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The Verge
How to watch the Facebook Connect livestream
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to deliver the opening keynote to the Facebook Reality Labs event, Facebook Connect, this Thursday, October 28th at 1PM ET / 10AM PT.
The annual VR / AR announcement and live demonstration event is in its eighth year and was formally called “Oculus Connect” due to its focus on virtual reality technologies. With word on a Facebook rebranding looming, the event is the perfect stage for the 17-year-old company to announce big changes along with the possible announcement of a new “pro” Oculus VR headset.
When and where can I watch the Facebook Connect event?
The keynote starts at 1PM ET / 10AM PT on Thursday, October 28th. The event will be streamed live from the Facebook Connect event page, which can be...
Published on 28 October 2021 | 12:00 pm
Tesla owners can now remotely stream live footage from their car’s cameras
Tesla’s Sentry mode, the feature that uses the car’s cameras as a surveillance system to catch would-be thieves and vandals, has been upgraded to let owners view a livestream, Electrek reports. The “Sentry Mode Live Camera Access” feature is rolling out with Tesla’s 2021.36.8 software update, but only appears to work with the manufacturer’s iOS app at present. An Android release is yet to be confirmed.
“You can now remotely view your car’s surroundings when parked to confirm the safety of your environment before returning to your car,” is how Tesla’s release notes describe the new feature. It’s a significant upgrade for the vehicle’s Sentry Mode feature, which originally launched in 2019. Although there have been workarounds, Sentry...
Published on 28 October 2021 | 11:12 am
Apple’s notch ‘fix’ brings fat bezels back to the MacBook Pro
A new support document released yesterday details a “Scale to fit below built-in camera” option in macOS that will forcibly scale apps to only use the display below the notch. It’s a temporary workaround for apps that don’t currently play nice with the notch on Apple’s new MacBook Pros.
The camera notch cutout on Apple’s latest laptops was meant to enable a more expansive edge-to-edge screen. But as we saw yesterday, owners of the new MacBook Pro models have seen both apps and the OS misbehave, whereby app menus and status bar items can get hidden under the camera cutout. The scale-to-fit workaround fixes this, but results in the type of large bezels the notch was meant to negate.
The scaling feature was demonstrated by artist @Jatodaro...
Published on 28 October 2021 | 8:51 am
Gizmodo’s photos from the massive iPhone 4 leak have disappeared
Photographs from a historic moment in tech news history, the day a Gizmodo reporter published hands-on pics of the then-not-yet-announced iPhone 4, are now missing. And they’re not alone — vast quantities of pictures from G/O Media sites like The Onion, Jalopnik, and Deadspin (as well as Gizmodo) have been removed, reportedly intentionally, according to Gawker.
A recent Gawker report highlights that Buzzfeed has also been wiping many older images from the web. Still, Buzzfeed’s reason for doing so is relatively apparent after management explained the copyright claims on old photos deemed some of them “high-risk.”
Both cases are examples of “link rot,” where content on the internet is drastically changed because it either disappears...
Published on 28 October 2021 | 2:47 am
Samsung earnings record fueled by chips, OLEDs, and foldables
In 2020, Samsung weathered the pandemic by posting a record high for revenue in the third quarter of 66.96 trillion won. The company just revealed that it set another record for the same period in 2021, reaching 73.98 trillion won, or about $63 billion. While its revenue was up about 10 percent, Samsung says its profits grew by 26 percent from last year to hit 15.82 trillion won ($13 billion).
Despite a shortage of key chips worldwide, the memory chips and processors Samsung makes that go into everything from servers to mobile phones are in as much demand as ever. Shifts to hybrid work mean have companies buying more SSDs, CPUs, and RAM for servers
As the world’s...
Published on 28 October 2021 | 12:55 am
Alienware’s new Aurora R13 comes with Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake CPU
Alienware’s new Aurora R13 gaming desktop comes with Intel’s newly released 12th Gen Alder Lake chip and a brand-new design. You can choose anything from the Core i5-12600KF up to an i9-1200KF, as well as a range of Nvidia graphics cards.
The R13 also shows off Alienware’s redesigned Legend 2.0 chassis, which comes with an increased amount of internal space that’s supposed to promote better airflow. It also offers the option of a clear side panel that tacks on an extra $70 to your purchase. You can still open the case without any tools, making it easy to upgrade components or start customizing.
On the AMD side of things, Alienware introduced the Aurora Ryzen Edition R14 that ships with up to an AMD...
Published on 27 October 2021 | 9:02 pm
How to use SharePlay to share your FaceTime screen
One of the new features that iOS 15 has promised to offer is the ability to share your iPhone and iPad screen during FaceTime sessions so that you can enjoy films, music, and other media along with friends and family. While this new feature, called SharePlay, did not ship with the first version of iOS 15, it has been included in iOS 15.1 and can now be enjoyed — to a limited extent.
Currently, you can share content from Apple TV and Apple Music — assuming both of you are subscribers — and a few other apps. I had no problem sharing a YouTube video, for example; other apps that are supported include HBO Max, Hulu, and Disney Plus (but not Netflix). It can be presumed that the list of shareable apps will continue to expand.
It’s quite easy...
Published on 27 October 2021 | 8:39 pm
Apple’s system to tell on creepy apps just arrived in beta
Apple’s App Privacy Report, announced at WWDC 2021, has made its way onto iPhones with the first release of the iOS 15.2 beta, according to MacRumors. The new screen in Settings gives users an overview of what information their apps have access to and what they’re sharing.
According to Apple’s WWDC announcement, the feature will show you what permissions apps have and how often they accessed them over the past week (for example, it could show that your weather app accesses your location every hour). The report will also show you which other web domains the app contacted and let you compare that with the sites you visited directly in the app to give you a better idea of who could be seeing your data.
Published on 27 October 2021 | 8:31 pm
A major Hollywood union could vote soon on a deal for better streaming pay
A Hollywood union representing tens of thousands of production workers will soon decide whether to ratify agreements that will, among other labor protections, enforce better pay from streaming services.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) announced Tuesday that it reached a tentative three-year “area standards” agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that “delivers our members a fairer deal on streaming,” according to the union’s international president Matthew Loeb. AMPTP represents major Hollywood studios that include, among others, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros.
A spokesperson for the union told The Verge that lawyers are still working out...
Published on 27 October 2021 | 7:49 pm
GameStop memes even harder with ‘Web3 Gaming’ and NFT job listings
After a rollercoaster of a year on the stock market fueled by WallStreetBets retail trading, GameStop is going full meme and looking to build a “Web3” platform, according to a flurry of job listings posted to its careers site on Monday. One of those ads, discovered by CoinDesk, is a LinkedIn listing for a “Head of Web3 Gaming” in which the company says it's looking for someone to “accelerate the future of gaming and commerce” based on blockchains.
If you’re lucky enough to have never heard the phrase “Web3,” it’s often used to describe a decentralized, crypto-based internet. That tracks with the other job listings, which indicate that GameStop is developing some sort of NFT platform, likely based on Ethereum. While sometimes job...
Published on 27 October 2021 | 6:04 pm
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