen over the next three days with 112 sessions for 7,500 attendees.

The event runs from August 4 to August 6, starting at 6 a.m. Pacific time to accommodate international attendees.

But the GDC had more time to plan this week’s event, with talks from leaders at Disney, Niantic, Microsoft, Sony, EA, and Blizzard.

Eve Crevoshay, executive director of Take This, will give a talk on mental health awareness for game developers.

As for next year’s GDC, Stern said she didn’t know what would happen yet.

While the company technically launched Firefox 79 for Windows, Mac, and Linux last week, it only unveiled its marquee feature today.

Firefox 79 by default blocks redirect tracking, also known as bounce tracking, and adds a handful of new developer features.

Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0Before we dive into Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0, which is rolling out over the next couple weeks to protect against redirect tracking, it’s important to look at the foundation it is built on.

Firefox 70 followed in October with cross-site tracking cookies from sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn blocked under the Standard setting.

Redirect trackingSince enabling Enhanced Tracking Protection by …

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will get access to over 100 games via the Project xCloud streaming service starting September 15, Microsoft announced today.

This means that those paying the $15 a month for Game Pass Ultimate will be able to play these 100-plus Xbox games on their Android phones or tablets, all thanks to cloud gaming technology.

This further increases the value of Game Pass Ultimate, which gives members access to a library of downloadable Xbox and PC games.

Xbox Games Pass has over 10 million subscribers as of April.

The Project xCloud support will be available in 22 countries, including the U.S. and United Kingdom.

Startup Isima today emerged from stealth with $10 million in funding to launch a data convergence platform called BiOS.

IDC expects the global big data analytics market to be worth $274.3 billion by 2022, and Forbes found in 2017 that over 50% of companies were adopting big data.

Entrepreneur notes that businesses using big data experience a profit increase of 8-10%, on average.

But obstacles remain, with 40.3% of respondents to a Statista survey suggesting big data usage was held up by a lack of organizational agility.

With BiOS, organizations can collate business intelligence and AI-driven applications into a single platform to derive insights from real-time data.

Today, T-Mobile announced it has taken the second step by launching the “world’s first nationwide standalone 5G network,” a change it says will improve 5G performance, as well as substantially expanding its U.S. 5G coverage.

Unlike “non-standalone 5G,” which combines new 5G radios with an older 4G network core, standalone 5G is next-generation through and through, enabling carriers to deliver even faster data speeds alongside a wider array of 5G-specific network features.

Though T-Mobile will continue to operate non-standalone and standalone 5G networks during its transition to full 5G, phones connected to standalone 5G won’t need to simultaneously use their LTE and 5G radios, which will im…

According to Mozilla, Firefox 79 can now block a new technique called "redirect tracking."

This way, even if advertisers employ redirect tracking, users will have a brand new identity each day, preventing companies from linking previous activity to a unique user profile.

While currently only active for Firefox 79 users, Mozilla said ETP 2.0 would eventually roll out to all users within the next few weeks.

However, Mozilla says that blocking redirect tracking won't be active for all known ad tech companies.

Additional details about redirect tracking are available on the MDN developer network.

Read MoreAn Iranian hacking group known as Oilrig has become the first publicly known threat actor to incorporate the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol in its attacks.

As its name hints, the tool can transfer data between two points using classic DNS requests, but it can also use the newer DoH protocol.

Oilrig is most likely using DoH as an exfiltration channel to avoid having its activities detected or monitored while moving stolen data.

This is because the DoH protocol is currently an ideal exfiltration channel for two primary reasons.

But while Oilrig is the first publicly reported APT to use DoH, it is now the first malware operation to do so, in general.

After Windows 10 upgrade, use this checklist to ensure safety and privacy Watch NowMicrosoft has revealed it has awarded security researchers $13.7m for reporting bugs in Microsoft software since July last year.

The Redmond company has 15 bug-bounty programs through which researchers netted $13.7m between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020.

"The researchers who devote time to uncovering and reporting security issues before adversaries can exploit them have earned our collective respect and gratitude," said members of the Microsoft Security Response Center in a blogpost.

Microsoft's total annual bug-bounty payouts are now much larger than Google's awards for security flaws in its software, which…

Google on Tuesday started rolling out Nearby Share, a new Android feature -- akin to Apple's AirDrop -- that lets users easily share content across devices.

Nearby Share is rolling out Tuesday to select Google Pixel and Samsung devices running Android 6+.

When a user wants to share a file, link or picture, they can tap on the Android share icon and choose a nearby recipient.

They can also adjust the privacy settings, so they're hidden from all Nearby Share users, only visible to their contacts or only visible to some contacts.

Google will roll out the feature to more Android smartphones over the coming weeks and eventually bring it to Chromebooks.

Apple revamped its 27-inch iMac with new Intel processors, AMD graphics and upgrades across the board.

The 27-inch iMac starts at $1,799 and Apple also updated the iMac Pro as well as the 21.5-inch iMac.

Apple's 27-inch iMac is likely to be the workhorse, but the iMac Pro, which has Intel Xeon processors and a $4,999 price tag, may also garner a look.

Core additions to the 27-inch iMac include:The latest 6- and 8-core 10th generation Intel processors.

iMac Pro has up to a 10-core processor option.

Apple announced the change in a blog post Tuesday and named Greg Joswiak as his replacement.

Schiller's new title will be Apple Fellow, though he'll continue to lead the App Store and Apple Events.

Joswiak had been the head of product marketing for four years before stepping into Schiller's shoes as the new head of Worldwide Marketing.

Joswiak has been with Apple's marketing team in some capacity for 20 years.

Schiller's most recent accomplishment as head of marketing was turning Apple's popular annual developer conference, WWDC, into an all-digital affair this summer.

Angela Lang/CNETAmazon's minority investment in Deliveroo won the approval of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) approved on Tuesday.

The deal will give Amazon 16% stake in the UK-based food delivery company, a figure that the CMA believes won't reduce competition.

"We have not found this to be the case given the scale of Amazon's current investment, but if it were to increase its shareholding in Deliveroo, that could trigger a further investigation by the CMA."

The CMA paused Amazon's investment in the meal-delivery service last year amid concerns that a merger would reduce consumer choice and break competition rules.

The decision to clear Amazon's investment comes a week aft…

Sarah Tew/CNETOne of the changes greatly accelerated by COVID-19 is how we deal with the physical act of paying for things.

Contactless payment is now a must-have for every brick and mortar store, take-out restaurant or farmers market.

Nobody took contactless," Phelan says.

"Many of them, literally in March, really had that fundamental choice -- Do I stay with the way I used to do things or pivot into the new way?"

Both safety concerns and economic realities are driving this shift, Phelan says.

A San Francisco-based company called Formant is giving you -- yes, anybody -- the opportunity to take Spot the robot for a walk, remotely.

The Comac C919 that soared into the sky over eastern China that day wasn't trying to set any records in size or speed or to demonstrate amazing new aviation technologies to the world.

But through its manufacturer Comac, China is pushing ahead to a bigger aviation future, even if it takes a generation.

In building the C919, Comac is focusing along a narrow, purely nationalistic line where the experience of building the jet is what's important, says Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with the Teal Group in Washington, D.C., who calls the C919 a "national jet."

Though it entered service in 2016, only about 30 of the 90-seat aircraft have been delivered to a handful of Chinese airlines.

At …

Visa's new small business survey shows how everyone from farmers to shopkeepers is ditching cash for safer payments.

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There is a day-to-day struggle in businesses currently using artificial intelligence, which is made more difficult because of sequential technologies.

Examination; Plug OpportunityProcesses of Artificial Intelligence are making significant progress in reducing several walks of life problems.

As of a rule, the cost of Artificial Intelligence requires intelligence on the work being done for proactive development.

However, if Artificial intelligence claims to be a plug-and-play canned legacy, you need to be highly suspicious.

The power of artificial intelligence needs a hard edge at business processes and the majority of resources.

Here are the technology trends that are emerging post-pandemic.

The technologies including virtual meetings, cloud technology, digital identity verification tools, face recognition technology, and virtual private networks (VPNs) are supporting remote work.

Needless to say, digital technology trends can harness reduced human interactions, increased productivity, automation, and simplifies lives while containing the virus.

By embracing emerging technologies, businesses can better position themselves in the post-COVID-19 business landscape that lies ahead.

To keep their companies on course, now and in the future, its high time businesses understand the importance of the technology trends parad…

iOS 14 beta 4 adds support for the Exposure Notification API, restores 3D Touch functionality, and more.

iOS 14 beta 4 features the build number of 18A5342e.

If you don’t see iOS 14 beta 4 immediately, keep checking as the update is still rolling out.

What’s new in iOS 14 beta 4?

iOS 14 initially lacked support for the Apple and Google Exposure Notification API for COVID-19 contact tracing.

While there were small bumps to the 21.5 inch iMac and the iMac Pro, most of the love was saved for the 27-inch iMac, which starts at $1799.00.

Although the new 10th-generation CPUs, 1080p webcam (finally), and nano-texture display options have stolen the headlines, the new 7 nm AMD Radeon Pro 5000 Series GPU options are a pretty big deal as well.

Lesser configs, like the entry-level $1,799.00 model and mid-tier $1,999.00 model are stuck with the Radeon Pro 5300 with 4GB of GDDR6 memory.

If you opt for these configurations, you’ll notice that there are no upgrade paths to the higher tiered 5000 series GPU models.

With new video-centric cameras on the horizon like the 8K-capable Canon EOS R5…

Apple announced today that Phil Schiller will transition into a new Apple Fellow role.

Schiller has long served as Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, but that is a position that will now be occupied by Apple’s Greg Joswiak.

In his new role as an Apple Fellow, Schiller will continue to “lead the App Store and Apple events.” He will also continue to offer “thought partnership and guidance” as an Apple Fellow and will report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

For the last four years, Joswiak had served as Apple’s vice president of worldwide product marketing.

His new role will give him the broader title of senior vice president of worldwide marketing.

Apple today will release the fourth betas of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 to developers.

iOS 14 beta 4 details:iOS 14 beta 4 is available to developers via an over-the-air update.

You can find all of the details on what changed in iOS 14 beta 3 here.

Testers should still expect performance and stability issues when running iOS 14 beta 4 on primary devices for the time being.

Catch up on 9to5Mac‘s coverage below:We also expect Apple to release iPadOS 14 beta 4, macOS 11 Big Sur beta 4, tvOS 14 beta 4, and watchOS 7 beta 4 today.

Today’s best deals include Nike+ Apple Watch Series 5, Anker’s HomeKit cameras, and a notable offer on the CalDigit Thunderbolt 3 dock.

Nike+ Apple Watch Series 5 models as much as $80 offNike is discounting select Apple Watch Series 5 GPS + Cellular Nike+ models from $425.

Make sure to put your savings towards good use and pick up an extra Apple Watch band.

Best trade-in deals9to5Mac also keeps tabs on all the best trade-in deals on iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Apple Watch, and more every month.

Be sure to check out this month’s best trade-in deals when you decide it’s time to upgrade your device.

Alongside the release of iOS 14 beta 4, Apple today has also released watchOS 7 beta 4 to developers.

watchOS 7 beta 4 can be installed by developers through the companion Apple Watch app on iPhone or by heading to the Settings app on the Apple Watch itself.

watchOS 7 is currently available to developers only, but for the first time ever, Apple will also release a version to public beta users sometime soon.

You can now create and share watch faces with other people, but developers can also offer preconfigured faces in their application, while you can also add watch faces from the web.

Curious what Apple’s major software versions will do for your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Mac?

In addition to the improvements to the consumer iMac today, Apple has also made some very minor adjustments to the iMac Pro lineup.

The base model iMac Pro now includes a 10-core Intel Xeon processor, but unfortunately, the iMac Pro misses out on the new nano-texture glass option.

With today’s changes, Apple has dropped the 8-core iMac Pro from the lineup completely, and instead moved the 10-core iMac Pro down into that spot.

In an acknowledgement of this, Apple has rejiggered the iMac Pro line, dropping the old base eight-core model and moving the 10-core model to the base price.

Instead, the nano-texture upgrade is available only for the iMac and the Pro Display XDR; not the iMac Pro.

The crucial moment in the worst hack in Twitter Inc.’s history sounded like something millions of Americans would find unremarkable.

It was a call from the IT department.

Or at least, it seemed to be.

In fact, the call was from a Florida teenager who convinced a Twitter employee that he was a co-worker, according to prosecutors, who revealed their case last week.

The persuasion was a key leap forward during months of reconnaissance that ultimately granted the 17-year-old access to a host of Twitter accounts, including Barack...

Unfamiliar names such as byte and Triller have charged up the Apple App Store rankings because they offer short videos like those on TikTok, the social-media breakout facing an uncertain future in the U.S.

These nascent rivals are actively courting TikTok users, especially top influencers, in some instances offering cash payments to creators.

They are trying to capitalize on a question that is dominating social-media chatter: What happens if TikTok really goes away?

TOKYO—Profits from the videogame boom caused by people staying home are finding their way into the coffers of Japanese companies.

Sony Corp. said Tuesday sales and operating profit in the April-June quarter were roughly flat compared with a year earlier, despite red ink stemming from lower television and stereo sales.

That was because videogame players flocked to its subscription service and downloaded more game updates.

HONG KONG—President Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. government take a cut from the forced sale of the viral Chinese app TikTok sparked a new round of anger and reflection in China, as TikTok’s founder warned employees about “rising anti-Chinese sentiment.”On Tuesday, a number of prominent figures in China, including Google’s former country head, lambasted the U.S. for unfairly stifling China’s first global internet hit—while defending Beijing’s own restrictions on American technology giants.

BRUSSELS—Google’s plan to buy health tracker Fitbit is facing monthslong delays after the European Union’s antitrust enforcer launched an in-depth inquiry, echoing recent concerns raised by Australian regulators.

Google’s planned $2.1 billion bid for the California-based fitness-and-health data tracker was announced in November 2019, as the search engine seeks to increase its market share in the wearable and health data businesses.

The announcement caused uproar among privacy and consumer protection groups, who have raised...

The pandemic lockdown has been hard on tweens, teens and adults of all ages.

But its effects have been especially difficult for younger children, who thrive on the kind of physical interaction and social-learning they get at school.

As this pandemic lingers and many schools remain closed, some companies are gearing up to sell robot playmates.

Socially...

Angie Evans was determined to make online learning for her children better this fall after a disastrous spring, when schools closed with little notice and no time to prepare.

But like many parents around the country, her race to join with other like-minded families in so-called pandemic pods was soon derailed by fears that she was teaming with the haves and leaving out the have-nots.

Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony hit a new high score as people stuck at home splurged on its games.

The next level already looks within reach: The company’s new videogame console arrives later this year.

Sony on Tuesday reported an operating profit for the quarter ended in June that was 63% higher than analysts’ estimates on S&P Global Market Intelligence.

People holed up at home bought more games, which boosted sales at Sony’s game segment by 32%.

And since many of them downloaded games, instead of buying...

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter.

What if the U.S. government tries to restrain the power of America’s tech superstars, and it doesn’t work?

That’s essentially what has happened so far in Europe, where some regulators and lawmakers have been ahead of the United States in putting guardrails on Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.

I talked with my colleague Adam Satariano, who writes about technology in Europe, about what happens when government officials decide they want to do something about Big Tech, but struggle to figure out what that something should be.

Shira: What’s been Europe’s approach to the American tech superpowers?

LONDON — European Union authorities on Tuesday announced an investigation into Google’s $2.1 billion purchase of the fitness-tracking company Fitbit, raising alarms about the health data the internet giant would be acquiring as part of the deal.

The inquiry shows the increased scrutiny Google and other large technology companies are facing from regulators in Europe and the United States about their growing dominance of the digital economy.

Officials have raised concerns that the biggest tech platforms buy smaller companies to solidify their dominance and limit competition.

Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s top antitrust regulator, said a preliminary investigation of the Fitbit d…

The Neo is a four-foot-tall, 1,000-pound robot floor scrubber.

The high-tech machine can cruise large commercial buildings on its own, with no human supervision required.

This year, however, demand has shot up 100 percent just since the pandemic-induced shutdown in March.

Suddenly, the need for thorough, reliable and frequent cleaning is front and center.

“Before, a top executive at a big company would not really have known how their facilities got cleaned,” Mr. Sheikh said.